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isn't $25k kind of low? $250k would be better - below that most people are really just worker bees whose input for societal decision making is kind of meaningless.
I don't think one's influence on societal decision making tracks particularly well with income. For instance, in Pittsburgh we have a rail trail that runs from downtown to Cumberland, Maryland, where it connects with the C&O Canal Towpath and continues to Washington, DC. The trail was constructed over a 20 year period thanks primarily to local trail chapters who did all of the fundraising and grant writing themselves and coordinated their efforts to complete a project that involved innumerable bridge and tunnel restorations and required significant right-of-way acquisition. In addition to being an exceptional local resource, the trail attracts people from around the country and the world who are looking to do a weeklong ride that doesn't involve significant hills or automotive traffic. It's only possible because of all the mostly anonymous civic-minded people who volunteer to cut the grass and chainsaw downed trees and find novel ways to keep tunnels from icing in the winter without having to close the trail. These are all volunteers and the only requirement for having this kind of power is to show up. Literally. Yeah, you may start at the bottom as a worker bee but if you're willing to do the work then people will start handing more and more responsibility to you.
I'm on the board of a similar nonprofit that involves recreation and we're currently in the midst of a huge project with a lot of moving parts and various state agencies and other nonprofits involved and if I had a problem that required intervention from on high I could get at least two and possibly three politicians up the ass of whatever bureaucrat was in my way, and if the problem went deeper than lack of priority we could probably get targeted legislation passed. I don't know if anyone on the board makes $250k but if they do it's purely incidental. Contrast this with friends of mine who are lawyers making more than $250k because they billed a bunch of hours on some lawsuit that no one has heard about or cares about. Who has more of an impact on society? Or one guy I know who owns a plumbing business that makes a ton of money but I don't think he even votes.
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