🚨🚨 THREAD TIME 🚨🚨

let's talk about the differences between income, wealth, and class

tl;dr: income is earned, wealth is bought, and class is inherited

also hi friends, while on the topic of income, this work is my only source of it! times are tough and folks are really struggling, but if you have a couple extra bucks please consider sending a tip my way

💰 venmo rachel-kahn-5
💵 cashapp $rachokay

https://t.co/wGjQBJpWsW
INCOME is the amount of money a person makes from labor and investments

so if you work for 2,000 hours and are paid $40,000 in a year, that's income

OR if you have a $1,000,000 stock portfolio with a 5% return rate and cash out $40,000 of it, that's income too (fucked, right?)
WEALTH is the amount of capital you own

that could be owning a house and land worth $150,000

or owning a small business with $150,000 in assets

or owning $150,000 worth of stocks

wealth is the investments that are themselves accruing value
CLASS is about what you stand to inherit

in the united states we use a lot of weird doublespeak to avoid talking about the proletariat, the petit bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie directly

proletariat ~ working class
petit bourgeoisie ~ middle class
bourgeoisie ~ upper class
liberal categorizations of class are misdefined by income level (vs overall familial wealth). this happens because the bourgeoisie want the proletariat to believe class mobility is possible.

it isn't.
https://t.co/GEpWyuxuhQ
so when biden and cnbc are arguing whether a $400,00 income is "wealthy" or "upper middle class" they're actually both totally conflating a bunch of terms and misunderstanding the system

if you have $400,000 in income but no wealth, you aren't middle class. you're working class
frankly, even if you have $400,000 in income AND you have wealth, you aren't necessarily upper-class, because the inheritance of class isn't just capital and wealth--it's your connections. it's how many senators you have in your pocket. it's how many CEOs you can call on for help
that's why i say the only way to be in the bourgeoisie is to be born into it.

even if you make enough money to acquire capital and secure your wealth, YOU will never be bourgeoisie, because your parents weren't.
becoming filthy rich won't give you the advantages of having gone to a fancy boarding school and graduating from harvard. it won't give you the shared bourgeois cultural background.

you'll still dress wrong, talk wrong, enjoy the wrong things. they'll still see you as less-than.
at best you'll be like donald trump: a desperately self-conscious nouveau riche misfit

that's why the bourgeoisie have such an interest in obscuring who and what they are--they don't want you to realize you'll never become them, that their system is fundamentally nepotistic.
the only way to fix this problem is to do away with class altogether. and the only way to do away with class is to dispossess the bourgeoisie

capitalism only exists on the broken backs of working people. there are no good capitalists, just like there were no good slave masters.
but knowledge is also a kind of power, and i hope this thread will empower some of you to see through the smokescreen they've built for themselves.

they can't actually make us work. we can liberate ourselves. we can stop this by putting down our tools and refusing to cooperate.
@threadreaderapp unroll pls n thank u

More from Economy

The argument for deficits & debt raising interest rates in the US is not increased credit risk, it is that interest rates are a function of economic fundamentals, flows & policy. Deficits/debt change those.

I can't tell if I'm agreeing or disagreeing with @jc_econ.


Increasing government spending or reducing taxes increases demand (or reduces saving). This raises the price of loanable funds or the interest rate.

In a dynamic context, more demand means a stronger economy, the central bank raises interest rates sooner, and long rates rise.

(As an aside, we are not close to the United States needing to worry about credit risk and the risks are more overstated than understated in most other advanced economies too. But credit risk is not always & everywhere irrelevant, just look at the UK in 1976 or Canada in 1994.)

Interest rates have fallen over the last 20 yrs while debt has risen. This does not necessarily mean that debt rising causes interest rates to fall. It could also mean that other things have happened at he same time that pushed down interest rates more than debt pushed them up.

The suspects for these "other things" include slower productivity growth, slower popln growth, higher inequality, less investment, etc. All of which either increase the supply of saving or reduce the demand for investment, reducing the equilibrium interest rate.

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