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Half the World Is Now Middle Class Or Wealthier, Says Brookings Institution (brookings.edu)
schwit1 shares a report from the Brookings Institution: Something of enormous global significance is happening almost without notice. For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty. By our calculations, as of this month, just over 50 percent of the world's population, or some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered "middle class" or "rich." About the same number of people are living in households that are poor or vulnerable to poverty. So September 2018 marks a global tipping point. After this, for the first time ever, the poor and vulnerable will no longer be a majority in the world. Barring some unfortunate global economic setback, this marks the start of a new era of a middle-class majority.
In most countries, there is a clear relationship between the fate of the middle class and the happiness of the population. According to the Gallup World Poll, new entrants into the middle class are noticeably happier than those stuck in poverty or in vulnerable households. Conversely, individuals in countries where the middle class is shrinking report greater degrees of personal stress. The middle class also puts pressure on governments to perform better. They look to their governments to provide affordable housing, education, and universal health care. They rely on public safety nets to help them in sickness, unemployment or old age. But they resist efforts of governments to impose taxes to pay the bills. This complicates the politics of middle-class societies, so they range from autocratic to liberal democracies. Many advanced and middle-income countries today are struggling to find a set of politics that can satisfy a broad middle-class majority. The tipping point in the world today offers opportunities for business but complications for policymakers.
In most countries, there is a clear relationship between the fate of the middle class and the happiness of the population. According to the Gallup World Poll, new entrants into the middle class are noticeably happier than those stuck in poverty or in vulnerable households. Conversely, individuals in countries where the middle class is shrinking report greater degrees of personal stress. The middle class also puts pressure on governments to perform better. They look to their governments to provide affordable housing, education, and universal health care. They rely on public safety nets to help them in sickness, unemployment or old age. But they resist efforts of governments to impose taxes to pay the bills. This complicates the politics of middle-class societies, so they range from autocratic to liberal democracies. Many advanced and middle-income countries today are struggling to find a set of politics that can satisfy a broad middle-class majority. The tipping point in the world today offers opportunities for business but complications for policymakers.
At least 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That's not middle class and it's certainly not "no longer at risk of poverty".
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Be happy with the breadcrumbs the multinational corporations and the 1% throws at you. Now get back to work.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
[quote]They rely on public safety nets to help them in sickness, unemployment or old age. But they resist efforts of governments to impose taxes to pay the bills.[/quote] In my country (The Netherlands), the effective tax pressure is around 78% (meaning for every euro I make, I make 0,22 cents for myself and the rest gets taken by the government). More taxes will force people into the black economy or crime (you get more money by robbing people since the law enforcement is suffering under austerity measures, so there's a 1,8% chance of getting caught). It's not the reluctance for paying for services like healthcare etc, but the government is spending more and more on things which have nothing to do with those like immigration (costing 32k an immigrant per year on benefits alone; we take in 100k a year). But also the goverenment imposing tax relief on multinational etc, also nothing to do with services.
They look to their governments to provide affordable housing, education, and universal health care. They rely on public safety nets to help them in sickness, unemployment or old age.
Middle class is wealthy enough to pay for the unemployment insurances they get from their professional associations and unions. Who does like to use the social services that require you to run your every grocery receipt through them every month and announce every day you're unemployed and did try to get a job that day?
But they resist efforts of governments to impose taxes to pay the bills.
Depending of the country. Policy makers have themselves to blame if they waste so much of the taxes on non-sense that the people lose their confidence on their governments.
This complicates the politics of middle-class societies, so they range from autocratic to liberal democracies. Many advanced and middle-income countries today are struggling to find a set of politics that can satisfy a broad middle-class majority.
That's why many rely on multi-party systems and reduce the power of the presidents or royals over time in everyday politics.
The tipping point in the world today offers opportunities for business but complications for policymakers.
Privatization of the public services indeed offers opportunities to violate the rights of your fellow citizens, and complications to the policymakers as they try to hide their ill-gained wealth from the public scrutiny while they adjust the terms of the social contract that keeps the riots away from the streets.
so that boils down to "50% of people earns more than average"?
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No thanks to socialism.
When over half of the world are middle class, that just means that middle class will be redefined to mean more than it has in the past.
Average US income is $57617. If the USA wasn't so overinflated (print money, tax cuts to rich people, load up debt, debt repaid by poor people due to tax cut)....
Not only infinitely differentiable—and smooth, smooth, smooth like a baby's bottom—but also infinitely and indefinitely monotonic in instantaneous prospect.
And to think that another perspective is that the whole fragile edifice hangs by the thread of one stupid trade war.
Or a pandemic.
Or a rising tide.
"The middle class also puts pressure on governments to perform better. They look to their governments to provide affordable housing, education, and universal health care. They rely on public safety nets to help them in sickness, unemployment or old age. But they resist efforts of governments to impose taxes to pay the bills."
I would say - rightly so.
Most governments probably waste a great deal of money on whatever (inefficiency, corruption, wrong policies/investments, ...).
Instead of asking the people to give more, they could perhaps clean ship first (never gonna happen).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
It's this BeauHD retard...he's the reason I don't read Slashdot anymore.
Fuck you !
more than 50% of drivers are above average.
The problem here is that you can only solve one of those two problems. If you vote left to avoid squandering money to the corporations, you get to pay for the immigrants. If you vote right to stop funneling money to the traffickers the immigrants pay off, the money will instead be thrown at the corporations.
Either way, no money for you. One should assume that with all those parties available, at least one would be decent.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's not a snarky question. That's the whole crux of the debate.
Do you define "middle class" as: ... having X amount of assets? ... being able to buy X luxuries? ... having a salary of at least X? ... being X sigma from the mean?
How you answer that question changes your perception of the growth of the middle class?
The US is becoming poorer but places like China and India are becoming richer.
Definition of "middle class" used by researchers is ability to spend at least 11$ per day per person.
Yup. Obvious fake news from well-known shills for the financial oligarchy.
They've spent decades trying to destroy the middle class in the US, and are on the verge of success. They have little control, however, outside of their primary sphere of influence, and the rest of the world is catching up.
Why is the middle class a threat? Because disposable income can be converted into eventual wealth, with more people "joining the party". The assault on education, health, and income for people was predicated on preventing "the poors" from getting too uppity and threatening the 0.1%ers ecosystem. The dot-com blip was co-opted by Wall Street, and put an end to most of the "Nouveau riche" that endangered their class.
You also can track the decline in the US economy right along the decline of the middle class and increase in the wealth gap. People used to have more disposable income and spent it, stimulating our economy. The ultra-rich merely sit on their wealth and watch the US suffer for it with disdain.
You describe this theory about how those taxes create more crime. Yet the Netherlands are one of the safest places in the world, specially if we normalize by their relative size and individual freedom . Yeah, the Maldives are doing great, if you don't mind your alcohol being prohibited.
That system might not be perfect, but you singled out one of the best implementations that we have for a society that is effective and relatively efficient in keeping it's population happy, and in good part that is because it decided to care for all of its component parts. Almost every other place is doing worse off. There are exceptions of relative social peace and low taxes, but most that I know are either tax havens (those only leak benefits from balanced societies, their relative advantage would vanish if everyone followed suit) or havie some kind of sovereignly owned resource (like oil).
The word "poverty" to me conjures images of Depression-era, dust-bowl families with 8 kids living in a one-room tar-paper shack, no electricity, no running water, no crops, no food, no way out. Or hungry people living in tents under the overpass because they lost their jobs. It doesn't normally invoke people who spend all the money they have (or can steal) on meth, nor people who've had their $70K SUV repossessed because they couldn't actually afford the payments.
Maybe that's just me. This 2011 Heritage report is a bit dated, but interesting view.
"Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America's Poor"
The Census Bureau’s annual poverty report presents a misleading picture of poverty in the United States. Few of the 46.2 million people identified by the Census Bureau as being “in poverty” are what most Americans would consider poor—lacking nutritious food, adequate warm housing, or clothing. The typical “poor” American lives in an air-conditioned house or apartment and has cable TV, a car, multiple color TVs, a DVD player, and a VCR among other conveniences. While some of the poor face significant material hardship, formulating a sound, long-term anti-poverty policy that addresses the causes as well as the symptoms of poverty will require honest and accurate information. Exaggerating the extent and severity of hardships will not benefit society, the taxpayers, or the poor.
Always the same story. Socialism creates poverty, capitalism creates prosperity.
With wide enough goalposts, any amount of people can be "middle class".
Wealth is relative, and so is poverty. While poor Americans have quite a lot by the standards of other societies, that's not the point. They still struggle to afford food, housing, transporation, medical care, etc. And they especially struggle to have these things on a predictable, reliable basis. That's where the poverty really comes in - that these things are not predictable and reliable, when they are essential for living in the given society. That lack of predictability and reliability exerts a mental stress on people, as they are preoccupied with thoughts of whether or not they will be able to maintain what they have.
This is why income and wealth inequality are valuable measures in a given country. A country like the US with extreme wealth but great wealth inequality experiences a variety of social problems as a result. Researchers from the UK have done a good job exploring the relationships between income/wealth inequality and social ills (https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/).
78% doesn't sound right. Here is a breakdown of income taxes in NL and there are other links to taxation in general in Wikipedia. It looks as if you did the usual thing, picked the top marginal rate, found a worse case scenario...
Nullius in verba
Such a narrow perspective in so many answers. Turn on your brain, people !
Living in the 1st and living in the 2nd or 3rd world makes for a dramatic difference these days. Real wages in the west have stagnated or gone down for two decades now. But for the poor of the world - China alone is lifting 10 million people out of poverty every year. People in Africa who 20 years ago didn't know where their next bowl of food will come from now have smartphones.
If you are among the very poor of the world, the last decades were a good time, in general.
Our personal perspective in the USA and in Europe is quite different. We are witnessing the ongoing largest theft in human history, called the financial crisis, and we watch the rich getting richer and us getting poorer.
But on a global scale, we are just 1.5 billion, give or take a few. Everyone else becoming less poor statistically overcompensates for our misery.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This only covers income taxes. What they don't take into account are the municipality taxes, the taxes on drinking water, plumbing, waste. You have to subtract them as well from your net income. When the dust settles, everything you buy has a 9% or 21% vat, which is also a form of taxes. So, if you add up all those extra taxes, you'll be hitting the >78% easily, and in some cases more. Sorry this is in Dutch, but this is a list of taxes on top of the income taxes (nr 2 is income tax). 1. Motorrijtuigenbelasting. 2. Inkomstenbelasting. 3. Grondwaterbelasting. 4. Hondenbelasting. 5. Precariorechten. 6. Onroerend goed belasting. 7. Extra op schuimwijn 8. Vennootschapsbelasting. 9. Vaarbelasting. 10. Toeristenbelasting. 11. Vermogensbelasting 12. Overdrachtsbelasting. 13. Milieubelasting 14. Kansspelbelasting 15. Dividendbelasting 16. Extra op frisdrank 17. Premie volksverzekering. 18. Omzetbelasting. 19. Assurantiebelasting. 20. Belasting personenauto BPM. 21. Extra op vruchtendrank 22. Suiker accijns 23. Brandstof accijns 24. Successierechten 25. Alcoholaccijns 26. Bier accijns 27. Accijns op minerale olien. 28. Kapitaal belasting 29. Verontreinigingsheffing oppervlaktewateren 30. Waterkeringsomslag. 31. Waterbeheersingsomslag 32. Ingezetenenomslag 33. Waterschapbelastingen 34. Rioolrecht. 35. Reinigingsrecht. 36. Afvalstoffenheffing. 37. Marktgeld. 38. Leges 39. Bouwgrondbelasting. 40. Havengelden. 41. Begrafenisrechten. 42. Extra op limonadesiroop 43. Parkeerbelasting. 44. Forensbelasting. 45. Baatbelasting. 46. Energiebelasting. 47. Belasting op leidingwater. 48. Schenkingsrecht. 49. Huurbelasting. 50. Verhuurdersheffing. 51. Bouwleges 52. Windmolentoeslag 53. Verkeersboetes 54. Bp procedurekosten 55. Vooroverlegkosten gemeente 56. Recreatie toeslag 57. Schoolgeld 58. Netbelasting 59. Opritbelasting bij de dijken (bestaat al in rivierengebied) 60. Verpakkingsbelasting 61. Energiebelasting 62. Extra op mineraalwater 63. Zorgverzekering 64. Precariobelasting 65. Erfpacht 66. EU naheffing 67. Tabaksaccijns 68. Reclamebelasting 69. Extra op vruchtensap 70. Straatparkeren 71. Erfbelasting 72. Internetbelasting (binnenkort ?) 73. Heffing op zonnepanelen 74. Luchthavenbelasting 75. Asielzoekersbelasting (binnenkort ?) 76. Bijdrage tbv basisinkomen (binnenkort ?) 77. tol westerscheldetunnel
Isn't the middle class in a country defined by the median income there? If so, 50% of the population will always be middle class or higher.
but the government is spending more and more on things which have nothing to do with those like immigration (costing 32k an immigrant per year on benefits alone; we take in 100k a year).
NET migration into NL last year was ~32k, not 100k. And of those, 2030 were asylum applicants. I'm reasonably sure a large percentage of the others are not on welfare.
The fact that that the 50th percentile has finally gotten bumped up far enough that it happens to be above the recognized poverty line is good, and it is a reflection of how well less developed nations are improving their standards, but the Pareto principle continues to apply to wealth distribution, and you are still going to see huge income disparities.
And of course, that still leaves aside the fact that middle class is a pretty broad classification that includes people who still don't make enough money to have savings to speak of or have any ability to prepare for retirement because they are too busy just living from one paycheck to the next.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Nothing more needs to be said.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
what
The median income of a population is a robust way to define the middle class. So by definition 50% of people earn more, 50% earn less at all time, in all countries. Money devaluation does not change the median. Adding a few billionaires to the population doesn't change much the result.
In contrast the arithmetic average is strongly sensitive to income inequalities, since a few additional billionaires can shift the average a lot.
because after that it's debatable. I've seen it as high as 80%
We do teach kids how to live on their own. If you're an at risk kid you go through what's called "Consumer Math".
One of the things folks have a hard time with is the concept of "You can't budget what isn't there". As the saying goes nobody in America is poor, we're a nation of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. Wages have been dropping at the low end for ages. Higher pay at the top end and with professionals has masked that. But you can see the results when you look at the percentage of income folks spend on food, housing, transportation and healthcare. It's been rising non stop and with it there's less money to save.
People aren't buying McMansions either. Yes, houses are bigger than the 50s but they're cheaper to produce. Factory automation has slashed the cost of building cars while the prices sky rocketed. And among the many shitty things Bush Jr did he deregulated the commodities market. resulting in higher food prices (the effect of which was why they were regulated in the first place).
And then there's the cost of education. We have Trillions in Student Loan Debt. Right wing think tanks will tell you that it's because greedy schools are following supply and demand and raising prices to soak up quick cash. I've got a kid in school and can tell you this is bullshit. There were half as many slots in my kid's 300 level classes as there were qualified applicants (GPA 3.8 or higher, yes, that's an eight, not a zero). If the schools were pricing based on demand they'd just raise the price until they got the right number of applicants. What _did_ happen is we cut federal subsidies in the 90s and 2000s (not all at once mind you, folks would notice that). What I don't understand is why otherwise intelligent people with kids in college repeat this lie...
I guess what I"m saying is the working class is getting screwed, and I wish we'd all wake up to the fact. You can't squeeze blood from a stone and you can't budget what ain't there.
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that's affordable without debt even on $12 bucks an hour. That SUV is used and built on a truck platform. It may guzzle gas but it's cheaper design makes it much more reliable. When you buy a vehicle even poor folks consider total ROI (though most wouldn't know it's called ROI).
If that's all the discretionary spending you can come up with you're not trying hard enough. I mean, if you're gonna shame the poor why not go all out and mention steak, lobster and Cadillacs. Oh, and don't go looking into studies that show the pressures from poverty affect decision making or how worrying about money and food non-stop lead to mistakes. Just keep drinking deep from the well of prosperity gospel.
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In the U.S. by definition you entered ' middle class' when you had a job, bought a car, a home and sent your kids to public school.
Not a chance! A kid works 5 years at GOOG, lives in a $2400/mo apt in SF and still can't afford a car payment, mortgage and child care. A kid can even choose to work three jobs, 7 days a week for a start-up. And it will barely cover car insurance, rent and groceries but there is no pathway to a car payment, mortgage and child care for a middle class lifestyle in the United States.
Bullshit...millennials are screwed by The Brookings Institution's white washed ivory proclamations to the contrary that insurance, rent and groceries is the new middle class.
Oct. 1, Juche 107 (2018) Monday
Reactionary Ideological and Cultural Poisoning of Imperialists Should Be Checked
The imperialists’ ideological and cultural poisoning targeting independent countries has become craftier and more vicious.
Failure to check the imperialists’ ideological and cultural poisoning would prevent a country from defending its sovereignty and dignity, let alone achieving the independent development and prosperity.
There is constant danger of infiltration of bourgeois ideology and culture into other countries, given the escalated moves of the imperialists to stamp out the independent forces, and the complicated situation.
The main target of the imperialists’ ideological and cultural poisoning campaign is young people.
The destiny and future of each country and nation depend on the new generation who would shoulder upon the future. Failing to do proper education of young people would result in getting them affected by bourgeois ideology and culture to be hooligans seeking their own luxury only.
The imperialists remain unchanged in the way of their aggression designed to disrupt and disintegrate the anti-imperialist and independent countries and attain their goal through the reactionary ideological poisoning.
Countries aspiring after independent development and social progress should bear this in mind and thoroughly frustrate at the germinal stage the bourgeois ideological and cultural poisoning by the imperialists.
Ri Hak Nam
I know personal responsibility is a foreign concept to most of you slashdotters.. but the reality is that many of those in the first world that do not exist in the middle class are there BY CHOICE. Its certainly not a lack of opportunity. They blow off work to party or play video games and watch TV. They continue to have children when they cant afford the ones they already have and birth control is MUCh cheaper than children so dont go making excuses about how difficult it is to obtain. Day after pills are cheaper than a large box of diapers! ALL OF YOU consistently excuse bad behaviors as if the people are just victims of circumstance. By doing that you subsidize their behavior allowing the cycle to continue. And for all you morons idolizing those nordic Utopias.. you never want to acknowledge the FACT that they have the HIGHEST rates of personal debt ON THE WHOLE FUCKING PLANET. They live and die in debt because ANY luxury items they want they have to buy on credit because all their disposable income goes to taxes on basic goods and services.
Apparently, human society has a tendency to concentrate resources and influence following a power law distribution, and there's not much that can be done about that.
Sure there is. Raise the top marginal tax rates, and introduce Thomas Piketty's idea of a (net) wealth tax.
Inequality was much lower between 1950 and and about 1980 (WW2 having levelled the playing field). However, ever since Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism became popular in the 1980s we've been heading towards (if not already entered) a new Guilded Age in the West.
It's not that hard to back a more reasonable Gini index (from >0.40 in the US, back to ~0.30): raise taxes, and use the revenues to rebuild infrastructure, better the social safety net, and improve education (so teachers don't have to take up second jobs).
This is not rocket surgery.
Don't live in SF where government artificially restricts the housing market. Move to Memphis, TN, where the median home price is $82,700.
First off, making more than 40k a year in USD puts you in the top 1% for the world. On that scale, being middle class would scare the hell out of me. Next, people who are the least bit financially literate are going to have a lot more as they near retirement age because that is what they were supposed to be doing, saving for a time when they would no longer be able to earn a decent wage. People who might have been working at entry level jobs with almost no savings in their twenties could easily be millionaires by age 60. But that requires a certain level of self-control and financial literacy. Face it. A lot of people are not financially literate and educating them is only going to help some of them. Not that we shouldn't try to make courses in certain things (managing your credit rating, managing your pay and deductions, how to create a sustainable savings plan, how to create a household budget, needs versus wants, and how to shop for food and necessities when you are out of work) mandatory in high school. Many people could swim all day in the sea of knowledge and never get wet. Even as adults, now, everything they would ever need to know they could pick up in an hour a day on the internet in a month or two for free. What does it say about people that so few make the effort? The only alternative to them blowing it for themselves would seem to be to have their government save and invest some portion of their income for them. Unfortunately, we can't trust politicians access to all that money if it were saved up somewhere as there is no good way to prevent them from sticking their hands in it. Case in point being what happened to Social Security (and it could still be fixed in twenty minutes if the right people in DC got together and agreed to do it, don't hold your breath). So in practice, to help people who never accumulated any savings, this always seems to work out as the government just using tax money to help alleviate the worst of the misery so we don't find dead bodies in the gutter every morning, as used to be the case in the good old days. But, politicians being politicians, once they have all this money flowing through their hands, and so many people dependent on it, they try to find ways to use it to address other issues, from noble but misguided ones, to just retaining their own grasp on power.
There are published stats on how people have recovered by decile from the last crash, and only those of us in the top 10 percent of the US have actually increased our wealth, all the rest of you are still broke.
(source: Marketwatch, use that google thing you lazy peon)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
People saying they can only afford to live paycheck-to-paycheck always get mad when I ask them how much they save by living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Bear with me here, I'm trying to get my head around this place.
I help business owners sell their expertise online.
Think tanks are ideologically based with an agenda by the owners. You have to not fall for the intended plan to get people equating them with legitimate institutions.
Sure professors and universities seem to have a bias; but they do not have a ruling elite (usually setup by 1 person) that dictates from above. They may have hiring and tenure committees with biases but it's free to run in other directions and not completely beholden to a few founders/owners and their later corporate sponsors. The real conspiracies ARE the think tanks, not the universities and laboratories.
These think tanks primarily sprung out or grew from the Nixon era to give corporations more power over messaging. Their whole purpose is to promote intellectual whores or the occasional true believer and the rare intellectually honest ideologically aligned employee. It's not as noble as a lawyer (which for many is reaching too far already.)
Smoking is GOOD for you!! The think tanks said so! You think they gave up after losing on smoking?! They won for 30 years. It only expanded. Who has the time to take apart well funded fake science / studies anymore? Obviously, if there are any hints of truth they'll exploit it to the hilt and maybe do a little good by accident.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
when people who can only afford a 2 year old iPhone instead of the latest one call themselves poor. Lack of actual, serious, genuine trouble such as mass war, famine and roaming rape gangs apparently does seriosly crazy things to the psyche of a lot of people over many decades of calm.
Immigrants don't take even a tiny fraction of what corporations have been raking in since the 1980s tax cuts and deregulation. Immigrants are a net contributor to the economy. Particularly those who work illegally because they pay Social Security and payroll taxes but can't get the benefits.
From the article:
We make these claims based on a classification of households into those in extreme poverty (households spending below $1.90 per person per day) and those in the middle class (households spending $11-110 per day per person in 2011 purchasing power parity, or PPP). Two other groups round out our classification: vulnerable households fall between those in poverty and the middle class; and those who are at the top of the distribution who are classified as “rich.”
11 -110 per day, when already adjusted for purchasing power, is clearly claiming that only having 11/day per person is NOT poverty.
This story reminds me of that. By definition, middle class means those people in the middle of the socio-economic ladder. How far up or down on the ladder you place the cut off points is subject to change by whomever is collating the data, but not the definition itself.
I can't be bothered to read the source, but it occurs to me that this sort of story could be generated simply by moving the lower boundary downwards while also not recalculating the median or mean. I am no mathematician, certainly not a statistician, but the article just strikes me as bad statistics in action.
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folks buy used SUVs. Old ones. 10+ years. They last 20+ years because they're built on a truck chassis. Poor people are often blue color and they know this. There's plenty of non luxury SUVs. How do you not know this? I can get an old Suburban for $5k with 150k miles and it'll go another 100k miles with minimal maintenance. Get a Sentra with 150k miles on it and it's about ready for the dump.
/. they'll take you with it.
Of course some people have legitimate financial problems. You're cherry picking outliers to make yourself feel better about ignoring the plight of the working class. I get it. You're worried that if they're paid better, have healthcare and decent jobs that you'll lose those things. You're seeing those things slip away every day. Outside of the top 10% we all are. But dumping all over people for their mistakes isn't the solution. Yeah, if they'd put their heads down and got a college education then put their heads down some more and worked non-stop for 20 years they'd be doing OK. Not a lot of folks can do that, but us Americans act like it should be the norm. Start accepting people for who they are and you'll start seeing improvements in the world. If not things will keep going to shit, and unless you happen to be a millionaire slumming it on
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they go on craiglist or to a sled lot and but an old SUV because they're durable as fuck and cheap to fix. Again, truck parts. I drive a really old car (25 years) and the parts I get don't last. I get 2 years out of a radiator if I'm lucky. I don't have the option to buy better parts because they don't make them. That's what happens when you drive old cars.
Your BMW is nice and all, but the parts are _expensive_ and a lot of the work can't be done without special tools. Again, truck chassis. The blue collar guys buying those things can easily work on them.
If you've got a new Focus and can afford to maintain a BMW you've probably been away from the world of the dirt poor for a while. It's very different, very weird and completely counter intuitive. The world is a mess when you're part of the working poor.
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because it based on polls of people asking "Do you have $1000 bucks". That's so little money that it swings wildly, from as high as 80 to as low as 60%. But I've yet to see a poll where it drops below 60%, so I'm starting to use that number so that folks like you don't try to use the variation as a straw man to discredit the (extremely valid) point that a majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (e.g. they don't have enough savings to even pay 1 months rent/mortgage).
/.. They're going to eat you alive. And me too. And everyone else reading this post. Now is the time for us to show some worker solidarity and stand up to them if we want to.
And, well, I can't really thank you for living up to my expectations and bringing up that straw man, but there it is.
And yes, we can absolutely be in an era of people having a large amount of discretionary income while the majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The phrase your looking for is "income inequality". You're right that you can't have both the _majority_ of people living paycheck to paycheck AND the _majority_ of people having high discretionary income, but I don't see any evidence of that.
People buying cell phones does NOT mean they have a lot of discretionary income. It means that cell phones are cheap. Cheap Chinese electronics mean people can afford what used to be luxuries. OTOH things that used to be taken for granted (like college education, healthcare, affordable housing and transportation) have become luxuries that devour the majority of people income and drive them into bankruptcy.
You can't not know this. Again, you're strawmaning. Like the Avocado Toast guy, Fox News with their "Poor people have refrigerators and yes we are going to ignore anti-slum laws that require apartments to have fridges" and of course the old standby "Welfare queens in Cadillac buying Steak & Lobster with food stamps". It's prosperity gospel. Blaming the working classes' woes, which have largely been caused by outsourcing and a global race to the bottom, on poor moral character so that you don't have to do anything about it and can feel good about abusing them.
It won't last. You're not a member of the ruling class. The ruling class doesn't post to
Or don't. My kid graduates college in 2 years, I only have the one and odds are good my line is gonna die out. I'll be dead from heart problems in 15 years thanks to poor genetics no matter how healthy I am. I'm starting to lose hope for you guys. I can only do so much outreach. I'm not Bernie fsckin' Sanders here.
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APK is zero-class, poor as shit living in a hellhole dump in New York (itself a dump state.)
Feels good, doesn't it?
"I define the global middle class as those households with daily expenditures between USD10 and USD100 per person"
So basically, crap study.
Move the goalposts and you can even make people in section-8 housing look like "middle class".
The USA unemployment, count only those unemployed less than 13 months is around 3% to 4%.
Count every unemployed person in the USA and it's around 11% to 14%.
R we really better off? Some work 3 jobs. Hell, I use to work 2 jobs.
Red Neck just never learn. Vote like a Billionaire. Vote for Democrats that can create laws so we don't have to be a red neck no more. Lets create laws so we can also get $20 dollar as minimum hourly pay.
They don't want me to post this short smart message.
I've kept reading Slashdot through all the crap that's occured over the years, but now that right-wing propaganda is being published as serious news, maybe it's finally time to go.