80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck¶

"80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck" is a hilarious claim, considering that 50% of US households have a net worth of $200,000, and they self-report being "paycheck to paycheck" by including various forms of paying themselves (retirement funds, mortgages, etc.) https://t.co/drT4d6jOYH Kinda can't believe I need to say this but median means the value separating the top 50% from the bottom 50%.

The fact that the median household net wealth in the US is $192,000 means 50% of households have at least that much money. "Paycheck to paycheck" conjures images of precarity, i.e. "If I miss my next paycheck, I am ruined." If you own $200,000 more than you owe, you are, quite simply, not even close to that situation. Same if you -- like 75% of American households -- own $30,000 more than you owe. When these people say "paycheck to paycheck," they don't mean they'll be on the streets. They mean they might have to liquidate assets. They might have to hit pause on the wealth generation machine that 90% of the world can't even access in the first place. And "might have to" is doing a lot of work there, considering that most of them have enough in liquid assets to pay their bills for three months (so really "paycheck to 6 paychecks"). Three months to find a new job before you even have to start liquidating your $200k net worth. This classic formulation of "the government is giving so much money away to other countries instead of helping poor starving Americans" is an attempt to present Americans -- the richest population on the planet -- as the primary victim of American imperialism. \(3.8 billion a year is pocket change to the US. It's 0.0025% of the ~\)155 trillion owned by the top 65%. There is no burden being placed on the country or its people for funding genocide, and it's disgusting to present it as even close to the scale of Palestinian suffering. The genocide is being perpetrated in your name. The government is not redirecting that pocket change away from your American Dream House -- it's setting aside a few bucks per person to ensure it can extract blood from its imperial subjects. Blood you use to fertilize your lawn. People are being slaughtered by the thousands, and your concern is that the government owes you $11.

And you wonder why actual communists despise you.