Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

money.cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 309 posts

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#201

Post by dionidium »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #170
vkou wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens when those 25% retire or can no longer work? They eat cat food on their meager social security payments.

I’m skeptical that this happens much. It reeks of urban legend. Now, I’m sure some seniors do this, but I suspect it’s due mental issues rather than fiscal concerns. Is cat food even cheaper than really cheap canned food?

In my experience, nobody wants to hear this, but basic food is damn near free. I get it, I get it -- it's just a silly thing Sean Hannity says. It also happens to be true. Nobody has to eat cat food to save money. Have you priced beans and rice lately? It barely costs anything.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#202

Post by veidr »

babaganoosh89 wrote: post #177
mid wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spin. From the actual survey data at https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/files/SH... , page 6: Overall, which one of the following best describes how well you are managing financially these days? 14 (0.1%): Refused 893 (7.2%): Finding it difficult to get by 2,395 (19.2%): Just getting by 4,930 (39.6%): Doing okay 4,215 (33.9%): Living comfortably

Are you sure that's right? I don't get how that adds up to 40%.

If 40% of people can't find $400 in a pinch, then it means at least some of those people self-reporting as "Doing OK" still can't find $400 in an emergency.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#203

Post by skookumchuck »

cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #100
ralusek wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being trapped in a debt spiral due to past financial desperation is just a way of iterating forward in the loop of bad decision making. What I am saying is that to enter financial desperation in the United States is not actually possible if you utilize the available social safety net and make proper decisions.

Untrue. Get majorly sick or in a major accident and lose your insurance because your job finds a reason to restructure your department. Trust me, you will enter financial desperation very quickly while you wait for the social safety net to catch up, and by that time you're thousands of dollars in debt, likely already out of your house, and totally screwed.

40% of Americans are not and never were majorly sick. Unless you count drug addicts and winos.

Yes, I've lost jobs before because of corporate restructuring.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#204

Post by BigChiefSmokem »

baby wrote: post #32
cryptoz wrote: post #3

This makes it clear why our current capitalism doesn't work. The ruling class / rich and wealth people and businesses could extract more wealth out of the middle and lower classes than they do now, if the lower classes were more stable and secure. In the US especially, but nearly everywhere, there are hoards of people trying to lower or eliminate social services, basic science research, etc, with the dog-whistle clai…

I can’t believe you’re getting downvoted so much for that. Socialism fear is still very real.

Hello to Peter Thiel and the rest of the angry bunch.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#205

Post by stevenwoo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #160
rndmize wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is optimistic to the point I choked on my coffee. Our economy is predicated on consumer spending; we have a whole set of industries built on the backs of poor financial decision making and being near-broke (payday loans, credit cards, overdraft charge reordering, debt collectors, etc.) all of which pull power away from desperate people and give it to others (now your landlord/phone company/ISP/etc have lega…

> Actually, it appears that voters and politicians have zero interest in improving this situation, seeing as the current administration is making every effort to demoralize and defang the CFPB The current administration was elected with fewer votes than the leading opponent, so it certainly reflects a subset of voters and the politicians comprising the administration, but hardly is a basis for concluding that voters…

Although comforting, the having a majority of the votes is a misleading metric in some ways, the electoral college is skewed so that voters in states with lower population have more power so each vote is not equal. This effect carries over to the Senate where a similar outcome with lower population states having more power so one person's vote is more powerful depending upon their geographic location.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#206

Post by api »

alasdair_ wrote: post #137
jadedhacker wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The piece you're missing is that none of this is a mistake, the entire economy is designed to do this. Apathy and hoping it'll get better will if anything make it worse (not that I'm implying that's your position). The only thing that will make it better is demanding that things change. This means mass unionization, strikes, worker owned businesses, protests, leftist politicians like Sanders and Corbyn, and a whole p…

>the entire economy is designed to do this Unless you are a firm believer in the power of the Illuminati, we have as close to the opposite of a planned (and thus designed) economy as one can get in the present day. Just because a behavior or other feature in a complex system is emergent doesn't mean the system was initially designed that way.

I really dislike how absurd conspiracy theories are used to discredit any discussion of networks of power and how those networks operate.

There is no vast monolithic conspiracy but there are certainly many smaller ones (lobbyists, front groups, back room deals, etc.) with incentives that align. Alignment of incentives can generate a result that looks a whole lot like the result of a big organized conspiracy.

If anything the less organized network of aligned interests is tougher to resist than an "Illuminati." It's more resilient and antifragile. Big vertically integrated power structures are slow and brittle.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#207

Post by ridgeguy »

ralusek wrote: post #31
sjg007 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should but you know personal responsibility and all that jazz. The wealthy only care when the pitchforks come out. The biggest achievement of the wealthy has been to convince the middle class to eat itself.

But personal responsibility is actually an important concept. It is completely unacceptable to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency as a functioning adult. That is a situation that can only be achieved by poor decision making and a lack of personal responsibility. Any strategy that is employed to remedy this has to contend with the fact that the individuals who need to have this situation remedied for themselves…

I find your absolutist view remarkably blinkered, indeed unrealistic in the fundamental sense of the word.

I wonder if you suddenly incurred uninsured medical expenses of oh, let's say, 20X your net worth or annual income, whether you might see things differently.

A family of four on a $50K annual income would find a sudden $1000K obligation utterly devastating.

That's life for (IMHO) too many of us. On average, it has far more to do with luck than your proffered causal moral failure. I think we can do better.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#208

Post by skookumchuck »

dionidium wrote: post #199
skookumchuck wrote: post #195

> Those who don't have the cash on hand say they'd have to cover it by borrowing or selling something. Be careful about concluding that these people are poor. I'm not poor, and I have no cash. Everything is invested. Piling up cash in a savings account just means it'll get eaten away by inflation. This is hardly uncommon. If you've got a house with a large payment, you aren't poor, even though you may not have any ca…

A version of this comment appears every time this is discussed. This isn’t what we’re talking about. These aren’t liquidity problems. People really just don’t have the money.

It's literally what the article is talking about. I included the quote. I suggest they are misinterpreting their data, and are measuring the wrong things.

It's like that daft statistic a few years back that 40% of corporations don't pay any income tax. This raised all sorts of righteous hysteria. Never mind that 40% of corporations lost money that year, and income taxes are not due when you lose money.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#209

Post by danans »

Maybestring wrote: post #181
dragonwriter wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In discussion of capitalist economies, a rough definition (loosely following Marx) of the major classes is: haut bourgeoisie (capitalists): those who own capital and rent labor to apply to it. petit bourgeoisie (middle class): those who live by a combination of labor and capital, particularly those who apply their own labor (perhaps alongside a small amount of rented labor) to their own capital. proletariat (working…

Do I understand correctly that an Uber driver with a 30k capital investment in a car is part of the petite bourgeoise, and a surgeon working for a hospital who has put 400k toward education is part of the proletariat? Or do you count education as capital?

It's just a classification system, so I wouldn't take it in isolation. If what you are trying to understand is wealth and power, you have consider more dimensions.

In Marx's time, these categories perhaps mapped more consistently to the gradation of wealth and power, but there were exceptions then too.

And the degree to which an asset is "capital" that produces wealth and income without the owner's labor is relative to it's scarcity. The 30k car is a common possession, and also it has no added economic value without the driver's direct labor. A fleet of cars driven by rented labor is capital, as are factories, valuable land, or high concentrations of wealth.

Education is a kind of capital, but the surgeon's student loan is no different in than a social worker's student loan, except in the cost and income potential.

In that sense the surgeon is a worker but their work usually produces a great deal of extra income that allows them to purchase capital assets of other kinds.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#210

Post by scarface74 »

ryanx435 wrote: post #197
Maybestring wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I understand correctly that an Uber driver with a 30k capital investment in a car is part of the petite bourgeoise, and a surgeon working for a hospital who has put 400k toward education is part of the proletariat? Or do you count education as capital?

Marx's labels are so outdated it doesn't make sense to use them in our modern economy.

I agree. When a couple of developers can start a software company with nothing but a credit card and an AWS account the concept of "capital" has changed a lot.
Post reply on HN