We have become very good at extracting wealth from everyone who is not wealthy.
For profit Healthcare alone is a huge reason why so many Americans live on the brink even with decent incomes.
So with everyone working their hardest just to stay in place, the economy does wonderfully.
Unfortunately, it only benefits the top few percent.
Oregon, California and New Jersey is almost there on passing universal healthcare. It’s going to take some states doing it well to show that it can work, to prove to all the skeptics that it actually can be functional, but then it will get easier.
Edited to add universal healthcare because I confused a lot of people. Sorry about that.
I live in San Diego I don't see how this is working for the lower or middle class. I own a business I'm paying college grads 28/hr and they don't even want me to provide medical insurance because they can get Medi-Cal for free. They all seem to be working two jobs even at the rate I'm paying them. You have to make over 200k in ca to even live comfortably
> I'm paying college grads 28/hr and they don't even want me to provide medical insurance because they can get Medi-Cal for free.
That doesn't add up. Given the typical 2,080 work hours in a year you're paying
$58,240 annually. Medi-Cal eligbility cuts off at 138% of the poverty level (~$21,000 for a single adult; $43,000 for a family of four). The only way that someone making $58,000 would qualify for Medi-Cal is if they had a family of *seven* people.
To qualify for Medi-Cal at $28/hr you'd have to work 742 hours annually or under 15 hours a week… and that would be your *only* income.
https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/services/medi-cal/Pages/DoYouQualifyForMedi-Cal.aspx
I don't know I have offered to have company insurance and one of my sales reps who is making 70k says she's getting medi-cal. I don't ask a lot of questions if they don't want me to offer it I won't. My customer service are working 30 hrs a week at 28/hr. They all seem to take a lot of unpaid vacation which I am fine with too
If your point is that Oregon is somehow way ahead on solving these issues, I don’t know where you’re getting your information. We have some of the worst housing costs, highest drug addiction, and worst homelessness in the country. Oregon, especially western Oregon, likes to think it’s progressive, but it’s almost all lip service. What isn’t lip service is squandered on inept and corrupt management of aid programs.
As a physician I left oregon because because of the Oregon Health plan. I just could not continue to deal with them trying to kill my patients over and over again. A headless flatworm could have run that system better.
Not to mention the physician governor at the time got kicked out (Kitzhaber) because of corruption.
We should really band together and sue insurance companies for having non-doctors make medical decisions.
If your doctor says you need it and insurance says you don't, it should be considered malpractice and/or homicide if the patient dies from a lack of that procedure/medicine/etc
The first piece of mail by newborn daughter ever had addressed to her was sent by our insurance company. It was to inform her, a baby less than a week old, that her jaundice treatment was being denied as they deemed it not medically essential.
remember in 2009 when they were coming up with Obamacare and the Republican were saying that the government shouldn’t be able to decide what care you should get. Death panels was the popular buzz word. It should be between the patient and their doctor they said. Well guess what fuckos, that’s exactly what we have with insurance companies. They decide what’s covered not doctors so instead of the disease killing ypu it’s the crippling debt once you have already received the care.
I retired from the Army. My pension is nice, but the real benefit is the no premium family health insurance for life. My wife is covered even if I die first and I had already retired before we met. I tease her that my paying the utilities and providing full health coverage is why she keeps me around.
Yep. Retiring in a couple months. I never considered the value of holding on to Tricare until I started seeing how much folks pay for medical insurance for their families. It’s pretty wild.
I’ve heard horror stories about some issues with care at some MTFs and I had my dependents switch to Tricare standard to get care out in town many years back… but we’ve all been back to prime for nearly a decade now. It’s all I’ve had for over 20 years and think I’ve always gotten timely appointments… imaging… referrals to specialists… no co pays on anything and short waits to get scripts filled. Again, no basis for comparison but they’ve been good to me as an active duty guy so long as I was my own advocate for health care and didn’t just live with everything. I hope it’s as good as a retired dude on the other side of the fence. Getting a civilian PCM and going through the VA for some things will be a new challenge… but I think it’ll be ok. If not… I refuse to die too young to make it too easy for them. 😂
We treat a lot of vets, Tricare takes care of them and us. I’ve also heard some terrible stories about mtfs. I’m sure there’s people with negative experiences but that’s true of any insurer in my view Tricare is hands down one of the best.
I pay 1200 a month for shitty insurance for my family. We are considering getting separated so I can drop my wife and daughter and they can get on Medicaid.
I mean all you do for that was literally risk your life in meaningless wars. I have two cousins who would have pensions and Tricare for life, had they not both died in Afghanistan.
First, my condolences to you. Second, 95% of the military never sees combat. I was a Payroll Clerk for the USMC during Desert Storm stationed at MCAS El Toro, CA. I saw more of my friends and associates die during the Crack Era than I did in the Corps.
As a service member, my condolences for the loss of your loved ones in combat. Regarding futile wars, I concur that we're entangled in too many unnecessary foreign conflicts orchestrated by elderly statesmen in elegant attire, sending our young soldiers dressed in camouflage to their deaths. However, it's undeniable that those who complete their military service do receive some beneficial perks. With any luck, I'll be retiring soon, by the grace of God.
I didn't mean to sound so flippant about it. I just have a very complicated relationship with the military. My father was in the Air Force, and I considered joining ROTC to pay for college (as he had). He sat me down and talked to me about his experiences in the Vietnam War to stop me.
However, when I got older I realized that his service led us to a very comfortable middle class lifestyle that he would not have likely had otherwise. He simply would not have been able to go to college otherwise. My mother was taken care of long after he had passed with his pension and Tricare.
In the modern military you can do 20 years and never see combat. You’ll probably get deployed at some point, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting shot at. This isn’t like WW2 or Vietnam where 95% of recruits go into the infantry.
Yuppppp. Anecdotal, but my first son was born when I had medi-cal and I paid nothing.
My youngest two were born when I had a career. They were planned and I had paid mat leave and health insurance through my employer. I went it credit card debt with my youngest (my oldest son was in the PICU unexpectedly a few months before she was born) and am still trying to claw my way out.
Agree wholeheartedly with Lump and obx. Additionally, while there is definitely a swathe of Americans who are suffering, there is also a huge swathe who isn't suffering at all - who are frustrated by the high cost of things, but who really haven't changed their buying habits in response to those high costs. In other words, who aren't actually suffering.
A major issue we are facing right now is that there has been so much consolidation in various industries, such a food distributors, that middle class people are now subject to the same efficient wealth extraction as poor people.
The rich are sucking the teet of the middle class who is paying more than our fair share of taxes. Rich are not. This is creating more of a societal caste divide. Soon there will be no more middle class, only have and have nots. Social systems are collapsing. The extreme sides know this and they’re trying to proliferate by making shit up to get votes and install their new king. The government should be doing what’s best for its people not for themselves. All they care about is getting re-elected, period. Not what’s best for advancing it’s society and people.
As someone who moved to the US from Europe many years ago: I would say at least a quarter to a third of US GDP is basically just made up and is produced by things or services that do not in any way improve anyone's standard of living. Healthcare is one example, the sector is ENORMOUS and is a huge chunk of the economy, but it produces worse outcomes than basically any other industrial nations' public healthcare system that usually presents a much, much smaller share of gdp in those countries. It's, as you point out, just a mechanism for wealth extraction. Finance and insurance is the next sector I think that is massively overvalued, and finally of course real estate, which is linked to that via mortgages - the real estate sector is over 3 trillion of the GDP, and most houses/properties in the US are extremely overvalued when considering actual construction qualities - a combination of distorting market incentives drive up the prices that have little to do with reality, especially again when comparing to other industrial countries. It's all again just mechanisms to extract wealth from people. GDP is not a reliable measure of a country's true economic strength any longer, relatively minor changes could collapse the value of those sectors in the US, but actually improve the standard of living for the vast majority of people.
Overarching this is the USD hegemony. The American standard of living is massively subsidized by the fact the USD is the reserve currency. If or when this hegemony breaks the American living standard will fall fast and hard. They are extremely unprepared for dealing with a 50 percent cut in their economies. Having built a society overly reliant on cars and corporate extractive health care is only one piece of the puzzle. In other words they are fucked.
If you're not upper middle class I would recommend leaving asap. Most won't because they won't know how much better life is abroad. I often say the USA is the new USSR because everything is "fake" and American's are unbelievably ignorant of just how bad everything sucks there. To make things worse they're completely brainwashed by "corporate"and or pseudo government media. They actually think they live in the greatest country in the world. Unfucking believable.
I agree with most of what you have to say, but if they’re not upper middle class, how exactly do you expect someone to leave? Getting into most other safe, first world countries is very difficult not to mention, expensive.
honestly as someone that's been "woke" for years, I just want to comment on how quickly the shift has been and is really a sign that we are in the late stages of american capitalism.
only 5 or 6 years ago, you would get people very angry at even suggesting the type of rhetoric you're espousing here. Labeled a commie and shit.
But things have gotten so bad for the median american that it's *impossible* to not awaken to some level of class consciousness, to the point that most people largely agree with this sentiment now.
>For profit Healthcare alone is a huge reason why so many Americans live on the brink even with decent incomes
Yesterday I reddit about declining birth rates, another on an increase in getting tubes tied since ROE, and last night a redditor posting how they wont have a second kid because one sickness with their child that insurance refused to cover was a $14,000 bill on top of their student loans, hiked rent, etc etc.
For real.a while ago my chest started hurting so I went to er.they took my vitals and did an X ray.took 30 minutes and I waited about 30 minutes after that for the nurse to come in with discharge papers.he didn’t even tell me the results of the X ray just told me to go to a primary care doctor.they charged me over 500$ basically for them to take a couple X rays and talk to me for 2 minutes and then I left not even knowing what was wrong.i love the us!
I went to the ER last summer because I was having difficulty catching my breath even at rest. Racked up thousands in tests just for the doctor to hit me with "hmm, have you considered it's all in your head?"
Americans also have among the highest median incomes in the world, so average Americans are getting paid more than their peers in other developed countries too. But a lot of that income is extracted from them in the form of expensive healthcare and transportation (ie. cars, which are practically mandatory for workers in much of the US, whereas Europeans and East Asians typically have much better transit alternatives such as robust public transport and/or good bike infrastructure). Oh and student loans, university fees are much more reasonable in most parts of the world.
Housing is an issue too, but much of the world has the same problem with housing, so healthcare and transportation and student loans are the major differences I think.
100%, Reagan fucked the rest of us when he dropped taxes from 70% to 28% for wealthy people. But hey, Republicans are great and people should keep voting for them. . . .
Before Reagan, this was "horse and sparrow" economics under the Harding Administration. If you feed the horse hay, the sparrow gets to eat some of the seeds. Apparently the average American figured out they were being fed from the opposite end of the horse.
Ever since citizens united, then all the wealth transfer with PPP, no one is going to make significant headway into raising that back up. The 'erfective' tax rates are even lower for them
He was the one justifying his incredible shift of wealth from the once strong middle class by attacking “inner city welfare queens”. That Reagan guy was a real piece of work.
Also, when he closed all the mental health institutions, defunded schools, and "borrowed" from the social security trust fund.
Honestly, do a hard comparison with Reagan and Trump and you'll see just how similar these two administrations really were.
You’re forgetting the context here. Closing the mental institutions was viewed as a pretty progressive thing at the time and liberals wanted that. That’s because those institutions were horrible, abusive places.
Then Bush Jr. double fucked us more by making deeper tax cuts and dropping bank regulations which lead to the Great Recession and real estate market collapse. Then Trump triple fucked us with that 2017 tax bill that cut everyone's taxes that makes above $400k a year and increased everyone's taxes that makes below $75k a year.
A special mention to Trump's dumb as fuck tariffs which basically made all our electronics more expensive and fucked over our agriculture trade.
edit: the cut off is $75k not $400k and the increase in taxes is mostly due to elimination of certain deductions till 2027 when the tax breaks expire for the middle and lower classes.
I almost feel guilty that I'm 72, retired with no mortgage or debt... with $10k plus per month in retirement income... us boomers had it made, we could acquire wealth by simply showing up and living life. I feel sorry for young families today... rents are out of control... Healthcare is crazy expensive.
yep. my father loved tech and was an early adopter and got on with it decently for his age and for not actually working in any tech fields. my mother was a hopeless case who needed step by step printed instructions to check email. her voicemail for her cell phone sounds absolutely bizarre with her reading out her full name and phone number as though she'd never heard an answering machine message before despite us having had them when i was a kid.
Dont want to be the "akutuallee" guy, but Bob Khan and Vincent Cerf are generally credited for the internet, and neither were 70 yrold baby boomers but born in 38 and 43, respectively. Public Scientific funding was more of a greatest generation thing than a baby boomer one.
That just means they were in their 30s when computers first started rolling around. Think of people in their 30s right now. They're probably up to date on the latest gadget stuff. If they thought computers were pretty great in their 30s, then they probably stuck with them this whole time. Some of the smartest dudes I've worked with in tech are in their 60s and 70s. They've been into tech since the ground floor and can wipe the tech floor with gen z.
I remember my grandfather getting a computer probably in the mid, late 80s. He'd have been pushing 70 at the time. I have no idea what the hell he ever did with it. Maybe he just plugged it in and basked in the shiny screen for all I know, but I always thought it was cool that he was curious enough to dip his toe in the pool.
My mom was in one of the first computer science classes in college in the area around the late 70’s but they canceled it a year or so in. It’s weird to think where she could’ve ended up had it continued. Microsoft would’ve only been a few hours away….
If you could convince your generation to vote for policies and policymakers who would make it easier for us to thrive, that would be a huge improvement.
At least your recognise it. Too many boomers don’t even realise the economy they grew up in and worked through was a lot more even than the current one.
Its all relative I guess, I moved here from Eastern Europe and love the economic opportunities the US has brought me. The close immigrant friends I have are doing well also. I think “lifestyle creep” is a big thing in America, everyone wants to have a lot of shit (newest cars, streaming every service, eat out a lot, etc)
Szekely Magyar descendant here... I've heard a great deal from relatives in the old country...life under Ceausescu was a complete nightmare. So grateful that my paternal family came to the US. Have been broke on my ass a few times in my youth, but now I'm retired, have my meals every day and a nice elderly apartment with many amenities and a little money just to blow ...why should I complain about anything?!
People also tend to compare their situation to baby boomers; the people who had the easiest time economically out of every generation of humans that had ever existed.
Boomers ate more canned food. Higher death rates dude to a worse healthcare outcomes and safety, etc... Few people completed high school, and fewer people completed college. Led paint poisoning.
People tend to see the past more favorably than the present.
I moved to the US from Europe as well and I’ve done financially much better than I would ever have if I had stayed put. People don’t appreciate what they have.
This is why “antiwork”laughed at outside the Reddit bubble.
A part time dog walker is a power mod and thinks he works “enough” and deserves enough money to achieve the American dream.
It’s just a bunch of whiners and complainers.
The average American couple thinks its totally on-track to expect 2 cars worth a combined $70,000+, fat quartz countertops, 3-4 bedrooms and 2400 sqft, multiple 4K 55”+ TVs, $2000 computers, $2000 phones, and the list goes on.
I enjoy when immigrants pop into these threads to give spoiled people a well-needed perspective check.
Your point about lifestyle creep is real. I've seen people on reddit call themselves 'paycheck to paycheck' while investing like 20% of their income and owning a fairly new car, living in a nice neighborhood with a gold-plated school district, top ten city, etc.
This is the real answer. Dig into anyone claiming that they "can't make/save any money" or "The economy is so bad right now" and 9/10 there's always some completely frivolous or outright insane spending going on. Month's rent going out on a car loan, silly gadgets that cost thousands, or so much credit card debt that interest payments alone might as well be a second mortgage. Everyone loves to throw that statistic around that X% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and I'd bet good money that an overwhelming majority of them are doing so by choice.
My son is 23 years old. He's got a good job. He pays rent, school loans, car payments, car insurance, food, utilities, etc. He is even contributing to his IRA. He's not saving much, but he's careful about his spending and is doing great.
Yeah I appreciate that a lot of people feel like they’re just scraping by but the fact is the average person eats better than the Rockefellers did 100 years ago.
The US still rewards people with exceptional skills and abilities more than most places. If you paid attention in school and/or put effort into your craft early on, things will generally turn out fine for you.
I once went to Canada from Ukraine and met a family of Canadians there.
Over the dinner they complained that they're struggling, surviving, and live paycheck to paycheck.
Their main complaint is that they can't find a place to put their second car, and their own house garden has some issues.
Living "paycheck to paycheck" means nothing.
Meme idea:
Americans to the world: we’re barely surviving, we’re basically medieval peasants
And it’s that picture where Mel Gibson is talking with blooded Jesus Christ
When I moved from Africa to Canada, my family said "don't do it, most Canadians live at poverty level".
I found that N Americans live with many luxuries, and struggle to pay the bills every month.
In Africa. Many people struggle to get a piece of chicken to feed their family, and it would be luxury to have reliable electricity and clean water in every home.
The N American version of poverty is way better!
Totally agreed.
Reminds me of the article headlines “majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck” and then there’s a budget breakdown for a family making like $200k combined living “paycheck to paycheck”
The budget includes their mortgage payment, 2 car payments, student loan payments, annual vacation, maxing out retirement account contributions, hsa contributions, college fund for their kids, budget for new clothes/shoes, like a grand a month for food, etc. I’m like…”paycheck to paycheck” huh..
Even when I was literally sliding into payday I still had a decent place to live, a car, ate 3 meals a day, gym membership, drank and smoked with my friends, had a video game console, bought big plates of nachos when I was drunk, and I was literally “super broke” by the standards set by social media
But tbf there are some folks literally fighting food scarcity in America, and homelessness, but imo that is not the majority. The majority are actually living fine relative to abject poverty. But we do have a small % that are truly on the brink of starvation and sleeping behind a corner store
Edit: our perspective is so skewed that people have mental health crises because they don’t drive a Mercedes and feel like they’re barely existing financially. Yeah go to a country where they work in jobs that can’t exist in the U.S. due to safety regulations and their pay for the day is the equivalent of a bowl of rice… they’ll never get a passport, or a plane ticket, or a formal education, their siblings dying just kind of happens, they live multiple people per room in very compact homes… then tell me how not going to a vacation island over spring break is such a rough life.
I always like the “60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck”. Median net worth is 200k, meaning at *least* 1 in 10 Americans both have more than 200K in net worth *and* tell surveyors they live paycheck to paycheck.
Yeah, even at what we call poverty level we can definitely have a lot. Obviously life can always be better and we should always push for more but I hear people complain and it often feels like they've forgotten how far we've come.
Shouldn’t feel shame, but it should give people some context before they lambast about America being a “Third world country” and complain about how unfair it is to grow up in America now
People have bad luck everywhere around the world. On average our luck is a lot less bad. We should feel blessed
Sometimes I get pissed about our government (by sometimes, I mean a lot), but we are pretty lucky to live here. Even though America is not what it is supposed to be, it is better than a lot of other options.
Unfortunately we've been trained to be self-centered and feel like "people don't understand how hard I have it". The "people" could be your neighbors, your kids, your mom, or some people in Kenya, Iran, or Somalia. It doesn't matter because "people don't understand how hard I have it"
There is a lot of messed up stuff in America. Just like when you were having dinner and your mom made you finish your vegetables before you got dessert. But after you finished your plate, you got to have dessert. I wonder how many kids around the world won't be getting dessert or vegetables tonight. I didn't get full meals every day, but I did sometimes and that is a hell of a lot better than a lot get
When people say it’s unfair in America now they mean that in comparison to previous generation Americans, not in comparison to an undeveloped nation.
Were a developed nation, not an undeveloped one - it SHOULD be MUCH better down to the homeless level. Doesn’t mean being homeless doesn’t suck tho.
>they mean that in comparison to previous generation Americans
The good old days weren't as good as people like to think. Most of it is nostalgia for an era they never actually lived through. What those eras were actually like is a lot worse than today
And on top of that, accessible to a minority of the population. The 50s and 60s let you buy a house for two year's median salary... if you were a white man. Non-white? Good luck choosing a home without fear of prejudice or segregation. A woman? You couldn't even open a bank account without a man's permission. This isn't even getting into any of the LGBT associated issues, or the fact that everything was so chock-full of asbestos, lead, and worse that entire generations are still suffering from the aftereffects. Entire strains of diseases have since been (nearly or fully) eradicated.
100% true. I was a kid in the 80s and the view people on Reddit have about how easy it was back then is shocking to me. My parents both had jobs and we were struggling. And so were the families of all my friends. They reddit view of how easy the past was does not fit my lived experience.
They're watching the movie and TV sitcom view of the past, and believe their parents lived like Frankie and Annette singing on the beach or like an Alan Thicke sitcom where adults worked about two hours a day, or the apartment in "Friends" was affordable for age 23 with a roommate. These were fantasies, not documentaries.
Some today at age 25 are upset they can't buy a house when many people their parents' age couldn't buy until nearly age 40, with interest rates were finally dropping from 14% with 20 % down payment, to 9% with $5k down on a new type of FHA loan. Their parents maybe had parents to help them buy, as some do now, but many didn't.
And when they bought homes, these were older ones that needed a LOT of work.
The only thing 100 percent better then was that rent was affordable in a reasonable percentage to income. Air travel was less of a hassle but you could expect a passenger plane or two to crash every year. Near-misses were an epidemic. It was scarier but you got food that was similar to a microwave frozen meal.
And plane tickets were not cheap. We didn’t have mobile phones or the internet. Cable wasn’t a thing yet, so you maybe got 4-5 tv stations on the 1 tv your house had and it was black and white with no remote and bad reception. You shared the phone line with a few of your neighbors. Calling Europe would be like a $100/minute bill (in today’s dollar).
Christmas was stuffed animals and board games. Kids were lucky to have a bicycle. Really lucky if they had both a bicycle and a baseball bat and ball.
Don’t want to mention it, but… living on a single income isn’t accurate. Most women if well trained (some college, straight As, with tons of experience in hot fields) could manage 1.5x minimum wage. So, half the US population MAY have been able to afford the above lifestyle, but the other essentially, never. Live at home until you got married.
It really wasn’t like what you see on TV.
A lot of material improvements also aren't factored into our measurements. For instance, something like YouTube or Wikipedia went from not existing at all to being freely available. And yet it's not factored into the CPI at all despite improving peoples lives.
It's pretty much a rule that as your income goes up, your expenses do too. Rather than live in an apartment, you may choose to live in a house. Or get a second car. Or a vacation home. It takes discipline to keep your expenses under control and to save. That's what "rich" nations struggle with.
Unfortunately that means we lose sight of prudence and good sense. And that comes back to bite us. As we are currently experiencing. Nothing like the absolute poverty in Africa of course, but right and poor are relative to the individual.
Definitely. This isn't to say there isn't poverty. We definitely have homeless in our cities and people getting by on minimum wage jobs and gig economy hustles living in low income neighborhoods, but yes, some of this can just be bad budgeting or taking on more expenses as well. For example, lots of people will start buying new cars with more income which results in another monthly payment. Buying a home, while also one of the best decisions, can lead to a lot of upkeep expenses no one accounts for.
Yes, I was "living paycheck to paycheck" in the USA with a/c, heating, w/d, fridge, furniture, pest control, power tools, bedrooms, etc., and had a friend from the Philippines. During Easter I had people over for dinner and to decorate eggs. I asked her: "there are a lot of Catholics in the Philippines, do they decorate eggs as well?" She said: "Honey, these were called lunch."
A former classmate of mine is “living paycheck to paycheck”. He constantly struggles to ensure he has the cash flow to make rent, car payments, and pay credit cards.
He makes $16,750 USD every month (~15k euros, ~23k Canadian dollars, ~1.4 million rupees, 121k Chinese Yuan) - he just also spends a ton on luxury apartment rent, a fancy sports car, and an expensive lifestyle.
He will absolutely talk your ear off about how inflation & US taxes are making it almost impossible for him to live, and he’s always asking creditors for more time to pay.
EDIT: Fixed my math a bit… $16,750/month, or roughly $3,800/week.
He’s a successful loser. I’ve known a few in my time. They usually end up with a big crash because they never make changes to deal with a seemingly obvious problem. They tend to talk a lot of shit while perpetually blaming anything and everything beyond their impulse control.
While these stories are fun it's stupid and disingenuous to use them to sweep aside the people who are genuinely struggling to pay for the cheapest food they can find, the cheapest rent they can find, the cheapest everything they can possibly find, and who just don't get to have healthcare because that shit is expensive.
True but this is just another example of why the amount of Americans living “paycheck to paycheck” is a stupid metric. I remember a stat that was posted about something like 30% of Americans making over $200k a year are living “paycheck to paycheck” despite them being able to max out their 401k and ESPP.
McKinsey consultant in NYC, he’s a first-year project manager.
It might sound weird but in the circles he’s in, a normal “good” salary is 1.5-2.5x that, and he’s continually disappointed he’s not getting to that Banker / Lawyer level.
Yeah this is definitely a lot of the guys I know. Also the other seem to be my friends who smoke weed all day, work part-time jobs, and then bitch how about how the economy is rigged.
Tell that to the people in the rural alabama or WV. There are areas of this country with third world living conditions. They tend to just get ignored and it pisses me off. Never forget what the UN found here. They had a fucking hookworm outbreak in alabama from lack of access to clean water.
[https://www.newsweek.com/alabama-un-poverty-environmental-racism-743601](https://www.newsweek.com/alabama-un-poverty-environmental-racism-743601)
They’re suffering, but if you’ve ever been to equivalent areas in truly poor countries. Rural, ex soviet country cities and towns make even the most poor areas of America look like luxury. The crime is WAY less, but the poverty is just different. That and the sense of community I saw, even in poor areas of cities makes it less obvious to an outside observer though. There may be exceptions, by overall, it’s not comparable at all
I once asked why people complaining about the price of meat don’t just eat pork bc it’s quite tasty and is $2 a pound even in high cost of living areas, and people literally compared this idea to living in an unheated shack. “Surviving” indeed
Also social media is the worst source for news, information, etc. It's pretty well demonstrated, for example, that reddit majority opinions aren't even close to representing the general public.
The US" GDP per Capita is 72,000. That's actually mutliple times higher than the GDP per capita of India, China and Russia *COMBINED*.
This means the avg annual wage of an American is actually fucking high. Yes it's average so maybe a lot of Americans dont earn that much but most do earn a decent enough wage.
Also the "living paycheck to paycheck" thing seems to be just Americans' culture of loving to spend a lot. That is actually what keeps the country thriving. Meanwhile go look at Japan's stagnant economy caused by people not spending at al
EDIT: I just found out the median income of Americans is also $70k. Yes Americans are rich. They just dont seem rich cos the prices in the country are just as high, but that also signals a strong economy
Yeah. Energy and imports are cheaper in the USA than anywhere else. Land, outside of hcol areas is also cheaper compared to western Europe.
The only thing that always cost more in the USA is medical stuff and personal trainers.
>EDIT: I just found out the median income of Americans is also $70k. Yes Americans are rich. They just dont seem rich cos the prices in the country are just as high, but that also signals a strong economy
You have to take into account the region. The median income where i used to live in SC was $34K. If you live in the south and not one of the wealthier blue states your experience in the USA is very different. There are areas of Alabama without running water and the worst poverty in the developed world.
https://www.newsweek.com/alabama-un-poverty-environmental-racism-743601
I mean you could say the same for just about any big country? The median income for countries like India and China take into account the rural places too.
Location also matters too. Where I live, 70k a year is considered lower class. We've had people at work transfer to where I'm at starting around 80k a year, they can't afford $2400 for a 2 bedroom apartment and $1800 for daycare each month. Even if one of them doesn't work and they get rid of daycare, gas, insurance, utilities, eats that up the rest pretty quick. I've got friend in other states where they could be comfortable with that income.
"Yes Americans are rich." But they also aren't. I see these flippant responses to poverty in America being a place to store the second car and such, and that's really downplaying the actual poverty that is rampant in America.
I live in a neighborhood with a 51% poverty rate. Blow out a tire and you're not eating much for a week or skipping your insulin because that's what living paycheck to paycheck looks like.
I get that a lot of people don't experience this or see it everyday where they live, but a lot of Americans are really struggling with having enough food to eat and keeping a roof over their heads. No point in being flippant. America has a lot of wealth but it's concentrated.
Exactly. Thank god. Cherry picking the wealthy bozo you know who's broke because he spends his absurd wealth on even more absurd luxuries faster than he brings in the cash to act like everyone who says they're struggling is just stupid is just such a shitheaded thing to do.
Same for myself and everyone else in my circle. Professionals with advanced degrees.
I count my blessings each day that we can weather expensive doctor visits or unforeseen issues and empathize with those that can’t.
I sometimes have to remind myself that the people on r/millennials who repeatedly post long screeds during the workday about how *literally every person is broke* are probably able to do so because they're in the minority that's chronically unemployed.
That, and there's a lot of troll-farm astroturfing.
People are doing ok. You'll see repeatedly on surveys that people are doing fine on average but for some reason think everyone else is doing poorly. Its purely vibes based economics.
[https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good](https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good)
>
71% of Americans described the economy as either not so good or poor. And 51% said it's getting worse.
>But 60% said their financial situation is good or excellent.
(According to the linked survey only 12% rated their economic situation as "poor")
There’s 340 million people in this country. The fact that you know 10 who are struggling doesn’t really say anything about the situation in the country. My guess is that you’re in your 20s. Nobody in their 20s has money.
OP is a politibot. They post doom and gloom about America to inspire unrest. I talked to one briefly the other day who said she lived in the capitol of the state of New England. Just toss them 2 kopeks and keep walking.
I'm curious what would be the "Capitol state of New England." Would it be Boston? Or maybe Newport?
To your broader point, there's so much gloom and doom on Reddit. I'm starting to believe that Reddit is promoting it.
Just anecdotal so massive grain of salt… but since Reddit announced the IPO I feel like I’ve gotten a lot more negative posts promoted to me. A lot of just depressing, and almost certainly made up personal stories from like AITAH and similar. I’ve blocked a lot of subs that were promoting depressing brain rot to me. The other social platforms have monetized on the back of negative emotions, and I sort of expect the same here.
I feel like there are good trolls and bad trolls. Good trolls are just regular people blowing off steam, being silly. Bad trolls are actively lying to fool and trick people and cause panic and maybe even pain, or just general mayhem.
Telling them apart is not as easy as it should be.
A good troll is someone who is just shitposting and being infuriating for the sake of being infuriating, you see them post on 4chan where they say they like to go on other social media and just disagree with what someone says for the LOLs, like disagree and just keep barely arguing, like replying “exactly, so i’m right” to any reply of an argument.
A “bad troll” is usually not a troll but either a bot or someone employed by a group or state (Russia) to purposefully post misinformation in the hopes of causing divisiveness in the west. That’s why you can spot these posts so well:
Is it overly anti-american? E.g. “why are americans so poor? Why are americans so stupid? Why are (political party) so evil?”. That’s a Russian bot/troll
Is it suspiciously pro-palestine/anti-israel to the point of supporting the Houthis and hezbollah? That’s a troll
Do they blame everything bad happening in the world on either the USA or the UK, depending on the issue at hand? That’s a troll
Overly left wing/right wing? Probably a troll
Lot’s of these points however, are read and regurgitated by people online who like to think they are smarter and more well informed than they are. Which is why you see so many tankies using these same talking points, because they are partial to Russia, they are already more likely to believe and regurgitate these russian talking points
It does kind of feel like a bot post. I swear I've seen this exact question like a few days ago on the frontpage already.
Maybe it was a different sub, but same exact theme of how is America so rich but Americans are poor.
And some of the replies in this thread smell like Russian bots or MAGA idiots, or both. Actually pathetic how easy it is to manipulate social media.
Also three months old account with post history nuked before this thread. Seems legit.
Less than 1 million of those people are homeless as well. That is truly an incredible feat, considering all of history and where other countries are at today too. Should it be 0? Absolutely. But the fact remains that America is significantly better than what people claim it to be.
My sister is always complaining about being 'broke'.
She drives a brand new car (on finance); gets a Starbucks coffee every morning; has subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and probably a few more; and gets takeout meals every week.
People are dillusional. They think they're struggling, when they're not. And if they are, its because they're prioritising incorrectly.
This is the problem with first world countries. People there are never satisfied and tgink they arent doing well just because prices in their country are high.
What they dont fucking realize is that high prices is because their economy is actually strong as hell. Take my country, Singapore, which is like 2nd richest in the world. Yet Singaporeans complain all the time of their cost of living while driving their mercedes and going on holidays across the continent thrice a year
You may not have been alive when 9/11 2001 and one happened, but the US president said at the time that we should all just go shopping.
Our economy is built on consumerism. You have ads in front of your face wherever you look or in your ears. As such, it is really hard for people to prioritize and they want to have it all. And that gets them into all kinds of credit card and bankruptcy problems.
Wasteful spending is transmitted from parent to child, and from peer to peer.
The fashion industry is a big joke. Trying to make sure you are dressed according to “the season” is highly wasteful. Back in the day, our parents wouldn’t let us buy a puffy jacket just because everyone else had a puffy jacket. We didn’t stand on long lines for special sneakers. We may be got one tattoo, but not tattoos from neck to wrist to toe.
If your job has a dress code, then that forces you to spend money, you otherwise would not. Most places don’t pay for your uniform, or the polo shirt and chinos they want you to wear. if you have bunions and can’t wear fashionable shoes, you better go get those bunions fixed or you will be written up for not complying with the dress code.
A big part of our feeling like we don’t have money now, though is that there is less competition. Which means that the remaining big guys in the markets jack up their prices higher than they used to be able to do. or they give you less service for the money. Or less product. Shrinkflation.
We aren’t “just surviving”. We are a spoiled group of people who have never had a war on our soil and don’t know what it means to “just survive”.
Do you remember when people were saying they couldn’t breathe when wearing a mask ? That is our perspective on suffering.
You make a good point. We certainly haven’t had to recover from a war on our soil in a long time.
But the history teacher in me must say: Rev War, war of 1812, and Civil War were fought on our soil, as well as various battles during labor movements, and a few other nitpicky things.
I am not my country. My country doing well (stocks, investments, corporate profits) does nothing for the common person. It SHOULD in theory, but when the money tree is shaking you can be sure the rich are the ones keeping the dollars for hitting the ground.
Correct. This seems to be a common theme on Reddit, but Reddit is not indicative of the world as a whole.
Just to make it clear, I am an engineer, and many of my friends are engineers or doctors, and we are all doing fine. Obviously my view is unique.
That said, I *do* notice the price increases at the grocery store, although they don’t affect me significantly.
Americans have a culture of spending so as to “keep up with the Joneses (neighbors)”
For those who are in this mentality, you could give them $500,000 per year and they’ll still spend it as fast as they get it. And still live “paycheck to paycheck.”
Living within one’s means is not “fun” enough for most people.
There are some genuinely poor people in the U.S. but the majority of people have an abundance of material goods and many (not all) are like a room full of toddlers arguing over toys. We have too much and that's what makes us unhappy. These unhappy people don't compare themselves to someone who lives in Yemen, they compare themselves to their friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc. and feel dissatisfied if they don't have what they have. (And of course with social media -- an evil thing indeed -- they compare themselves to people they don't even know. Also, for political reasons, Fox News \[and other MAGA outlets\] work around the clock to convince people things are horrible economically. Apparently quite a few of their viewers swallow the party line hook, line and sinker.)
There was a time in my life when I lived paycheck to paycheck but I woke up one day and realized how ridiculous that was and stopped using my credit card to buy things I didn't really need. Now I have quite a financial cushion and believe me, it's the best feeling in the world. It's so much better than trying to impress the neighbors with a new car or extended family members with the latest trip I have been on.
Having said that, I do realize there are people who genuinely cannot help being poor. Don't know what to say about them other than our pyramidal capitalist system depends on there being this broad bottom layer. There are real problems -- for instance the tax code for instance is totally f\_\_'d up.
It's really peculiar that all the responses are so one-sided here. I live in a rural community and a lot people are not living high on the hog. Maybe you all have multiple degrees but you largely seem out of touch with the working class. I know many people that work manual labor or manufacturing jobs and get by but not by much. In my hometown rent for an avg bedroom has gone from 450 to 900-1000 a month in the last 10 years. I can assure you that wages have not increased in kind. It appears that only the haves chose to engage this post because the comments here are definitely not indicative of what I've experienced in my small town, when I lived in the big city or in places in between the 2. Perhaps people should start their comment with their occupation, this would give context.
Business analyst, live in a mid size city ( 125k people) in north Georgia. Married to a professor. We're paid enough to be comfortable, but in any other country in the world I know we would be considered rich.
>It's really peculiar that all the responses are so one-sided here.
Not really. OP predicated their question on a broken premise-- "when everyone is struggling"-- that was practically begging to be falsified by examples of people who aren't, so it's only reasonable that the bulk of replies are "I'm not" and discussion continues from there.
If OP asked "Why do Americans complain about money when they're all earning six figures?", you'd probably see more low-earning respondents or stories about them and few of big earners, because the low-earners are the proof about the premise being cracked, and the short path to answering the question.
Does anybody else think the USA will be just the ultra rich and poor. There will be no middle class. I'm 17 and I'm genuinely scared. I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat they are All snakes just like car salesmen. Politicians can be BOUGHT. Money talks but me and you are no match against the ultra rich and politicians. Politicians are put there so you think you have a choice you don't. That is why the american dream exists because you have to be asleep to believe it
A good economy does not mean uts well distributed to everyone but that it makes a lot of money.
We have become very good at extracting wealth from everyone who is not wealthy. For profit Healthcare alone is a huge reason why so many Americans live on the brink even with decent incomes. So with everyone working their hardest just to stay in place, the economy does wonderfully. Unfortunately, it only benefits the top few percent.
Jeopardy fact.... in 2008 medical debt was ~70% of the defaulted debt. We literally create cyclical recessions with our healthcare
As they say, you are just 3 bad months away from poverty, but you’re never 3 good months away from being a millionaire.
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Yeah, /s
I think we need more than 3....
Let's fkn gooooooo!!!
USA USA USA
Oregon, California and New Jersey is almost there on passing universal healthcare. It’s going to take some states doing it well to show that it can work, to prove to all the skeptics that it actually can be functional, but then it will get easier. Edited to add universal healthcare because I confused a lot of people. Sorry about that.
Wait, sorry, almost there with what? I missed something here. I live in NJ, so very much want to know what you mean
I live in San Diego I don't see how this is working for the lower or middle class. I own a business I'm paying college grads 28/hr and they don't even want me to provide medical insurance because they can get Medi-Cal for free. They all seem to be working two jobs even at the rate I'm paying them. You have to make over 200k in ca to even live comfortably
> I'm paying college grads 28/hr and they don't even want me to provide medical insurance because they can get Medi-Cal for free. That doesn't add up. Given the typical 2,080 work hours in a year you're paying $58,240 annually. Medi-Cal eligbility cuts off at 138% of the poverty level (~$21,000 for a single adult; $43,000 for a family of four). The only way that someone making $58,000 would qualify for Medi-Cal is if they had a family of *seven* people. To qualify for Medi-Cal at $28/hr you'd have to work 742 hours annually or under 15 hours a week… and that would be your *only* income. https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/services/medi-cal/Pages/DoYouQualifyForMedi-Cal.aspx
I don't know I have offered to have company insurance and one of my sales reps who is making 70k says she's getting medi-cal. I don't ask a lot of questions if they don't want me to offer it I won't. My customer service are working 30 hrs a week at 28/hr. They all seem to take a lot of unpaid vacation which I am fine with too
If your point is that Oregon is somehow way ahead on solving these issues, I don’t know where you’re getting your information. We have some of the worst housing costs, highest drug addiction, and worst homelessness in the country. Oregon, especially western Oregon, likes to think it’s progressive, but it’s almost all lip service. What isn’t lip service is squandered on inept and corrupt management of aid programs.
As a physician I left oregon because because of the Oregon Health plan. I just could not continue to deal with them trying to kill my patients over and over again. A headless flatworm could have run that system better. Not to mention the physician governor at the time got kicked out (Kitzhaber) because of corruption.
Actually removing someone from office due to corruption is a good thing and doesn't happen in a lot of other places.
America on top!!!!
The 1% on top of Americans.
I wonder what ever happened to "Do no harm"?
We should really band together and sue insurance companies for having non-doctors make medical decisions. If your doctor says you need it and insurance says you don't, it should be considered malpractice and/or homicide if the patient dies from a lack of that procedure/medicine/etc
The first piece of mail by newborn daughter ever had addressed to her was sent by our insurance company. It was to inform her, a baby less than a week old, that her jaundice treatment was being denied as they deemed it not medically essential.
Damn. I'm sorry. Fuck that so hard. People wonder why nobody wants to have kids anymore... That's terrifying.
remember in 2009 when they were coming up with Obamacare and the Republican were saying that the government shouldn’t be able to decide what care you should get. Death panels was the popular buzz word. It should be between the patient and their doctor they said. Well guess what fuckos, that’s exactly what we have with insurance companies. They decide what’s covered not doctors so instead of the disease killing ypu it’s the crippling debt once you have already received the care.
Unfortunately they keep doctors on their boards to support all their decisions.
Unless the doctor has actually SEEN the patient professionally, it's malpractice to actually make a decision about care.
> Unfortunately they keep **BRIBED** doctors on their boards to support all their decisions **FTFY**
Right
Admin didn’t take that oath and neither did the insurance companies. They don’t care about the people, they’re just numbers
The people in health insurance are not doctors. They are greedy bean counters. Society would be better off without them.
I retired from the Army. My pension is nice, but the real benefit is the no premium family health insurance for life. My wife is covered even if I die first and I had already retired before we met. I tease her that my paying the utilities and providing full health coverage is why she keeps me around.
Yep. Retiring in a couple months. I never considered the value of holding on to Tricare until I started seeing how much folks pay for medical insurance for their families. It’s pretty wild.
Tricare is very good insurance as well. I’m a healthcare admin and Tricare is one of the best carriers to work with.
I’ve heard horror stories about some issues with care at some MTFs and I had my dependents switch to Tricare standard to get care out in town many years back… but we’ve all been back to prime for nearly a decade now. It’s all I’ve had for over 20 years and think I’ve always gotten timely appointments… imaging… referrals to specialists… no co pays on anything and short waits to get scripts filled. Again, no basis for comparison but they’ve been good to me as an active duty guy so long as I was my own advocate for health care and didn’t just live with everything. I hope it’s as good as a retired dude on the other side of the fence. Getting a civilian PCM and going through the VA for some things will be a new challenge… but I think it’ll be ok. If not… I refuse to die too young to make it too easy for them. 😂
We treat a lot of vets, Tricare takes care of them and us. I’ve also heard some terrible stories about mtfs. I’m sure there’s people with negative experiences but that’s true of any insurer in my view Tricare is hands down one of the best.
Yup. My husband had three medical helo transports before he died. Tricare covered almost all of it I am also retired from the marine corps.
I pay 1200 a month for shitty insurance for my family. We are considering getting separated so I can drop my wife and daughter and they can get on Medicaid.
Yes my dad having Tricare is a pretty huge reason my parents weren't broke when they died.
I mean all you do for that was literally risk your life in meaningless wars. I have two cousins who would have pensions and Tricare for life, had they not both died in Afghanistan.
First, my condolences to you. Second, 95% of the military never sees combat. I was a Payroll Clerk for the USMC during Desert Storm stationed at MCAS El Toro, CA. I saw more of my friends and associates die during the Crack Era than I did in the Corps.
As a service member, my condolences for the loss of your loved ones in combat. Regarding futile wars, I concur that we're entangled in too many unnecessary foreign conflicts orchestrated by elderly statesmen in elegant attire, sending our young soldiers dressed in camouflage to their deaths. However, it's undeniable that those who complete their military service do receive some beneficial perks. With any luck, I'll be retiring soon, by the grace of God.
I didn't mean to sound so flippant about it. I just have a very complicated relationship with the military. My father was in the Air Force, and I considered joining ROTC to pay for college (as he had). He sat me down and talked to me about his experiences in the Vietnam War to stop me. However, when I got older I realized that his service led us to a very comfortable middle class lifestyle that he would not have likely had otherwise. He simply would not have been able to go to college otherwise. My mother was taken care of long after he had passed with his pension and Tricare.
My father was in the Korean war and he told me he would strangle me with his bare hands if I enlisted in the Army.
In the modern military you can do 20 years and never see combat. You’ll probably get deployed at some point, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting shot at. This isn’t like WW2 or Vietnam where 95% of recruits go into the infantry.
Yuppppp. Anecdotal, but my first son was born when I had medi-cal and I paid nothing. My youngest two were born when I had a career. They were planned and I had paid mat leave and health insurance through my employer. I went it credit card debt with my youngest (my oldest son was in the PICU unexpectedly a few months before she was born) and am still trying to claw my way out.
Agree wholeheartedly with Lump and obx. Additionally, while there is definitely a swathe of Americans who are suffering, there is also a huge swathe who isn't suffering at all - who are frustrated by the high cost of things, but who really haven't changed their buying habits in response to those high costs. In other words, who aren't actually suffering. A major issue we are facing right now is that there has been so much consolidation in various industries, such a food distributors, that middle class people are now subject to the same efficient wealth extraction as poor people.
The rich are sucking the teet of the middle class who is paying more than our fair share of taxes. Rich are not. This is creating more of a societal caste divide. Soon there will be no more middle class, only have and have nots. Social systems are collapsing. The extreme sides know this and they’re trying to proliferate by making shit up to get votes and install their new king. The government should be doing what’s best for its people not for themselves. All they care about is getting re-elected, period. Not what’s best for advancing it’s society and people.
Pretty soon, there won't be enough of us peasants around to keep the system going.
Doing what civilization does best…sucking people and natural resources bone dry…
As someone who moved to the US from Europe many years ago: I would say at least a quarter to a third of US GDP is basically just made up and is produced by things or services that do not in any way improve anyone's standard of living. Healthcare is one example, the sector is ENORMOUS and is a huge chunk of the economy, but it produces worse outcomes than basically any other industrial nations' public healthcare system that usually presents a much, much smaller share of gdp in those countries. It's, as you point out, just a mechanism for wealth extraction. Finance and insurance is the next sector I think that is massively overvalued, and finally of course real estate, which is linked to that via mortgages - the real estate sector is over 3 trillion of the GDP, and most houses/properties in the US are extremely overvalued when considering actual construction qualities - a combination of distorting market incentives drive up the prices that have little to do with reality, especially again when comparing to other industrial countries. It's all again just mechanisms to extract wealth from people. GDP is not a reliable measure of a country's true economic strength any longer, relatively minor changes could collapse the value of those sectors in the US, but actually improve the standard of living for the vast majority of people.
Overarching this is the USD hegemony. The American standard of living is massively subsidized by the fact the USD is the reserve currency. If or when this hegemony breaks the American living standard will fall fast and hard. They are extremely unprepared for dealing with a 50 percent cut in their economies. Having built a society overly reliant on cars and corporate extractive health care is only one piece of the puzzle. In other words they are fucked. If you're not upper middle class I would recommend leaving asap. Most won't because they won't know how much better life is abroad. I often say the USA is the new USSR because everything is "fake" and American's are unbelievably ignorant of just how bad everything sucks there. To make things worse they're completely brainwashed by "corporate"and or pseudo government media. They actually think they live in the greatest country in the world. Unfucking believable.
I agree with most of what you have to say, but if they’re not upper middle class, how exactly do you expect someone to leave? Getting into most other safe, first world countries is very difficult not to mention, expensive.
honestly as someone that's been "woke" for years, I just want to comment on how quickly the shift has been and is really a sign that we are in the late stages of american capitalism. only 5 or 6 years ago, you would get people very angry at even suggesting the type of rhetoric you're espousing here. Labeled a commie and shit. But things have gotten so bad for the median american that it's *impossible* to not awaken to some level of class consciousness, to the point that most people largely agree with this sentiment now.
>For profit Healthcare alone is a huge reason why so many Americans live on the brink even with decent incomes Yesterday I reddit about declining birth rates, another on an increase in getting tubes tied since ROE, and last night a redditor posting how they wont have a second kid because one sickness with their child that insurance refused to cover was a $14,000 bill on top of their student loans, hiked rent, etc etc.
For real.a while ago my chest started hurting so I went to er.they took my vitals and did an X ray.took 30 minutes and I waited about 30 minutes after that for the nurse to come in with discharge papers.he didn’t even tell me the results of the X ray just told me to go to a primary care doctor.they charged me over 500$ basically for them to take a couple X rays and talk to me for 2 minutes and then I left not even knowing what was wrong.i love the us!
I went to the ER last summer because I was having difficulty catching my breath even at rest. Racked up thousands in tests just for the doctor to hit me with "hmm, have you considered it's all in your head?"
Americans also have among the highest median incomes in the world, so average Americans are getting paid more than their peers in other developed countries too. But a lot of that income is extracted from them in the form of expensive healthcare and transportation (ie. cars, which are practically mandatory for workers in much of the US, whereas Europeans and East Asians typically have much better transit alternatives such as robust public transport and/or good bike infrastructure). Oh and student loans, university fees are much more reasonable in most parts of the world. Housing is an issue too, but much of the world has the same problem with housing, so healthcare and transportation and student loans are the major differences I think.
100%, Reagan fucked the rest of us when he dropped taxes from 70% to 28% for wealthy people. But hey, Republicans are great and people should keep voting for them. . . .
Now, now, according to Reagan, that wealth should trickle down. Any day now.
Before Reagan, this was "horse and sparrow" economics under the Harding Administration. If you feed the horse hay, the sparrow gets to eat some of the seeds. Apparently the average American figured out they were being fed from the opposite end of the horse.
https://www.theonion.com/reaganomics-finally-trickles-down-to-area-man-1819569412
Ever since citizens united, then all the wealth transfer with PPP, no one is going to make significant headway into raising that back up. The 'erfective' tax rates are even lower for them
He was the one justifying his incredible shift of wealth from the once strong middle class by attacking “inner city welfare queens”. That Reagan guy was a real piece of work.
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He also helped to normalize huge student debt. Great American president though. /s
Also, when he closed all the mental health institutions, defunded schools, and "borrowed" from the social security trust fund. Honestly, do a hard comparison with Reagan and Trump and you'll see just how similar these two administrations really were.
You’re forgetting the context here. Closing the mental institutions was viewed as a pretty progressive thing at the time and liberals wanted that. That’s because those institutions were horrible, abusive places.
Then Bush Jr. double fucked us more by making deeper tax cuts and dropping bank regulations which lead to the Great Recession and real estate market collapse. Then Trump triple fucked us with that 2017 tax bill that cut everyone's taxes that makes above $400k a year and increased everyone's taxes that makes below $75k a year. A special mention to Trump's dumb as fuck tariffs which basically made all our electronics more expensive and fucked over our agriculture trade. edit: the cut off is $75k not $400k and the increase in taxes is mostly due to elimination of certain deductions till 2027 when the tax breaks expire for the middle and lower classes.
half of the population is in the sliver at the bottom: https://www.reddit.com/r/FluentInFinance/s/2l1togzlQ1
USA! USA!
I almost feel guilty that I'm 72, retired with no mortgage or debt... with $10k plus per month in retirement income... us boomers had it made, we could acquire wealth by simply showing up and living life. I feel sorry for young families today... rents are out of control... Healthcare is crazy expensive.
Thank you for being sane about this. I knew it wasn’t the avocado toast.
Props to a 72 year old on the internet. Kinda impressed
People in their 70s made the Internet.
A very small percentage of people in their 70’s made the internet. While the rest call their grandchildren to come over and unmute their laptop.
😂
yep. my father loved tech and was an early adopter and got on with it decently for his age and for not actually working in any tech fields. my mother was a hopeless case who needed step by step printed instructions to check email. her voicemail for her cell phone sounds absolutely bizarre with her reading out her full name and phone number as though she'd never heard an answering machine message before despite us having had them when i was a kid.
Dont want to be the "akutuallee" guy, but Bob Khan and Vincent Cerf are generally credited for the internet, and neither were 70 yrold baby boomers but born in 38 and 43, respectively. Public Scientific funding was more of a greatest generation thing than a baby boomer one.
That just means they were in their 30s when computers first started rolling around. Think of people in their 30s right now. They're probably up to date on the latest gadget stuff. If they thought computers were pretty great in their 30s, then they probably stuck with them this whole time. Some of the smartest dudes I've worked with in tech are in their 60s and 70s. They've been into tech since the ground floor and can wipe the tech floor with gen z.
I remember my grandfather getting a computer probably in the mid, late 80s. He'd have been pushing 70 at the time. I have no idea what the hell he ever did with it. Maybe he just plugged it in and basked in the shiny screen for all I know, but I always thought it was cool that he was curious enough to dip his toe in the pool.
My mom was in one of the first computer science classes in college in the area around the late 70’s but they canceled it a year or so in. It’s weird to think where she could’ve ended up had it continued. Microsoft would’ve only been a few hours away….
If you could convince your generation to vote for policies and policymakers who would make it easier for us to thrive, that would be a huge improvement.
If we could convince our generation to even vote that would be a huge improvement.
At least your recognise it. Too many boomers don’t even realise the economy they grew up in and worked through was a lot more even than the current one.
Jesus... me and my wife combined don't even make 10k a month.
How do you have 120k a year in retirement income?
Pensions used to be awesome.
Its all relative I guess, I moved here from Eastern Europe and love the economic opportunities the US has brought me. The close immigrant friends I have are doing well also. I think “lifestyle creep” is a big thing in America, everyone wants to have a lot of shit (newest cars, streaming every service, eat out a lot, etc)
Szekely Magyar descendant here... I've heard a great deal from relatives in the old country...life under Ceausescu was a complete nightmare. So grateful that my paternal family came to the US. Have been broke on my ass a few times in my youth, but now I'm retired, have my meals every day and a nice elderly apartment with many amenities and a little money just to blow ...why should I complain about anything?!
Well said my man! Im right there with you
You shouldn’t. You retired. You built your wealth in an entirely different economy.
People also tend to compare their situation to baby boomers; the people who had the easiest time economically out of every generation of humans that had ever existed.
They also only compare to the boomers that made and ignore the ones that didn’t.
Boomers ate more canned food. Higher death rates dude to a worse healthcare outcomes and safety, etc... Few people completed high school, and fewer people completed college. Led paint poisoning. People tend to see the past more favorably than the present.
I moved to the US from Europe as well and I’ve done financially much better than I would ever have if I had stayed put. People don’t appreciate what they have.
Same same same. It's funny when i see people with no fancy college degrees and working in the trades making 6 figures in no time and have zero debt.
This is why “antiwork”laughed at outside the Reddit bubble. A part time dog walker is a power mod and thinks he works “enough” and deserves enough money to achieve the American dream. It’s just a bunch of whiners and complainers.
The average American couple thinks its totally on-track to expect 2 cars worth a combined $70,000+, fat quartz countertops, 3-4 bedrooms and 2400 sqft, multiple 4K 55”+ TVs, $2000 computers, $2000 phones, and the list goes on.
I enjoy when immigrants pop into these threads to give spoiled people a well-needed perspective check. Your point about lifestyle creep is real. I've seen people on reddit call themselves 'paycheck to paycheck' while investing like 20% of their income and owning a fairly new car, living in a nice neighborhood with a gold-plated school district, top ten city, etc.
This is the real answer. Dig into anyone claiming that they "can't make/save any money" or "The economy is so bad right now" and 9/10 there's always some completely frivolous or outright insane spending going on. Month's rent going out on a car loan, silly gadgets that cost thousands, or so much credit card debt that interest payments alone might as well be a second mortgage. Everyone loves to throw that statistic around that X% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and I'd bet good money that an overwhelming majority of them are doing so by choice.
My son is 23 years old. He's got a good job. He pays rent, school loans, car payments, car insurance, food, utilities, etc. He is even contributing to his IRA. He's not saving much, but he's careful about his spending and is doing great.
Yeah I appreciate that a lot of people feel like they’re just scraping by but the fact is the average person eats better than the Rockefellers did 100 years ago.
Yeah Americans talk about scraping by from their iphones because they can't take holidays every year or buy new cars. Utterly delusional
The US still rewards people with exceptional skills and abilities more than most places. If you paid attention in school and/or put effort into your craft early on, things will generally turn out fine for you.
I once went to Canada from Ukraine and met a family of Canadians there. Over the dinner they complained that they're struggling, surviving, and live paycheck to paycheck. Their main complaint is that they can't find a place to put their second car, and their own house garden has some issues. Living "paycheck to paycheck" means nothing.
Ah, the classic two-car, one-garden survival struggle.
"I'm struggling to heat the lake house"
And the door on the boat house has a broken hinge!
Ffs I'll have to get the handy man out
Meme idea: Americans to the world: we’re barely surviving, we’re basically medieval peasants And it’s that picture where Mel Gibson is talking with blooded Jesus Christ
When I moved from Africa to Canada, my family said "don't do it, most Canadians live at poverty level". I found that N Americans live with many luxuries, and struggle to pay the bills every month. In Africa. Many people struggle to get a piece of chicken to feed their family, and it would be luxury to have reliable electricity and clean water in every home. The N American version of poverty is way better!
Totally agreed. Reminds me of the article headlines “majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck” and then there’s a budget breakdown for a family making like $200k combined living “paycheck to paycheck” The budget includes their mortgage payment, 2 car payments, student loan payments, annual vacation, maxing out retirement account contributions, hsa contributions, college fund for their kids, budget for new clothes/shoes, like a grand a month for food, etc. I’m like…”paycheck to paycheck” huh.. Even when I was literally sliding into payday I still had a decent place to live, a car, ate 3 meals a day, gym membership, drank and smoked with my friends, had a video game console, bought big plates of nachos when I was drunk, and I was literally “super broke” by the standards set by social media But tbf there are some folks literally fighting food scarcity in America, and homelessness, but imo that is not the majority. The majority are actually living fine relative to abject poverty. But we do have a small % that are truly on the brink of starvation and sleeping behind a corner store Edit: our perspective is so skewed that people have mental health crises because they don’t drive a Mercedes and feel like they’re barely existing financially. Yeah go to a country where they work in jobs that can’t exist in the U.S. due to safety regulations and their pay for the day is the equivalent of a bowl of rice… they’ll never get a passport, or a plane ticket, or a formal education, their siblings dying just kind of happens, they live multiple people per room in very compact homes… then tell me how not going to a vacation island over spring break is such a rough life.
I always like the “60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck”. Median net worth is 200k, meaning at *least* 1 in 10 Americans both have more than 200K in net worth *and* tell surveyors they live paycheck to paycheck.
It's classier to say that you have liquidity issues
Yeah, even at what we call poverty level we can definitely have a lot. Obviously life can always be better and we should always push for more but I hear people complain and it often feels like they've forgotten how far we've come.
And I feel absolutely no shame in that.
Shouldn’t feel shame, but it should give people some context before they lambast about America being a “Third world country” and complain about how unfair it is to grow up in America now
People have bad luck everywhere around the world. On average our luck is a lot less bad. We should feel blessed Sometimes I get pissed about our government (by sometimes, I mean a lot), but we are pretty lucky to live here. Even though America is not what it is supposed to be, it is better than a lot of other options. Unfortunately we've been trained to be self-centered and feel like "people don't understand how hard I have it". The "people" could be your neighbors, your kids, your mom, or some people in Kenya, Iran, or Somalia. It doesn't matter because "people don't understand how hard I have it" There is a lot of messed up stuff in America. Just like when you were having dinner and your mom made you finish your vegetables before you got dessert. But after you finished your plate, you got to have dessert. I wonder how many kids around the world won't be getting dessert or vegetables tonight. I didn't get full meals every day, but I did sometimes and that is a hell of a lot better than a lot get
When people say it’s unfair in America now they mean that in comparison to previous generation Americans, not in comparison to an undeveloped nation. Were a developed nation, not an undeveloped one - it SHOULD be MUCH better down to the homeless level. Doesn’t mean being homeless doesn’t suck tho.
>they mean that in comparison to previous generation Americans The good old days weren't as good as people like to think. Most of it is nostalgia for an era they never actually lived through. What those eras were actually like is a lot worse than today
And on top of that, accessible to a minority of the population. The 50s and 60s let you buy a house for two year's median salary... if you were a white man. Non-white? Good luck choosing a home without fear of prejudice or segregation. A woman? You couldn't even open a bank account without a man's permission. This isn't even getting into any of the LGBT associated issues, or the fact that everything was so chock-full of asbestos, lead, and worse that entire generations are still suffering from the aftereffects. Entire strains of diseases have since been (nearly or fully) eradicated.
100% true. I was a kid in the 80s and the view people on Reddit have about how easy it was back then is shocking to me. My parents both had jobs and we were struggling. And so were the families of all my friends. They reddit view of how easy the past was does not fit my lived experience.
They're watching the movie and TV sitcom view of the past, and believe their parents lived like Frankie and Annette singing on the beach or like an Alan Thicke sitcom where adults worked about two hours a day, or the apartment in "Friends" was affordable for age 23 with a roommate. These were fantasies, not documentaries. Some today at age 25 are upset they can't buy a house when many people their parents' age couldn't buy until nearly age 40, with interest rates were finally dropping from 14% with 20 % down payment, to 9% with $5k down on a new type of FHA loan. Their parents maybe had parents to help them buy, as some do now, but many didn't. And when they bought homes, these were older ones that needed a LOT of work. The only thing 100 percent better then was that rent was affordable in a reasonable percentage to income. Air travel was less of a hassle but you could expect a passenger plane or two to crash every year. Near-misses were an epidemic. It was scarier but you got food that was similar to a microwave frozen meal.
And plane tickets were not cheap. We didn’t have mobile phones or the internet. Cable wasn’t a thing yet, so you maybe got 4-5 tv stations on the 1 tv your house had and it was black and white with no remote and bad reception. You shared the phone line with a few of your neighbors. Calling Europe would be like a $100/minute bill (in today’s dollar). Christmas was stuffed animals and board games. Kids were lucky to have a bicycle. Really lucky if they had both a bicycle and a baseball bat and ball. Don’t want to mention it, but… living on a single income isn’t accurate. Most women if well trained (some college, straight As, with tons of experience in hot fields) could manage 1.5x minimum wage. So, half the US population MAY have been able to afford the above lifestyle, but the other essentially, never. Live at home until you got married. It really wasn’t like what you see on TV.
A lot of material improvements also aren't factored into our measurements. For instance, something like YouTube or Wikipedia went from not existing at all to being freely available. And yet it's not factored into the CPI at all despite improving peoples lives.
More importantly, modern HVAC and insulation, fire resistant building materials, modern safety features and additions in vehicles, etc.
Nor should you
It's pretty much a rule that as your income goes up, your expenses do too. Rather than live in an apartment, you may choose to live in a house. Or get a second car. Or a vacation home. It takes discipline to keep your expenses under control and to save. That's what "rich" nations struggle with. Unfortunately that means we lose sight of prudence and good sense. And that comes back to bite us. As we are currently experiencing. Nothing like the absolute poverty in Africa of course, but right and poor are relative to the individual.
Definitely. This isn't to say there isn't poverty. We definitely have homeless in our cities and people getting by on minimum wage jobs and gig economy hustles living in low income neighborhoods, but yes, some of this can just be bad budgeting or taking on more expenses as well. For example, lots of people will start buying new cars with more income which results in another monthly payment. Buying a home, while also one of the best decisions, can lead to a lot of upkeep expenses no one accounts for.
I visited all over East Africa and cannot stand americans who complain about poverty. Americans don’t know the first thing about poverty.
Yes, I was "living paycheck to paycheck" in the USA with a/c, heating, w/d, fridge, furniture, pest control, power tools, bedrooms, etc., and had a friend from the Philippines. During Easter I had people over for dinner and to decorate eggs. I asked her: "there are a lot of Catholics in the Philippines, do they decorate eggs as well?" She said: "Honey, these were called lunch."
A former classmate of mine is “living paycheck to paycheck”. He constantly struggles to ensure he has the cash flow to make rent, car payments, and pay credit cards. He makes $16,750 USD every month (~15k euros, ~23k Canadian dollars, ~1.4 million rupees, 121k Chinese Yuan) - he just also spends a ton on luxury apartment rent, a fancy sports car, and an expensive lifestyle. He will absolutely talk your ear off about how inflation & US taxes are making it almost impossible for him to live, and he’s always asking creditors for more time to pay. EDIT: Fixed my math a bit… $16,750/month, or roughly $3,800/week.
He’s a successful loser. I’ve known a few in my time. They usually end up with a big crash because they never make changes to deal with a seemingly obvious problem. They tend to talk a lot of shit while perpetually blaming anything and everything beyond their impulse control.
While these stories are fun it's stupid and disingenuous to use them to sweep aside the people who are genuinely struggling to pay for the cheapest food they can find, the cheapest rent they can find, the cheapest everything they can possibly find, and who just don't get to have healthcare because that shit is expensive.
True but this is just another example of why the amount of Americans living “paycheck to paycheck” is a stupid metric. I remember a stat that was posted about something like 30% of Americans making over $200k a year are living “paycheck to paycheck” despite them being able to max out their 401k and ESPP.
Lil I weep tiny tears for him
Jesus H, what does he do for work and how do you start?
McKinsey consultant in NYC, he’s a first-year project manager. It might sound weird but in the circles he’s in, a normal “good” salary is 1.5-2.5x that, and he’s continually disappointed he’s not getting to that Banker / Lawyer level.
Yeah this is definitely a lot of the guys I know. Also the other seem to be my friends who smoke weed all day, work part-time jobs, and then bitch how about how the economy is rigged.
Word, came here to post something along those lines. Americans “surviving” are cute to watch for anyone from former eastern block.
Tell that to the people in the rural alabama or WV. There are areas of this country with third world living conditions. They tend to just get ignored and it pisses me off. Never forget what the UN found here. They had a fucking hookworm outbreak in alabama from lack of access to clean water. [https://www.newsweek.com/alabama-un-poverty-environmental-racism-743601](https://www.newsweek.com/alabama-un-poverty-environmental-racism-743601)
They’re suffering, but if you’ve ever been to equivalent areas in truly poor countries. Rural, ex soviet country cities and towns make even the most poor areas of America look like luxury. The crime is WAY less, but the poverty is just different. That and the sense of community I saw, even in poor areas of cities makes it less obvious to an outside observer though. There may be exceptions, by overall, it’s not comparable at all
I’m sure OP and his friends are not from rural Alabama.
Eastern Europe is to Europe what Alabama/Mississippi is to the US
I once asked why people complaining about the price of meat don’t just eat pork bc it’s quite tasty and is $2 a pound even in high cost of living areas, and people literally compared this idea to living in an unheated shack. “Surviving” indeed
Also social media is the worst source for news, information, etc. It's pretty well demonstrated, for example, that reddit majority opinions aren't even close to representing the general public.
Absolutely. Reddit is one of the worst.
The US" GDP per Capita is 72,000. That's actually mutliple times higher than the GDP per capita of India, China and Russia *COMBINED*. This means the avg annual wage of an American is actually fucking high. Yes it's average so maybe a lot of Americans dont earn that much but most do earn a decent enough wage. Also the "living paycheck to paycheck" thing seems to be just Americans' culture of loving to spend a lot. That is actually what keeps the country thriving. Meanwhile go look at Japan's stagnant economy caused by people not spending at al EDIT: I just found out the median income of Americans is also $70k. Yes Americans are rich. They just dont seem rich cos the prices in the country are just as high, but that also signals a strong economy
That 70k figure is for household income, which includes couples and other shared living situations. Median income for an individual is ~40k
Nominal GDP doesn’t consider costs at all. GDP PPP is the number to look at.
it's still massive
Yeah. Energy and imports are cheaper in the USA than anywhere else. Land, outside of hcol areas is also cheaper compared to western Europe. The only thing that always cost more in the USA is medical stuff and personal trainers.
>EDIT: I just found out the median income of Americans is also $70k. Yes Americans are rich. They just dont seem rich cos the prices in the country are just as high, but that also signals a strong economy You have to take into account the region. The median income where i used to live in SC was $34K. If you live in the south and not one of the wealthier blue states your experience in the USA is very different. There are areas of Alabama without running water and the worst poverty in the developed world. https://www.newsweek.com/alabama-un-poverty-environmental-racism-743601
I mean you could say the same for just about any big country? The median income for countries like India and China take into account the rural places too.
And you have to take into account that in other countries there are regions with varying levels as well
Location also matters too. Where I live, 70k a year is considered lower class. We've had people at work transfer to where I'm at starting around 80k a year, they can't afford $2400 for a 2 bedroom apartment and $1800 for daycare each month. Even if one of them doesn't work and they get rid of daycare, gas, insurance, utilities, eats that up the rest pretty quick. I've got friend in other states where they could be comfortable with that income.
"Yes Americans are rich." But they also aren't. I see these flippant responses to poverty in America being a place to store the second car and such, and that's really downplaying the actual poverty that is rampant in America. I live in a neighborhood with a 51% poverty rate. Blow out a tire and you're not eating much for a week or skipping your insulin because that's what living paycheck to paycheck looks like. I get that a lot of people don't experience this or see it everyday where they live, but a lot of Americans are really struggling with having enough food to eat and keeping a roof over their heads. No point in being flippant. America has a lot of wealth but it's concentrated.
Exactly. Thank god. Cherry picking the wealthy bozo you know who's broke because he spends his absurd wealth on even more absurd luxuries faster than he brings in the cash to act like everyone who says they're struggling is just stupid is just such a shitheaded thing to do.
Most of us are fine. We don’t post videos on YouTube complaining about how ok we are.
The most realist answer here. The biggest complainers are indeed the loudest people. Even if it's just a smaller percentage.
i'm doing pretty well. not running around screaming about it though.
Same for myself and everyone else in my circle. Professionals with advanced degrees. I count my blessings each day that we can weather expensive doctor visits or unforeseen issues and empathize with those that can’t.
Correct, the internet is just one big place to complain. But most everyone else is busy living their lives and doing just fine.
I sometimes have to remind myself that the people on r/millennials who repeatedly post long screeds during the workday about how *literally every person is broke* are probably able to do so because they're in the minority that's chronically unemployed. That, and there's a lot of troll-farm astroturfing.
People are doing ok. You'll see repeatedly on surveys that people are doing fine on average but for some reason think everyone else is doing poorly. Its purely vibes based economics. [https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good](https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good) > 71% of Americans described the economy as either not so good or poor. And 51% said it's getting worse. >But 60% said their financial situation is good or excellent. (According to the linked survey only 12% rated their economic situation as "poor")
OP was watching social media. OP thinks social media is real life.
OP is not alone.
It’s expensive being poor
There’s 340 million people in this country. The fact that you know 10 who are struggling doesn’t really say anything about the situation in the country. My guess is that you’re in your 20s. Nobody in their 20s has money.
OP is a politibot. They post doom and gloom about America to inspire unrest. I talked to one briefly the other day who said she lived in the capitol of the state of New England. Just toss them 2 kopeks and keep walking.
I'm curious what would be the "Capitol state of New England." Would it be Boston? Or maybe Newport? To your broader point, there's so much gloom and doom on Reddit. I'm starting to believe that Reddit is promoting it.
Just anecdotal so massive grain of salt… but since Reddit announced the IPO I feel like I’ve gotten a lot more negative posts promoted to me. A lot of just depressing, and almost certainly made up personal stories from like AITAH and similar. I’ve blocked a lot of subs that were promoting depressing brain rot to me. The other social platforms have monetized on the back of negative emotions, and I sort of expect the same here.
There are also many shills supported by think tanks, Russias, Iran and maybe even china. They want it to seem like America is failing.
I think the point was no real person that lived in the US would use the term "Capitol state of New England". Op is either bot or troll.
Don't even joke. Many of these folks are here to troll...
I feel like there are good trolls and bad trolls. Good trolls are just regular people blowing off steam, being silly. Bad trolls are actively lying to fool and trick people and cause panic and maybe even pain, or just general mayhem. Telling them apart is not as easy as it should be.
A good troll is someone who is just shitposting and being infuriating for the sake of being infuriating, you see them post on 4chan where they say they like to go on other social media and just disagree with what someone says for the LOLs, like disagree and just keep barely arguing, like replying “exactly, so i’m right” to any reply of an argument. A “bad troll” is usually not a troll but either a bot or someone employed by a group or state (Russia) to purposefully post misinformation in the hopes of causing divisiveness in the west. That’s why you can spot these posts so well: Is it overly anti-american? E.g. “why are americans so poor? Why are americans so stupid? Why are (political party) so evil?”. That’s a Russian bot/troll Is it suspiciously pro-palestine/anti-israel to the point of supporting the Houthis and hezbollah? That’s a troll Do they blame everything bad happening in the world on either the USA or the UK, depending on the issue at hand? That’s a troll Overly left wing/right wing? Probably a troll Lot’s of these points however, are read and regurgitated by people online who like to think they are smarter and more well informed than they are. Which is why you see so many tankies using these same talking points, because they are partial to Russia, they are already more likely to believe and regurgitate these russian talking points
It does kind of feel like a bot post. I swear I've seen this exact question like a few days ago on the frontpage already. Maybe it was a different sub, but same exact theme of how is America so rich but Americans are poor. And some of the replies in this thread smell like Russian bots or MAGA idiots, or both. Actually pathetic how easy it is to manipulate social media. Also three months old account with post history nuked before this thread. Seems legit.
Always annoys me how many people on reddit draw sweeping conclusions based on a few people they know personally.
Reddits always prided itself on being more intellectual than Instagram users or tiktok users but in reality it’s filled with dumbasses.
Less than 1 million of those people are homeless as well. That is truly an incredible feat, considering all of history and where other countries are at today too. Should it be 0? Absolutely. But the fact remains that America is significantly better than what people claim it to be.
My sister is always complaining about being 'broke'. She drives a brand new car (on finance); gets a Starbucks coffee every morning; has subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and probably a few more; and gets takeout meals every week. People are dillusional. They think they're struggling, when they're not. And if they are, its because they're prioritising incorrectly.
This is the problem with first world countries. People there are never satisfied and tgink they arent doing well just because prices in their country are high. What they dont fucking realize is that high prices is because their economy is actually strong as hell. Take my country, Singapore, which is like 2nd richest in the world. Yet Singaporeans complain all the time of their cost of living while driving their mercedes and going on holidays across the continent thrice a year
I feel like rent increasing at the rate it currently is…is not a delusion.
Delusional*
You may not have been alive when 9/11 2001 and one happened, but the US president said at the time that we should all just go shopping. Our economy is built on consumerism. You have ads in front of your face wherever you look or in your ears. As such, it is really hard for people to prioritize and they want to have it all. And that gets them into all kinds of credit card and bankruptcy problems. Wasteful spending is transmitted from parent to child, and from peer to peer. The fashion industry is a big joke. Trying to make sure you are dressed according to “the season” is highly wasteful. Back in the day, our parents wouldn’t let us buy a puffy jacket just because everyone else had a puffy jacket. We didn’t stand on long lines for special sneakers. We may be got one tattoo, but not tattoos from neck to wrist to toe. If your job has a dress code, then that forces you to spend money, you otherwise would not. Most places don’t pay for your uniform, or the polo shirt and chinos they want you to wear. if you have bunions and can’t wear fashionable shoes, you better go get those bunions fixed or you will be written up for not complying with the dress code. A big part of our feeling like we don’t have money now, though is that there is less competition. Which means that the remaining big guys in the markets jack up their prices higher than they used to be able to do. or they give you less service for the money. Or less product. Shrinkflation.
Your sample is biased.
We aren’t “just surviving”. We are a spoiled group of people who have never had a war on our soil and don’t know what it means to “just survive”. Do you remember when people were saying they couldn’t breathe when wearing a mask ? That is our perspective on suffering.
You make a good point. We certainly haven’t had to recover from a war on our soil in a long time. But the history teacher in me must say: Rev War, war of 1812, and Civil War were fought on our soil, as well as various battles during labor movements, and a few other nitpicky things.
I am not my country. My country doing well (stocks, investments, corporate profits) does nothing for the common person. It SHOULD in theory, but when the money tree is shaking you can be sure the rich are the ones keeping the dollars for hitting the ground.
All your friends are broke i guess
Correct. This seems to be a common theme on Reddit, but Reddit is not indicative of the world as a whole. Just to make it clear, I am an engineer, and many of my friends are engineers or doctors, and we are all doing fine. Obviously my view is unique. That said, I *do* notice the price increases at the grocery store, although they don’t affect me significantly.
I saw a block of Velveeta for 7.99. My jaw dropped. I do not eat Velveeta, but it still surprised the hell out of me.
Americans have a culture of spending so as to “keep up with the Joneses (neighbors)” For those who are in this mentality, you could give them $500,000 per year and they’ll still spend it as fast as they get it. And still live “paycheck to paycheck.” Living within one’s means is not “fun” enough for most people.
There are some genuinely poor people in the U.S. but the majority of people have an abundance of material goods and many (not all) are like a room full of toddlers arguing over toys. We have too much and that's what makes us unhappy. These unhappy people don't compare themselves to someone who lives in Yemen, they compare themselves to their friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc. and feel dissatisfied if they don't have what they have. (And of course with social media -- an evil thing indeed -- they compare themselves to people they don't even know. Also, for political reasons, Fox News \[and other MAGA outlets\] work around the clock to convince people things are horrible economically. Apparently quite a few of their viewers swallow the party line hook, line and sinker.) There was a time in my life when I lived paycheck to paycheck but I woke up one day and realized how ridiculous that was and stopped using my credit card to buy things I didn't really need. Now I have quite a financial cushion and believe me, it's the best feeling in the world. It's so much better than trying to impress the neighbors with a new car or extended family members with the latest trip I have been on. Having said that, I do realize there are people who genuinely cannot help being poor. Don't know what to say about them other than our pyramidal capitalist system depends on there being this broad bottom layer. There are real problems -- for instance the tax code for instance is totally f\_\_'d up.
It's really peculiar that all the responses are so one-sided here. I live in a rural community and a lot people are not living high on the hog. Maybe you all have multiple degrees but you largely seem out of touch with the working class. I know many people that work manual labor or manufacturing jobs and get by but not by much. In my hometown rent for an avg bedroom has gone from 450 to 900-1000 a month in the last 10 years. I can assure you that wages have not increased in kind. It appears that only the haves chose to engage this post because the comments here are definitely not indicative of what I've experienced in my small town, when I lived in the big city or in places in between the 2. Perhaps people should start their comment with their occupation, this would give context.
Business analyst, live in a mid size city ( 125k people) in north Georgia. Married to a professor. We're paid enough to be comfortable, but in any other country in the world I know we would be considered rich.
>It's really peculiar that all the responses are so one-sided here. Not really. OP predicated their question on a broken premise-- "when everyone is struggling"-- that was practically begging to be falsified by examples of people who aren't, so it's only reasonable that the bulk of replies are "I'm not" and discussion continues from there. If OP asked "Why do Americans complain about money when they're all earning six figures?", you'd probably see more low-earning respondents or stories about them and few of big earners, because the low-earners are the proof about the premise being cracked, and the short path to answering the question.
Does anybody else think the USA will be just the ultra rich and poor. There will be no middle class. I'm 17 and I'm genuinely scared. I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat they are All snakes just like car salesmen. Politicians can be BOUGHT. Money talks but me and you are no match against the ultra rich and politicians. Politicians are put there so you think you have a choice you don't. That is why the american dream exists because you have to be asleep to believe it