gibmiser,

If you conflate home ownership with wealth, more people will view themselves as targeted by policies that target the rich - even if that is not the reality. Useful for getting voters to oppose taxing the rich.

alvvayson,

Ding ding ding.

This is why the rich try to muddy the waters.

They try and make it appear as if the homes and retirement funds of the middle class are somehow equivalent to the hundreds of billions owned by the rich.

Fun fact: if we would tax the rich and lower taxes on the middle class, we would get something closer to socialism. Under pure socialism, where everyone owns an equal share of the total wealth, the average household would actually be worth $1.6M.

Any household with less wealth than that is actually doing worse under the current system compared to full equality.

adespoton,

I disagree. Homeowners of multi-million-dollar properties have something others really want — property — but they also usually don’t actually OWN the property; they have mortgages.

And if they sold their property, some of them would be wealthy, but they’d also be homeless. And as soon as they attempted to buy another property (or even rent), they’d be back to having very limited disposable income.

So yeah; they’re still middle class. Someone else is holding the purse strings; the purse is just bigger.

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