The key to understanding why discussions of wealth in the US are so strange: you are fabulously wealthy *long* before you're truly safe from poverty, because our safety net is such a joke that the wrong medical condition can lose you your job *and* cost hundreds of thousands of $

Rich Americans don't feel rich because you have to be so far beyond merely "rich" to really be safe from the precarity our society is organized to inflict on as many people as possible

This is why the same people being so anti welfare is just as "against their interests" as anybody else: they're still hurt by the enforced insecurity. But they can't even admit this to themselves, so here we are

America: accidentally artificially creating shared class interest among everyone who works for a living, ie along almost perfectly Marxist class lines, decades after the end of the specific form of industrial capitalism that created those interests organically, to own the commies

The climate crisis capitalist US is the dialectical synthesis of "first as tragedy" and "then as farce"

This thread brought to you by working out how much a simple kidney stone removal would have cost me without my fancy expensive insurance

(hint: years of my savings even as a BigTech engineer )

Before someone starts an argument: no, this isn't a "you should pity rich people"

it's a "~all of us benefit from policy that removes this kind of risk from everyone's lives. If you're a rich white collar employee & think you're secure, go do the math on a worst case scenario"