5 ms·

The hell of it is, he still isn't middle class. The US doesn't even have a middle class anymore. He is just no longer at the very bottom of the underclass. He i

by ncmncm 4y ago

The hell of it is, he still isn't middle class. The US doesn't even have a middle class anymore. He is just no longer at the very bottom of the underclass. He is now mid-lower lower class. It is impossibly hard for most people not in the upper class in the US to conceive of just how impossibly far they are from that upper class. $100k/yr? Lower class. $200k/yr? Still lower class: you still can't afford to send your kids through college, and still make your house and car payments, replacing your car every year or two. Yes, that was what middle-class people used to do. What happened to the middle class? It was eliminated, by explicit political policy. The US income curve is now strongly bi-modal. One hump for upper class, another for lower. Very few people are near the middle, where the middle class once was. Those few are either tacking to get to the upper class, probably futilely, or are well on their way out of it, and won't be back. The Republican Party discovered that they could get lower-class people to vote against their own interests, and for the interests of the upper class, by convincing them they were not lower class. Now half the country votes mainly to try to keep the desperately poor from taking what they have managed to scrabble together, and in the process ensure the extremely rich get extremely richer and don't have to pay for anything, and especially not let any of it go to those same voters. Up until around 1970, Americans' income was on a relentless rise. That had stopped by 1980, and has been more or less level, since. The income didn't go away, at all. The total amount has skyrocketed, since, going up at the same rate as before. Just, rich people get all of the difference, everything from that line down to the flat line describing what they have left for the rest of us. All this is policy, and the program to get there was spelled out in the Powell Memorandum, which you can read online. During COVID lockdown and supply-chain upsets, they got insanely more money, somehow, again at the rest of our expense.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> The US income curve is now strongly bi-modal. One hump for upper class, another for lower. Very few people are near the middle, where the middle class once was. Evidence? Because I don't think the US income distribution looks like this at all. [Edit: Oh, you've got your own definition of "middle", which is completely different from what everyone else in this conversation is using. With your definition of "middle", I could see there not being many people there. I still don't think the distribution is bi-modal, though.]
- ffggvv 4y ago
  this is the distribution. https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distribution-of-household-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri... OP is just making stuff up arbitrarily
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    You wish. But I remember an America that still had a middle class. It wasn't like this. My father grew up on a farm, upper middle class. He carried around a roll of $100 bills, and once bought an airplane on the spot, out of it (plus the motorcycle he rode up on). By the time I went to college, we were mid-lower middle, and I worked my way through (took 7 years), but there still was one.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      When I ask for evidence, and someone else supplies it, "you wish" isn't a strong rebuttal to the evidence. > It wasn't like this. I kind of have to agree with you here. I think three things made a huge difference: The breakup of the extended family, the rise in medical costs, and the rise in college costs. And, maybe, the failure of the pre-college education system to prepare people for the workforce (or even for adult life). But the 50s through 70s were a golden time, at least in the US. Everyone else was rebuilding, and we had all the industry, and so we had a ton of jobs. But it wasn't always like that. My father was born in 1930. He tells about having to re-use thread, not because they didn't have money to buy thread, but because the thread factories had closed. They didn't know when (if ever) it was going to be different. That was the first eight years of his life. So... it wasn't always like the 50s, either.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Right. But the amount of money that could be paid in regular wages and salaries has continued on up, since the '70s, at the same rate. It just isn't, anymore. Instead, the extreme rich contrive to skim it off. Then they hire PR experts to trick people. Very, very successfully, as you can see in this thread. People really cling to the idea that they are doing well, and always compare their status to those further down, as they have been trained to do. Most cannot conceive of how life is for the actual upper class, or even what it would be for somebody truly middle class, if there still were any.
refurb 4y ago
This take is not based in reality. An individual income of $200k put your firmly in the top 10% of income earners in the US. But the claim is they are lower class? This seems really disconnected with reality. I’m not sure you understand what life is like for the average American.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  I understand very, very well. The average American lives in a hellscape, one serious illness removed from homelessness. If you can imagine losing your home to illness, you are lower class like the rest of us. Upper class is what they call the 1%. Most of us are among the other 99%.
  - idrios 4y ago
    This may be more of an indictment on medical costs in the US than on income distribition.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      See how good they have got at redirecting our attention? We even do it for them.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - refurb 4y ago
    Sorry, no. Your hyperbole doesn’t match up with the typical experience. I have had family members with serious illness, who are lower class (truly lower class, not the top 10% as you claim lower class are) and no, it didn’t make them homeless. If you’re making $200k per year you’re richer than 90% of Americans who globally are some of the wealthiest in the world. Claiming someone making $200k is “lower class” comes across as self-pity and a complete lack of perspective.
  - sershe 4y ago
    An average American lives unbelievably rich, safe life by the standards of pretty much any major country that has ever existed or currently exists (yes, including Europe - see e.g. disposable income, debt etc. here - https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm). An average American is indeed saddled by a healthcare system distorted by misaligned incentives (tax-free benefits), tons of regulation and government ineptitude, corporate lobbyists abusing regulation and government ineptitude, and self-serving unions (AMA). However, the probabilistic impact of medical bills is basically non-existent on an average American. This is kinda like car crashes vs plane crashes - one is actually a cause for concern, the other makes good news stories. The biggest difference between median and average, for Americans, is the amount of whining - while a median American seems pretty ok, the average is driven up by super-whiners who tend to either live in a crappy, expensive city for no reason; have a useless humanities degree; or think that luxury is a human right. Or some combination of the three :)
rayiner 4y ago
> Still lower class: you still can't afford to send your kids through college, and still make your house and car payments, replacing your car every year or two. Yes, that was what middle-class people used to do. This is a complete delusion designed to justify affluent people asserting they’re “middle class.” Americans never lived like that. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, most people didn’t even go to college. They lived in a house with half the square footage, but more people in the household. If they got cancer, they just died. The problem isn’t republicans, or not just republicans. The problem is that Democrats also refuse to raise taxes on the top 25% above the current Reagan-era lows. Every other developed economy functions by heavily taxing the top 25%. Even in the US, that group earns the plurality of income. What makes the American tax structure unusual isn’t the absence of wealth taxes or low capital gains or corporate tax rates. It’s incredibly low tax rates on upper middle class people. What makes America unusual is that affluent professionals identify as beleaguered members of the “bottom 99%” instead of acknowledging that they are the people that must be taxed to pay for the social services they claim to want. You know why many Americans are on the edge of medical bankruptcy? It’s not because we don’t have wealth taxes on billionaires. Sweden doesn’t have that either. Neither does Germany or France or Spain or Italy. The reason is because of the incredibly low taxes paid by Facebook engineers, doctors, lawyers, and other white collar professionals. My au pair paid about the same tax rate in Germany, with an entry level desk job (40%) as my double private practice lawyer household in Maryland. That’s because the second to highest tax rate (42% versus the top 45%) kicks in at the equivalent of $70,000/year. In Sweden, the top tax rate kicks in at 1.5x the median income (under $100,000 in the US).
- jen20 4y ago
  > You know why many Americans are on the edge of medical bankruptcy? It’s nothing to do with the tax rate, and entirely to do with the insane insurance system that does not even try to keep costs reasonable. The UK gets this correct with the same tax rates (when you include property tax) as the US.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    That might be a plausible explanation if it wasn't for the fact that many government services in America cost vastly more than their equivalents in Europe: public education, public infrastructure construction, etc. Even advocates of universal healthcare like Elizabeth Warren don't argue they could achieve universal coverage without a trillion+ in annual spending increases. Also, the UK does not have similar taxes to the US: https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd.... US taxes, at all levels, are 25.5% of GDP. UK is 32.8%. And those taxes in the UK fall much more heavily on the middle class. That's partly because the brackets are tighter (the 40% rate kicks in at 50,000 pounds, and the top rate of 45% kicks in at only 150,000 pounds). But also because a huge fraction of revenues is from the 20% VAT.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> The US doesn't even have a middle class anymore Like most capitalist societies historically, the US still has a middle class (petit bourgeoisie.) Like most capitalist societies, this class is fairly small (not as small as the upper class, the haut bourgeoisie, though), generally high-income group, defined by relying on a mix of labor and capital income, both being important (or applying their own labor, rather than overwhelmingly rented labor, to their own capital.) The idea of a middle-income “middle class“ was always a lie to divide the working class and protect both upper classes against them.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Top lower did once shade smoothly into bottom upper. A solid voting cohort was there. The last of them were the Baby Boomers, who lately wonder what happened to the rising prosperity they grew up with. That prosperity continued, to a height unimaginable at the time. But their children and now grandchildren get a constantly decreasing share of it.
akavi 4y ago
> you still can't afford to send your kids through college, and still make your house and car payments, replacing your car every year or two. Yes, that was what middle-class people used to do. Where is this halcyon universe where the median (or even the 75th percentile) American: * Paid for their children to go to college * Bought a new car every other year 'Cause that doesn't resemble any point in the past century of the universe we currently inhabit.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The memory hole has proven very effective.
sershe 4y ago
This is an utterly deluded perspective that maybe only applies in hyper-regulated, to borrow from one below comment, "hellscapes" like NYC an SF. And maybe not even then. A median house is $400k (and yes, it's located near a job, probably a median job). A payment on that is <$2k after recent rate increases. Changing cars every 2 years is dumb and maybe made sense when cars were much lower quality, but still, median new car is what, $30-40k? How much is median, decent college, e.g. an in-state university? In most of the country, $200k is not middle class indeed - it's "rich". Real /median/ household income is still on "relentless rise": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N Middle class "shrinking": https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/middleclass1.png?x91208 https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/middleclass1.... To counter other left-wing delusions implied in this post, housing-to-income ratio is long-term almost flat, until the recent inflation: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... I am not sure if they adjust by size, as median house size has also increased by a lot over this time; if they don't it understates the modestly of the housing price increases. Government spending as %% of GDP is constantly growing, or at most flat in good times: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S And social services as %% of that are growing, too: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-the-federal-government-spend-your-tax-dollars-on-social-insurance-programs-mostly/ft_17-04-03_budget_420px/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-t...

by ncmncm 4y ago

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

> The US income curve is now strongly bi-modal. One hump for upper class, another for lower. Very few people are near the middle, where the middle class once was. Evidence? Because I don't think the US income distribution looks like this at all. [Edit: Oh, you've got your own definition of "middle", which is completely different from what everyone else in this conversation is using. With your definition of "middle", I could see there not being many people there. I still don't think the distribution is bi-modal, though.]

ffggvv 4y ago
this is the distribution. https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distribution-of-household-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri... OP is just making stuff up arbitrarily
- ncmncm 4y ago
  You wish. But I remember an America that still had a middle class. It wasn't like this. My father grew up on a farm, upper middle class. He carried around a roll of $100 bills, and once bought an airplane on the spot, out of it (plus the motorcycle he rode up on). By the time I went to college, we were mid-lower middle, and I worked my way through (took 7 years), but there still was one.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    When I ask for evidence, and someone else supplies it, "you wish" isn't a strong rebuttal to the evidence. > It wasn't like this. I kind of have to agree with you here. I think three things made a huge difference: The breakup of the extended family, the rise in medical costs, and the rise in college costs. And, maybe, the failure of the pre-college education system to prepare people for the workforce (or even for adult life). But the 50s through 70s were a golden time, at least in the US. Everyone else was rebuilding, and we had all the industry, and so we had a ton of jobs. But it wasn't always like that. My father was born in 1930. He tells about having to re-use thread, not because they didn't have money to buy thread, but because the thread factories had closed. They didn't know when (if ever) it was going to be different. That was the first eight years of his life. So... it wasn't always like the 50s, either.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Right. But the amount of money that could be paid in regular wages and salaries has continued on up, since the '70s, at the same rate. It just isn't, anymore. Instead, the extreme rich contrive to skim it off. Then they hire PR experts to trick people. Very, very successfully, as you can see in this thread. People really cling to the idea that they are doing well, and always compare their status to those further down, as they have been trained to do. Most cannot conceive of how life is for the actual upper class, or even what it would be for somebody truly middle class, if there still were any.

refurb 4y ago

This take is not based in reality. An individual income of $200k put your firmly in the top 10% of income earners in the US. But the claim is they are lower class? This seems really disconnected with reality. I’m not sure you understand what life is like for the average American.

ncmncm 4y ago
I understand very, very well. The average American lives in a hellscape, one serious illness removed from homelessness. If you can imagine losing your home to illness, you are lower class like the rest of us. Upper class is what they call the 1%. Most of us are among the other 99%.
- idrios 4y ago
  This may be more of an indictment on medical costs in the US than on income distribition.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    See how good they have got at redirecting our attention? We even do it for them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- refurb 4y ago
  Sorry, no. Your hyperbole doesn’t match up with the typical experience. I have had family members with serious illness, who are lower class (truly lower class, not the top 10% as you claim lower class are) and no, it didn’t make them homeless. If you’re making $200k per year you’re richer than 90% of Americans who globally are some of the wealthiest in the world. Claiming someone making $200k is “lower class” comes across as self-pity and a complete lack of perspective.
- sershe 4y ago
  An average American lives unbelievably rich, safe life by the standards of pretty much any major country that has ever existed or currently exists (yes, including Europe - see e.g. disposable income, debt etc. here - https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm). An average American is indeed saddled by a healthcare system distorted by misaligned incentives (tax-free benefits), tons of regulation and government ineptitude, corporate lobbyists abusing regulation and government ineptitude, and self-serving unions (AMA). However, the probabilistic impact of medical bills is basically non-existent on an average American. This is kinda like car crashes vs plane crashes - one is actually a cause for concern, the other makes good news stories. The biggest difference between median and average, for Americans, is the amount of whining - while a median American seems pretty ok, the average is driven up by super-whiners who tend to either live in a crappy, expensive city for no reason; have a useless humanities degree; or think that luxury is a human right. Or some combination of the three :)

rayiner 4y ago

> Still lower class: you still can't afford to send your kids through college, and still make your house and car payments, replacing your car every year or two. Yes, that was what middle-class people used to do. This is a complete delusion designed to justify affluent people asserting they’re “middle class.” Americans never lived like that. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, most people didn’t even go to college. They lived in a house with half the square footage, but more people in the household. If they got cancer, they just died. The problem isn’t republicans, or not just republicans. The problem is that Democrats also refuse to raise taxes on the top 25% above the current Reagan-era lows. Every other developed economy functions by heavily taxing the top 25%. Even in the US, that group earns the plurality of income. What makes the American tax structure unusual isn’t the absence of wealth taxes or low capital gains or corporate tax rates. It’s incredibly low tax rates on upper middle class people. What makes America unusual is that affluent professionals identify as beleaguered members of the “bottom 99%” instead of acknowledging that they are the people that must be taxed to pay for the social services they claim to want. You know why many Americans are on the edge of medical bankruptcy? It’s not because we don’t have wealth taxes on billionaires. Sweden doesn’t have that either. Neither does Germany or France or Spain or Italy. The reason is because of the incredibly low taxes paid by Facebook engineers, doctors, lawyers, and other white collar professionals. My au pair paid about the same tax rate in Germany, with an entry level desk job (40%) as my double private practice lawyer household in Maryland. That’s because the second to highest tax rate (42% versus the top 45%) kicks in at the equivalent of $70,000/year. In Sweden, the top tax rate kicks in at 1.5x the median income (under $100,000 in the US).

jen20 4y ago
> You know why many Americans are on the edge of medical bankruptcy? It’s nothing to do with the tax rate, and entirely to do with the insane insurance system that does not even try to keep costs reasonable. The UK gets this correct with the same tax rates (when you include property tax) as the US.
- rayiner 4y ago
  That might be a plausible explanation if it wasn't for the fact that many government services in America cost vastly more than their equivalents in Europe: public education, public infrastructure construction, etc. Even advocates of universal healthcare like Elizabeth Warren don't argue they could achieve universal coverage without a trillion+ in annual spending increases. Also, the UK does not have similar taxes to the US: https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd.... US taxes, at all levels, are 25.5% of GDP. UK is 32.8%. And those taxes in the UK fall much more heavily on the middle class. That's partly because the brackets are tighter (the 40% rate kicks in at 50,000 pounds, and the top rate of 45% kicks in at only 150,000 pounds). But also because a huge fraction of revenues is from the 20% VAT.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> The US doesn't even have a middle class anymore Like most capitalist societies historically, the US still has a middle class (petit bourgeoisie.) Like most capitalist societies, this class is fairly small (not as small as the upper class, the haut bourgeoisie, though), generally high-income group, defined by relying on a mix of labor and capital income, both being important (or applying their own labor, rather than overwhelmingly rented labor, to their own capital.) The idea of a middle-income “middle class“ was always a lie to divide the working class and protect both upper classes against them.

ncmncm 4y ago
Top lower did once shade smoothly into bottom upper. A solid voting cohort was there. The last of them were the Baby Boomers, who lately wonder what happened to the rising prosperity they grew up with. That prosperity continued, to a height unimaginable at the time. But their children and now grandchildren get a constantly decreasing share of it.

akavi 4y ago

> you still can't afford to send your kids through college, and still make your house and car payments, replacing your car every year or two. Yes, that was what middle-class people used to do. Where is this halcyon universe where the median (or even the 75th percentile) American: * Paid for their children to go to college * Bought a new car every other year 'Cause that doesn't resemble any point in the past century of the universe we currently inhabit.

ncmncm 4y ago
The memory hole has proven very effective.

sershe 4y ago

This is an utterly deluded perspective that maybe only applies in hyper-regulated, to borrow from one below comment, "hellscapes" like NYC an SF. And maybe not even then. A median house is $400k (and yes, it's located near a job, probably a median job). A payment on that is <$2k after recent rate increases. Changing cars every 2 years is dumb and maybe made sense when cars were much lower quality, but still, median new car is what, $30-40k? How much is median, decent college, e.g. an in-state university? In most of the country, $200k is not middle class indeed - it's "rich". Real /median/ household income is still on "relentless rise": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N Middle class "shrinking": https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/middleclass1.png?x91208 https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/middleclass1.... To counter other left-wing delusions implied in this post, housing-to-income ratio is long-term almost flat, until the recent inflation: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... I am not sure if they adjust by size, as median house size has also increased by a lot over this time; if they don't it understates the modestly of the housing price increases. Government spending as %% of GDP is constantly growing, or at most flat in good times: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S And social services as %% of that are growing, too: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-the-federal-government-spend-your-tax-dollars-on-social-insurance-programs-mostly/ft_17-04-03_budget_420px/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-t...