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Do you think you have to earn enough to be in the top 1% of all earners in the country in order to be 'rich'?


Honestly, this is the thing that annoys me the most about the Occupy Wall Street slogan of "the 99% vs the 1%"; income is a power distribution and there really isn't a threshold you can step over and become rich.

Not that it really matters, since what catches fire politically is only modestly correlated with what is actually true.


Your point of view is kind of understandable in isolation... except, the slogan is a based on the economic fact that the vast majority of the wealth and income of the US is held by a mere 1% of its population.

The implications of that are many but the first and direct is that the US is a plutocracy. That is, the movement is not about (not) "becoming rich" or achieving the 1% (which as you imply would ultimately be a contradiction) ... It is about the nature and sustainability of such a society.


> ... the US is a plutocracy.

Half of the electorate pays no federal income tax in the U.S.




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