I would encourage you to go work with average Americans in average towns. The facts on the ground are stark and eroding.
So, the people you are mentioning making 12-18/hr, are literally below 1 in 4, to less than 1 in 10. These are not “average middle class Americans” except maybe in that higher end. These are low wage earners and are far below “average”.
I mean absolutely nothing normative by this statement, nothing about whether this is good or bad or what we should do policy, socially, whatever. But saying someone making below the 10th percentile is average is like saying someone making $75/hr is average.
But even this feels like it is overstating things. You say folks are one car repair away from being homeless. And there is a lot of polling that shows people would struggle to pay for repairs. But full on homelessness? I can only assume that you are describing towns/cities that offer no transport assistance at all, that lands people into being so dependent on a car. I believe it, but I struggle to think this is literally half the nation.
The reality is that when 40% of your income goes to rent, how many days of work can you miss before you can’t pay rent? If your car breaks down, how many days will your employer tolerate while you try to get it fixed, assuming you have the money to fix it.
You don’t have to believe me, just look up the state on the percentage of Americans living pay check to paycheck.
Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with your given scenario. I actually lost my car when I was younger. Was a rough few months while I got used to commuting without one. And I was lucky to have a roommate that kept my cost of living down.
And I remain a proponent of increasing pay to service providers. As well as finding ways to provide cheaper living conditions. First time home buyer programs are great, but seem unlikely to be relevant for the workers we are talking about? I see the median age of home care nurses in rural areas drifts up to 51-53. Which, granted, I see the median age of first time home buyer is drifting up. I don't think it is as high as those workers, though.
I do think there is a problem here. I just don't think it rises to "half the nation lives in abject poverty."
That is, Henry Ford changed the world because he deployed capital to make workers so productive that they could afford to buy the cars they make.
A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough to put their own children in child care. So child care fails to revolutionize the world the way the car did.
I would agree with you that more capitalism would be better but only if you acknowledge that monopolies are not capitalism; they are the logical end and death spiral in unregulated and unmanaged capitalism.
They are the black hole that a dead star collapse into.
They are highly productive but the market doesn't value them. It values the backup forward on a basketball team - an almost completely non-productive job - more than a doctor. It values the owner of a company at $1 trillion, which is obviously absurd.
A $1T founder is rewarded for building a massive system that employs hundreds of thousands of people, moved technological progress forward dramatically, and has positively affected the lives millions.
A doctor provides life-saving care, but they are physically limited to helping one person at a time. A backup NBA forward might not save lives, but their work is broadcast and monetized across millions of screens at once.
Arguing that entertainment is "non-productive" ignores human nature. People gladly pay to be entertained. If sports have no value, do you feel the same way about books, art, and movies?
Probably the highest paid athletes in the world are european soccer players and the thing there is that these salaries can be justified in terms of the value top players bring in a game where being relegated can bring the money train for a team to a halt. You don't see working-class soccer fans complaining about this (they feel the value!) but the owners and many representatives of capital get fuming mad about it.
(Funny, growing up in youth soccer in the US taught me to think of the game as an exercise in Brownian motion where there are too many people on the field who aren't held accountable. It wasn't until I had an argument with a recommender system that couldn't accept that I hated soccer that changed my mind and turned me into one of those sports fans who rolls out of bed Saturday mornings to watch the Premier League that I realized how high the stakes are in the European game.)
Acting is about art, which brings up different issues and value. But looking at broadcast sports, the marginal value of doing that work is still zero: If that person didn't play football, someone else would and the entertainment benefit would be the same (excluding the few extraordinary athletes like Messi).
If there was some accountability those teams would be better or would be playing at a different level or not at all. So I'd argue pro/rel is a net plus because it leads to better play. Personally I watching the New York Red Bulls (Major League Soccer) play in person but overall soccer is the US is not up to international standards.
What blows my mind about soccer in the UK is that interest is so great that they can support two leagues below the Premier League and I know there are leagues below those. When I went to the Cornell/Syracuse game which is a legendary matchup that attracts a lot of youth players in the audience I was just thinking of the depth and width of the pyramid of soccer play from Kindergarten all the way to the world cup which is what makes the soccer universe so compelling. (Kinda wish more of us enjoyed college soccer!)
From a sports perspective, sure, I agree. I've often thought that the only non-competitive position on a sports team is owner. If anyone else, coach or player, performed for one year like the some team owners do for decades, they'd be out of a job. Owners won't agree to losing their jobs (fire the bottom 5%?), but relegation ... but would the other owners want the biggest market, for example, relegated?
But this discussion is about societal value. Whoever wins and loses, every game is net zero in entertainment value (whatever that is worth): 1 win and 1 loss. Every relegation is net zero: one team promoted, one relegated. Every championship: 1 team wins, another finishes 2nd, etc., no matter who it is.
The $1T business owner doesn't provide nearly that much marginal value to society.
The backup (or starting) NBA forward provides zero marginal value - if they didn't do it, someone else would and the outcome for society, entertainment, would be the same. It doesn't matter how well they play basketball; that doesn't make it more entertaining (with a few extraordinary exceptions). People in the US enjoy college sports, where performance is much worse, as much as professional sports. People root for their 'bad' local team as much as a good one: they do prefer winning, but that is a zero sum tradeoff with the other team's fans.
The income for the two examples are the results of economic distortions.
My kids' teachers provide contribute far more than the latter, and far more than they are paid.
Only someone blinded by ideology.
In Capitalism surplus economic value goes to the Capital class, so it seems like it is working as designed.
Why do you assume that Capital class has an ideological loyalty to the capitalist system? If they can get rich without having to compete or do any kind of effort, don't you think they'd prefer that to actually 'working' for the money? Once they've got theirs, do you think they care about what happens after?
Look at the good deal that the UAW has gotten for auto workers in the system, both US car makers and the union are pretty happy right to keep this system in place and shrink in the face of technological change like electrification not to mention abandoning small cars for large cars that are profitable for now.
(Funny how I often I see "good old boys" driving Asian compacts because they can afford Asian compacts, and I see office workers driving big-ass trucks)
There's an extreme selection bias there. If you run an agency that works with low income families you're not going to see a representative sample of the overall population.
Maybe. Unfortunately, what digitaltrees wrote here is ambiguous. It could also be read as this:
Our caregivers serve low income families. Those caregivers, who are our employees, earn $12-18/hr which is above minimum wage. Our employees absolutely struggle. Our employees are the ones using food banks and housing assistance because many are one car repair away from homelessness.
digitaltrees: which interpretation is correct?
I got into this to build software to lower admin expenses and improve operations for an otherwise under served industry. We are making progress and have supported thousands of people in having stable careers. The horror stories I could tell of other agencies exploiting people due to incompetence or malice are shocking.
???
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Note this is already inflation adjusted, so "housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing" is already accounted for.
The more relevant statistic is that median real wages have only grown by about 29% across 40+ years (~0.6% per year)
Since 2000, medical care costs have risen by 121.3%, hospital services by 275%, college tuition and fees by 196%, compared to consumer goods by 86.1%. Things like TVs and electronics went way down in costs while the essentials have absolutely skyrocketed. The cheap stuff drags the average down.
You need a lot more than a single graph to argue against the quality of life going down for Americans.
Where are you getting household income from? It clearly says "Personal Income"
So the case that quality of life is trending downward is still completely valid and shows why you can't just point at a single graph and say "see? line go up therefore quality of life fine"
Labor force participation rate for both males and females has basically been flat for the past decade, so the recent discontent about "costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse" is still unsupported. Moreover the 1970s was never an era of stay at home moms. Female labor force participation rate was already 45%, against around 78% for male. It also topped out at around 60% (so basically 15% increase, max) with the rate for males dropping.
Median personal income is per individual, which is obvious. After I corrected myself the question then became "did the typical individual's real income keep pace with the cost of the things they can't avoid buying?". The answer is no. And I already showed why.
There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
If you put Germans whose lives function in a US-style, even just getting to work will be a huge drag.
Misery depends on the structure of society. Here in Sweden I can walk to work. This means that I'm spending zero money on travel to work, and that my travel to work contributes $0 to Swedish GDP. But this is actually better than if Swedish GDP were higher and I was traveling by car.
This is one way in which GDP can be extremely misleading.
That's you. but nobody In Sweden drives to work?
I see walking to work as an relative to each individual and their job lcoatiopna dn circumstance of where they live, not a country related thing.
For example, ,ost of my jobs in EU that me and my gF had required a car to get to work because companies put their offices out in the boonies to save money so walking was not an option, and neither was public transport.
> But this is actually better than if Swedish GDP were higher and I was traveling by car.
GDP growth "experts" would disagree. It's the reason we don't have mandatory WFH for white collar jobs after Covid proved it's possible and salves the environment
A smaller fraction than in the US. I think most people I know drive.
>I see walking to work as an relative to each individual and their job lcoatiopna dn circumstance of where they live, not a country related thing.
Well, it isn't. It's about how walkable environments are.
>GDP growth "experts" would disagree. It's the reason we don't have mandatory WFH for white collar jobs after Covid proved it's possible and salves the environment
Well, they may disagree, but the whole point is the goal of society isn't GDP, since GDP is easy to game with things like creating situation where people are effectively forced to waste energy, drive to work-- that sort of thing.
Then why are people(westerners mostly) bullying Japan for stagnant GPD growth and refusing mass migration to boost their GDP?
* Median household income in Mississippi: $44,717
* Median wage in Germany: €5,370 per month, equals $73,565.
So even the individual median wage in Germany is more than 50% higher than the median household income in Mississippi.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
But in addition to the raw numbers, you have to keep in mind that they don't account for cost of living and that different countries account for various services differently, especially health care.
I would assume this doesn't account for Germans having different healthcare costs which will aboslutely wreck the average American household with how fucked our system has become.
People watch too many influencers and lose track of reality -it’s not all Beverly Hills and Kardashians and Real Wives of X-town everywhere. That’s fantasyland.
Gentrification has also bought up a lot of the older areas and created what feels like faux poverty aesthetic gated apartments and over priced eateries with random shit sprinkled in like Axe throwing places. (Please someone where did all of these axe throwing places come from)
Things are also different down here because you see a massive loss in land/homes lasting families for generations due to petro-chemical and now data center companies buying up whole towns to bulldoze and built into pollution centers.
I'm seeing a lot more cars with doors, bumpers and windows missing because people just need their scrap heap of a car to continue to get them to work across town. We don't have walkable cities and even homeless people sometimes have cheap bicycles with scrap weedwacker motors bolted on because they can't afford a car or the time to get a license.
Someone else brought up the real truth, a lot of us are living paycheck to paycheck and entirely beholden to how much room we still have on various credit cards to buy food after paying bills. Eternal debt slavery is becoming extremely common.
It's not abject poverty, its just dire circumstances for a huge number of everyday folk.
People want healthcare, they want cheaper housing, they want high quality jobs, they want lower crime. Material outcomes absolutely matter and there is zero evidence to suggest that "high incomes" in the US translate to anything except more blood for corporations to extract.
A lot of the US looks like they're doing great but fits into the category above.
Non-poverty would look like:
* You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent
* You make enough money to be on trajectory to save up to pay for your own food, housing, transportation, and medical expenses in retirement when you are physically unable to serve the workforce
So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright?
> and medical expenses in retirement
You're saying I'm in poverty because I understand and intend to use Medicare?
These are trivially poor definitions.
My definition is if you need to borrow money to put a roof over your head, at the minimum renting, you're in poverty. There are huge chunks of the US population borrowing money to pay for rent.
If your locality doesn't provide adequate public transit, then a car is a necessity, and the onus is now on the locality's economy to make sure everyone can access that; if your locality doesn't pay high enough to afford that car without borrowing money, then yes, you're in poverty. Alternatively, the locality can choose to provide adequate, safe public transit, and the bar of poverty would change.
Most of the US doesn't think this way because they're delusional and have been conditioned to feed the financial system and pay for things with money they don't have.
I think this isn't as unreasonable as it seems to everyone living it. It's like water to the fish.
We are conditioned that everything should be fueled by more and more debt, and your dollars should constantly be devalued so you can't stop grinding.
The little people can never be allowed to just work enough to accumulate what they need and then take it easy.
The best approximation would be the homeless population in the US (about 500k people), but even then most homeless would not even qualify.
"Half" is a gross exaggeration.
I assure you that when your basic housing and nutrition are uncertain and missing even a few days of income will result in cascading effects of hunger and homelessness, the underlying stress is overwhelming.
It doesn’t have to be this way, we don’t let bullies steal all the toys on the playground and destroy the very ecosystem that they want to have fun in, why are we letting capital accumulate in the hands of the most effective capitalists at the risk of destroying the very markets that let them succeed.
I say that as a capitalist, if we lose the system because we allow unchecked Monopoly and wealth concentration, we won’t get it back.
Maybe it feels good to say "actually everyone is a victim of capitalism", but it muddies real necessary work when it comes to determining whether to prioritize how resources need to be allocated between a disabled person living on the streets vs a graduate student who is currently just a little underwater on their credit card payments.
I find it hard to believe that half the US would meet the criteria for any reasonable definition.
Any definition of "abject poverty" that includes a comfortable lifestyle and $12-15k excess income every year is not a serious definition.
Source? All the ones I know of use questionable methodology like: "being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage".
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-amer...
I'm asking you the question because a statement like 50% of [population] is making a claim to some notion of what they expect society to look like
you introduced the benchmark "not being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage", though I would expect a modern day society that makes any claim to be wealthy to be able to have above 50% of it's population to be able to support something like that as that would indicate they can support a small family
You're saying that's not a good benchmark, so I'm trying to understand:
1) Do you have a different benchmark?
2) Is your key complaint that being unable to own a 2 bedroom house doesn't mean that individual or family is in "abject poverty"? In which case fair, though I would ask what does mean abject poverty for you?
It seems like you're saying 2, but I want to be sure
The exact number is heavily contested[1], so I know better than to provide my own. That said, the official poverty lines are a pretty good place to start, and it's pretty safe to say is that whatever the line for "abject poverty" actually is, "2 bedroom apartment on 1 person income" is pretty far away from that. That claim doesn't require me to provide a specific poverty line.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#M...
Well, that's (at minimum) what you need to raise a family and replace yourself in the labor pool.
Either the Western world allows people the financial and real estate resources to have children in the next 5 years or we're all fucked. The tail end of the boomers enters retirement in 10 years and while millennials can take care of the boomers, eventually we will need to be taken care of, and for that millennials need to have children now as long as we still can.
Economics could as well and the system would still work.
Why is it impossible for Americans to live with 300 sq ft per person like baby boomers did as kids, but now we must live with 600+ sq ft per person?
Because the American suburbia developers want some nice chunky profits. It isn't enough any more to sell glorified matchsticks and cardboard.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
The 350 million Americans looking at the top of the US economy and crying need to turn around and take a look at what's behind them.
There are something like 7 billion people behind them, worse off.
https://research.senedd.wales/research-articles/poverty-and-...
Does being poor cause mental health issues, or are mental heath issues a cause of poverty... The answer here clearly better access (read free) to mental heath care, and it wont have the impact one would think (see the UK data).
> Look at other stats like rising infant mortality
You mean the attributions tied directly to maternal complications: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr033.pdf
The thing is we changed how we collect this data, to something that would be considered bad: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/13/maternal-mo... - There are tons of criticism on how we collect this data, they are valid, if you dont like this source, find another its a mess of our own creation.
> dropping IQ etc.
The largest root cause is that people spend too much time on their cell phone dumbing themselves down. Think about that one... no one feels the need to elevate themselves, they are happy to spend time on what amounts to leisure. Would you have sympathy for the person who gets fired cause they chose to play 18 holes of golf 5 days a week rather than do their job?
The first article you site contradicts that position.
I would also argue that regardless of the cause, society should provide mechanisms to take care of people. Just like we don’t blame people for crop failures, hurricanes, fires or other catastrophic health issues, and instead have insurance, fire departments, etc. poverty is a consequence of social policies. We should strive to create social policies that have less inequality because they are more stable, safe and consistent with what everyone would want if they didn’t know what role they would occupy.
This is a functionaly unmovable number. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
> you can't afford rent
Because we as a society have drastically changed how we use housing: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... -- Multi generational housing was a thing. Having roommates was a thing... the premise of "golden girls" would be lost to a modern audience, because cohabitation is dead. The premise of "bosom buddies" would get canceled for its insensitivity, but no one would understand because boarding houses are all but gone.
Building every one in the world an American style house, would cripple the globe. Concrete, Sand, Copper, Wood are going to become massive problems long before we get close to getting the job done.
> Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket.
You think that vacation homes are causing the housing crisis? Are eroding wages elsewhere? The industry of these locations is TOURISM, and a fair bit of it is international. (Not Nantucket).
It's not like whaling is going to make a comeback to make Nantucket a viable place to live again.
> Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"
Plenty of Americans look at musk and say "lets eat the rich" ... the problem is that the rest of the world has those same hungry eyes for us.
> "from people richer than them"
You may want to spend some time reflecting on where that money came from. How much lobbying and market manipulation, employee abuse, bullying, exploitation, wage theft, government (taxpayer-funded) grants and infusions of cash, bribery, corruption, dark patterns, law-breaking were involved, and how much tax avoidance and evasion was involved.
Anyone who believes this has absolutely no concept of what abject poverty looks like.
That is a very common reality.
The range of human experience is longer and broader than being a 20 something single young person
> half of the US is living in poverty
This statement is also false.
> I encourage you to try to live on anywhere from $7 to $15 an hour
That's the bottom quintile, not the bottom half. The Median household income is $83,730, which would be more like $41.50.
Instead they said "abject poverty" as an emotional emphasizer, and people rightly called them out.
The median (not average) household income in the US is 80K USD. p25 is 40K. p10 is 20K. They're struggling, sure.
But I wouldn't call that abject poverty.
But you could. There is no law of the universe that is going to stop you. Words are something randomly made up by humans.
> it's just plain wrong.
Again, words are completely made up, so it can't really be wrong in the traditional mathematical sense. It could be misinterpreted, perhaps. Of course that is dependent on how you've chosen to randomly make up "wrong".
People responding reject that, because if you're not being specific, you're not making an argument, you're just here to be an asshole.
Since you've made this point, I've gone ahead and reported that comment.
Suppose their definition for abject poverty is: having an income equal to or below the median income. Yes, they would be right. Is it a problem that they are right?
However, you would also be right in agreeing that having an income equal to or below the median income equates to half the population, so you are wrong to think that only they can be right. Of course, that assumes you have used my definitions for these terms and not your own. It is likely that, once we are updated with your definitions, that you were right all along. What are your definitions for the terms you have used?
That's the beauty of discussion. You don't need to guess. You can ask!
This is absolute nonsense. We use common language to refer to common things in understandable ways in order to communicate with each other. You don't get to just handwave baldly incorrect statements as "well maybe he just has a different personal definition" without basically rendering literally all conversation moot and pointless.
"Yeah, I know he said 2+2 is 5, but you don't know he defines 5" is just as patently silly.
Common doesn't mean ever-present. In practice, it is impossible for everyone to converge on a shared understanding for all terms. There are provably many people in the world who have never even heard the term "abject poverty" before. They cannot possibly understand what the term means to you. Fundamentally, "abject poverty" can only mean in that comment what the author believes it means. That may overlap with your understanding, but it also may not. We can also prove that he is not a mind reader and thus cannot tune it to your understanding. He is limited to his understanding and his understanding alone.
A good faith actor who believes there may be a discrepancy in understanding will seek clarification. That is what a discussion forum is all about. If one does not want to participate in discussion, why be here?
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
>link for "Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989"
income =/= wealth
And the counter argument is wealth is different than income the implication is that wealth inequality is 1) lower than income inequality and 2) more important for some unspecified reason.
But if wealth inequality is more extreme then that means 1% control GREATER than 80% of wealth. So point 1 is false. And point 2 is most likely irrelevant because greater concentration likely means whatever harm from one category would track the other category
That's still measuring wealth, not income. The correct statement to draw from the chart is that top 1% by income have nearly as much wealth as the bottom 80%.