Dude, I'm not going to google 1% income cutoff for you. As for 500k cutoff, my brother makes $400kish in California. His house and neighborhood is nothing special being from the midwest.
Anyway, my point is that many of these so-called 1%ers that you hate so much are simply people at finance companies, banks, tech companies, etc that are doing their jobs. They don't wake up in the morning laughing about how many people they fuck over. In fact, most of they are quite happy that they are responsible for so many people being employed, pensions being funded, technology products being produced, etc. Most of these people didn't fuck over millions to get to the jobs that they did. They went to school, got a good degree and started working for a company. Maybe their family name gave them a heads up, maybe their parents got them a good connection, but they didn't shoot some poor people and climb over their dead corpses to get to their position.
Now that doesn't mean the system isn't biased. Of course it is. However, just because it is biased doesn't make the people at the top all automatically psychopath narcissists that laugh everytime they see a poor person. It is shocking that you are so biased in this regard. You see prejudice in many places that it is, which is good, but in this case you need to check your own prejudice.
Jesus Christ, this is ridiculous.
The people you describe could fit quite comfortably even in the second-highest 1%. You can be rich, even very rich, and be nothing more than someone doing your job, taking your place in society. Once you're in that top 1%, though, there is no reasonable justification for that level of wealth. I repeat,
there is no reasonable justification for that level of wealth. I know one of the tenets of capitalism is that the sky's the limit, that we can't decide how much people can and can't have, but it's come to the point where the imbalance is so extreme, so obscenely over-the-top, that
all of society is suffering. This isn't theory!
The poor have virtually nothing, the "middle class" are
barelyany better. You can't have the level of wealth the 1% have and say "at least I'm giving some people jobs" or "I sure am glad I got that degree!". These are not "simply people at finance companies, banks, tech companies, etc". Those guys are one, two or three percentiles lower. The top 1% are leeches, absorbing and hoarding as much as they can and using that hoarded wealth to ensure that they can hoard even more. And they're doing a fantastic job! I would suggest they won't rest until they have it all, except they've probably calculated just how many "scraps" they can leave to society in order to keep people working to generate more money
for them. They already have more wealth than could have any practical purpose in any number of lifetimes, but it's still not enough! So if you're going to stand there and tell me that "Yeah, I guess the system is kind of flawed, but in the end these are just people like you and me", you're the one being naive. Had they been born outside of the 1%, sure, they would be like you and me, but they were born into a ridiculously exclusive club whose rules require that you not care about the damage you're wreaking across society.
The total amount of wealth available at any given point is finite. Right now, the majority of it is resting in the coffers of the 1%, doing nothing but being used to multiply itself. Every dollar these fuckers suck out of circulation is a dollar that nobody else will ever see. They are taking a bigger and bigger piece of the pie with every passing year, leaving less and less for the rest of society to simply be able to function. If the above chart was cut off after 99% and the 1%'s share was put back into circulation,
everybody would benefit. This is not bias, brother. You can't have that much wealth (
destructivelevels of wealth) and not be a psychopath. You can't.
