> The number you're looking for is $465k.

The link references data from 2014.

> The rewards for creating something new need to be worth the risk of complete failure and loss of income for those years.

New things are not inherently valuable by virtue of being new. I don't feel that we ought to reward people who for merely creating things that are new. And why should anyone be rewarded beyond having a comfortable, easy life? $465,000 is an insane salary, magnitudes larger than is required for a comfortable life.

> Not if you give up on living in the most expensive parts of the US.

You're thinking in a narrow context. For someone like me who moved from the midwest to the west coast, yah, I could just go back "home". The larger issue however is that, to borrow a tired phrase, it takes a village to raise a child. The jobs that make a city work are largely not high-income earning jobs. That is: paramedics, firefighters, teachers, bus drivers, road repairmen, linemen, auto mechanics, delivery drivers, locksmiths, and on and on. Much fewer of these people are transplants than the high-earners and don't have support networks in those cheaper parts of the country. Creating cities where only the wealthy can afford to live necessarily, forcefully pushes other people out.

> Even then, a housing shortage is hardly attributable to income inequality.

While I agree that it's vital to build enough housing for the demand, there is one reason alone that a house can cost $600,000. That is because someone has ~$120,000 in liquid, spendable cash. If everyone had only $1000 of cash, how much could a house possibly cost.

> A broken healthcare system can't be fixed by fewer rich people.

I agree, the healthcare system is broken and the problem isn't for lack of money. But when you see politicians attempting to gut medicare for tax breaks for the rich it doesn't little to instill confidence that that money could be better spent.

> Capping incomes of successful professions will not add more fulfilling professions nor will it increase their savings.

I agree.

> But by making it include skilled professionals that had to put in huge risks to get where they are

"Huge Risks"? If you have stories about skilled professionals who risked their security and failed I'd love to hear them.

> I don't know what "impossibly larger" is supposed to mean in this context. Someone who makes $250k will not see someone who makes $500k as making an "impossibly larger" amount of money than them.

Sure, but someone who makes $45,000 is likely to see $100,000 as impossibly larger. Referencing the professions I listed above, can those skilled professional expect to make $250,000 a year in their profession?

> If this whole movement had been more carefully crafted to exclude people that had to go to medical school and go $350k into debt

While I only know a handful of people who have gone to medical school or law school, the path to repaying those loans seems to be pretty straightforward and perhaps a little nerve-racking at times, but I don't know anyone who's gone destitute as a result of those loans. Also, I'm critical of a system that puts the burden of risk on the individual for training individuals to do those important, necessary jobs.

Their risk-taking isn't what we ought to be rewarding, it's the value that those professions bring to the general population.

These problems are all intersectional. Is it the fault of rich people that there are poor people? Often not, in some cases yes. There have long been abuses of the lower economic classes by the higher economic classes. I think one the largest problems is how quickly wealthy people lose solidarity with lower earners and believe that it's their "hard work" that got them their wealth. People stuck in lower incomes know how ignorant that belief is. It's also exceedingly difficult for a person living paycheck to paycheck, raising a family or caring for dependent parent or whatever, to solidarity with someone who was in a position to go to med school or study law. Anger is often misplaced and I agree that the delineation between the %1 and the %99 percent is often fuzzed, but that doesn't make the anger an less real, any less meaningful.