How much Americans make in wages • Hacker News Board

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#151

Post by 0x262d » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #83

christophilus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helping your siblings is communism?

This is what Fox news and the modern GOP have done to my country. Note: I'm an ardent capitalist, not particularly partisan by nature, and probably would be a Republican at this point if my life had the Republican party remained what they were 50 years ago. Nonetheless, I'm often stunned at what we've become thanks to modern GOP-inspired propaganda. What would my dear (and communism-hating, btw) grandparents think of…

how can you say you are "an ardent capitalist" but opposed to partisanship and propaganda lol? do you think supporting capitalism over socialism is outside the realm of partisanship?

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#152

Post by owie829 » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

skilled wrote: post #65

I honestly wonder are people that delusional that they overlook the ridiculous debt that the country is in? Don't get me wrong, I am not from America myself but I have a lot of friends from there, and I generally don't hear anything good about the 'American dream'. If you take a hard step back, like way back. And take a moment to look at the "situation" with an outside perspective, don't you think it's a little ridic…

From an outside perspective the problem of household debt to household disposable income is not a uniquely American problem, nor is it even most acute in America.

Total household debt as a % of net disposable income is 109% in US. European countries with higher levels (in increasing order) are Greece, Spain, Belgium, France, Portugal, Finland, United Kingdom, Ireland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Netherlands, and Denmark.

In Denmark, household debt is 280% of net disposable income. https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#153

Post by pockettanyas » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #143

What a weird way to visualize this data. A simple histogram or CDF plot would have shown the patterns quite well. This way it's hard to follow the bands and blobs, which seem to be based on completely arbitrary cutoffs. It doesn't even seem to follow its own strange logic, jumping suddenly from just under $100K (1% per blob) to over $100K (8%) in a different part of the diagram. Why would anyone do this?

I totally agree, it's not a very clear way to show the data.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#154

Post by fzeroracer » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

rhexs wrote: post #135

fzeroracer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How, exactly, are they going to starve to death on food stamps? Some sort of fancy medical diet Medicaid isn’t covering?

Because food stamps gives them about 180 dollars a month to feed two people. That's hardly enough to survive a month, especially for two disabled people that also have trouble cooking for themselves.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#155

Post by anoncoward111 » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

extra88 wrote: post #139

anoncoward111 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you possibly assert this when property taxes in the Tri-State (23 million people) are often $10,000 a year per house, and income is taxed at 5-9% compared to Texas which is 0. The price of rent/mortgage is directly affected by property tax.

Homeownership is not necessary for well-being. The absolute cost of property taxes in some parts of the Northeast are high because the properties are highly valued. Taxes are not robbery, people in higher taxed areas get more services than low-tax places like Texas. Higher property taxes correlate with higher rent but the inverse can be true when home buying (i.e. a seller can ask more for a home in a low property ta…

I appreciate your reponse, and agree that the entire country is not the Northeast :)

However, I would urge you not to discount the existence of 50m people in the Northeast megacorridor[1]. I am not particularly aware of what services are received that directly benefit people living here other than the ones that I have personally experienced, which are unemployment income and pension income for teachers (my parents).

In fact, 90% of property taxes in NY are sent to our school districts. I don't have kids, so I can only benefit from this in the abstract.

Additionally, I think it's important to note that in the last 20 years, wages have not risen in NY more than a dollar or two per hour, yet property values have risen from 100k to about 300k on Long Island.

I think these are serious headwinds for anyone pulling in 30k a year post tax, such as myself.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#156

Post by anoncoward111 » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #145

anoncoward111 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then assume 50-60% are working and include the addition multi-million person metropoles I left out like BOS PHI PHX etc

Assuming that 50-60% of the population of cities is working is probably too high. As a simple example, the third table at https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2016/t... data for New York City for 2016. Total population is 8,537,673. Population under 18 is 1,798,888. Population over 64 is 1,155,075. That's 35% of the population right there. Some of them might be working, of course. For the kids, this…

I appreciate your statistics but I'm not quite sure how they are related to our discussion.

Most of the kids in NY state are living under the care and support of their parents and aren't working, therefore they shouldn't even be a factor in population/labor force participation metric.

Additionally, many of the old people who aren't working shouldn't be factored in either because they are receiving quite high pensions to live from, as well as social security.

When you factor this in, my initial ratios still stand. Out of the 325m people living in the USA, 45% are working (145m). When subtracting the 30% of Americans who are retired or under the care of parents, you are removing 100m people.

Therefore, as you say, the "prime age" labor force participation rate is 65% (145m/225m).

Applying this ratio to my original numbers, 45.5 million people are laborers in the Northeast. The other 25m either used to be laborers or are protected financially by laborers.

We cannot possibly say that an area like Amarillo TX, with just 100,000 laborers, is indicative of some nationally sustainable trend where cost of living is cheap and wages are still high.

This denies the existence of an extremely large block of humans, who are struggling despite earning decent money.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#157

Post by lucozade » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

largehotcoffee wrote: post #67

>48% of wage earners had net compensation less than or equal to the median wage Isn't that how math works?

Net compensation includes bonuses and such. It's not just wages. The 48% figure is the cumulative total of people with net compensation If you look at the SSA data, It also highlights that the mean net compensation is about $48k. And 67.4% of wage earners have net comp below that figure. Which is in line with the graphic.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#158

Post by anoncoward111 » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #78

anoncoward111 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, do you want a specific number? Because if you go to the Wikipedia page for "List of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas", you'll see the following Amarillo TX population: 265,000 NY, LA, CHI, DAL, HOU, DC, MIA: 70,000,000

Houston is a place where $60k is enough to buy a house.

Is it enough, or just barely enough? I'm seeing a median home price of 300k per Zillow. In addition to coming up with the 15-60k needed to put a downpayment on the house, you are hit with $2,000 a month in mortgage/insurance.

This hardly sounds like a steal to me because it is exactly what I am paying in NY. I make $2200 post tax per month, which is bang on the median income in this area. Half of my money goes to rent, the other half to car/food/health insurance and so on.

Were I to lose my job or have kids, the situation would be completely unaffordable in a matter of months as opposed to years, which is the type of cushion the earlier generations had.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#159

Post by notacoward » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #77

walrus01 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The authors write that "the incomes of the top 1% collectively made up 11% of national income in 1980, but now constitute above 20% of national income, while the 20% of US national income that was attributable to the bottom 50% in 1980 has fallen to just 12% today. Further, "while average pre-tax income for the bottom 50% has stagnated at around $16,000 since 1980, the top 1% has experienced 300% growth in their inc…

However the top 20% pay over 80% of the taxes.

So? That will always be true for any income tax, except for one so regressive it amounts to a poll tax. It's close to being true for most other kinds of taxes as well. There's always going to be some number for which you could make such a statement. Since inequality of tax is directly related to inequality of income, all you're really proving is that income is much more concentrated than ability is, i.e. that we do not live in a meritocracy, that the rich get richer primarily due to the mechanics of the system instead of by exhibiting merit. However progressive our tax system is, it's clearly far outweighed by the regressive mechanics built in to the rest of the system.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#160

Post by devonkim » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

jurassic wrote: post #52

kough wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you subsidize your siblings? I'm going to be in the same situation and I'm not sure what I'm going to end up doing but I think I'm going to end up doing it.

Yeah, moderately. This year I gave about $7k to each sibling which is life-changing for them and not really a hardship for me other than slightly delaying my home-ownership goal. For one sibling, I'm the safety net when crises happen that they can't afford. E.g. can't come up with their car insurance deductible, water heater broke, etc. They don't ask but I always offer when it's clear that a small outlay would spare…

I’m from a family of immigrants and still believe in some level of separation between family and money. While I believe in aiding family on the basis of love, I also believe in witholding money on the basis of love as well. For example, if a family member has a substance abuse problem lending them money is not helping them, agreed? The correct action involving money is to help pay for rehab or at most their housing payments if it puts no burden on oneself.

This issue is a very important one because it can strain or break marriages if your spouse does not agree with how money should be treated among family. How one treats money is a part of how they implement their values and morality in general, after all.