How come people often say "Hey, life is tough, and you need to suck it up and move on"; But almost nobody ever says "Hey, life is tough, and we need to suck it up and move on"?
It always sucks to be you. It rarely sucks to be us.
If your life is hard, then you should have just done what I did. I worked hard; saved a percentage of every paycheck; had white, middle class parents; lived in a supportive family; got a good education; didn't get sick or have chronically sick family members to support; grew up in the right part of town; networked with wealthy people at family gatherings from my early teens; and had a trust fund to pay for my university education. As you foolishly chose not to do those things, you only have yourself to blame.
Yeah, again, nothing whatsoever to do with anything I posted or anything I was arguing, so you and LP have fun with your emotional appeals to whatever the fuck you’re talking about.
Well, as it wasn't directed at you
My mistake. Since I was the one who used the phrase “It’s tough” I assumed you were referring to my post.
Are you suggesting that this is NOT how a great many comfortably well off people behave?
No, I was pointing out it had nothing to do with anything I was arguing. The only part of what you posted that would apply to anything I was arguing would be this part:
I...saved a percentage of every paycheck
That’s it.
Obviously if you don’t have a paycheck, you can’t save any percent of it. And if your monthly necessities (rent, food, health) outpace your monthly salary, it is exceedingly difficult to save. It takes tremendous discipline and commitment and if health, in particular, is compromised, you’re fucked in the US.
Being on the cusp of poor (aka, “working poor”) is tough. Again, we ALL know this. We don’t have to always reinvent the wheel whenever these discussions come up and rant about how much it sucks to not have money in the US.
That is ALWAYS on the Democrat’s platform. There has never been an election in the past fifty years where Democrats did not have social programs for the poor and working class primary on the list. Nor am I arguing any differently. Quite the contrary. Regulation is absolutely required, but magical unicorns don’t exist and get us exactly nowhere.
Or, worse, get us Trump.
And misnomers like “wealth inequality” don’t help. “Wealth Disparity” would help, but “Wealth Inequality” implies that there is some sort of
equality as a norm—as a birth right—that we have deviated from and that’s simply not true. It shifts the focus off of the
real issue and instead only fans emotional flames exactly as seen in yours and LP’s responses.
WHAT ABOUT THE POOR! Yeah, what about them? They’re fucked and always have been and always will be and we need to work that out, but that has fuck-all to do with how some people save and invest and others do not
among those who have the resources that could be saved and invested but instead are not.
For anyone that was actually alive in the eighties as I was, you know what I’m talking about. My generation was the “eat the rich/fuck daddy” generation on one side and the other side was the masters-of-the-universe/bonfire-of-the-vanities side (who went all-in on junk bonds and penny stocks, etc).
We thought we’d die tomorrow so we lived for today. We didn’t want anything to do with our father’s and grandfather’s generation (which was all about investing and business and wearing a suit and tie).
Every movie we watched (
Say Anything being a prominent one) was all about John Hughes middle class privileged white kids rejecting their parent’s wealth and becoming artists or slackers or basically anything other than the stuffy 50’s way of life. We were the after birth of the 60s and 70s that our older siblings came up in.
And it was exactly this period (the mid 80’s) that Saez and Zucman (the economists behind the Occupy movement and Sanders’ slogan) pointed to as the beginning of the wealth disparity in the US. They too had excluded the poor from their analysis and for the same reason; if you don’t have money to save/invest, then you’re not part of the conversation regarding how we—as a nation—save and invest. It was an analysis primarily about the middle class on up (those with a
net worth of around $86,000 or more).
So to point to the poor in response to a post about how we save or don’t save, invest or don’t invest simply has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It’s an important topic in its own right, but not applicable to anything I was talking about.
