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40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

money.cnn.com

251–260 of 309 posts

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently below that threshold. But I could choose to expand my business, maybe hire a few people and create some jobs and productive economic output. But if you are going to tax me heavily for that then no, I'll probably just stick to what I am doing and not bother.

> But if you are going to tax me heavily for that then no, I'll probably just stick to what I am doing and not bother. That’s fine. Since we have a free market economy, someone else who wants that money more than you will do it instead.

Free market economy does not mean everyone has the same money, connections, skills, and ability to produce the economic output.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#252

I do not believe this. Even when I was flat broke starving I could always scrape up 400 somewhere and that was decades ago. Credit cards, friends and family, pawn shops. There's a way. This is a VERY misleading headline.

So basically, things were different for you decades ago, therefore the article headline is misleading?

You may want to rethink that.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "According to statistical data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the top 1% had an adjusted gross income of $465,626 or higher for the 2014 tax year." "Doctors, lawyers, and IT people making low six figures" have absolutely nothing to fear. And for the extremely few fortunate people who actually make more than half a million dollars each year, they will easily be able to afford the new taxes.

You should really read https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0... -- whether you agree with the author's politics or not her numbers are in fact right. There's no way to pay for the sort of expansive welfare state some people want solely by additional taxes on "the top 1%". There just isn't enough money there, it turns out.

Megan McArdle is a hardened libertarian sophist that blames poor people that die in fires for their own victimhood.

https://theoutline.com/post/2303/megan-mcardle-has-a-lot-of-...

However, to answer some of these points:

1) With respect to healthcare, investopedia has different numbers than the ones she cites: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08061...

Some of the savings we posit from healthcare can be used to pay for other programs.

2) Eliminate Imperialism - Save > $1T dollars by not fighting wars based on lies. The Pentagon's budget was recently raised by about the amount a version of free college education would cost.

3) Tax the (Natural Person) Rich - Take their giant chunk of change and use it to buy more stuff, like infrastructure

4) Eliminate the Rentier Class - Housing is suddenly cheap and ordinary people have much more pocket change. Who will be incentivized to build housing then? Well, your representatives of course.

5) Tax the Tax Evaders - Apple, Google, and all the rest that use tricks to hide billions overseas (or have it parked here after the tax bill).

There's lots of money to find, just look under the couch.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#254
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should but you know personal responsibility and all that jazz. The wealthy only care when the pitchforks come out. The biggest achievement of the wealthy has been to convince the middle class to eat itself.

>The wealthy only care when the pitchforks come out. I can't find the link right now, but there was a TedX talk by a multi-millionaire arguing that he wants to be taxed more. And it's a growing trend, a lot of very wealthy people are starting to plead for higher taxes. The reasoning being if wealth inequality continues to widen, eventually it won't be a case of shaking the rich to empty their pockets a bit, it will b…

>The wealthy only care when the pitchforks come out. I can't find the link right now, but there was a TedX talk by a multi-millionaire arguing that he wants to be taxed more.

This? https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you're going to do with that is to piss off the upper middle class, not the people who actually got fat on the backs of the poor and who are so far ahead of the situation that you're never getting that money back. It's gone. The only equalizer left is massive inflation, which may happen for other reasons.

Inflation doesn't make much difference to inequality, because the wealth of the rich is primarily assets not cash.

This is so true.

If anything inflation only makes matters worse for people who weren't careful enough to save and invest in assets(like land) early on in their life.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#256
post #82
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is incredibly rich country. Every second teenager is carrying iPhone worth more than yearly income in a large portion of the world. It is all thanks to capitalism. Problem is that most US population is not educated/smart and easy to manipulate into crazy consumption. UBI will not fix it, it will make it worse. Even putting more money into education is not really a clear solution. You need to understand that mi…

Every second teenager is carrying iPhone - are you sure? [Citation needed] Problem is that most US population is not educated/smart and easy to manipulate into crazy consumption - conspicuous consumption: a fault that can be levied far wider than just the US. The US has a well documented and understood education system and their unis are respected across the world. You need to understand that middle class is gone. -…

> Every second teenager is carrying iPhone - are you sure? [Citation needed]

There is 70 millions of iPhone sold in last 4 years in US. If you include other high-end phones it makes teenager/adults to carry half the year of work in Pakistan and year of work in Madagascar.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/242269/apple-iphone-in-t...

> The US has a well documented and understood education system and their unis are respected across the world.

It is highly specialized and makes most US educated people clueless outside their niche.

> Are you saying that the 2-5% are subsidising the other 95-98%?

Yes. Most non-technology work is now cost centre.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#257

Wow, everything in this thread is "those evil rich people, fleecing the poor." Quite aside from the fact that the target audience of this site can expect to make around 2X the median income of the US--meaning that we are those evil rich people--surely the problem isn't this one-sided. The poverty rate in the US is about 13% [1]; we would expect those people to not have any savings. That leaves about 33% unaccounted f…

>Quite aside from the fact that the target audience of this site can expect to make around 2X the median income of the US--meaning that we are those evil rich people--surely the problem isn't this one-sided. Not debating this fact, however cost of living makes a huge difference. 2x the median income doesn't mean much if everyone lives in big cities where the cost of living is 2x the median also. I feel like this is a…

I agree with you about cost of living. But my point was, that someone living on what I would consider to be an untenable income for London is actually able to save up for a down-payment on a house--in London! Sure, I understand the desire to have a "break from misery," but my point is that the conclusion she came to was that her lack of savings was entirely her decision. If someone living in ex-council houses (as an American, those words don't mean anything to me, so thanks for your description) has the financial ability to save up for a down payment, I think a lot of people in the U.S. do, too. Sure, it takes some self-sacrifice and discipline. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just saying that I don't think we should be blaming the evil rich people for people's lack of savings without having a look at some personal responsibility.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, it appears that voters and politicians have zero interest in improving this situation, seeing as the current administration is making every effort to demoralize and defang the CFPB The current administration was elected with fewer votes than the leading opponent, so it certainly reflects a subset of voters and the politicians comprising the administration, but hardly is a basis for concluding that voters…

Although comforting, the having a majority of the votes is a misleading metric in some ways, the electoral college is skewed so that voters in states with lower population have more power so each vote is not equal. This effect carries over to the Senate where a similar outcome with lower population states having more power so one person's vote is more powerful depending upon their geographic location.

> Although comforting, the having a majority of the votes is a misleading metric in some ways

In some ways, perhaps, but not when the question is whether the actions of the person elected can, based on the election results, be taken as proof that the voters collectively have zero concern for an issue.

> the electoral college is skewed so that voters in states with lower population have more power so each vote is not equal.

True.

> This effect carries over to the Senate

No, it's a carryover from the Senate: electoral college representation is identical by state to Congressional representation in both houses combined.

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#259

Wow, everything in this thread is "those evil rich people, fleecing the poor." Quite aside from the fact that the target audience of this site can expect to make around 2X the median income of the US--meaning that we are those evil rich people--surely the problem isn't this one-sided. The poverty rate in the US is about 13% [1]; we would expect those people to not have any savings. That leaves about 33% unaccounted f…

I would push back on this bit about teenagers: > so they don't count as they aren't living on their own. I think it's a significant assumption to make that parents would be able/willing to cover a random $400 expense. The study did not specify a specific type of emergency expenditure, just that it was unexpected. I can fully imagine a scenario where parents would cover hospital visits for a bad case of the flu, but n…

This is kind of tangential, but I find it a sad commentary on our society when an abortion is considered a "fair unexpected expense" of a teenager. Abortion is 100% avoidable [1]. And regardless of your view on women's rights, etc. the fact is that a living human is killed in an abortion. "Don't have sex until you are okay with the possibility of getting pregnant" apparently isn't very popular, but the situation is entirely preventable. (I'm not trying to push an agenda here, just reacting.)

[1] Unless rape is involved, but that isn't the normal case. (Abortions because rape are 1%, according to http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/abreasons.ht.... Disclaimer: I scanned the link for figures, I didn't try to figure out if it is pro- or anti- abortion.)

Re: 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In discussion of capitalist economies, a rough definition (loosely following Marx) of the major classes is: haut bourgeoisie (capitalists): those who own capital and rent labor to apply to it. petit bourgeoisie (middle class): those who live by a combination of labor and capital, particularly those who apply their own labor (perhaps alongside a small amount of rented labor) to their own capital. proletariat (working…

Do I understand correctly that an Uber driver with a 30k capital investment in a car is part of the petite bourgeoise, and a surgeon working for a hospital who has put 400k toward education is part of the proletariat? Or do you count education as capital?

> Do I understand correctly that an Uber driver with a 30k capital investment in a car is part of the petite bourgeoise

In the simple, no debt financing case, that's the most obvious categorization, though much the same concerns that lead to questions about whether those drivers are rightly categorized as contractors might be raised as to whether they are genuinely self-employed independent business owners or rented labor being applied to Uber capital with a weird gatekeeping mechanism.

> and a surgeon working for a hospital who has put 400k toward education is part of the proletariat?

A lot to high income workers (surgeons often very much among them) are joint capital/labor earners of a kind that diverges from the independent small business owner model, because they gain substantial income, often deferred through reinvestment and often mainly in what are held largely as retirement funds, on capital to which their own labor is not applied, as well as selling labor to capital; for that reason they’d generally be seen as petit bourgeoisie, thought somewhat different from the main textbook example.

> Or do you count education as capital?

Traditionally, if it's not been made property that can be itself sold freely in capitalist economy, it's not capital in the analysis of economic class in a capitalist economy. (Looked at from within the system rather than from critics of capitalism, ask yourself: are the returns of education taxed like labor or like capital—that tells you how the capitalist system itself sees them.)

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