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30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

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Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#51

Post by blindriver »

jmclnx wrote: post #7

To the billionairs via income inequality. When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail. I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question. We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then

When I went to university, my minimum wage summer job could pay for tuition and dorm fees for the entire year. The price is up over 20x since then, and in some colleges it's even higher. It's because of the predatory student loans allowed universities to charge whatever prices they wanted and they knew that students would get the loans to pay for them. It's sickening.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#52

Post by Retric »

accrual wrote: post #29
Retric wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US didn’t have many large prosperous cities in the west or most of the south until very recently. Railroads and AC really changed where people lived in America. https://1940census.com/Img/1940_census_map_usa.jpg vs zoom in a little here: https://maps.geo.census.gov/ddmv/map.html LA and New Orleans should have made the list, after that it’s more questionable.

What is "very recently"? Atlanta for example is a central rail hub and was founded 188 years ago as Terminus.

I was going back to 1940 as recent history, back in say 1840 the largest southern city was New Orleans followed by Charleston, SC at 29k people and Louisville, KY at 21k.

To wonder where the wealth went you need to look at places that where at some point wealthy. Wealth however takes time to accumulate because waves of immigrants or kids from population booms don’t tend to have a lot of wealth.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#53

Post by ModernMech »

delichon wrote: post #16
jmclnx wrote: post #7

To the billionairs via income inequality. When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail. I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question. We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then

I'm sending IP packets to you from a computer I bought from one billionaire, built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire. These people made billions by capturing a fraction of the value they created. The market is not a zero sum game.

> built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire

Billionaires did not build any operating systems or computers or launch any satellites or write any web pages you are using. Workers built those things while billionaires watched.

Linux is a testament to how much we don't need billionaires to organize ourselves to create these things.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#54

Post by geff82 »

SimianSci wrote: post #15

"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula." In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enc…

This is exactly what I felt the last two times I was in the US.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#55

Post by SimianSci »

ef2k wrote: post #39

At least Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller had a rivalry to see who had better public works.

This goes to where our wealthiest people no longer invest in our society. We used to use a progressive tax system as the means of helping this process along, but I dont think anyone can argue that this has since been subverted.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#56

Post by qaq »

esrauch wrote: post #43
qaq wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again to do what? at scale there are many physical constraints. You can't take physical resources used to create a 500M yacht and build 100 apartment buildings. Those crazy valuations exist in part because none really tries to convert any significant portion of that paper wealth into physical things.

I'm not sure if I'm following this example. A 500M Yacht concretely uses a large amount of materials/engineers/building expertise, right? It's not the exact same skills as building apartments but it is concrete "atoms" in terms of materials, engineering, sweat labor, fuel. Those resources could be used on apartments. It's not like there's a fixed number of naturally occurring megayachts around and the $500m price is…

Yep but if you take all that paper wealth and distribute it you aint getting much physical shit out of it. The yacht example is relevant for ratio of how even physically manifested rich people toys convert to real world things people care about. 250M NYC apartment only consumed physical resources enough to build 15 regular size homes and so on.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#57

Post by yoyohello13 »

delichon wrote: post #16
jmclnx wrote: post #7

To the billionairs via income inequality. When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail. I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question. We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then

I'm sending IP packets to you from a computer I bought from one billionaire, built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire. These people made billions by capturing a fraction of the value they created. The market is not a zero sum game.

This weird 'hero narrative' that the CEO class build all the things needs to die. Those billionaires would be nothing without standing on the shoulders of the workers.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#58

Post by aidenn0 »

chasd00 wrote: post #8

This US is a big place, I don’t think it’s accurate to start an article with “traveling accross America” when you only drove around the DC area, one part of Maryland, NYC, and small part of South FL.

It also seems to focus on those with student loans and degrees they'll never use, when we've never had much more than half of HS graduates enroll in a 4-year college the following year and over 60% of the population over 25 lack any college degree.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#59

Post by SimianSci »

blindriver wrote: post #44

You can summarize it like this: People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x. People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except th…

The last time this happened in America it gave rise to Progressivism. Mandani is the first in a long line of corrective actions that American society needs to make in order to correct itself and not deteriorate into neo-feudalism.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#60

Post by BobbyTables2 »

samdoesnothing wrote: post #9

It's inflation. The hidden tax that's perpetually underreported by governments and acts as a massive transfer of wealth to the property class.

I wonder if it’s even a transfer of wealth or just all an illusion.

It’s easier to downplay inflation so people think they’re doing better.

In 12 years, my salary is up about 50%, most of the change since Covid. Sure, sounds amazing… However, home prices doubled. Consequently auto, home, and flood insurance has at least doubled. Prices on even raw food has gotten crazy, restaurants are also 50-100% increase in prices. Health insurance is about 4x what it used to be for me. Tax bracket is higher.

So aside from the huge luck of low interest loan at a smaller principal, it doesn’t feel like anything amazing has happened.

On the flip side, I feel the plight of those looking at a 30yr loan at 5-6% on $500k. I can’t stomach it today and certainly not 12 years ago either.

By normal inflation rates, feels like I’ve seen maybe a 15% “raise” for over a decade extra of specialized experience —- before considering increased costs. Of course that was from changing jobs twice…

And quite frankly, property ownership is somewhat a poor investment, just better than renting. The S&P 500 has nearly tripled over the same time period. Of course, taking a 15 or 30 year loan for stock market investment would be insane (aside from impossible).

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