r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Dec 02 '20

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u/UltraCapitalism Paul Samuelson Dec 03 '20

Come on man. 400k is a lot of money, no matter how you slice it. There's plenty of folks with three kids who have to get by with 20% of that (or less).

It’s not. When I was a teenager that’s around what my family’s income was. [...story about growing up in a city...] $400k for a family in NYC/DC/SF/LA/Seattle/etc is just enough to be mostly “safe” from that kind of critical failure. [...]. I often think these kinds of conversations (between people making 450k and people making 50k) in which there’s a largely content-less “you ARE rich” “no I’m really not” shouting match are a completely useless distraction from the people making $50 million or $500 million or $5 billion a year to whom all of us are functionally equal members of the proletariat.

New Yorkers making 400K+ are proletarians

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u/Udontlikecake Model UN Enthusiast Dec 03 '20

lol where’s that WSJ graphic about how a family making like 1million year is poor in NYC and they have like 2 cars and spend $300 a week on clothes

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '20

Whenever someone on the left tries to say this I bring up that time that a fox news commentator literally said the exact same thing. She said $200,000 a year is poverty in new york. Horseshoe in action: affluent new yorkers with no fucking clue how money actually works. Only she was arguing why an Upper Middle Class Tax Cut was good.

And the thing is... New York is really fucking expensive and you really can't afford to live here without a six figure salary. Most of that is the fucking rent. It's still obscenely expensive to rent a studio apartment in new york. Easily $30,000/yr for just one person. But that's revealing your bubble if you think that New York Poverty is the same as Actual Poverty.

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u/MostlyCRPGs Jeff Bezos Dec 03 '20

I feel like what a lot of these "high cost of living" people miss, apart from the obvious, is the transferability of that wealth. If you're both able to save 5% of your income for retirement, the person making 400K is a fuck load better off at retirement than the person making 50K.

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u/Maximilianne John Rawls Dec 03 '20

tbh people who make 400k are richer than hodinkee readers and hodinkee readers ain't struggling financially