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Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

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Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#251

Post by kasey_junk »

hansvm wrote: post #185
kasey_junk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kroger, the largest grocery in America and one that routinely sets of anti-monopoly interdictions have a profit margin of 1.76%. What profit margin line would you suggest counts as price gouging?

Doesn't that also count the investment losses they made last year, the cost of gobbling up other companies, the interest from the debt they acquired with previous expansionary practices, etc?

Sure, but you can run the numbers for basically every grocery in America. The industry considers 3% margins to be outstanding.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#252

Post by comrade1234 »

testing22321 wrote: post #224

Health care costs are only a concern in the one developed country where it’s not universal and paid for by taxes (or completely free if you don’t work or don’t work much) One of the reasons the US is in the mess it is comes from its inability to recognize many of its problems not only can be solved, but already have been in two dozen countries. Making out like everyone puts up with the same dysfunction leads to peopl…

We have an insurance system similar to Obamacare here in Switzerland but not the same problems as the USA. (Healthcare is expensive here but everything is expensive here so it's difficult to make the comparison)

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#254

Post by Herring »

techdmn wrote: post #234
Herring wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but I suggest that's only part of the story. For some reason, workers in the west don't organize/vote by class any more. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/why-americans-dont-v... In the US, the last time democrats tried to tackle healthcare, they lost scores of seats all down the ballot. https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ... I remember tracking Trump's poll numbers on 538 (befo…

Can't speak for anyone but myself of course, but I was pretty disappointed with the way Democrats under Obama tackled healthcare. One of the big differences between Obama and Clinton in the primaries was that Clinton was in favor of an individual mandate, and Obama was not. We still ended up with an individual mandate, which is both offensive on grounds that the government is forcing you to find and pay for insurance…

Whatever is worth doing is worth doing badly. Obamacare wasn't perfect, but it had tons of positive effects and could later be improved. Republicans seem to be the only ones with a 50-year plan and the discipline to see it through.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/americans-vi...

> 41% of Americans say the government should provide more assistance to people in need

> 30% say it's providing about the right amount

> 27% say it should provide *less*

41-57? If there are issues in America, it's because Americans want it that way.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#255

Post by gruez »

Epa095 wrote: post #236
gruez wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And it really is as simple as that. It really isn't, because your "simple" comparison is bunk. For one, it's measuring stock vs flow. Stock prices measure stock, eg. the size of a piggy bank. Salaries measure flow, eg. your annual salary. Directly comparing the two results is meaningless. It's easy to demonstrate this with the piggy bank example. If your salary was 50k/year, you saved 5k/year, then your piggy bank w…

Feel free to look at dividend yields, but I can pretty much guarantee that it has not halfed in the period the stock market doubled. Most likely it stayed relatively flat, somewhere between 1.5% and 2%. So if you had 100 million you would get 1.7 million as dividend 5-7 years ago, now it's roughly doubled, without selling any of your stocks. Not that it really matters. Given how much faster the stock market grows com…

>Feel free to look at dividend yields, but I can pretty much guarantee that it has not halfed in the period the stock market doubled. Most likely it stayed relatively flat, somewhere between 1.5% and 2%.

Eyeballing this chart it looks like it dropped around a third since the pandemic.

https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/spx-div-yld....

https://ycharts.com/indicators/sp_500_dividend_yield

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#256

Post by 93po »

bluedino wrote: post #174
siliconc0w wrote: post #34

Our health system is so amazingly bad. Even if you have insurance, you roll the dice getting even basic care. Very easy to end up with hundreds or thousands of dollars in bills if your provider codes something wrong or your insurance denies payment. Much less an actual medical issue that requires repeated trips to a specialist, an expensive medication (even generic), or hospitalizations.

On the other hand you can get things like million-dollar organ transplants.

yes it's nice of our overlords to not let us literally die in certain circumstances, even though organ transplants are sometimes denied by insurance for really fucked up, evil reasons

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#257

Post by yoyohello13 »

Aurornis wrote: post #141
phyzix5761 wrote: post #76

I did some math a while ago on this topic: 40 million Americans live below the poverty line of $15,000 per year. [1] Total U.S. household net worth (excluding real estate) is around $54 trillion. [2] If every household above the poverty line donated 2.5% of their net worth annually to people living below the poverty line, we could erase poverty instantly. Here’s the math: 2.5% of $54 trillion = $1.35 trillion $1.35 t…

If you put a 2.5% annual tax on net worth, that net worth would very rapidly find its way to other countries. Wealthy people would learn to structure their earnings to flow into businesses in other countries to avoid this wealth tax. This would reduce income tax in the United States. I would guess the overall effect would trend toward a net tax loss. If you gave 40 million people an extra $15K per year to spend, the…

The end result of this logic is that poverty must exist for society to function and I just don’t accept that.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#258

Post by kasey_junk »

ac29 wrote: post #189
kasey_junk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kroger, the largest grocery in America and one that routinely sets of anti-monopoly interdictions have a profit margin of 1.76%. What profit margin line would you suggest counts as price gouging?

Just to clarify, that is their net margin. Their gross margin was slightly above 30% last quarter.

Grocery stores have lots of operations costs. Real estate, employees (Kroger employs ~400k people), cold chains, logistics, etc.

Feel free to set the bar for price gouging via gross margin, but then you are just suggesting that you don’t want operational efficiency in grocery store price comparisons.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#259

Post by tekla »

tayo42 wrote: post #100
aeblyve wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to learn more about the unit economics of groceries. How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation? [0] If the latter was functioning well in a competitive market, I would expect their play to be on lower margins but higher volume. [0] Mostly I'm referring to offal TBF, which I think most firms are happy to make any money on at all.

The thing I don't get is farmers markets being more expensive.

Farmers markets are incredibly shitty inefficient ways of getting food from farm to consumer. Also the people who shop at them tend to be much much richer.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#260

Post by an0malous »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #192
garciasn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look at the name of each of the primary groups in the US: - Progressives - Moderates - Conservatives Progressives, by definition, want 'progress'. Conversely, Conservatives do NOT want progress; if anything, they want regression and thus their desire to roll everything back done in the name of Progress(ives). Moderates just want to play both sides and find some sort of middle ground; something that doesn't reall…

This is not the right framing. The left vs right battle was invented so people wouldn't think about the up vs down battle. It's wealthy people vs everyone else but the wealthy people convinced everyone else that it's red vs blue.

This is absolutely correct, just observe how both parties attack Zohran Mamdani in spite of his wild popularity
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