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We need to define rich. To me, 14 million is rich.
Right now, Bill Burr could buy a house, cash, buy solar power for that whole house. And buy a new car every 5 years.
Then just sit at home, and not do shit. Ever.
I can't do that. Nobody I know can do that.
He's rich, but only "American Dream" rich, not "controlling the media" and "funding anti-science think tanks" rich. It's the latter that are the problem.
It's not like he's "give a Nazi salute to millions of viewers and nothing of consequence happens" rich.
Exactly!
Millionaires aren't the problem. Oligarchs are the problem.
Without a passive income it is difficult to become rich.
He who is paid by the hour can only trade his time for money.
No it isn’t people investing and expecting massive ROI are already part of the problem. They are driving companies to generate as much profit as possible.
You need a salary of 350k a year after tax which is like a 700k salary before tax. Or more likely you need a good company and yeah they will be evaluated for a sale for in the milions, but generally that is incorrectly counted towards your net worth. Since you are counting future income from the company towards your net worth.
$14M is almost exactly the top 1% of US households by wealth, around a million to million-and-a-half of them. There's only 750 billionaires. The billionaires are less than 0.1% of the US 1%.
$14M is plenty to live very comfortably, but it's little enough that you still have to consider costs of big purchases. You're not going to own a jet. You can have multiple houses as long as you keep them normal-sized. $14M is rich, but it's not Rich-rich.
You're saying to me that Bernie Sanders is in the 1%, but not the 0.01% so it doesn't count as rich. That's REALLY your arguement here?
Yup.
Listen, I understand that numbers are scary, but the difference between 'ordinary rich' and 'problematic rich' is entirely in the numbers. I've probably got 10x as much cash in bank as you, but I'm not rich. My grandma, retired with a paid-off house and a bit of 401k, probably - technically - a millionaire, but still not rich. Billionaire who gets stopped for speeding or DUI can drop $100,000 on lawyers, the way I might drop a penny in the Take-a-penny dish, not just fighting his ticket but investigating and suing the PD that stopped him. That billionaire can pay a politician $1M for special treatment the way I might buy lunch.
Your grandma with $1M ain't problematic rich. Billionaire is problematic rich. The threshold is somewhere in between, and probably closer to $100M than $10M. Estate tax starts at $14M. Most of the proposals for wealth tax start somewhere around $50M.
You know the difference between 14 million and 14 billion?
About 14 billion.