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Millennial men with different incomes

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Re: Millennial men with different incomes

#41

Post by infinite8s »

nwah1 wrote: post #22
tuna-piano wrote: post #19

Does the $1.5M earner not add up to anyone else? His expenses are $6K a month ($72k a year, but call it $100k). His after tax income, call $800k. That leaves $700k unaccounted for - and he's talking about saving $15k for his kids college, or not being able to retire for 15 more years? I don't get it.

He didn't say how many kids. Or how many mothers.

He said he put away 15k in a tax advantaged account for his child (singular). But agree - his annual income doesn't square with his desire to save more, bring his family over from the UK, or pay off his mortgage.

Edit - actually his family status says getting married next year, and rereading the statement about the education savings he could be speaking in the future tense.

Re: Millennial men with different incomes

#42

Post by heyheyhey »

tuna-piano wrote: post #26

I assume many people here are earning amazing incomes, >$100k. Does anyone else feel extremely guilty about this? When I read about the guy who takes two trains a bus and walks a mile to get to work, while trying his best to save just $1100 for a car, my heart breaks. The work I do is easy - I sit in front of a screen in my own house. When I go to a fast food restaurant and order from a woman in her 40s, who likely h…

> Does anyone else feel extremely guilty about this?

Not really. I feel like I've put in the time and effort (along with a little luck) to get to where I am in life.

Unfortunately, life is unfair. While it was nice having parents who supported me, I feel like it's just an advantage in life I was fortunate to have. On the contrary, I'm a short, unattractive, non-white male living in a city that's 90% white; there isn't much I can do in that regards. That's just life.

Re: Millennial men with different incomes

#43

Post by rfrank »

belovedeagle wrote: post #35
tuna-piano wrote: post #26

I assume many people here are earning amazing incomes, >$100k. Does anyone else feel extremely guilty about this? When I read about the guy who takes two trains a bus and walks a mile to get to work, while trying his best to save just $1100 for a car, my heart breaks. The work I do is easy - I sit in front of a screen in my own house. When I go to a fast food restaurant and order from a woman in her 40s, who likely h…

Why do you associate public transit use and not owning a car with low income? I make $100k+ and I don't own a car; I commute to work every day on public transit (with two transfers on the return journey, something a lot of people say high earners won't do) and I use public transit to get around whenever possible.

http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructur...

Re: Millennial men with different incomes

#44

Post by coredog64 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #8

> We have more opportunity, but the price of living is unbearable. The cost of basic groceries & clothing is down dramatically over the last 50 years. The price of housing could be too, but we've decided that it's more important to keep prices rising and supplies limited.

40 years ago it would be seen as okay to have a middle class family in a 1600-1800 sq. ft. house. Now ostentation requires that it is 4000 sq. ft. with a garage bigger than the childhood home of either homeowner.

Re: Millennial men with different incomes

#45

Post by Mystrl »

MrFoof wrote: post #40
tuna-piano wrote: post #26

I assume many people here are earning amazing incomes, >$100k. Does anyone else feel extremely guilty about this? When I read about the guy who takes two trains a bus and walks a mile to get to work, while trying his best to save just $1100 for a car, my heart breaks. The work I do is easy - I sit in front of a screen in my own house. When I go to a fast food restaurant and order from a woman in her 40s, who likely h…

My first job was at a Wal-Mart. My second job was at a meatpacking plant, because it simply paid better. My third job after busting my ass at home was doing web dev, back in the late 90s, in which I was hilariously underpaid. Today I'm a self-employed data warehousing and database performance consultant with no shortage of work and paying myself about what the Junkluggers guy does. There's a way out if you bust your…

Do most people actually have short commutes? I think I've grown so used to commuting an hour + each way doesn't faze me at all. In high school it was 45 mintues on a bus each way. University was bus bus skytrain bus for about an hour and 45 minutes and work now is bus bus train skytrain taking about 80 minutes. Honestly I would rather spend 80 minutes on transit than 45 minutes diving since I can sleep on the train in the morning and I'm usually reading on the way back not to mention the cost of owning a car.

Re: Millennial men with different incomes

#46

Post by LandoCalrissian »

belovedeagle wrote: post #35
tuna-piano wrote: post #26

I assume many people here are earning amazing incomes, >$100k. Does anyone else feel extremely guilty about this? When I read about the guy who takes two trains a bus and walks a mile to get to work, while trying his best to save just $1100 for a car, my heart breaks. The work I do is easy - I sit in front of a screen in my own house. When I go to a fast food restaurant and order from a woman in her 40s, who likely h…

Why do you associate public transit use and not owning a car with low income? I make $100k+ and I don't own a car; I commute to work every day on public transit (with two transfers on the return journey, something a lot of people say high earners won't do) and I use public transit to get around whenever possible.

My wife and I only have one car which basically only gets used on the weekends. Having good public transit makes a great difference for all income levels. All boats rise with the tide.

Re: Millennial men with different incomes

#47

Post by dogma1138 »

michaelchisari wrote: post #18
rayiner wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have a much higher wealth gap than those countries. So tax burden as a percentage isn't a useful metric. Which is why I compared tax burden as a percentage of total taxes to income as a percentage of total income. In Sweden, the top 10% make roughly a quarter of the income and pay roughly a quarter of the taxes. In the U.S., they make about a third of the income, but pay almost half the taxes.

As pointed out above, though, top 10% is not a very useful metric.

Are the bottom 10% a better statistic? In the UK the bottom 10% pays 43% of the tax burden, many of them do not pay income tax at all. This is what you get when you have both direct and indirect taxes, income tax in the UK is only 29% of the total Tax Revenue corporate tax revenue is on the other hand only 8%, capital gains taxes are People always claim Europe this Europe that look at how well they tax the rich, well sorry but they aren't taxing the rich well, and the European taxation system isn't progressive it's regressive.

The majority of the tax revenue in virtually every EU country does not come from progressive taxation, it doesn't come from taxing the rich via capital gains or corporations it's done by taxing nearly every item you buy and every service you use at a flat percent that doesn't cares if you are rich or not.

Re: Millennial men with different incomes

#48

Post by nibs »

tuna-piano wrote: post #19

Does the $1.5M earner not add up to anyone else? His expenses are $6K a month ($72k a year, but call it $100k). His after tax income, call $800k. That leaves $700k unaccounted for - and he's talking about saving $15k for his kids college, or not being able to retire for 15 more years? I don't get it.

I get this weird feeling that that is the revenue line of his PR firm and not his after tax income. After tax income of $1.5M is insane. He would be among the CEOs he references, working all the time. A passive income of $1.5M from a service business? He is a greater producer than me, or perhaps almost anyone. If it is true or close though, very impressive.

Re: Millennial men with different incomes

#49

Post by wfo »

rayiner wrote: post #5

The comments about taxes are really interesting. There is a perception in the U.S. that the wealthy don't pay enough taxes, but in reality the top 10% carries a much a larger share of the tax burden (relative to their share of income) than in countries like the U.K., France, Germany, and Sweden: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/05/ameri... . So the question is: where does this perception come from?…

First of all, the top 10% is nobody's definition of "the wealthy" -- that's what, ~100k? That's a single professional salary of someone who is doing well. That's a double-income family, where both parents have middle-lower class jobs depending on the area.

"The wealthy" that everyone refers to are the 1% -- hedge fund managers, CEOs, not doctors and engineers. Certainly not 100k/year households.

And the article and your argument both miss a fundamental point, which is not simply about income, but about wealth. The top 1% in the US owns 40% of the wealth. And for the ultra wealthy, much of their gains are not through income but rather through capital gains which are by comparison almost entirely untaxed.

The 'perception' comes from reality: you shouldn't frame it as if there is this false perception that exists and ask us to help you find out why, assuming your position is true and moving on without argument -- it is a true perception, it just isn't only based on income and on that arbitrary cutoff.

Also, "mid-2000s" (the graph that you linked) was a long, long time ago in terms of wealth inequality. It was before the great recession which devastatingly altered the inequality landscape.

Re: Millennial men with different incomes

#50

Post by weberc2 »

antisthenes wrote: post #30
tuna-piano wrote: post #26

I assume many people here are earning amazing incomes, >$100k. Does anyone else feel extremely guilty about this? When I read about the guy who takes two trains a bus and walks a mile to get to work, while trying his best to save just $1100 for a car, my heart breaks. The work I do is easy - I sit in front of a screen in my own house. When I go to a fast food restaurant and order from a woman in her 40s, who likely h…

You should feel somewhat lucky, because your parents made a substantially bigger investment in you than you realize, through which you were allowed free time to acquire the technical aptitude to become a developer (or whatever else allowed you to become a high earner). Whether you want to keep feeling guilty is up to you, but you should definitely go thank your parents again! > When I read about the guy who takes two…

What were the poor infrastructure choices? I'm of the impression that the highway system (if that's what you're referring to) worked very well. Sure, it would be nice to have a train going everywhere you wanted, but in a place as sparse as 1950s America, that wasn't feasible. The choices don't seem poor to me, but they worked so well that there is less need for public transit. The remaining problem is that the cost to own or contract a car is too high for many folks--hopefully the self-driving car revolution will alleviate that and prove once again that our highway infrastructure was an investment and not a liability.
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