Vote for candidates who will make healthcare a right and college affordable. While young people are bleeding out financially, rich people are getting a tax cut and they're running up the debt on the younger generation.
This is nitpicking a bit, but college is affordable, it's just very expensive. A side effect of the government guaranteeing student loans is that universities could charge basically whatever they want, knowing that students would still be able to pay it. It funded massive expansions, but instead of universities taking on the debt, students did.
> A side effect of the government guaranteeing student loans is that universities could charge basically whatever they want,
This is only true of private for-profit universities, not private nonprofit universities nor public universities. For public universities, the main cause of rising tuition is state funding cuts:
Your primary complaint could have all the wind taken out of its sails if we just magically took all the money away from wealthy people and burned it. Because wealth inequality would go down. It wouldn't actually help anyone, but wealth inequality would go down. Affordable housing is a problem best addressed by the people who live in the areas that have a lack of affordable housing. It's not something that needs addre…
It might help, actually. Your assumption is that what the rich do with their mmonet doesn't actually hurt the poor; but it can. Itcab be used to purchase narratives and political influence in ways deeply harmful
My grandparents also lived through the depression. And how did they cope with it? Joined a labor union, joined the socialist party. Maybe not such a bad idea?
As a counter-anecdote, my grandmother is still alive: she was born in 1918. She just voted for Trump, to give you an idea of where she stands politically. She coped with it by scrimping and saving every penny. She literally washes saran wrap to reuse it, despite having enough pension these days to get by. She saves grocery-store bags. She eats every crumb on her plate. She never wastes leftovers, ever. She went to co…
> He traded to get a 5-cent raise.
A five cent raise in today's currency or back then? Per hour or week?
Assuming it's hourly, if it's from "then" could you convert it to modern currency, or present it as an percentage increase so we can understand what kind of relative increase that was?
Five cents sounds like nothing today, but 70 years ago it would have been significant.
Your primary complaint could have all the wind taken out of its sails if we just magically took all the money away from wealthy people and burned it. Because wealth inequality would go down. It wouldn't actually help anyone, but wealth inequality would go down. Affordable housing is a problem best addressed by the people who live in the areas that have a lack of affordable housing. It's not something that needs addre…
It might help, actually. Your assumption is that what the rich do with their mmonet doesn't actually hurt the poor; but it can. Itcab be used to purchase narratives and political influence in ways deeply harmful
You're still focusing your attention on supposed bad behavior of the rich rather than the wellbeing of the poor.
If you think the poor need something, like say more funding for inner city schools, then say that and suggest a reasonable tax, perhaps a tax on luxury goods that would disproportionately affect the wealthy. Or if there's a specific bad behavior, such as pharmaceutical advertising, talk about that. But just complaining about wealth inequality sounds more like hating the rich than caring about the poor.
Except they also had less. This is the ... I'm not sure of the right word, paradox? duality? ... anyway, the problem/benefit of globalisation, that it leads to cheaper stuff. We all have more today, even on less money. Thought experiment: ask yourself when it was better to be poor: 1950, or 2018. In 1950 you could... go to the library? In 2018, even the very poor likely have a mobile phone, the internet, a games cons…
The plummeting costs of technology over time make it a poor barometer for measuring wealth. Instead of mobile phones and TVs, look at bigger items like health care, housing, and education, all of which have gotten more expensive (in the case of education, astoundingly so) even as inflation-adjusted wages have decreased.
There's a simpler test here. If you weren't sure what color your skin would be, what income bracket you'd be born into, what level of health you'd have at birth, or even what country you'd be born in, would you rather be born in 2018 or 1950?
Yes it is because that 13.3% is on top of your federal taxes (which don't change). A Californian making $150k is making $20,000 less than a Texan making $150k. That's sizeable! And Californians pay more in property taxes!
The 13.3% bracket starts at around a million dollars a year. Where do you get $20,000 from? A single person with no dependents with that income would pay about $11,000 in state income tax and $37,000 in federal income tax.
150*0.133.
That's still $11k coming out of your pocket for the privilege of living in California.
American salaries are difficult to make sense of from a European perspective. The referenced average salary of $36,000/year for millennials with only a high-school diploma would be a normal entry-level salary for a software engineer in most of Western Europe, and a very good salary for experienced engineers in Eastern Europe. Tax burden is higher here as well, and while the cost of housing is exorbitant many parts of…
City-based salary adjustments are really something only educated professionals get, low-wage earners are screwed in big cities. I think also it will shock you how much every day items are compared to Europe. For one, public transportation is not available to most of America. So you have to have a car and car insurance, thats hundreds of dollars more per month right there. Cellphone service costs 3x as much as anywher…
Agreed. For context, in the Netherlands you pay about $100 in monthly healthcare insurance. You pay about $160 a month for college tuition. You don't need a car, and transport to work (by public transport, car or indeed bicycle) is generally paid for by your company. Student loans are available at 0% at the moment. There's housing and healthcare subsidies for lower-incomes. (I'm not sure about housing though. There's a few crazy cities in the US, NY, SF, LA etc. But by and large, the median American pays a substantially lower square footage price than citizens of somewhat similarly rich European countries like the UK, Netherlands, France, Germany, as far as I'm aware. And we also have our outliers in London, Paris etc where the price-income ratio is off the charts. The US has far more land and is far less dense than Western-Europe, with land prices as a function of density (demand for land) I'd say Europeans have less real purchasing power on housing.
The 13.3% bracket starts at around a million dollars a year. Where do you get $20,000 from? A single person with no dependents with that income would pay about $11,000 in state income tax and $37,000 in federal income tax.
150*0.133. That's still $11k coming out of your pocket for the privilege of living in California.
And that’s still $37,000 making a huge difference between your net and gross income.
I don’t dispute that state taxation makes a difference. I dispute that it makes such a huge difference.
What resources or "connections" do you need? Thinking you need all these things before you can start is the biggest obstacle to actually starting.
Realistically, you need a couple thousand dollars at an absolute barest minimum to open a company and strike out on your own. Incorporation paperwork and filings, even for an LLC in an inexpensive state will be a few hundred, with an Inc generally more. Annual filing fees run $800 minimum in my state; that's if you do all the calculations and paperwork yourself. Then, you need adequate capitalization for the company…
A factor for courts to consider: Significant undercapitalization of the business entity (capitalization requirements vary based on industry, location, and specific company circumstances)
I started saving at about 6. My dad did the numbers to show me how much I could have by retirement. After inheriting a little from my grandparents and saving that too, and after saving as much of my income as possible, it paid off (literally).