How much Americans make in wages

Sounds like you haven't had to deal with family members in abject poverty before?

My parents can't work, for example. They're both disabled and rely on food stamps plus medicare just to survive. This puts a rather large financial burden on me at times to say the least, because I would rather not see my parents starve to death.

If only we had a government that took better care of people in poverty. Imagine that.

> more robust and decentralized system than us all being atomized and being cared for by the state.

Decentralized, sure. Robust? No way. Unless they are wealthy and economically independent, your family are a small number of failures away from not being able to support you. A locally correlated failure ( i.e a plant or industry that employs many of them folds) can knock out the support system. Not to mention that unlike government programs, your family are under no legal obligation to help you.

I'm not disagreeing that there is a "lower class" of Americans that face these circumstances. What I'm disagreeing with is the article's implication that the median American somehow shares this plight. The article ignores a crucial fact: that the "median income" does not represent the "median American." The "median American" makes over $50,000 at age 35+. The "median income" reflects everyone just starting out in their career, etc. That's the basic fallacy of the article. We imagine someone with kids making $30,000 and how hard that would be. And then we see that the median income is $30,000, and are shocked to think that somehow half of all people must be in those "dire" financial circumstances. But someone making $30,000 with kids to support is in fact far below the median. The median family income in the U.S. is $73,000.

These statistics are not "improbable"--they are fact: https://dqydj.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/average_median_....

Your point about health insurance also contradicts reality. Excluding people covered by Medicare and military health care, 70% of Americans have employer-sponsored health insurance. That covers, on average, 86% of premiums for the employee and 75% for dependents. Many Americans don't have health insurance, of course. But the median American does. The person making $30,000 and getting "gouged on health insurance" out of that amount is far below the median.

> This is not even counting the fact that Americans work more for less

That's simply false. The median income in the U.S. is about 10% higher than Sweden (and much higher than the U.K. or France or Germany). Do Swedes get 36 extra days off each year to compensate? (No they don't.) Disposable income at the median is even higher in the U.S. because Sweden has extremely high tax rates on the middle class. The poor in Sweden, on the other hand, are much better off thanks to those taxes on the Swedish middle class.

>I'm not disagreeing that there is a "lower class" of Americans that face these circumstances. What I'm disagreeing with is the article's implication that the median American somehow shares this plight. The article ignores a crucial fact: that the "median income" does not represent the "median American." The "median American" makes over $50,000 at age 35+. The "median income" reflects everyone just starting out in their career, etc. That's the basic fallacy of the article. We imagine someone with kids making $30,000 and how hard that would be. And then we see that the median income is $30,000, and are shocked to think that somehow half of all people must be in those "dire" financial circumstances. But someone making $30,000 with kids to support is in fact far below the median. The median family income in the U.S. is $73,000.

I would certainly hope you would agree that each American in those age groups is going to have experienced different job prospects and different stages of the economy, which is why it can be misleading. For example I would easily make the argument that the average American below the age of 35 would also have considerably more debt than Americans age 35+. This is just one measure of how median income can be entirely misleading.

And my arguments against your statistics was more about the fact that you linked to a highly partisan outlet seemingly known for heavily cherry-picking statistics to prove a hard-right bias.

>Your point about health insurance also contradicts reality. Excluding people covered by Medicare and military health care, 70% of Americans have employer-sponsored health insurance. That covers, on average, 86% of premiums for the employee and 75% for dependents. Many Americans don't have health insurance, of course. But the median American does. The person making $30,000 and getting "gouged on health insurance" out of that amount is far below the median.

Premiums are only one half of an equation; with HDHPs even if your employee covers a large amount of the premiums a medical emergency still leaves you stuck with over 6k in debt, something a lot of poor families cannot afford considering how little they have in savings [1]

> Do Swedes get 36 extra days off each year to compensate? (No they don't.)

Yeah, about that. [2] Sweden gets 34 total days of paid leave per year, guaranteed. America has no such provisions and it is entirely up to the discretion of the company. For developers, we can probably expect to get around ~10-15 days off, plus occasional holidays.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-have-less-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...

In my language (Marathi), we have a phrase for this which can be translated as "from the bowl into the plate". The intention is to expand the meaning of "me" to include people that matter. Then you no longer think of the money that you give out as a loan or a gift; you're merely spending it on your extended self.

I was afforded the "luxury" of doing a PhD instead of getting a job out of college because my older brother was working and assumed the financial responsibility of the house. Now I work too, and if the occasion arises, I am happy to part with reasonable sums of money without even thinking of whether it is meant to be repaid or not.