111–120 of 205 posts
Yet the chart shows that the US middle class is much wealthier than the middle class of other countries.
Reading this through the lens of income inequality; I don't think having a smaller, yet richer middle class, is necessarily something to be proud of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd most like to have an existence where I don't worry about being bankrupted by a medical emergency or surviving on cat food once I retire[0]. [0] The cheap cat food, I mean, not the $10/meal cat food that rich Americans buy their pets.
Presumably since you're posting on this site you have a marketable skillset in a high demand field, which means you can enjoy a lucrative career and through making good decisions have significant retirement savings so you can afford to eat normally. Maybe you meant that you want that existence for others, in which case, you might have a point, but I think a lot of the people who have your worries in the tech industry…
Top 20 congressional districts by income are Democratic. Proof : https://finance.yahoo.com/news/midterms-one-party-controls-w... When the alternative is an "opposition" party that is suffering from "affluenza" , it's unlikely real fixes will happen anytime soon.
Interestingly it seems from this articles figures that the actual disposable income of the middle class and lower class of the US is much higher than in Europe [1]. "The United States’ smaller middle income group still earns more than almost all its Western European counterparts. The average disposable income among middle income Americans in 2010 was $60,884, placing it comfortably ahead of Norway, which averaged $56…
Although the US doesn't have much higher GDP levels than Western Europe, it has substantially AIC (average individual consumption) levels. That is the median American household doesn't produce much more than their European counterparts, but they tend to consume much more. There's a couple of reasons for this. One is that many land is cheap and abundant, which lowers the cost of living. Two is that US multinationals m…
GDP per capita:
US: $59k Germany: $45k UK: $40k France: $39k
30% higher than Germany isn't "much higher"?
It's worth reading the underlying OECD report: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-healt... Two points based on the charts on page 44, 46. 1) Looking at just "middle income" people exaggerates the situation in the U.S. because part of the reason the U.S. has a smaller middle class is because it has a bigger upper class. About 15% of the U.S. is "upper income" versus 5% in countries like Denmark, No…
> The lower threshold for the U.S. is $23,416 PPP-adjusted 2010 dollars per year.
A person that makes this in the US usually will not receive health insurance at work. Depending on the specifics of the person's demographics/state/income, a worker at the boundary between "middle income" and "lower income" may not be eligible for ACA subsidies and may not make enough to pay premiums. The middle/lower part of the income range is where a lot of the uninsured live. Jobs that pay near this boundary also tend not to come with real health insurance. So the frequent debate about repealing the ACA means that even if they are insured today, these folks do not have any healthcare security as the nation actively debates repealing their lifeline. (IIRC the Supreme Court will decide this summer whether millions of people lose their insurance this year. It's not a sure thing either way.)
My personal take is that not until you're fairly rich (upper middle class) can you attain roughly the level of healthcare security that comes with residency in other rich countries. And even that requires you to stay employed, so it's still a lesser quality of security.
Similar factors apply to the rest of the safety net. The US might be the worst rich country to live in if you're low-income/modest income.
This is misleading. Every countries in Europe would have a smaller middle class if you take the $32-33k median US income.
If you mean the whole world, then yes that is (mostly) true, but it is true for every high income nation, and therefore not really informative. If you mean against other high income nation's, then it is only true in the most superficial sense, as once you include all benefits available to people, and social and economic mobility, the US quickly falls down the charts.
Just against Europe (France, Germany, and UK). If everyone is poorer, I don't see the win. Remember Europe used to have a higher GPD per capita than the US not so long ago.
In all my travels no one is more deluded about the middle class than in the US. Healthcare is cheaper in Europe therefore it must be worse, somehow. The government is completely dysfunctional and we are worse off for it. Rather than pay slightly more to fully fund a working city/state/federal government everyone would rather pay slightly less and have a government that can't work at all. Then, complain about the fact…
This was once sort of the truth for the US, when everyone in the world owed America immense amounts of money after WWII and the US was paying _heavily_ into education. That's ended. The US is now becoming stupid politically and, even worse for the populace, uncompetitive - that "American Innovation" is dead and it ain't coming back for at least thirty or forty years unless education gets a serious booster shot. This…
This also is not a new thing. When I was in high school years ago, quite a few school buildings in the county were literally falling down trailers. With that going on, the school board decided to build a huge brand new building on some of the most expensive real estate downtown. There were some protests and the news did stories about it, but in the end the building was built. And, there are still schools with buildings that are nearly falling down.
Household income is a stupid metric. In America, the top 20% of households contains TWICE as many PEOPLE as the bottom 20% of households. The top 20% of households contains FOUR times as many income earners as the bottom 20% of households. The top 20% of households contains THREE times as many children and HALF as many retirees as the bottom 20% of households.
So when someone says America has too many "poor" households. Consider that those poor households EXIST because they are WEALTHY enough to afford it!
Consider Italy. More households in the middle income share than America. Is that because Italy is an economic paradise? Or because of a strong, centralized bureaucracy capable of administering income distribution schemes? Maybe. But it could be the case that the old and young can not afford to establish their own households. So they continue to live with the working members of their family and enjoy the "benefit" of being a middle class household.
I don't mean to imply that America is perfect and that Italy is not. I only want to say that this chart is an awful way to represent data and is, in my opinion, intentionally misleading.
My intuition about this as someone who grew up in America and has traveled internationally quite a bit is that nowhere else on earth are the middle classes so convinced that one day they will be "millionaires" than here. This causes them to act against their own best interests. (This was observed by Engels long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness )
That doesn't follow. You can act completely selfishly by not voting for unsustainable policies that appear to benefit you in the near term but would harm you in the long term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't completely wrong. 76% of Americans spend a year of their life in the top 20%, 56% in the top 10%. https://www.aei.org/publication/evidence-shows-significant-i...
The top 10% for individuals is 114k[0] and for a household is 178k[1]. They may eventually get to millionaire status, but there's still a long way to go. Basically, getting to 100+k at the end of a long career and plenty of saving & investing (which Americans are not great at [2]) may get you there, but I don't think those stats you provided really bear out the case. [0] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator…