38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/goodbye-middle-class-51-percent-of-all-american-workers-make-less-than-30000-dollars-a-year
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Whoa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by Packratona!
The United States government spends about 1/3 of all its tax revenues on the military budget. You can figure all the rest out from there.....with a little critical thinking. :D
People are clearly "making up" income deficits by spending on credit cards.
I have heard any number of culprits fingered for the “demise of the middle class”. The article puts the blame on foreigners and robots. The Sandernistas see it as a matter of “the rich” not contributing their “fair share”, although they aren’t terribly specific about who the rich are and what fair might be. Trumpkins incline to the sneaky Mexican theory. Some point to bankers or the wrong flavor of politician. One suggestion posted here is that our defense establishment is too robust. Some blame declining wages on a general dumbing down of the American population, variously attributed to teachers unions, parsimonious taxpayers, electronic entertainment or organized religion. Others see us in an overall cultural decline: we have become lazy and entitled, and are now paying the price. Others still see a surfeit of lawyers as the cause.
I agree that most American folks are lazy and almost all people in the US have a toxic sense of entitlement.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
My personal opinion is that a massive swath of people who think they have an "income problem" actually have a spending problem.
I'm always a little skeptical of statistics published by small groups with an agenda, but those numbers may be close as far as I could tell with a small amount of sleuthing. There seemed to be a little better picture if you excluded age groups under 25 years of age. In my mind the migration of manufacturing overseas and automation of jobs is a big factor. I worked for a manufacturing company for part of my career and in my later years of employment it was getting hard to find temporary workers to do relatively hard manual labor that paid fairly well, say $15 dollars an hour, and a chance of well paid permanent employment with health and retirement benefits. Rumor around was that people would rather work easier jobs in the service industry that paid minimum wage. So I think there is something to folks being lazy. I also think there is something to the overweighted wages of upper echelons and enormous wages of CEOs, where wage distribution is not fair to the lower incomes.
compared to what, they spend more hours at work than almost any other country on earth.Quote:
I agree that most American folks are lazy
I think that depends on the income. 20k is not much. 30k? I think it depends on the part of the country and whether it's household with kids or just some single person's income, in an expensive part of the country it's not much either and will be a struggle even for one person, but somewhere cheaper it might be less so.Quote:
My personal opinion is that a massive swath of people who think they have an "income problem" actually have a spending problem.
Both very good points. I stand corrected on the first issue for sure.Quote:
Originally Posted by ApatheticNoMore
When my parents were young and first married (1950's), my Dad, with only a GED, made enough money to own a house and allow my Mom to stay at home. He didn't have a fancy white collar job either. That scenario does not happen today. A high school graduate working full time at a minimum wage job (or even a couple of dollars above minimum) can barely afford to pay rent on a one bedroom apartment. I'd hardly say that's a spending problem. It's a everything-has-increased-in-price-except-wages problem. Minimum wage jobs are only meant to be for high school and college students (as most conservative politicians say)? Tell that to my husband (48) who has a masters degree and has to work two part time low wage jobs to equate one full time one because its impossible to find higher paying "career" jobs here. I've worked at my job (office job) for 13 years and only this year finally hit $15.00/hr. We're fortunate that we live in a state that has one of the lowest costs of living in the country, otherwise we'd be screwed financially. And to hint that we're lazy and it's our own fault for making so little really makes me see red.
+1Quote:
Originally Posted by Gingerella72
+1 Emphasis mine.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gingerella72
Might want to take a gander at the data on median household income over the past N decades:Quote:
Originally Posted by Gingerella72
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...967_-_2011.PNG
Note the fun fact that you can cherry-pick smaller timeframes from this dataset, and change the scaling on the axes to convey your particular marketing message...
Endless economic growth on a finite planet is not possible.
Obviously wealth inequality is a major issue. But I think everyone from "successful working class" on up the class hierarchy needs to learn to be happier with much less.
That's not obvious to me, but I salute those marketers of victim hood who have managed to implant the phrase "wealth inequality" in the brains of most Americans. That is an awesome accomplishment in just a few short years.Quote:
Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler
It's been over 50 years since Kurt Vonnegut published Harrison Bergeron. Luckily, we don't yet have a "Handicapper General' to enforce mandatory leveling, although Bergeron was set in the late 2000's so there's still time.Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
K-Von was a democratic socialist and a secular humanist!Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
Income levels are pretty inconsequential really. What is significant is the debt of younger adults. Student loan debt being the most offensive. Doesn't 6.8 % seem a bit abusive to you? Yet many current student loans are that high. And now they get out of college and the easiest way to get rid of that debt is to join the military. How convenient to let the debtors fight and die for the lenders. Or they go to their parents and now that great retirement plan gets put on hold maybe a decade. It can't be stopped with political elections and it can't be stopped by revolution (not enough firearms in the world to take on the military).
It will only be stopped by eliminating the dependency we have chosen to be a part of. So what if the masses decide not to participate in the buy, buy, buy and more, more, more. What if we say, we are satisfied. Go sell your crap to somebody else willing to go in debt to you for it. What if we bring them down to our level. Just simply live and starve the rich bastards to death.
Also, they made a movie of that story back in the early 1990s. And I think they made one recently...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2081_(film)Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
Amen, brother!Quote:
Originally Posted by Williamsmith
Player Piano strikes me as a somewhat more realistic scenario. No jobs. Huge competition for the few good roles, runaway credentialism, testing etc. Everyone else doing make-work. It's a lot closer to present reality than a government instituting equality, I mean one can at least see the Player Piano scenario in current trends.Quote:
K-Von was a democratic socialist and a secular humanist!
K-Von was certainly a visionary. I celebrate his entire catalog of novels and stories and non-fiction.Quote:
Originally Posted by ApatheticNoMore
Dude, in my world, the 1990's were just recently.Quote:
Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler
I would suspect that the size of the household unit has declined somewhat over the last half century, which could mean that income is available to support fewer people.Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
Good point, and now most families have 2 wage earners.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
There was probably a lot of poverty in 1965. Wasn't it about that time Bobby Kennedy was doing his "other America" tours in areas of real and serious poverty, genuine hunger etc..
Still it is hard to get beyond the record homelessness problem visible everyday on the streets, no matter how many statistics get thrown around.
It's only statistics and not solid anecdote, but according to this homelessness has been declining.Quote:
Originally Posted by ApatheticNoMore
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...merica/279050/
I think that it might be worth it to reexamine what it really means to be homeless.
A person can be without a house or an apartment or a condo but still have food, healthcare, friends, clean water, and a place to shower too.
People live in vans and are happy: http://www.cheaprvliving.com/
People live in cars and are happy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PCwnCC5Sw0
People live in tents and are happy: http://www.businessinsider.com/ultra...ke-work-2015-7
it's not anecdote, statistics show that locally homeless has increased a lot lately. It's the evidence of my eyes backed by data which by the way is not called anecdote. National stats are really an entirely separate issue as one doesn't live nationally. There is something about seeing so much abject poverty on a daily basis ...Quote:
It's only statistics and not solid anecdote
This sounds like a great commercial for communism....Quote:
Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler
"People live in work camps and are happy."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Williamsmith
Not really. My mortgage was nearly at a rate of 12%. That taught me not to get into debt like that again, and I haven't.
Should I prefer that Nanny G take more from the rich to give to me, the poor person who [was stupid enough, like everyone else at the time] signed up for that mortgage? Do I really need someone to protect me from myself?
Obviously you did not check those websites or watch those videos. hahaQuote:
Originally Posted by Williamsmith
How far do you take this though?Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
But housing prices tend to fall when mortgage rates go up because ultimately it's the monthly pyment that matters. With student loans proliferating the opposite has occured with tuition.Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
Whatever happened to usury laws? I say we bring them back.
why do you think they don't exist? That's regulated on a state level. To me it's a flip of a coin why one rate is ok but another is not.Quote:
Originally Posted by JaneV2.0
Why do you (the generic you) know what loan rate is best for me? What if I really NEED some money and my ability to payback is high risk, yet someone is willing to lend it to me at a higher-than-you-think-acceptable rate? Why do YOU get to decide my terms of business?
It is a middle class value, to borrow money at an acceptable rate. That "acceptable rate" varies and is regulated by politicians voted in and maintained by middle class culture. In street culture rates are higher. So, who are you to look down on users in the street for using unregulated lenders?
think about how the aristocracy looks down on us little people with credit card debt and car loans. We are smug in our comfort zone of "reasonable" rates, no usury excess for us! We are intelligent consumers. Yet the uber rich think we are idiots to pay ANY interest AT ALL, or at minimum you borrow from the family trust at a nominal rate.
It's all relative, valuing the cost of money. It's about values, usually class driven, sometimes intellectually analyzed, but likely emotional.
i intend this to address UL's question as well.
The bankruptcy bill a few years ago did away with them. Or at least did away with the ones that interfered with banks profit. Like the ability to use bankruptcy on student loans. Perhaps if Trump becomes president he'll teach the students how to work bankruptcy the way he has. Or better yet, if only the little guy could do like the mega banks and not just declare bankruptcy, but get bailed out when things go wrong...Quote:
Originally Posted by JaneV2.0
So we're all OK that the current system has, over time, evolved so that every advantage goes to the very rich, with more and more stumbling blocks (FICO scores, student loans, insurance- dominated health care) to keep the rest of us in our place. I'm convinced that greed is the dominant value in what passes for culture here. Other countries seem to regard a well-educated population (for example) as an investment in their future; we think of our students as a herd of cash cows.
I could not agree more! Sad state of affairs.Quote:
Originally Posted by JaneV2.0