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Averages lean upwards due to some people making millions. Federal taxes aren't the only taxes. State and other taxes are factored in. Rent may average at $110

Averages lean upwards due to some people making millions. Federal taxes aren't the only taxes. State and other taxes are factored in. Rent may average at $1100 in an ideal world, but near cities, $1100 is increasingly rare. Every time this is mentioned someone will chime in and say "yeah but I live in rural Nebraska and pay less than that." Which is fine. But then your employment options are slim, most jobs aren't paying $40k a month, not everyone is a tech contractor making 200k a year from their bedroom on a lakefront, not everyone wants to be or can be a tech contractor, and a lot of jobs performed by "normal" people (people on HN are generally highly paid and anything but typical) will involve long commute times unless they're living in the middle of town... in which case rent prices shoot up fast. The average person also needs to pay for health care in the US (even if their company provides insurance, they're fucked when they get sick because insurance covers very little for most people not in very expensive programs). They have car loans. They have college loans. They need to pay deposits just to move. 9-5s are being replaced with 9-6s and people have less free time. When you factor in all of that, the "average office worker" looks like a dream life to a lot of people. What people considered a boring hell of a life in 1965 is a fantasy unobtainable to an increasing number of "average" people. Comments claiming it's "easy" for "average" people here make me think some people live in a bubble detached from all reality.

piokoch 5y ago
This most interesting part for me is this "What people considered a boring hell of a life in 1965 is a fantasy unobtainable to an increasing number of >>average<< people". It would be good to analyze what happened between 1965 and 2022, what has changed that instead of progress we see some kind of downward spiral. Or maybe 1965s are idealized? Are there people looking on this? I have zero knowledge to understand all of this, unfortunately.
- dazc 5y ago
  I was born in '65. My dad had a regular job, mum didn't work and I have 3 siblings. We lived, what would be classed today as, a lower middle-class lifestyle. Aside from earnings and cost of living, the one thing I believe that has changed is that I don't remember knowing of many people living a much better life than I was at the time. Now it seems everyone is, even those earning much less than I do. Driving a car you could never be able to buy outright, multiple foreign holidays, fine dining and designer clothing are pretty much the norm these days because, somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it.
  - reducesuffering 5y ago
    > somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it. How do you think Google and Facebook are trillion $ companies? They run targeted advertising to induce consumer demand via manipulation-as-a-service ("Hey advertisers, not enough people willingly going out to buy your $70 clothes made for $1? Here's the people susceptible to feeling inadequate when you show them how much sexier they'll be after their purchase). The $ they skim has to come from someone's pockets at the end of the day.
- mellavora 5y ago
  See: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/life-simpsons-no-longer-attainable/617499/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/life-simps... The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence. By Dani Alexis Ryskamp Updated at 11:10 a.m. ET on February 8, 2021.
- snomad 5y ago
  > It would be good to analyze what happened between 1965 and 2022, what has changed that instead of progress we see some kind of downward spiral. Whether you agree with him or not, this video highlights how the 70s changed everything (in the US at least) The Cardboard Box Reform - Nixon's Ghost Bill & A Crucial Flaw in Democracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY
- apatters 5y ago
  I don't mean to suggest there are no problems with cost of living. In broad strokes here's what happened since '65, or let's go back a little further to the start of the post-WW2 world. 1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting) 2. The government went off the gold standard 3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization Those are the three biggies. Expanding the number of available workers kicked off the pressure on wages. Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation. Globalization shrunk the number of jobs available and was the nail in the coffin. So that's why we don't have the same economics as a nuclear family in the 60s. Now in practice a lot of essentials in the US CPI have stayed pretty cheap. Technology enabled a lot of things to stay or become cheap. But a few big ones are a train wreck. Home ownership, health care, education, all skyrocketed. So when I see someone on the median income say "Man I'm getting older and I don't know how you can afford to settle down and buy a house and start a family" yeah that's a very real problem which is grounded in facts. But when someone says "life sucks for the 24 year old who has the resume to work in the Valley and pulls down almost a quarter mil," here's what that is: horse shit.
  - quintushoratius 5y ago
    Your premise needs a reality check. > 1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting) The rate of women in the workplace ticked up slightly during WW1 and WW2, but by no means was it a sea change. That's a narrative pushed by "traditionalist" thinkers that found a simple thing to pin social upheaval on The real change was accelerated industrialization during the first half of the 20th century. Millions moved from farms to factories, men and women alike. > 2. The government went off the gold standard So what? > Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation. If you call a steady 1-2%/year "massive". The real effect has been to stabilize the economy. I guess people who like gold standards don't know their economic history. The 19th century, which is arguably a recognizable modern economy (in the West), was punctuated by panics and strong recessions that made the "Great Depression" look tame. (which itself makes the Great Recession look pretty tame.). Getting of the gold standard was key to fixing that. > 3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization I agree with you here, but again I think you overstate the impact. The US was once in the position of SE Asia today: (relatively) educated workforce, cheap labor, lax standards compared to Europe. In it's time, the American South was the jobs-export market for the North. These trends have been happening basically forever. More importantly, the remaining manufacturing jobs, and there are many, are high wage and high skill. They're also high productivity, so there are fewer. That leads to another force at work, which is a bigger threat than exported jobs: automation. Most manufacturing jobs didn't leave, they disappeared.
noduerme 5y ago
Eh, last place I rented in Portland was $1300. I can hit the gas pedal and make $250k a year if I want, but last year I laid low and tucked in under $100k, took time off, still managed to save a bunch of cash. My GF is a massage therapist and makes $50-60k a year. We've got multiple cars and houses. We're both self-employed so we each pay for our own health insurance out of pocket. This is the dream to a lot of people... in the third world. The truth is we're both relatively lazy and could easily double our income in this country, tomorrow, if we wanted to. BUT NOT AS LAZY AS GENERATION TIKTOK.
- friedturkey 5y ago
  Cool. Most people aren't given a life that allows them to just make 250k if they want to. As a programmer, tech workers are the laziest people around but incredibly overpaid. The people making 1/4 your pay are busting their asses harder than we can imagine.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    I know exactly how hard they're busting ass - I was a cab driver, bus boy, waiter, bartender and minimum-wage graphic designer before I was a coder. It's not those people I'm worried about. They're all learning more as they go along. It's the ones who disdain work. And use incoherent political talking points to justify laziness and being supported by their parents. They have no pride. [edit] It's also absolutely natural to me, and a sign of vigor in America, that I should have started at minimum wage in the service industry and now command $200/hr. in my 40s. And it's natural to me that other people should go through the same process. It's good for them. It was good for me. It teaches you hard work and humility; being poor teaches you the value of a dollar. This is the only country in the world where that has been possible for generation after generation. My grandparents were immigrants who came to the US with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Most of my colleagues are of other races, and their parents and grandparents were immigrants too. My grandpa died with $1M or so in savings. This was not a green light to fuck off and not work. It was a dire warning that I had to get a job at 14. So it's not like "some people" auto-magically have this incredible privilege of making $250k a year, you have to work for it, and that's what's expected of you in this country. People everywhere else in the world desperately want the chance to do the shit jobs that our kids think they're too good to do. That's a parenting problem. A messaging problem. A civilizational problem. [edit2] >> most people aren't given a life This is an incredibly offensive thing to say to someone if you don't know the specifics of their life. I kind of ignored it, but I shouldn't have. It betrays a very specific flaw in your thinking. You assume that everyone who has things must have had those things given to them. Is that what your parents told you? Is that what you tell yourself when you don't feel like working harder? That everyone else was just given what they have? That just means you were brought up with a poor work ethic. Blaming people who work harder than you or even people who were lucky and born rich doesn't get you anywhere. Good; stay in a gutter, but don't pretend to preach to people who put in the time.
vba616 5y ago
>some people live in a bubble detached from all reality. It would be helpful (and I think recommended in the HN guidelines) to provide some relatable basis for your opinions from your life experience. Like for example, your context for normal rents, normal cities, normal commutes, normal states, normal experience with health insurance when you can't get it from your employer, what you think a normal car & car loan is, why "boring" is relevant to "hell" and struggling in life, whether and why rental deposits are an abnormal hardship to you, if you have ever had a proverbial 9-5 job... I'm not demanding an answer to each specific item above. But when you casually accuse people of living in a bubble, you should show them a different one even if you only have one or two real data points from experience.
- mbfg 5y ago
  i paid 1K a semester to go to college.
  - vba616 5y ago
    Ok...that doesn't paint much of a picture. If I could rewind things to when I was 18, and go to community college for two years, transfer to the university for the last two, and live at home, it would be extremely cost-efficient, but we all have to make decisions without hindsight, with perhaps the advice of our elders who grew up in a completely different world.

piokoch 5y ago

This most interesting part for me is this "What people considered a boring hell of a life in 1965 is a fantasy unobtainable to an increasing number of >>average<< people". It would be good to analyze what happened between 1965 and 2022, what has changed that instead of progress we see some kind of downward spiral. Or maybe 1965s are idealized? Are there people looking on this? I have zero knowledge to understand all of this, unfortunately.

dazc 5y ago
I was born in '65. My dad had a regular job, mum didn't work and I have 3 siblings. We lived, what would be classed today as, a lower middle-class lifestyle. Aside from earnings and cost of living, the one thing I believe that has changed is that I don't remember knowing of many people living a much better life than I was at the time. Now it seems everyone is, even those earning much less than I do. Driving a car you could never be able to buy outright, multiple foreign holidays, fine dining and designer clothing are pretty much the norm these days because, somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  > somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it. How do you think Google and Facebook are trillion $ companies? They run targeted advertising to induce consumer demand via manipulation-as-a-service ("Hey advertisers, not enough people willingly going out to buy your $70 clothes made for $1? Here's the people susceptible to feeling inadequate when you show them how much sexier they'll be after their purchase). The $ they skim has to come from someone's pockets at the end of the day.
mellavora 5y ago
See: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/life-simpsons-no-longer-attainable/617499/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/life-simps... The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence. By Dani Alexis Ryskamp Updated at 11:10 a.m. ET on February 8, 2021.
snomad 5y ago
> It would be good to analyze what happened between 1965 and 2022, what has changed that instead of progress we see some kind of downward spiral. Whether you agree with him or not, this video highlights how the 70s changed everything (in the US at least) The Cardboard Box Reform - Nixon's Ghost Bill & A Crucial Flaw in Democracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY
apatters 5y ago
I don't mean to suggest there are no problems with cost of living. In broad strokes here's what happened since '65, or let's go back a little further to the start of the post-WW2 world. 1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting) 2. The government went off the gold standard 3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization Those are the three biggies. Expanding the number of available workers kicked off the pressure on wages. Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation. Globalization shrunk the number of jobs available and was the nail in the coffin. So that's why we don't have the same economics as a nuclear family in the 60s. Now in practice a lot of essentials in the US CPI have stayed pretty cheap. Technology enabled a lot of things to stay or become cheap. But a few big ones are a train wreck. Home ownership, health care, education, all skyrocketed. So when I see someone on the median income say "Man I'm getting older and I don't know how you can afford to settle down and buy a house and start a family" yeah that's a very real problem which is grounded in facts. But when someone says "life sucks for the 24 year old who has the resume to work in the Valley and pulls down almost a quarter mil," here's what that is: horse shit.
- quintushoratius 5y ago
  Your premise needs a reality check. > 1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting) The rate of women in the workplace ticked up slightly during WW1 and WW2, but by no means was it a sea change. That's a narrative pushed by "traditionalist" thinkers that found a simple thing to pin social upheaval on The real change was accelerated industrialization during the first half of the 20th century. Millions moved from farms to factories, men and women alike. > 2. The government went off the gold standard So what? > Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation. If you call a steady 1-2%/year "massive". The real effect has been to stabilize the economy. I guess people who like gold standards don't know their economic history. The 19th century, which is arguably a recognizable modern economy (in the West), was punctuated by panics and strong recessions that made the "Great Depression" look tame. (which itself makes the Great Recession look pretty tame.). Getting of the gold standard was key to fixing that. > 3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization I agree with you here, but again I think you overstate the impact. The US was once in the position of SE Asia today: (relatively) educated workforce, cheap labor, lax standards compared to Europe. In it's time, the American South was the jobs-export market for the North. These trends have been happening basically forever. More importantly, the remaining manufacturing jobs, and there are many, are high wage and high skill. They're also high productivity, so there are fewer. That leads to another force at work, which is a bigger threat than exported jobs: automation. Most manufacturing jobs didn't leave, they disappeared.

noduerme 5y ago

Eh, last place I rented in Portland was $1300. I can hit the gas pedal and make $250k a year if I want, but last year I laid low and tucked in under $100k, took time off, still managed to save a bunch of cash. My GF is a massage therapist and makes $50-60k a year. We've got multiple cars and houses. We're both self-employed so we each pay for our own health insurance out of pocket. This is the dream to a lot of people... in the third world. The truth is we're both relatively lazy and could easily double our income in this country, tomorrow, if we wanted to. BUT NOT AS LAZY AS GENERATION TIKTOK.

friedturkey 5y ago
Cool. Most people aren't given a life that allows them to just make 250k if they want to. As a programmer, tech workers are the laziest people around but incredibly overpaid. The people making 1/4 your pay are busting their asses harder than we can imagine.
- noduerme 5y ago
  I know exactly how hard they're busting ass - I was a cab driver, bus boy, waiter, bartender and minimum-wage graphic designer before I was a coder. It's not those people I'm worried about. They're all learning more as they go along. It's the ones who disdain work. And use incoherent political talking points to justify laziness and being supported by their parents. They have no pride. [edit] It's also absolutely natural to me, and a sign of vigor in America, that I should have started at minimum wage in the service industry and now command $200/hr. in my 40s. And it's natural to me that other people should go through the same process. It's good for them. It was good for me. It teaches you hard work and humility; being poor teaches you the value of a dollar. This is the only country in the world where that has been possible for generation after generation. My grandparents were immigrants who came to the US with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Most of my colleagues are of other races, and their parents and grandparents were immigrants too. My grandpa died with $1M or so in savings. This was not a green light to fuck off and not work. It was a dire warning that I had to get a job at 14. So it's not like "some people" auto-magically have this incredible privilege of making $250k a year, you have to work for it, and that's what's expected of you in this country. People everywhere else in the world desperately want the chance to do the shit jobs that our kids think they're too good to do. That's a parenting problem. A messaging problem. A civilizational problem. [edit2] >> most people aren't given a life This is an incredibly offensive thing to say to someone if you don't know the specifics of their life. I kind of ignored it, but I shouldn't have. It betrays a very specific flaw in your thinking. You assume that everyone who has things must have had those things given to them. Is that what your parents told you? Is that what you tell yourself when you don't feel like working harder? That everyone else was just given what they have? That just means you were brought up with a poor work ethic. Blaming people who work harder than you or even people who were lucky and born rich doesn't get you anywhere. Good; stay in a gutter, but don't pretend to preach to people who put in the time.

vba616 5y ago

>some people live in a bubble detached from all reality. It would be helpful (and I think recommended in the HN guidelines) to provide some relatable basis for your opinions from your life experience. Like for example, your context for normal rents, normal cities, normal commutes, normal states, normal experience with health insurance when you can't get it from your employer, what you think a normal car & car loan is, why "boring" is relevant to "hell" and struggling in life, whether and why rental deposits are an abnormal hardship to you, if you have ever had a proverbial 9-5 job... I'm not demanding an answer to each specific item above. But when you casually accuse people of living in a bubble, you should show them a different one even if you only have one or two real data points from experience.

mbfg 5y ago
i paid 1K a semester to go to college.
- vba616 5y ago
  Ok...that doesn't paint much of a picture. If I could rewind things to when I was 18, and go to community college for two years, transfer to the university for the last two, and live at home, it would be extremely cost-efficient, but we all have to make decisions without hindsight, with perhaps the advice of our elders who grew up in a completely different world.