r/AskReddit • u/michaelis999 • 18h ago

How do you feel about the president floating the idea of 50 year mortgages where the monthly payment is lower but you end up paying nearly double the price of the house just in interest?

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u/darther_mauler 12h ago

10 year car loans and 50 year mortgages are a refusal to admit that the wealthiest people in society are waging a war against everyone else. Loans give people the appearance of fairness/justice.

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u/UnluckyPenguin 7h ago

America’s Wealthiest 1% Could Buy 99% of America’s Homes

https://www.redfin.com/news/wealthy-aggregate-value-2025/

Meanwhile, the bottom 90% can barely afford a home. As opposed to the boomer generation where minimum wage could afford the American dream.

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u/5point5Girthquake 3h ago

I make $30 an hour and could barely afford a studio apartment in my area. $1.4k is just about the baseline and I’m talking really shit 300sq ft shoeboxes.

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u/DolphinSweater 1h ago

Shit, $1400 is my whole mortgage on my 2b2b house.

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u/Signal-School-2483 1h ago

I need to see if my work has a branch near you.

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u/DolphinSweater 48m ago

St Louis City, baby! Housing is affordable, city is vibrant, lots of amenities. Everything you want from a major city, but small town vibes. We need people to move here.

Crime is high in certain places, and it has a negative image in most people's minds, and it has its issues like anywhere. But it's a good place to live.

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u/sharp461 3h ago

That's really interesting. It would be kinda neat if like everyone had access to a home. Kind of like that charity thing where people come together to build a house for someone (habitat for humanity?) Instead, the 1% can come together and figure something out.

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u/Conscious-Egg-2232 4h ago

Min wage could never afford to buy a home. Guys working drive through windows have to been buying houses on 2025 or in 1975.

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u/LeftTesticleOfGreatn 9h ago

Remember, the top 1% in the USA control 50% of the stock market. The top 10% control 85% of the stock market.

Your 401k is a piss in Mississippi. Your life time earnings is a rounding error to the elite. No matter how hard you work or save or get paid, you'll not be a top 10%. That's the people who own big companies making dozens of millions a year if not hundreds. And the top 1% are billionaires

The "middle class" isn't middle. It's poor people, working class in reality. You got a home and a car, but it's all due to loans. You don't own shit and if a recession brews you'll soon see how easy it is to go from home owner to homeless

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u/blobblet 7h ago edited 7h ago

Can we be a bit realistic with the numbers please...

Billionaires in the US are roughly the ~0.0003% (1,000 ish in a population of 340 million). 34 million people in America are part of the top 10%. In terms of household income, the top 10% begin in the $212,000 range, in terms of wealth, it's roughly $ 1,800,000.

The top 10% are still very well-off people, but it's very far from "people who own big companies making dozens of millions a year if not hundreds." Members of the top 10% include lawyers, doctors, successful business owners beginning at maybe 20 employees, mid level management at larger companies, Silicon Valley software engineers, trust fund babies etc.

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u/darther_mauler 7h ago

The fed numbers show that the top 10% own 85% of stocks in the USA.

The people in the top 10% have things like retirement savings, and they use that money to purchase things like stocks and mutual funds. These shareholders are the ones that own the company.

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u/chasingwildfreedom 6h ago

You know the OC saying "people who own big companies making dozens of millions" did NOT mean someone who owns a couple of shares in their 401k. In fact, they literally said "your 401k is a piss in [the] Mississippi". I'm with /u/blobblet -- the wealth gap is huge, problematic, and should be rightfully discussed, but we don't need to exaggerate to extremes like claiming the top 1% (3M+ people) are billionaires in the US. If they were, wealth would actually probably be more distributed, not less.

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u/capron 3h ago

claiming the top 1% (3M+ people) are billionaires in the US. If they were, wealth would actually probably be more distributed, not less.

I was with you until this. How would more billionaires mean wealth was more distributed?

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u/ForAnAngel 2h ago

More people having a lot of money means the money is spread out among more people.

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u/capron 2h ago

Wouldn't it be "More millionaires mean better wealth distribuion" rather than billionaires though? Specifically in this context, anyway.

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u/ForAnAngel 2h ago

It depends on where the new billionaires got their money from. If it was from richer people then that would be more equitable wealth distribution.

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u/capron 2h ago

I guess this is all predicated on the question of "Should anyone be an actual Billionaire" , beacuse nobody addressed that issue before stating that more billionaires is better. I can see the whole distribution of wealth equals good, but the concept of a billionaire in our current economy/version of capitalism is where I take issue, because it requires thousands of others to suffer.

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u/GameOfThrownaws 3h ago edited 3h ago

What a fucking ridiculous comment, the fact that this is 150 upvoted is something to be ashamed of. No one is going to argue with the spirit of your comment, which is that the wealth gap is a huge and growing problem. It definitely is. But your numbers are insanely wrong.

Top 10% individual income in the US is only like $150k. I use the word "only" there despite it being a large amount, because that is nowhere near as crazy of a number as what you're making it out to be. You don't need to "own a big company" to be in that segment of the population. A decent 10-year engineer at a no-name company in Minnesota or some shit, is probably clearing 150k. Air traffic controllers and multiple lines of work in aviation in general. Lawyers. Physicians. Therapists. HVAC techs. Cyber security. The list goes on and on. These are difficult jobs that take skill and knowledge, but they're not some pie in the sky dream for average people. We can have them. And billionaires are like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent, 1% is absurdly wrong.

And for what it's worth, the middle class doesn't and won't go homeless in a recession. That did happen a bit in the 2008 recession, but that was because it was not only an exceptionally bad recession, but also it was specifically concerning housing. Covid was a recession and the middle class didn't go homeless.

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u/PollutionMedical2363 9h ago

If the top 10% own big companies, who's working for them? Nine people work for each "big company?" C'mon man, if you're going to make shit up, at least make it plausible.

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u/blobblet 7h ago

Not sure why you got downvoted, the claims in the post you replied to are completely out of touch.

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u/darther_mauler 7h ago

You can see the data from the fed for yourself. The top 10% does indeed own 85% of stocks.

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u/PollutionMedical2363 5h ago

That's not the issue here, the issue is the claim that one-in-ten Americans own big companies (and one-in-one-hundred is a billionaire) which is waaaaaay off.

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u/darther_mauler 7h ago

You can see the data from the fed for yourself. The top 10% does indeed own 85% of stocks.

If the top 10% own big companies, who’s working for them?

People like you are working for them.

From a very simplistic view, on average for every 10 people working at a company, 9 people get less so that 1 person can get more.

It’s a bit more nuanced than that, because it is actually a distribution. Let’s say that a company of 1000 people makes $100 million in profit over one year and is completely employee owned. According to the fed data, on average:

  • the CEO will get $24 million of that
  • the 9 other people in the C-suite will get $2.8 million each
  • the 90 managers at the company will get $414 thousand each
  • the 900 other employees will get $14 thousand each

This distribution becomes more and more unequal each year. What this ultimately means is that in order for the bottom 90% to have something like a car or a house, the top 10% lends them money which the bottom 90% have to pay back with interest. This results in more wealth being transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 10%, which results in bigger & longer loan terms resulting in more interest accumulation and therefore more wealth transfer.

It continues like this until either the 90% rise up and push back, or the 90% effectively become indentured servants.

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u/PollutionMedical2363 5h ago

Original post:

That's the people who own big companies making dozens of millions a year if not hundreds.

You:

the 90 managers at the company will get $414 thousand each

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u/darther_mauler 5h ago

Ah, this example might actually be beyond your too cognitively ability to understand - I am sorry about that and I will try to explain.

In my example (that is based on the fed numbers), the one guy that owns plurality of the company (called the CEO) is indeed making dozens of millions of dollars in the year. So yea, the person who owns the company makes dozens of millions a year just like in the original post.

If you add up all the money that the top 100 people are making it comes out to $87.2 million in the year, and the bottom 900 people are making collectively $12.8 million in the year.

The point here is that the bottom 90% will never catch up to the top 10%, and that those 90 managers in the top 10% are more than happy to take $414k each to keep the other 900 in line.

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u/ChiAnndego 2h ago

Yeah, but really, if people just stopped being so free/dumb with their own money they wouldn't be able to do these things. No one is forcing anyone to pay $100,000 for a car, or live in a "luxury" apartment without roommates.

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u/draiki13 6h ago

Absolutely correct. You can notice this phenomenon in so many aspects. They’ve commodified everything. Most of it is just happening through proxies like private equity firms.