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The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most Nations
- rhapsodic 7y agoLet the record show that this post went to the top spot on HN in 5 minutes, before it got flagged into oblivion.
- williesleg 7y agoWell this is certainly hacker news!
- andy_ppp 7y agoI really enjoyed the post, could we not discuss if it’s factual before we down vote it to hell...
- mumblemumble 7y ago> as explained by President Obama’s former chief economist Lawrence Summers, “government assistance programs” provide people with “an incentive, and the means, not to work.” In the interest of pre-empting one obvious way to interpret that quote, this has a lot to do with the way that social welfare programs tend to be structured, and not necessarily a lot to do with laziness. To take one concrete anecdote, many years ago a bartender at a neighborhood bar I used to frequent had to quit because she got a promotion at her day job. She didn't want to. She was actually kind of pissed off about it. The problem was, the pay raise pushed her combined income just above the cutoff point for eligibility for the state's Medicaid program, but still got her nowhere near what it would have taken to get health care on the private market. So, in order to advance her career while also retaining access to health care, she had to quit her side gig.
- thehappypm 7y agoThis type of program is why a lot of folks are suspicious of socialist policies. The bartender in this case is somewhat abusing the system. Instead of working and paying for her own health care, she is choosing to not to work in order for other taxpayers to pay for her health care.
- ksdale 7y agoIf benefits aren't graduated, then you can have a hypothetical situation where you can earn $25,000, and receive $5,000 of benefits, or earn $25,001 and receive $0 of benefits. In this hypothetical situation, every dollar you earn between $25,000 and $30,000 is extra work you have to do that doesn't net you any additional dollars. There's a whole separate discussion to be had about what taxes should pay for, but I don't think it's abusing the system. I think there's no question the bartender would work full time at a job that paid enough to pay for all of the living expenses and the healthcare, but that's not one of her options. Her options, according to the anecdote, were to work X hours for X money, or to work X + Y hours for X money.
- qntty 7y agoWell designed programs don't have the feature that making more money means you get less.
- pitaj 7y agoThese programs have been designed this way for many decades. Given that track record, why would anyone trust politicians to implement single-payer healthcare or other "socialist" policies?
- Jare 7y agoYeah this is outrageous! I only trust them to design "capitalist" tax policies for large companies and billionaires.
- Joeri 7y agoWell, distrust in the political system has been that way in the U.S. for decades. Single payer systems have been implemented auccesfully in many countries, all it would take is to copy from any one of those countries wholesale. For example, with the current money going into medicare and medicaid it would be possible to fund a universal healthcare system that was a copy of canada’s. They’re nice people, I’m sure they’d be willing to help set it up.
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- pitaj 7y agoDon't forget public housing programs that concentrate poverty and crime ("The Projects"). It's as if assistance programs were designed to maintain a permanent underclass of dependents.
- alfromspace 7y agoOn the other hand, nobody wants public housing projects being set up in their nice neighborhoods...often for good reason. The once-safe neighborhood where I grew up once had a grocery store - the lot was bought out by neighborhood housing, a low-income development was planned, locals complained, locals were called racists and NIMBYs, development was built anyway - and now there's no grocery store, no parking, shootings and burglaries are regular occurrences, and kids don't play outside. The problem isn't solved by spreading poverty and dysfunction around rather than concentrating it - it just makes it everyone's (read: your) problem.
- phil248 7y agoTo be fair, many states stopped building this kind of housing in the 90's. For a few decades now, any affordable housing built in NY or CA or dozens of other states is almost always mixed-income.
- JAlexoid 7y agoIt doesn't help. The 80/20 rule for affordable housing in NY(or is it NYC) has screwed up the market... Middle class gets to pay for it, while some places are now getting "poor entrances".
- phil248 7y agoThat's one stupendously negative way to look at it. Obviously it varies project to project. In California, where I've worked up close with many old and new projects, the new ones are almost always far better off than the old-school projects in terms of safety, cleanliness, community activity, etc. And they provide a lot of market-rate and middle-income housing in addition to low-income and senior housing.
- alfromspace 7y agoSimilar thing happened to a good friend of mine. I don't recall the exact numbers, but she got a raise from something like $11.50 to $13/hr. Suddenly no longer qualified for the pretty nice state Medicaid plan, and had to pick up some godawful high deductible, high premium plan that covers virtually nothing from the Obamacare marketplace. She pays at least $150/month for it in premiums, is nowhere near the deductible, and so far it's refused to cover an MRI two doctors have ordered for her. Plus she lost dental and vision coverage - just had to pay $300 out of pocket for a cleaning and x-rays. Something's very wrong when making more money makes you poorer and less healthy.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Something's very wrong when making more money makes you poorer and less healthy. Yes, what's wrong is cut-off thresholds (or just phaseouts that, when totalled across programs, exceed $1 lost benefits for each $1 of additional income.) It's one of the things motivating UBI, since then all the phaseout happens in one place, by way of progressive marginal tax rates.
- sieabahlpark 7y agoWhy not tackle the origin of the issue instead of subsidizing it? That just gives more money to the people who are now able to charge more. It's the same argument to raise minimum wage that'll apply to increasing UBI. I don't see it being the correct avenue to have long-standing progress.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Why not tackle the origin of the issue instead of subsidizing it? UBI is addressing the root of the issue I pointed to, with healthcare specifically, though, for the same avoiding thresholding reason that UBI serves for aid generally, public baseline healthcare should be universal and not income qualified.
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- yters 7y agoWeird, this post pops onto the top of HN, and then disappears completely from the front page.
- vasilipupkin 7y agoPossibly on a dollar consumption basis, but you know what they don’t have in Europe ? This https://www.google.com/amp/s/wreg.com/2019/04/07/4-adults-2-kids-shot-and-wounded-at-chicago-baby-shower/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/wreg.com/2019/04/07/4-adults-2-...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tanilama 7y agoEven considering healthcare?
- refurb 7y agoYes, because the US has relatively generous social programs that cover healthcare for the poorest.
- allworknoplay 7y agoCan someone check me on this? It seems that by equating spending/consumption with wealth, the things that cost us more (healthcare, transport, telecoms, etc) than other nations are being counted as wealth when really they're just overpriced and the profit (generally) goes into someone else's pocket? At a very basic level, if my quality of life is shitty because I have to work too much and I wind up buying dinner more because I can't afford the time to cook, that's counted as "wealth" in this calculation. I could be misinterpreting it, but I don't see how.
- JAlexoid 7y agoThat's how you get increased GDP - force people to get services, that they should not need to get.(think tax services in US for individuals) If you forced everyone to pay for each Thank you and Please, your GDP would skyrocket!
- thatfrenchguy 7y agoBut what food do they eat ? How much time off do they have ? What's their living conditions ?
- pitaj 7y agoIt's adjusted for cost of living.
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- badpun 7y agoWhat food they do eat is largely their own choice. I wouldn't be surprised for example, if the bottom 20% of the US would spend more money per capita on food (purchasing parity adjusted) that median Spanish family, and still manage to eat worse than them.
- arbuge 7y agoBe careful about jumping to conclusions before you read the full article. "The high consumption of America’s “poor” doesn’t mean they live better than average people in the nations they outpace, like Spain, Denmark, Japan, Greece, and New Zealand. This is because people’s quality of life also depends on their communities and personal choices, like the local politicians they elect, the violent crimes they commit, and the spending decisions they make."
- blunte 7y agoIn that case, the title is very misleading.
- kube-system 7y agoNot unless the reader assumes that money equates directly to quality of life. America doesn't really have a reputation for wise spending habits and relaxed working habits.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoThat throw-away about "the violent crimes they commit" is a particularly amusing tell. It's impossible to take the content on this site seriously. if you look at the Daily section you'll find the usual curriculum of stock right-wing interests and talking points - transparent climate change denial, attacks on the earnings of federal government workers, attacks on the EPA, stock anti-gun control talking points, stock anti-abortion talking points, and so on. It's absolutely disingenuous to pretend this is an objective fact-based site when in fact it's just another right-wing blog with a political angle to sell. For comparison here are official USDA figures and French ENFAM figures on food security. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/interactive-charts-and-highlights/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5876965/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5876965/
- Excel_Wizard 7y agoThis particular site is definitely strongly right-leaning. However, the vast majority of its claims are based in objective scientific studies and reporting. It's a pretty rare bird, don't see a lot of sites with its style.
- qntty 7y agoSeems misleading because it doesn't account for debt or differing costs of living [edit: doesn't account for it effectively].
- thehappypm 7y ago"Another important strength of this data is that it is adjusted for purchasing power to measure tangible realities like square feet of living area, foods, smartphones, etc. This removes the confounding effects of factors like inflation and exchange rates. Thus, an apple in one nation is counted the same as an apple in another."
- qntty 7y agoAverages like purchasing power don't tell the whole story for poor people. You have to ask how much of the basic necessities of life they can actually get for their money.
- cheriot 7y agoDoes it account for access to health care? How about the way we underfund schools in poor neighborhoods?
- kstenerud 7y agoThe problem is that this article is all over the place, and seems to be deliberately muddying the waters. For example: "The upshot is laid bare by the fact that this OECD measure assigns a higher poverty rate to the U.S. (17.8%) than to Mexico (16.6%). Yet, World Bank data shows that 35% of Mexico’s population lives on less than $5.50 per day, as compared to only 2% of people in the United States." The article is full of loaded words, which already makes me distrust it, and then I find these kinds of silly comparisons...
- JAlexoid 7y ago"Thus, an apple in one nation is counted the same as an apple in another." Em.... Nope. That's factually incorrect. PPP is a metric for overall currency value, not apples to apples comparison. If you wish to point out apples - the cheapest retail apples I can buy in NY is $3.21/kg, while retail price for apples in Germany is $1.94/kg. The apple PPP index is, anecdotally, 1.65. The formal PPP index for Germany is 1.08, as in $1 buys you 8% more in Germany... that is factually untrue at the lower end of the income.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoIt sounds like these people could be going into debt. The graph compares consumption, which does not imply the spending was the direct consequence of having some earned income.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoHow about necessary expenses? In the US a vehicle is a near-necessity, whereas other countries actually have functional public transport. Car ownership just entails higher expenses, with no improvement in quality of life.
- sjg007 7y agoWell car ownership can improve quality of life. You spend less time in bad weather.. you can live in a quieter area outside of town.
- ummonk 7y agoDoes discharging debt in bankruptcy count as earned income?
- NeutronStar 7y agoHas the debt already been taxed?
- sjg007 7y agoI think there can be tax implications. Maybe a judge can waive those though if they aren't by default.
- Synaesthesia 7y agoYeah but considering the wealth of the USA the bottom 20% should have the highest living standard in the world.
- gus_massa 7y ago> The OECD data is particularly flawed because it is based on “income,” which excludes [...] healthcare provided by Medicaid, free clinics, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Don't many of the other countries offer some kind of "free" medical service for everyone? Should they add this to the average income of those countries? Anecdote time. Here in Argentina we have: * Free hospitals and free ambulances for emergencies, and even some standard procedures. The quality and waiting time may vary. It's free for everyone. Should they count this as "income"? * Also we get a compulsory 5% discount of the salary for additional healthcare that is controlled by the working union, this includes dental care. The quality and waiting time may vary. I'm not sure if they would count this 5% as income. * Also you can pay a private medical plan or pay to a medic for a consultation. The quality and waiting time may vary, but it's usually faster and you have more options to pick a good medic hopefully.
- chrisco255 7y agoIn the U.S. we have Medicaid for low-income earners. So the bottom 20% the article mentions would largely qualify for free health care: https://eligibility.com/medicaid/texas-tx-medicaid-benefits https://eligibility.com/medicaid/texas-tx-medicaid-benefits
- erentz 7y agoHave you looked at Medicaid eligibility requirements? It is a common misunderstanding that if you’re poor you get Medicaid. Eg. In Florida no matter how poor your are you don’t qualify unless you’re disabled, have children, or are pregnant. In other states there are hard income limits which are incredibly low, and earns a dollar more, you don’t qualify. You go from having free Medicaid to needing to pay $1000 per month in premiums which obviously you still can’t afford. Edit: actually looks like it’s the same thing in Texas, if you’re poor you don’t qualify. You have to have kids or be disabled. These are all the states that refused the federal funding for Medicaid expansion I guess.
- _bxg1 7y agoInteresting; I wonder if the kids thing is why I always hear from conservatives that medicaid is all we need in this area. "It's your fault for not wanting to start a family like a normal American."
- _bxg1 7y agoThe "study" cited was done by the very website citing it, and designed expressly to refute a NYT article that the author didn't like. I'm not going to defend the NYT as a paragon of level-headed reporting, but when your only source is yourself, that's a red flag. When your website is literally named "Just Facts", as a preempted defense against the narrative-heavy articles it actually contains, that's a red flag. America's poverty situation and cultural challenges are extremely complex. Nobody chooses to be poor. Plenty of poor people - I'm sure not every single one of them - aren't able to change their situation despite plenty of hustle. Welfare alone isn't the solution. But making reductionist blog posts on the internet in an attempt to justify your own urge to write people off as morally bankrupt solely based on their finances isn't helping anyone at all.
- vannevar 7y agoThe source data linked in the article are a bit fishy. On page 36, you see where (I assume) the author derived his consumption data, though the source is by household and somewhere along the line he converted it to per-capita. In that source table, organized by quintile, the consumption for the highest quintile is about twice that of the lowest. But in the same document, on page 35, the income by quintile shows the top 20% earning 10x the income of the lowest 20% (including government benefits). So the wealthiest 20% earn ten times as much, but spend only twice as much? Where does the rest of the money go? It seems highly unlikely that both tables are accurate.
- sieabahlpark 7y agoTo savings...?
- vannevar 7y agoThat would be a lot of savings. :-) The actual savings rate is less than 10% (https://www.statista.com/statistics/246268/personal-savings-rate-in-the-united-states-by-month/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/246268/personal-savings-...).
- octopoc 7y ago
- chrisco255 7y agoIntuitively, this makes sense. Why would immigrants influx into the United States with no hope of improving their economic situation? From the NY Times article this article critiques: 'A prime example is their claim that “America is the richest country” in the OECD, “but we’re also the poorest, with a whopping 18% poverty rate—closer to Mexico than Western Europe.”' The scale of poverty in Mexico is much higher than in the U.S. And higher still in central America. This "3rd World U.S." narrative is often repeated, but as the author shows it has no basis in reality.
- refurb 7y agoPoverty is always relative. Until we change that definition, we’ll always have people in poverty no matter how much the poor’s Living situation improves.
- JAlexoid 7y agoI mean... Poverty is a well understood concept. If you're able to pay for basic needs* without experiencing hardship - you're not poor. * - Basic needs expand with progress. But things like food, shelter, clothes and education are pretty ingrained now.
- allworknoplay 7y agoThey're comparing to Europe. We don't have an influx of immigrants from Europe.
- grecy 7y ago> This "3rd World U.S." narrative is often repeated, but as the author shows it has no basis in reality. Right. The Reality is that the US is at the very bottom of developed (OECD) countries, and is often more comparable to developing countries than developed ones. >Why would immigrants influx into the United States with no hope of improving their economic situation? You are correct that people want to influx into the US from very poor undeveloped countries (3rd world). You'll find that hundreds of millions of people living in developed (OECD) countries have no interest in living in the US. If you want meaningful and useful comparisons, compare the US to developed (OECD) countries. There is nothing to be gained from comparing a major league team to a team of beginners.
- pbreit 7y agoIf you've spent much time at all in pretty much any European country you would know how much better the general quality of life is than in USA, even/especially amongst the poor. I'm not sure consumption is the best metric.
- goatlover 7y agoBut Europe doesn't represent most of the world's population or land area.
- gingabriska 7y agoIt's not my experience. Which countries specifically are you talking about? Countries in East Europe can have lower quality of life, mostly depends on your income.
- pbreit 7y agoWestern & Northern, for sure.
- allworknoplay 7y agoNo, it's a crazy metric. We consume vastly more healthcare, for example. Is that wealth? This article is insane, and the site has an extraordinarily clear (and manifest) right-wing bias.
- wil421 7y agoIf Europe has such a better quality of life than the US then why are the immigration stats so skewed in the US’s favor? About 3x as many Europeans immigrate to the US than the other way around.[1] These numbers only look at Western Europe, if you added the whole continent it would be a much larger gap. It would be 2 million more if you add Eastern Europe. [1]https://mises.org/wire/3-times-many-europeans-move-us-other-way-around https://mises.org/wire/3-times-many-europeans-move-us-other-...
- TheCoelacanth 7y ago1. Western Europeans mostly speak the language in the US, so they have an easy time living there, while most Americans only speak English so would have a harder time living in most of Europe. 2. The US is great for people in upper income brackets who can actually manage to migrate, not so much for the lower income people who can't.
- allworknoplay 7y agoWhat a ridiculous site. "In other words, we are conservative/libertarian in our personal views—but unlike many policy and media organizations—Just Facts is devoted to objectivity, and we do not favor facts that support our viewpoints. Instead, we will report any fact that meets our Standards of Credibility, regardless of the implications." Except that's never true. 1) If your views make you more inclined to report on / investigate along certain ideological lines, you'll wind up reporting vastly more "facts" that fit your views, even if you're only reporting "facts". 2) Other news media outlets will cherry-pick your facts, even if you don't. 3) Unconscious bias is a fucking thing, guys. This is not neutrality.
- ufo 7y agoTheir bias is patently obvious if you visit their page on abortion: https://www.justfacts.com/abortion.asp https://www.justfacts.com/abortion.asp The entire article is dedicated to repeating typical pro-life talking points. For example, a timeline of when the fetus' heart starts beating, "debunking" cherry-picked statements from Planned Parenthood, and testimonials from people born prematurely.
- allworknoplay 7y agoFor example, if anyone is curious, check their "facts" on energy: https://www.justfacts.com/energy.asp https://www.justfacts.com/energy.asp There's a giant section on the benefits of fracking, but the environmental impact section is limited to "generally" not being a problem. They use that word "generally" like 10 times, and they don't bother to report the facts that in many cases it has been a direct and obvious problem. That's not neutrality.
- daneel_w 7y agoIn the USA 20% is a span large enough to cover everyone from those who have roof over their heads and get by, to those who never know if today will be the day they get to eat something.
- rndmize 7y agoI have a tendency to spend some effort evaluate sources I'm unfamiliar with before I spend time reading their material in detail these days, largely to save time. As such, I glanced around the site and saw they had an article global warming and had a look. The material looks like it's focused on facts and well-cited, but this rapidly started to feel like a "Merchants of Doubt" kind of product. Feel free to look at the Global Temperature Changes section and make your own assessment - but this feels like politics before (distorted) facts to me, and I'd expect the rest of the site to be similar. https://www.justfacts.com/globalwarming.asp https://www.justfacts.com/globalwarming.asp
- bumby 7y agoThere's some weird circular referencing within this article. One example is the claim of tax rates disincentivizing work, which references another justfacts article. Following that article, it basically gives a weak "some economists believe" statement without much rigor, and further on even negates the referenced claim with "In general, findings indicate that the labor supply of so called “primary earners” tends to be less responsive to changes in marginal tax rates" I thought there were some relevant points on improving ways we measure poverty but consumption seems to be a less than ideal metric to me at face value because consumption can be propped up by bad debt. A consumption to debt ratio may be more appropriate.
- rgbrenner 7y ago"Just Facts" "Your source for reliable research" "A resource for independent thinkers" Starts off with a made up study that links to itself. Can't get published in any journal, and no peer review. Proclaims the article meets "academic standards"... spends half the article railing against the NY Times. That's something you see all the time in research papers -- rants against a newspaper. /s This site sets off my fake news alarm. If you want to write an article, write an article. Don't make up a fake research paper. If you're going to lie about this, what else are you lying about. You know who needs a fake research paper to lend their writing credibility? Fake news. I don't trust a single word on the page.
- matthewaveryusa 7y agoVery cleverly written, manipulator students take note [1]. The data in the article is compelling but it is definitely conservative/libertarian (which they are not hiding in the about us page.) [1] One example: The quoted "green energy". A pedestrian interpretation would read these quotes as a euphemism equivalent to air quotes, implying so-called green energy. Yet it's also plausibly deniable as the "caused by" link refers to "green energy", so perhaps the quotes are in reference to the link. Very clever indeed, à la Ben Shapiro.
- refurb 7y agoAny rebuttal of the actual data in the article rather than just calling out air quotes?
- matthewaveryusa 7y agoA rebuttal first needs an argument. Can you tell me where I make an argument on the veracity of the data? Of course you can't because I didn't. If it wasn't clear enough, I have no qualms with the data, but I found the form to be classic neo conservative/libertarian -- a bit like your off-kilter zinger.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoIt's extremely hard to compare apples to oranges like this. I'm an American former military wife and Americans have trouble figuring out how to compare the value of a military compensation package to a civilian one because the two are structured so differently. It's so bad, people in the military sometimes think that they would be better off leaving the military for a better paid job, but those who actually do that tend to report money is tighter and quality of life worse as a civilian. You don't get much cash pay in the military, but flashing your ID gets you access to a ton of stuff for "free" that all costs money if you leave the military system and try to access similar services. So that's within the same country with the same currency, same federal tax system, etc. Trying to compare across countries is far harder. Decades ago, I saw a study (now completely out of date) that asked questions like "how many meals per day do you get?" It found that less than 1/2% of Americans were poor by the expectations of India. Many materially poor nations have more stay-at-home moms, stronger social fabric and family ties and other things of value that enhance quality of life and are generally overlooked in studies of this sort. In some sense, I don't care how America compares to other countries. I just know we do a poor job of taking care of our people in certain metrics. We need to stop quibbling about whether or not it's worse than a third world country and focus on resolving some of these issues. We need to fix our busted housing supply system that cranks out oversized homes that are a mismatch for our current demographic and creates nothing but a thing I call "suburban hell." We need to fix our healthcare issues. We no doubt could stand to work on other things, but those two are so bad they are chronically in the headlines.
- JAlexoid 7y agoThe only actual fact is that the bottom 20% of American residents spend as much as some developed EU national averages. But then the whole swathe of conclusions are pure ignorance. If I were to compare my $20 purchasing power in rural Pennsylvania vs the the same $20 in London, I would get more in London. It's really not the same. There are a lot of services that compound to create a lot of cost for people, that don't exist in many other places. And then there's the failure to recognize the status of USD, that makes this comparison wholly irrelevant. Donald Trump starts a trade war and the result is 5% rise in value of USD against multiple currencies.
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