America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
Around the same time this was shared to HN I Tweeted&#x2F;FB&#x2F;LinkedIn variations of the following<p>&gt;If I earned $10,000 a day it would take me 273.97 years to have earned 1 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Elon was worth about 20 billion a year ago, last month he was worth an estimated $185bn. Oof. In reality, I make a little over $17 an hour<p>His net worth increased an estimated 4.66 million times my annual gross income in the past year. I&#x27;ve been at my job 15 years.<p>When you stop and think about it, it can quickly approach the territory of crippling. I&#x27;ll probably <i>have</i> to work until the day I die, or until I physically can&#x27;t, whichever comes first.<p>My wife does a little bit better than me as a public school teacher, but she also probably logs 70-80 hours a week of work once you factor in grading&#x2F;lesson plan&#x2F;meetings&#x2F;coaching track for an extra $1500 a year&#x2F;Friday detention&#x2F;etc.<p>If someone gave me 100,000 USD, my stress level would freefall. My quality of life would drastically improve. My financial security would be able to weather any realistic event sans aggressive cancer treatment. Mr. Musk had his net worth increase 1.6 million times that amount last year. (Edit: This is an example, I&#x27;m not begging for money, so stop using it as a means of attacking my entire post)<p>Some days I just &quot;can&#x27;t even&quot;. With my faith, my wife, my friends, I try to be upbeat and positive when it comes to the future but when I see people like Musk, Bezos, even Gates and then I start worrying about replacing the roof&#x2F;well pump&#x2F;affording a mower come spring&#x2F;why does one spot of the kitchen floor dip a bit when I stand on it and how much is that going to cost me&#x2F;how long is my wife&#x27;s car going to last&#x2F;how long is my car going to last&#x2F;is it going to warm up anytime soon because we&#x27;ve already filled the propane tank twice since November&#x2F;etc and I just start to want to fully disconnect from reality and wish catatonia upon myself to escape it.<p>Then if I think about how fortunate I actually do have it, then I start getting depressed that there are people out there making 2.5x less than me in my own state, that there are homeless populations here in the U.S., and then I think but what about the people in &#x27;third world countries&#x27;, our minimum wage and homeless have it even better than many of them, then that catatonia starts sounding really nice again. If I can&#x27;t even seem to improve my own situation to have even a fraction of a percent of the financial security that even some people I personally know have (people that have posted on this very forum) then how the heck am I ever going to be able to help enough even less fortunate than me to not feel like crap when I remember they exist and have it worse than me?