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Also, “family income” now includes the wife, kids and dog. It used to be that ONE person could earn enough to pay for housing, food, car, Healthcare, etc.
So “family income” is NOT “keeping up with the cost of inflation” despite what the business world wants us to think.
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The most disturbing stat is that our contempt for the rich hasn’t really multiplied at all.
Speak for your damn self
Luigi converted a few people but so much more work to be done.
The land of the free and the poor \o/
Free*
*Terms and conditions apply
Free to be a profit producer for the capital-owning class, free to slip and end up a number in the prison industrial complex. Free to die of a preventable disease, homeless and destitute on the streets. All kinds of freedom!
There is an economic rule about this
Basically what it says is that new developments - like electricity, cars, computers - cause a temporary increase in demand for labor - and therefore higher wages.
As the technology becomes routine, optimization and automation remove the need for labor - demand for labor decreases and by the rule of the market wages go down.
This development is natural and has nothing to do with who’s currently president, policies or anything like that. To quote from the link above:
Stephen Cullenberg stated that the TRPF (Tendency of the rate of profit to fall) “remains one of the most important and highly debated issues of all of economics” because it raises “the fundamental question of whether, as capitalism grows, this very process of growth will undermine its conditions of existence and thereby engender periodic or secular crises.”
The only thing that guarantees that the population in the US can continue to live in the long-term is Universal Basic Income - which says that the state should distribute resources among the population even if the people don’t work. Basically a form of state-backed social welfare. Without it, the issue will continue to get worse, until people will die on the streets by hunger and cold in masses. UBI is a necessity for the person and for peace.
Serious question: wouldn’t Universal Basic Income rely on everyone paying their taxes instead of certain groups trying to hide or avoid paying it? I can’t see governments affording this without a serious look at their spending to pull back om somethings, or there being a sufficient amount in the coffers from taxation.
Debt money is constantly being created for the benefit of the already rich. Taxes are just another punishment for the poor. It’s not a real issue, just political theater/distraction.
There’s some monetary theory that suggests careful creation of money is actually fine and won’t lead to hyperinflation. So potentially, measured money printing to support UBI and stabilize the world economy might actually be fine? Honestly I don’t know enough about the theory and proofs to really say, but there’s some interesting possibilities if you allow for measured money creation
We have UBI in my country.
600-1300€ (depending number of children) as of this year. Over that you have to add up another series of subsidies. Most important one probably rent one that halves the cost of renting a house (the government takes care of about 50% of your rent if your income is bellow some threshold)
For reference minimum wage is 1134€
Most common salary is around 1200€
And healthcare is obviously free at the point of service.
But life is not as golden as you may thing. I used to be hardcore defendant of UBI until it became a reality. Now I’m not really into that. I think is faulty and actually bad for society. Many people are starting to have a feeling that breaking their asses 40 hours a week for getting the exactly same level of life quality that someone that does not work at all is just unfair. And tensions are on the rise. And I see a bad ending for it, it’s like a ticking bomb. And it’s bringing the contrary of peace, is creating confronting groups among our society.
Nowadays I am more defendant of reducing number of workhours. If there’s not enough work for everyone then maybe instead of working 40 hours a week people should be working just 20 hours a week, but everyone capable of doing work should be working, so everyone could work less hours and enjoy more life. I think it is more fair than UBI. And more likely to create social harmony.
That doesn’t sound like UBI. Someone working and earning a wage would earn that wage on top of the UBI so would not have the same quality of life as someone not working. What you described sounds more like a welfare program.
It’s the application of the proposed UBI in any welfare economy out there.
The proposed UBI does not make much sense. On that scenario the instant inflation of giving everyone X extra money would make the UBI irrelevant and unsuitable for a living.
What you are talking were proposed by some groups when IMV was implemented. But it was promptly taken out of consideration as it makes no economical sense whatsoever.
Difference between welfare programs and this UBI is that welfare programs are subject to other considerations. Like only first 5000 applicants get it, or the distribute X amount of millions between the Y people with more points, or they are subject to any other criteria. We have those here too. Difference is that UBI has no other criteria. If you don’t have that income that income is given to you. It’s how a UBI is applied. Giving 500€ to everyone just to take 500€ out of taxes from most to maintain it and letting inflation make UBI quantity irrisorium would make no sense.
In order to UBI to work the quantity given must be a living wage. And a living wage would always be close the most common wage in a developed country. I don’t see how it would be possible por a UBI to be a living wage and then the most common wage being approximately double that, it doesn’t seem feasible.
The U in UBI is universal. If not everyone gets it, it’s not UBI.
Universal means that ALL people universally have access to that basic income. By their own ways or with help.
Getting radical with the definition makes no sense.
Give everyone 500€, then take everyone who is working 500€ in taxes. Dafuck? No need for the unreasonable and additional paperwork of doing it the long way.
The purpose is ensuring everyone have at minimum 500€ (example) of disposable income. And that is rationally achieve the way I have explained that’s being done in all welfare countries that are taking this as an objective.
Still against it, one way or the other. But the other way seems unnecessarily convoluted for no rational reasons.
You are describing GMI and not UBI. Not sure what its confusing about universal
A lot is confusing.
What issue does it solve to give Elon Musk $500?
How it’s supposed to be kept a livable wage from that kind of proposed UBI without working salary when UBI+Minimum wage would result in the most common income, making automatically just UBI way below the minimum for a decent living in that society?
How does a more convoluted way of giving money solves any of the issues that arises from just giving money until a threshold?
Why it makes any sense to make it like that anyway?
I call an UBI the law that ensures that there is an Universal Basic Income. So if we set out universal basic income in 500€, no person in this country will have less than 500€ a month, simple as that.
And anyway that has severe issues. So I really think that we should be “giving jobs”, by reducing working hours of everyone, instead of money.
Universal Basic Income. No strings attached. Everybody gets it. There is no income threshold.
- Regular human: UBI
- McDonalds worker: UBI + McDonalds income
- Bus driver: UBI + Bus driver income
- Doctor: UBI + Doctor’s income
- Billionaire tech CEO: UBI + Tech CEO money
Yeah, the inflationary pressure would probably be insane and would constantly negate any progress. I’m not an economist so I don’t really know.
I think that’s a faulty interpretation of what an UBI should be.
Universal Basic Income should mean everyone Human has at minimum that basic wage. By their own means or with help.
Meaning ultimately that there are no humans living under X amount of money.
One of the key points of UBI is that it is universal, meaning everyone gets it regardless of their own means.
If you take it away from people who work then it’s just un/underemployment support and it discourages people from taking low paid jobs and breeds resentment towards recipients.
Where does it come the budget for that type of UBI? Two options:
-Taxes: then workers do not actually get the UBI as the same amount of money that goes in goes out. It’s just a convoluted way for getting the exact same result as just giving the money to the poorest to begin with.
-Printing money: knock! Knock! Who is it? hyperinflation!
-Tax, but just the rich!: If you want to tax the rich tax the rich. No need for a UBI excuse to do so.
Yes, some people are going to pay more in taxes than they get in UBI. But with UBI you raise the bottom level of income in society so that everyone is able to live. Then people can supplement UBI by working an amount which fits them. Nobody has to work 60 hours a week just to be able to live. And you should also have tax thresholds set so that people don’t pay as much in income tax as they get in UBI as soon as they start working - more/better paid work should always make you better off.
In the end yes the rich will have to pay more towards it because UBI is inherently a form of wealth redistribution.
Which country?
Spain
What country has UBI?
Spain.
It’s known as “Ingreso mínimo vital”. It’s money given to everyone under X income. Without any other considerations. Everyone who doesn’t have that money by themselves is given it by the government.
We also have RSI in Portugal and it works in a similar way. It is not UBI. The U stands for Unconditional. What you describe is just welfare.
Giving everyone, even millionaires, 500€ a month is an unreasonable application of UBI. It makes no sense doing it that way. No sense whatsoever.
Traditional welfare can run off, as it’s a program with X amount of money attached to it, UBI is not linked to allocated resources, so it doesn’t run off.
This the difference between traditional welfare and UBI is that UBI is given to EVERYone who needs it. As before welfare programs traditionally ran of of money before reaching everyone. There’s no need, and it makes no sense to just give everyone money that it’s going to instantly vaporize (via taxes or inflation)
I’m not debating the merits of UBI. All I’m saying is UBI is, by definition, unconditional.
Maybe. But given the unreasonable approach of a radical UBI I thought reasonable that more people understood the GMI approach as the way to actually materialize an UBI.
I stand corrected as it’s clear that many people actually believe that a pure UBI is somehow feasible as it’s simplest definition.
It’s like when talking about democracy we are not talking about ancient greek democracy but about modern democracy instead.
It should be universal human needs (food, shelter, healthcare, etc.)
If they’re just giving out paper money, it’ll be worthless by the time it reaches the poor.
Why are you still working 40 hours a week?
I’m actually not.
We have a strong union and we have 35 hours a week, full pay.
But national limit is still 40 (they are talking about lowering it to 37,5 but it’s taking ages).
This development is natural
lmao.
Any actual notes or thoughts?
The wealthy are much better off though. If you looked at the wage increase of the top 1%, if has risen by $800,000 a year (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/09/staggering-new-data-shows-income-top-1-has-grown-100-times-faster-bottom-50-1970) since 1970.
So capitalism is working exactly the way it is supposed to. Exploiting the middle and lower classes for the rich. This is exactly the progress they want.
It’s a trickle-up economy.
The working class gives the wealthy their blood and sweat and the wealthy turn it into urine and piss it back on their heads and then tell the working class the reason they smell like piss is because of immigrants.
It’s a sunshine economy: The wealth (moisture) slowly evaporates upwards.
Sadly it does more than merely trickle up.
It’s more like a torrent going upwards.
I would say in capitalism “middle class” however you define it is something that is not ideal to have. Rich will be employers who underpay poor people 50 cents a day or less (speaking in fully open market without state intervention on minimum wage and other basic needs) poor won’t have enough resources to fight for their right and will just pray to live to see better future or just die. Middle class is basically only ones who will have enough resources to fight but not have enough to be enslave other that’s why they are problem in state with pure open market and pure capitalism.
My definition of middle class is someone who has enough money to live somewhat peaceful life but don’t have enough money to call themselves rich.
There’s an old definition of middle class that goes something like: has enough time to participate in politics.
Much more than that. The richest men in the country doubled their net worth this year alone.
It’s actually even worse than that. The doubling was just in the last few months. Essentially, election time. You can practically hear them salivating at an incoming Trump admin.
Progress? … don’t you mean maintaining the status quo of human inequality for the past 10,000 years?
The rich are getting progressively richer relative to everyone else, so I’d call it accurate.
But somehow people are mad at queer folks and foreigners instead of the C-suite and their boards.
Somehow? If it’s not obvious that there are several engineered distractions, then people aren’t paying attention.
Easy: people get their “news” from places controlled by those C-suites and their boards.
Last week at a get-together I actually heard a conservative family member say how the drones in the news are to distract from the important issues like immigration.
This is a standard boomer that keeps news on the living room TV all the damn time. It’s not even the disconnect from both reality and compassion that gets to me any more. It’s how widespread it is, and how the propaganda works even better in the real world than in fiction.
And the difference went to fill the coffers of the rich.
I blame Reagan.
You have good reason to.
Reagan ruined everything.
Important to note here the important difference between “mean”, aka the average, and “median”, the middle number in a set. Assuming Krueger intentionally used “median”, the situation is actually worse than people realize.
The average can be affected by large outliers - like billionaires. IF the “average” American makes $50,000 a year, the median could actually be more like $30,000 (totally made up numbers, as an example).
In other words, the median is the more “accurate” number to use in these comparisons because the income of the extremely wealthy has less of an impact on the result.
You’re right about everything, but the post explicitly talks about median for everything but healthcare, so it should be fairly accurate already
True, yeah. I just wanted to be clear about it in case people confused median and mean. I work with high school students who struggle with the difference every year. So, thought maybe some adults who’d been out of school for a while might also not realize the difference.
When talking about stuff like this, large diverse populations and a near continuous variables, a single measure of central tendency is not very informative whichever you choose. They necessarily misrepresent most of the population, quite a lot, just for the sake of what . . . brevity?
That seems lazy to me and makes me think the author doesn’t really care too much about the people they’re trying to describe.
At least pick a few points across the distribution, and a give a bit more time to understand or explain maybe like 5 or 6 “representatives” out of of however many millions are being summarised by the one statistic.
If the author can’t afford to draw a full fledged histogram - at least do a box-and-whiskers.
Maybe that twitter thing is just fucking awful.
Kind of feel like the box and whisker would look something like this, only worse.
Median is (arguably) best if you want to give one value. Of course it’s better to give more, like first quartile, median, third quartile. But sometimes brevity is useful too
Brevity is okay if it doesn’t spawn comments like some I saw in the rest of this thread when i first read it, which I’m going to paraphrase rather than quote directly: “we’re talking about everyone because it’s an average”
I dont know how to educate people use, interpret and critique statistics, but I know I’d rather the tweeters were even more brief and just pointed to a source that does a decent job of showing the data and give people a chance to learn numbers can be used summarising what’s happening to a population.
If they’re just quoting a few numbers to support their opinions they can fuck off for all I care - that’s not actually going to help people understand what’s going on - or how the data can help them do so. It just creates more hot air. And whatever they pick, there is a counter argument ususally everyone can find a cherry that sounds plausibly representative of far more than it actually is.
But… I stopped going to Starbucks and quit buying Avocado toast? Can I buy a house yet?
You’re posting here from a mobile or computer, right? Unless that PC is at the library, you’re paying an internet bill of some sort! /s
Ugh, so lavish. I bet this guy also owns a water heater. No wonder he’s poor!
Well there at a library right? To use a library computer you need a library card, and we can’t expect poor people to be responsible with a library card. Obviously the commenter is irresponsible with their money paying late fees. Maybe if they stopped buying a new phone every year, or wasting money on a library they could buy a house. However keep buying the new phone we make because the shareholders demand higher returns each year. They need to do as we say and give us their money but it’s their fault for any consequences they face for us forcing them to give us their money. A perfect capitalist system. /S
Don’t forget that Medicaid and Social Security Disability still have the same $2,000 MAX asset limit (aside from a car and low-value residence). Back in 1974, that was a down payment on a house. Now that isn’t enough to rent a place to live, not enough to fix a car, and if you somehow have more than $2k in assets,( (DHS does bank and tax monitoring) they take your medical and food away, despite being disabled. If adjusted for inflation, it would be about $13k. Enough to put a down payment on a small house. A 2k limit enough for people with disabilities is BARBARIC.
I’ve written to so many politicians about this archaic rule and Lisa McClain told me that it’s that low, so that only the truly destitute use it… despite us paying taxes all our lives to protect us from starving. I was told that the disabled weren’t as important as older voters who deserve retirement disability.
I was told that the disabled weren’t as important as older voters who deserve retirement disability.
As a voting block with UBI (Social security) and Medicare, lifting the ladder up after them as a class is a reliable voting influence, and they turn out to vote. A lifetime of Israel first warmongering rulership brainwashing makes them an important constituency.
But screens have gotten cheaper per unit of area!
The first stat is a little misleading IMO. While the median car cost has increased ~2x (inflation adjusted), an entry level car price has only gone up ~1.2x (1971 AMC Gremlin vs 2023 Kia Rio LX; $1.8k/$14.8k vs $17.8k) and that’s more important for measuring relative quality of life.
Of course add on to that the fact that there’s easy access to second hand car markets and the number of features included with that base model vs the 1971 AMC Gremlin and it doesn’t seem like things are much worse.
Basically, average car prices increasing could just indicate that people are willing to spend more on cars for whatever reason that may be (better features, more car-centric culture, etc.). For this reason I’d like to see similar stats but about entry level options within each category. Probably less sensationalistic but still interesting.
That being said, I bet stats for the housing market and others would still show a notable increase even at the entry level, but I’d still like to verify this before blindly jumping on the sensationalist bandwagon.
There’s another important part of this equation: these are the things being sold. If someone can’t afford any car at all, they still wouldn’t show up in the entry-level car stats. But I think with how car-centric the US is, there won’t be many people going carless? But like you said, if the second hand market is good, everyone could be driving a barely used BMW and they still wouldn’t show up in any stats about new cars.
Basically, the only thing these stats tell us is that some people would have to spend a higher proportion of their income if they want to buy these things new. It doesn’t tell us if that means they don’t buy it, they buy it and go hungry, they buy an alternative, or they buy it without issue (because some other expense is cheaper or disappeared).
Inflation calculations try to account for this by considering a mix of products and services. If everything goes up across the board, people will get in trouble no matter their exact spending habits. You could also look at buying power or discretionary income to see if a population is doing alright.
The prices above increased a little harder than inflation, so you’d expect to see that as a decrease in discretionary income. The same would happen if wages didn’t keep up with inflation, which is a happy coincidence? Or exactly what the discretionary income stat is designed to do: show how much financial breathing room people have.
people are willing to spend more on cars for whatever reason
The reason is stifling car dependency, complete lack of alternatives, and large number of hyper-privileged man babies.
Also massive fuel subsidies allowing vehicles to just get bigger and bigger, you can’t even find small trucks anymore and there are only a handful of minivan options. EVERYTHING is an SUV!
I also want to know what those $25k houses are selling for now. Comparing to houses built in 2024 is stupid.
In 1988 my family home in the UK was 33k. We sold in 2011 for 185k. My house in 2014 cost 118k and is now worth 195k.
So, it’s not that stupid.
So the 1988 home sold for about 6 times its purchase price and and the 2014 house is 1.65 times its purchase price. Both of those are way less than the 25x that the image claims.
But the graphic is stating from 1971 so 18 years before the 1988 house. In 1971 the average house price in the uk was about 5k.
You are the one conflating here.
Then provide the 1971 to 2024 numbers. A house built after 1977 can appreciate much less than a house built in 1971.
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