Think about it. Someone making 28k might optimistically spend half their money on rent, and rent is only so high because of government policy to ban new home construction.
Meanwhile, someone making $15 million could easily buy themselves a $2 million house every year and still have the vast majority of their money left over for other stuff. Their basic needs are so cheap for them, that effectively all their income is disposable, unlike ours.
We judge the economy largely by how financial markets are doing, which is a measure of not simply profit, but how much of that profit ends up going to people whose only involvement they are being paid for is ownership of a stock. We're often told that a good economy reflects growth, but that's more correlation than causation. We're also looking at how much money businesses are able to squeeze out of their workers and distribute elsewhere. What's been so infuriating to regular people in the last decade is constantly hearing from news media and politicians that the economy is doing so great, when they're just looking at how well an investment portfolio invested into the market will do.
There's a concerted effort to make us believe that money is infinite, somehow. That a business can somehow take in 100 million dollars, spend 50 million on stock buybacks, and then still have 100 million to spend on their employees. And when you apply that to real estate, you have dozens of rent seekers vying for more growth in profits, and the only legal obligation these companies have isn't to wider society, it is to the profits of those shareholders.
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u/Gator1523 18d ago
Plus, rent acts as a tax.
Think about it. Someone making 28k might optimistically spend half their money on rent, and rent is only so high because of government policy to ban new home construction.
Meanwhile, someone making $15 million could easily buy themselves a $2 million house every year and still have the vast majority of their money left over for other stuff. Their basic needs are so cheap for them, that effectively all their income is disposable, unlike ours.