Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money • Hacker News Board

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#71

Post by ipince » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:01 AM UTC

jshen wrote: post #69

redwood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is that the bottom folks aren't as "needy" as folks were in, say, the great depression. - I.e. "no one starves in america" and most people know this: so while the distribution in wealth is extreme, the distribution in QUALITY OF LIFE is less extreme. - This biases people's view and makes them feel that generally, for most americans, things are okay. This is all true of course: except that the worry ab…

"the distribution in QUALITY OF LIFE is less extreme" You're kidding right? Ever have someone in your family get an unexpected major medical problem while their young and either have no insurance or have the insurance refuse to cover care? That is a quality of life killer! Or the simple fact that wages for the average person are stagnant or slightly down in the past few decades while healthcare costs are rising as we…

Well... on his/her defense, the quality of life might still suck for some people, as you aptly pointed out, but that doesn't contradict the original statement..

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#72

Post by vacri » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:07 AM UTC

tjansen wrote: post #38

michaelchisari wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A deli manager at a grocery store in the Chicago area in 1985 made $35k - $40k a year. Adjusted for inflation, that was the equivalent of around $72k - $81k a year. With full benefits. It's been clearly determined that wages have not kept up with inflation, so I would say that comparing one generation's wealth with their parents is not something that will yield hopeful results.

Did a manager at a grocery store have the same amount of responsibility as today? My guess would be that today being a deli manager just means that you need to follow your chain's rule books. In 1985, with more independent stores and smaller chains, a manager had more responsibilities, and thus her contributions were more directly related to the store's profit than today. Thus a good deli manager is worth less than s…

While we're pulling reasons out of the air, I think that the difference in wages betwen '85 and today is /clearly/ because of Saturn's wobble.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#73

Post by skorgu » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:09 AM UTC

michaelchisari wrote: post #36

ctdonath wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most lower-income americans make more than the world median income. Our "poverty line" is 20x the income line for half the planet. Of late in Atlanta, one news story about someone unable to pay to heat more than one room had a dramatic photo of her showing her heating bill in her living room - with a 55" HDTV and Xbox360 in the same room. Problem with that chart is scale: while 20% may have most of the money, the poo…

someone unable to pay to heat more than one room had a dramatic photo of her showing her heating bill in her living room - with a 55" HDTV and Xbox360 in the same room. There's a difference between the ability to purchase one-off consumer goods and the kind of situation this person is in. Consider that those consumer goods may have been purchased before an economically catastrophic event such as an illness or a layof…

My inner libertarian is unable to comprehend the confusion of ideas that allows the purchase of a 55" HDTV et cetera without ~six months of rent in the bank.

My inner liberal fires back with the complete, utter and deplorable lack of financial education and hence literacy in this country which is at the very least a partial cause of the most recent subprime financial kablooie.

My inner conspiracy theorist mutters something about that being awfully profitable for those able and willing to profit from said illiteracy.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#74

Post by vacri » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:13 AM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #15

gort wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that your neighbours are poorer than you thought they were.

They may have less net worth, but that doesn't mean they have income to the point that we could consider them "poor". I would really like to know what the median income is within each quintile of wealth distribution.

If you're the kind of person that frequents HN, I would have thought you'd have the google skills to find that out.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#75

Post by MichaelSalib » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:17 AM UTC

jonhendry wrote: post #57

cletus wrote: post #55

I find posts like this one depressing. They're cynical and shortsighted. The premise of such posts is that if people were aware of who was getting a tax cut they would be against it. Put another way: the premise is that everyone is purely motivated by self-interest. There are two immediate problems with this line of thinking. The first is tha it ignores how aspirational people are.i remember a survey from the 2000 el…

" The reality is just that they're taking less money. Bit of a difference." Can you afford to take a year off from work? It's just taking less money. The fact is that tax cuts aren't free. If they aren't matched by spending cuts, you're just deferring the tax increase until later and incurring deficits in the meantime. So you have to decide what you're going to cut. Which means weighing, say, decent healthcare for ve…

Indeed, your comment reminds me of that radical leftist Milton Friedman who once wrote "Remember, to spend is to tax." What a pity that so many have forgotten Friedman's words.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#76

Post by vacri » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:19 AM UTC

TGJ wrote: post #70

joshes wrote: post #60

No matter the intent or implications of the post or the poll, the fact remains that 20% of the people control 85% of the wealth . This seems horribly lopsided to me. Plutocracy seems to be an apt description.

How is it lopsided? If you look at 10 of your friends, is everyone one of them extremely well off? Is everyone of them extremely talented? There is no getting around the fact that there are gifted people and not so gifted people. To say that it is lopsided would almost imply that everyone deserves equal shares. 20% seems about right. 20% of the people are entrepreneurs and are smart, gifted, talented people that empl…

Ah, the good ol' "if you're poor it must be your fault" reasoning, wearing yet another dress today.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#77

Post by clarkm » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:26 AM UTC

gort wrote: post #14

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #13

Poor Americans are simply much, much, much needier than people realize. You're not needier just because your neighbors are richer than you thought they were.

I think the idea is that your neighbours are poorer than you thought they were.

Poorer relative to the other neighbors, not poorer in absolute terms.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#78

Post by cletus » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:27 AM UTC

jshen wrote: post #68

cletus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice try but no sale. This is the problem: talking about this issue will get you labeled as being anti- (health care for veterans in your case). The budget is blowing out for three reasons: Social Security, health care and the military. Of the three only the last is largely discretionary (being the ongoing cost for campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan). When FDR introduced Social Security there was something like 50 wor…

I'm kind of confused. The big three are our biggest expenses (which includes healthcare for veterans). So giving tax cuts to the super rich (or anyone really) without addressing the big three is the problem that the person you're replying to is pointing out. How is that a "no sale"? Cause he mentioned veterans?

http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/100223williams.pdf

> Growth in Budgets for Military Health Care

> The DoD's health care costs rose from about $20 billion in 1998 to $47 billion in 2010 (FY 2010 dollars)—an annual growth rate of 7.4 percent above inflation. Absent changes in policy, CBO projects they will at least double between now and 2028.

It's no sale because it's ~2% of the budget masked in emotion, which is at best an irrelevant distraction and at worst a deliberate attempt to demonize opposing views.

Limit the focus to just the (increasingly ill-named) "defense" budget and even then it's only around 10% and is dwarfed by the cost of discretionary operations within that budget/department.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#79

Post by natrius » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:34 AM UTC

javert wrote: post #42

redwood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is that the bottom folks aren't as "needy" as folks were in, say, the great depression. - I.e. "no one starves in america" and most people know this: so while the distribution in wealth is extreme, the distribution in QUALITY OF LIFE is less extreme. - This biases people's view and makes them feel that generally, for most americans, things are okay. This is all true of course: except that the worry ab…

it may be that, through the miracle of technology's abundance, we will continue on a track where we all have a high quality of life, but only a smaller and smaller pool of people "own" the production engines. I think the first part of what you said is right: we will continue on a track where we all have a high quality of life, absent a paradigm shift in which the economy crashes like in Weimar Germany. The second par…

We engineers live in an information economy. Many, if not most Americans do not (pardon my lack of statistics). They work in service jobs that will be trivially automatable in our lifetimes. Wealthy people will actually own the means of production in a very meaningful way, and those that aren't equipped by their genes, upbringing, or education to participate in the information economy will be unable to earn an income.

Secondly, despite the information economy, it is still very much about what you own. If you are capable of making something amazing, you still need savings or investors who will feed and house you while you make those things and pay the still significant costs of infrastructure that many products require.

Concentration of wealth matters. That doesn't necessarily mean that government intervention is a good idea.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#80

Post by natnat » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:37 AM UTC

cletus wrote: post #78

jshen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kind of confused. The big three are our biggest expenses (which includes healthcare for veterans). So giving tax cuts to the super rich (or anyone really) without addressing the big three is the problem that the person you're replying to is pointing out. How is that a "no sale"? Cause he mentioned veterans?

http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/100223williams.pdf > Growth in Budgets for Military Health Care > The DoD's health care costs rose from about $20 billion in 1998 to $47 billion in 2010 (FY 2010 dollars)—an annual growth rate of 7.4 percent above inflation. Absent changes in policy, CBO projects they will at least double between now and 2028. It's no sale because it's ~2% of the budget masked in emotion, which is at…

That last argument was about tax cuts, though, and not military health care spending. Even if we held military spending constant, it still would have been irresponsible to cut taxes because there was no corresponding spending cut that ensured those tax cuts were paid for.