| Chrkeller said: I understand you said multiple things that are false and now want to shift the goal post. |
No.
Reality is complicated. You want to complain that 22k isn't representative of the bottom 90%, because it's not. It wasn't intended to be, if I wanted to make something perfectly representative of reality, I would need to set up a much more complicated situation.
Because it is impossible to generalize perfectly.
| Chrkeller said:
200k isn't owning two house. |
Like this generalization, it depends on where you live.
200k in some parts of California, is probably struggling to own a tiny house.
200k per year in some parts of the Midwest, you could easily own a couple of good houses that practically look like mansions compared to those California houses.
it's hard to generalize when there are millions of different situations. Whether you have 5 kids or 2 or 0, whether you have nice cars or $2k cars that drive but are pretty beaten up. Even what town you live in - which affects the cost of housing. All of those things massively make differences.
| Chrkeller said: 200k is top 10%. |
200k is in the top 10%, and 22k is in the bottom 90%.
And yet you took issue with one, but not the other. 200k is not representative of the entire top 10%, just like 22k is not representative of the bottom 90%.
| Chrkeller said:
Liberals-> steal more money followed by gee whiz why are losing elections? Why are people leaving our states? Tough one to figure out. |
Yet liberals aren't losing those elections. They're not losing California, New York or Illinois.
And yet a lot of these people are moving to areas where taxes are high in different ways. A lot of those people are moving to Texas where property taxes are so much higher that most of them are paying more in taxes than the Californians are.
The bigger issue that California is having is that they're not building enough houses.
I was originally going to set up a completely different scenario of a billion people making a dollar and 1 person making a billion dollars. Would it be fair for each half to be paying the same amount of taxes?
This is the point of the thought experiment - I added this comment before you wrote your post, but apparently you quoted before I edited so you missed it:
If tomorrow your wages doubled, your costs wouldn't double. You need a smaller percentage of your income to live as you make more. Housing and food don't suddenly cost more just because you make more money. Your first thousand dollars is much more important than your millionth thousand dollars.
Billionaires are not living the same quality of life as everyone else just 1000s of times more expensive than everyone else for some reason.
I think the answer to that thought experiment is it is pretty obviously not fair. But I am sure you are going to deflect, because you feel it doesn't properly convey reality, or maybe you feel the people who have a dollar in this scenario obviously did something wrong.
Last edited by the-pi-guy - on 07 September 2025
