Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
Looking at the economy and the way it's working for non-billionaires, a million is functionally the new thousand.
It used to be that it was hard to lose money if you had a million or few, or so it seemed to me, especially when I was destitute or nearly so.
The divide between the haves and have nots that used to separate the upper and upper middle classes from the lower middle and lower classes, now separates virtually everyone else from the uber billlionaires.
Google shows me that 8% of Americans today are millionaires. (How are they counted? Suppose a couple with two kids and $1.2 million. Is that four millionaires (number of people in the million-dollar household) or zero (none would have a million after a split-up)?
As shown in a Wiki map below, the U.S. is in a worse Gini bracket than any European country except Bulgaria. Some apologists will argue that lower-income Americans may be better off than middle-income people in a country like Thailand, but that is misleading for several reasons. And I read that some Americans with full-time jobs are nevertheless sleeping in their car, with their kids!
ETA: Why do some images work on some Previews, but not after Posted?