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It depends how the income equality comes about. If wages of the rich are increasing but wages of the poor are staying steady or falling (I don't have numbers bu

It depends how the income equality comes about. If wages of the rich are increasing but wages of the poor are staying steady or falling (I don't have numbers but that seems more likely to me given the recession/unemployment etc.) life becomes more and more unaffordable for the poor.

gozur88 11y ago
Why would life become more unaffordable for the poor even though their wages are steady (which is the case)? Immigrants and their children now make up more than 25% of the US population. How many poor people can you expect an economy to absorb before wages drop on the low end?
- uxp 11y ago
  If wages remain steady, then they aren't being adjusted for inflation, and then life starts to become more and more unaffordable. Immigrants have about as much correlation with poor people as a cloudy sky has with flooding.
  - gozur88 11y ago
    We're talking constant dollars. If you want to talk unadjusted we're all in fat city. You're wrong about the immigrant thing. If you add a third again as many poor people to your population your statistics are gonna show a lot of poor people.
    - atomi 11y ago
      The way I look at it is if you were to walk into a store or restaurant and all you see are immigrants, and you were to somehow get rid of them they wouldn't magically be replaced by citizens. The store or restaurant just wouldn't exist or it would just be mostly empty. I don't think we should be trying to make far fetched correlations between suicide rates and immigration...
      - gozur88 11y ago
        You're missing the point. Let's say you have a country with a million middle class people (only). Over a ten year period a million poor people with a sixth grade education and no ability to speak the language immigrate to your country (legally, illegally, doesn't matter). If you look at the poverty statistics, you've had an enormous increase in poverty and your average wage is much lower. But that's just... math. Also, those people will push down wages on the lower end. Wages are a function of supply and demand. When you add a whole bunch of people to the supply without increasing demand, the clearing price will be lower just like the price of cars would drop if you doubled production and dumped them on the market. If you're a native born person you're not going to get a raise for a long, long time. If you really believe suicides are in part driven by income inequality, you can't pretend immigration isn't part of the problem.
        atomi 11y ago
        So instead of a wall that will cost billions to build and billions more to maintain, we use that money to invest in education, decrease taxes and raise the minimum wage.

gozur88 11y ago

Why would life become more unaffordable for the poor even though their wages are steady (which is the case)? Immigrants and their children now make up more than 25% of the US population. How many poor people can you expect an economy to absorb before wages drop on the low end?

uxp 11y ago
If wages remain steady, then they aren't being adjusted for inflation, and then life starts to become more and more unaffordable. Immigrants have about as much correlation with poor people as a cloudy sky has with flooding.
- gozur88 11y ago
  We're talking constant dollars. If you want to talk unadjusted we're all in fat city. You're wrong about the immigrant thing. If you add a third again as many poor people to your population your statistics are gonna show a lot of poor people.
  - atomi 11y ago
    The way I look at it is if you were to walk into a store or restaurant and all you see are immigrants, and you were to somehow get rid of them they wouldn't magically be replaced by citizens. The store or restaurant just wouldn't exist or it would just be mostly empty. I don't think we should be trying to make far fetched correlations between suicide rates and immigration...
    - gozur88 11y ago
      You're missing the point. Let's say you have a country with a million middle class people (only). Over a ten year period a million poor people with a sixth grade education and no ability to speak the language immigrate to your country (legally, illegally, doesn't matter). If you look at the poverty statistics, you've had an enormous increase in poverty and your average wage is much lower. But that's just... math. Also, those people will push down wages on the lower end. Wages are a function of supply and demand. When you add a whole bunch of people to the supply without increasing demand, the clearing price will be lower just like the price of cars would drop if you doubled production and dumped them on the market. If you're a native born person you're not going to get a raise for a long, long time. If you really believe suicides are in part driven by income inequality, you can't pretend immigration isn't part of the problem.
      - atomi 11y ago
        So instead of a wall that will cost billions to build and billions more to maintain, we use that money to invest in education, decrease taxes and raise the minimum wage.