Wealth Distribution in America

DistillerCMac · 4時間前

I think if we want to make graphics like this -- we should offer sources. I know it is annoying, but providing sources at the bottom helps us in the long run.

EDIT: Now with more sources and grammar from /u/AvTheMarsupial https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/3p9lng/wealth_distribution_in_america_fixed/

DrQAlias · 5時間前

Great, but the grammar in that last statement kills it for me, it makes it seem like its not part of "what Republicans want you to believe", but that Bernie actually wants the EQUAL model. There should be another "that" in that part of the sentence, as in "and that Bernie..."

letsseeaction · 5時間前

Good related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

(Though 'socialism' needs to be replaced with 'communism')

eastmangoboy · 4時間前

This is fantastic step in trying to explain things.

But... I have one criticism. It's still hard to gauge how much money that 1% really have. I wish there was an infographic that made me go, "Wow... that's ridiculous!"

pelsmacker · 5時間前

I appreciate your effort here. We need good explanations, and this goes a long way. But it's too wordy, and your main point is obscured by grammatical errors.

"Billionaires would have you believe that America sits at the IDEAL model, and Bernie Sanders wants to take the country..."

You mean that "Billionaires want you to believe that America sits at the IDEAL model and that Bernie Sanders wants to take the country to the EQUAL model"

However, this is too complicated. All you need to do is say under the equal model that Bernie Sanders is not proposing this. The main thing people need to understand is what democratic socialism is and to recognize that it is what they desire.

overconvergent · 3時間前

The thing that bothers me the most about this infographic isn't the wording that others pointed out. It's how "equal" the "ideal" model is. I think that many (most?) Americans would disagree with the ideal model as it is presented here. In this ideal model, it looks like the top 1% have only about 4 or 5 times as much money as the bottom 1%. If the poorest people have 50k, the richest have 250k; if the poorest have 20k, the richest have 100k. If the wealthiest 1% are millionaires, the poorest 1% have over 200k. This seems too extreme for the majority of Americans, and doesn't seem to be what Bernie envisions or match the reality in countries that have adopted the policies he is advocating.

FragRaptor · 6時間前

This image says that Bernie wants to do the "equal" model which equivocates itself with "communism". EVEN WHEN there's a "democratic socialism" model on the list... It says Billionaires want people to believe we are at the ideal "democratic socialism" model when we are not. The misinformation is staggering. Bernie wants the ideal, and billionaires don't it's pretty obvious...

A7394 · 6時間前

note: This was posted by /u/AvTheMarsupial last night, but was removed for title

ttll2012 · 4時間前

Why didn't this diagram use Gini coefficient (also known as the Gini index or Gini ratio)? Wouldn't that be more scientific and comparable with the status of other countries?

jordlake · 3時間前

I think this video does a good job of putting it in perspective. https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM

DoorMarkedPirate · 3時間前

Democratic socialism ultimately and ideally wants equality between classes, or Communism. Social democracy is kind of that middle ground.

Phantorri00 · 2時間前

But in communism everyone does not have the same resources :/ it is just a more advanced socialist mode, where after socializing the means of production, there is no need of private ownership regarding ONLY the means of production.

Private ownership will exist when it does not affect social production.

gackhammer · 5時間前

I like it (the graphic, not the actual wealth distribution in America)

FilteredRiddle · 3時間前

I read the billionaires and career politicians bit as, Trump and Bush, respectively. I also understood the point about Republicans saying Bernie wants the Equal model, which is untrue. So... I think the info graphic is great. Though, I agree that sources make everything better.

TBestIG · 3時間前

If anyone gets a better infographic I'd like to have it

AvTheMarsupial · 1時間前

Didn't expect this to blow up, congrats on that karma, /u/A7394.

Looking back on it, a lot of the text is totally unclear. I'll fix that and have it up in a jiffy. I'm trying to take into account all of the suggestions here like fixing text and clarifying, but I don't want to add too much to clutter up the graphs. It's not a question of looking pretty, the main functionality is to quickly share facts, not to hold an in depth discussion over the exact statistics and such.

(Plus, given how we're stuck on my admittedly poorly written conclusion, more confusion is hardly ideal.)

undiurnal · 26分前

Hate to be a naysayer, but when this came up in my feed I wasn't sure if it was /r/sandersforpresident or /r/crappydesign

No Sources. No y-axis. A poor explanation of units. Grammatical errors and oddities. And a distressingly flat palette (I had to work to read it).

I really appreciate the effort here, but it needs another couple passes before going primetime.

A7394 · 5時間前

Good discussion. I didn't make this, but I'd be willing to help edit the next version.

CostcoTimeMachine · 4時間前

People like trump don't want to maintain the status quo. They want to make the disparity even greater. He and others want to lower taxes on those people at the far right on their charts. Lower them.

Pvt_Larry · 2時間前

Good info, but it's pretty wordy and the sizing isn't terribly convenient to be honest. If it could be synthesized down any further that would be better.

But this is the point that needs to be emphasized; this is quite possibly the single biggest issue the country is facing, but other candidates and the media are absolutely silent about it. People need to see how bad this situation really is.

RainbowTrenchcoat · 2時間前

I think you might be able to craft a better chart using the info in Donahoff's look at wealth and income in America in 2010 (I doubt things have gotten better since then). Bottom 40% had a mean income just above the poverty line, and negative wealth. The bottom 80% owned 4.7% of non-home financial wealth. The bottom 90% owned 72.5% of debt. And figure 4 looks like a better graph, though it doesn't separate out the 1%- Actual wealth distribution was .1 for the lowest 20%, .2 for the second lowest 20%, 4.7% for 40-60, 10% for 60-80, and 85% for the top ten percent. People thought that an ideal distribution was 10-12-20-25-33, and that the way the distribution really was was was 2-8-12-20-58.

sajimo · 2時間前

Though it has its problems, I'm happy to see an easy to understand example of wealth distribution. Bernie should have someone putting together accurate images like this for social media. I'd definitely pass a new version of this along to my Facebook.

Side note: I talked with my neighbor yesterday, she hadn't even heard of Bernie Sanders... and she was big on Ron Paul last election. There are still a lot of people we need to reach out to.

edit: spelling

kerosion · 2時間前

Removing the jabs at republican candidates at the end could expand the audience of this graphic. The illustration could start interesting conversations with my friends dead-set against Bernie over the socialism phrase. However, as soon as these individuals hit the last sentence it's my experience that they will instantly discredit any points the rest of it has to say.

There's something to be said for simply sticking with the point and letting the idea sink in a bit.

Along with some cleanup of the grammar to strengthen the message the reach of this one can be enhanced quite a bit.

Gr1pp717 · 2時間前

Don't cut it off. Let it be asinine and annoyingly tall.

Z0di · 5時間前

Main problem with this is that it says Bernie wants the "equal" platform which you've explained as "Communism". This is not true, and hurts his image.

It's presented in a nice way, that's almost right, but it's bullshit.

Jp123500 · 2時間前

How is communism a logistical impossibility?

gosch13 · 4時間前

Not new information but brought forward in new context with the Bernie Sanders campaign.

thefrdeal · 3時間前

Wait, Bernie wants the "Equal Model" as in the communist one listed first? Is this misinformation or am I supporting the wrong candidate?

pudgypenguin22 · 3時間前

You should probably cite your stats. That 92% figure is what is sticking out to me the most.

pelsmacker · 3時間前

Honestly, it's pretty weird how difficult a time we--and Bernie--are having talking about his economic and social vision.

The world Bernie envisions has markets in goods, services and labor; it has trade; it has innovation; it has entrepreneurship and corporations. It has opportunity for hard workers to become rich.

The main difference is that taxes are used to ensure that people don't suffer and that everyone has the opportunity to flourish, and oversight of businesses ensure that workers are treated fairly. The ways we accomplish this are familiar, reasonable, and broadly supported, such as universal access to health care and education and old-age income.

Countries that have these have less of the fear and suffering than the US has and as-good or better business climates.

These policies lead, over time, to a less extreme distribution of income and wealth, but there will still be the differences with which Americans are comfortable and believe are economically motivating.

These are the policies of FDR and Eisenhower. They are the policies under which America grew rich and prospered after WWII. There is nothing scary or alien about it. Bernie Sanders is as American as it gets.

We don't have to suffer and fear and live under a mountain of debt just to make the extremely rich insanely rich. We can have an America that both is fair and is a land of opportunity.

Bernie Sanders for president.

VonBonn · 2時間前

An interesting statistic on wealth distribution:

The top 0,1% of America's population own roughly 200 times as much wealth as the bottom 40% of America's population.

If requested I will explain my calculation.

Wamadahama · 2時間前

Nice use of the solarized color palette

FuzzBall99 · 2時間前

I really resent the use of 'democratic socialism', it's a social democracy or contemporary socialism if you really push it. (Real) Socialism is democratic and the use of 'democratic socialism' seems to make this fact null. I'm not completely against the system (although my beliefs do differ from Sanders') I just resent the terminology used.

epik · 2時間前

More of this is exactly what the world needs to see.

A7394 · 2時間前

Some thoughts & takeaways:

I saw this posted late last night by another user. It was removed per Title guidelines. I woke up and posted it, to promote discussion, which it clearly has. It can clearly be improved, and we have enough motivated people to help the author of this graphic achieve their aim.

To the author, my apologies for any personal insults. It's visually appealing, we just need it to be perfect (with citations etc.).

TracyMorganFreeman · 1時間前

The poverty line fails to account for cost of living variance, and is pre tax transfers. Moreoverly, relative poverty metrics tell you nothing about to degree to which people struggle or don't.

Further, what "smooth" means is completely not defined nor is fair defined, and all manner of things can be included in smooth. Saying 92% of Americans support some fair distribution is useless without defining fair.

This is all before completely ignoring that who occupies a particular income category varies from year to year.

This is grossly misleading.

meatduck12 · 1時間前

This pretty much says Bernie Sanders wants a communist model, which is absolutely not true, especially when there is a democratic socialism model listed!

tweediddly · 1時間前

Just to be clear, this has resulted from government management. The government manages the economy. The solution is not to demand more, stricter, government management--nor is the solution to pretend like capitalism got us here.

Freazur · 1時間前

/r/dataisdepressing

h4rb1nger · 1時間前

Fuck it. Why not full on communism?

eric1_z · 1時間前

not a bad infographic, however I have two problems

1) sources

2) Bernie is for social democracy, not democratic socialism. He says he is the latter, but is principles line up more with the former.

aerlenbach · 1時間前

I'd love this same inforgraph in a less biassed tone if possible.

Iam-doriangray · 1時間前

Thanks for reminding me how broke I am :(

Ging_No_Hard_R_Sound · 1時間前

Let's not bash on most of the top 1%... it's really not as much money as you would think, and frankly, a surgeon or a doctor is barely in the 1%, yet the amount of work they do, and the amount of work and studying and accumulated knowledge they have to have is insane.

I don't think people understand that a doctor could be pretty much anything that they wanted to be, but they chose medicine over every other career (except maybe theoretical mathematician or physicist, though there are plenty of doctors that could have done that too) and sacrificed some of the best years in their life to do so.

rockoman100 · 1時間前

You guys still haven't figured out what communism and socialism are huh? sigh I'll give you some more time.

CallMeFierce · 1時間前

Can we make an effort to stop saying democratic socialism? There is no capitalism in an actual socialist society.

fireflyMfucker · 1時間前

Please... Capitalism and socialism has nothing to do with distribution! Only ownership!

testiclelice · 1時間前

This the problem with the Sanders campaign.

Yes, there is a wealth distribution gap. Yes, there is too much money in politics. Yes, the government is waging it's biggest intelligence war against it's own citizens.

But electing Bernie Sanders does not change that. It doesn't make those things different. The "Yes We Can" bullshit from Obama proved that pretty easily. The election of one man means little if you cannot create any sort of policy that will be accepted by your political foes.

People want to know WHAT Sanders will do to make incremental change. I don't want to hear any more summations of the problems we have. I've heard enough of that. I want to see policies. I want to see proposed budgets. I want to hear what EXACTLY Sanders would do about Russia, TPP, climate change, etc. I want to her about his allies. I want to know how much juice he has to squeeze.

It's time to stopping using Sanders funnel for progressive angst. It's time for Sanders to put out real policy.

91111111111111111111 · 1時間前

Isn't there a fundamental problem with policy proposals based on this data when it is promoted as "wealth distribution"? There's income, there's money, and then there's wealth... "Wealth" is not a finite resource - there is no limit to how much there can be. Therefore, and additionally, it is not and can not be "distributed". It's not as if there is some single source of this wealth and someone or something is dividing it up and providing it to people.

nojustwar · 1時間前

Everyone's got opinions here, which is great. If anyone has any constructive criticism, please mark up any changes you wish for OP to make. I'm sure OP is more than willing. Let's make this better rather than just shooting this dow.
OP, good job. I hope you can make some of the changes the commenter are (rightfully) asking for.

psoshmo · 59分前

This implies Sanders wants communism, which is not true.

HabitualCloud · 58分前

When did Sanders say he wanted to take America to the "equal model"? I thought he was for the ideal, democratic socialism model. Also it would be more accurate to describe the United States as a republic instead of a democracy. Threre are pockets of true democracy throughout the country, but in general, we elect representatives to make governing decisions for us.

Texas_Rockets · 56分前

As far as his goal of redistributing wealth... I agree that it is lopsided and I would like to see it evened out a bit, but I do not want to see the government undermining the free market. I believe that increasing the minimum wage outright is narrow minded and does not consider small businesses and by extension the middle class. The beauty of capitalism is that you get what you put in... I don't want to see ceo's of intercontinental corporations making close to what middle class workers make and I don't want to see wage workers at Walmart making disproportionately more than what they deserve... I don't want to see people who didn't go to college and are 30 yrs old making close to what someone with a masters degree, someone that worked their ass off to get where they are... I don't want to see these two treated as if their contributions are even close to equal.

Clearly there are wage earners that are overqualified but that is the exception and not the rule.

RebeccaNobody · 51分前

Frankly, this graphic makes me like Bernie Sanders less. I'd prefer the equal model.

dillonEh · 49分前

and would fight even against the theoretical model.

Shouldn't it say even for the theoretical model? That would be a huge improvement on its own, and many would argue that the "fair" model is a little too fair, though I don't really understand what the far-right columns mean.

JWolv · 48分前

So? Whats the big deal?

solid7 · 46分前

Can you add a legend? I can't tell what the bars, colors, or lines mean. I get that left-ish is generally "poor" and right-ish is generally "rich". Beyond that, this doesn't make a lot of sense.

Pseudly · 45分前

As a communist, this is both a misrepresentation of communism and socialism.

GammaWorld · 45分前

I'd be extremely interested in the "reality" graph being expanded to show how the reality has changed over the past 50 or 100 years.

sumnuyungi · 44分前

An alternative perspective, courtesy of Nassim Taleb: "WEALTH INEQUALITY AND SKIN IN THE GAME A well functioning society isn't one in which people are equal but one in which people have equal probability. So measuring static inequality is severely flawed. Take the United States. Less than 10% of the people in the 1982 list of richest 500 were there in 2012. Compare to France where 60% on the rich list today have inherited their wealth. And there are other more robust metrics: 56% of Americans will spent at least a year in the top 10% (in income not wealth). Not in Europe. So a good society is one in which people at the top have skin in the game hence can lose their money. Wealth generation should not lead to protected position at the top. Social mobility isn't in elevating people, it requires the top to open a position. So in Europe a civil servant from the "mandarin class" is safe for life as they extract rent from the system, while a good entrepreneur will run a chance of getting poor, leaving room for others. PS- Let me explain to those who don't get it. SITG means the rich needs to remain exposed to losing back his money rather than shielded. PPS- 39% of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 % of the income distribution, 56 % will find themselves in the top 10%, and 73% percent will spend a year in the top 20 %." Ref http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/from-rags-to-riches-to-rags.html?_r=0

jpastore · 39分前

I would like to point out American capitalism in this chart is monetarism.

wolfpackalpha · 36分前

This looks very similar to the info from this video: https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM

Kittyc3749 · 35分前

It should say at the bottom that Bernie Sanders wants to take us to the IDEAL model for Democratic Socialism, not the Equal model because that's communism, which is not his message.

cuulcars · 34分前

I got curious so I decided to look up what percent my parents are in (I'm a college student, so, I don't really have any money yet).

However, all the sites I've found that does this are very deceptive. They all do it by income, because the income statistics are much more palatable.

Example:

New York Times

Wall Street Journal

Very few of these represent WEALTH distribution rather than income distribution. I found this: WealthOMeter. But I have no idea how accurate is.

EmperorSexy · 32分前

The term "career politician" has too much of a stigma around it. Bernie is a career politician. He's spent his life in politics, activism, and public service. That's why he's great. Trump on the other hand hasn't even been in the game a decade. There has to be a better term for the millionaire political class.

DonnieNarco · 32分前

So we are just going to keep pretending like democratic socialism means whatever we want it to mean.

arcotime29 · 31分前

Americans have this irrational fear towards the word 'socialism', it's so embedded in their minds that you can't even mention the word without having a knee jerk reaction to defend capitalism. They have been taught a simplistic "socialism bad, capitalism good", it's a black and white view of the world. They have been told 'look around you, isn't capitalism great? We have everything and in great quantities'. Unfortunately the world is not as simple and people have become blind to the dark side of capitalism. People are so blind that they will go as far as defending the super rich, while they themselves have to work two jobs to barely scrape by. And this is America imagine how it is in third world countries. How long can this blindness go on?

You_For_Rick · 30分前

Rich people should definitely give me money.

Captain_Tactical · 30分前

So how many people should be jailed, killed, oppressed, beaten or hurt to obtain the ideal, democratic, or other model? Only the barrel of a gun will make it happen.

Whosedoor · 30分前

If you're taking requests, is it possible to see an infographic that compares "overall income" to "taxes paid"

People always say that secretaries pay more in tax% then their boss. But is that true just on an off basis or can you see that effect in data?

worldcitizencane · 15分前

Looks like a rehash of this infomercial a few years old https://youtu.be/vttbhl_kDoo

VYR3 · 8分前

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE

-Tyrion-Lannister- · 3分前

It's a stretch to say that Trump is a career politician

straws · 4時間前

Way too confusing and you don't cite any sources.

SynesthesiaBruh · 3時間前

TIL: Not holding A DAY in office qualifies you as a "career" politician.

FinalMantasyX · 2時間前

what the fuck kind of shitty graph is not labeled ON ANY AXIS?

Laverrick · 2時間前

Socialism

Social classes

ya okay

squishybloo · 3時間前

Noone else has pointed it out, but... I think this infographic is way too fucking big in general. Both in length and width.

The original video does a lot better. :/ And you should cite both the video and the study the video also cites as the sources for this information.

pt2091 · 2時間前

Any infographic should concretely define its y axis and show its sources.

GenBlase · 2時間前

Yeah I looked through it all. Clearly it is an anti sanders propaganda, it takes advantage of the fact that everyone hates the billionaires, then says Bernie Sanders are involved with the billionaires.

downonthesecond · 2時間前

Since CEOs are the ones making millions, then everyone should become a CEO.

本日のreddit gold目標額達成率