Look up 'Hell's Angels" by Hunter Thompson.
There's a chapter in the book where he talks about the economics of being a biker/drop out/artist circa 1970.
A biker could work six months as a union stevedore and earn enough to stay on the road for two years. A part time waitress could make enough to support herself and her musician boyfriend.
Or, to put it another way, in 1960 minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the cost of the average home was $11,000.00. A burger flipper could get hired on high school graduation day and be a home owner in 20 years without ever getting a raise.
That's the power of the New Deal coalition that ruled for 30 years.
You can still be a nomad at today's wages. I have a friend who works for a school year as a teacher, and then travels extensively for a couple of years. He lives like a nomad though, no fancy hotels or accommodations. That's what the Hell's Angels did back then too, in addition to plenty of additional illegal activities which provided them extra funding.
Well, one other thing in the 70s was everyone kind of lived a simpler life anyway. Not many had really luxurious things, and most places weren't trying to be anything fancy. It's just a place to live and the basics for most. I love what we have today, but I also miss those times as well since nobody cared if your place of living wasn't up to date with all the luxeries we come to take for granted as necessities or judged for possibly not having them.
Home ownership was lower in the 1960s than it is now:
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2024/01/30/home-ownership-rate-q4-2023
My idea of becoming rich isn't a fancy mansion.... It's having enough for all of my essentials and having plenty left over...
Ya know, what used to be normal?
I hate that we consider that rich. Being able to have a normal home, food on table and a bit left over for rainy days shouldn't be considered rich, it should be the baseline for everyone.
I wish I could both afford to have health insurance and afford to go to the doctor. I can't even afford to get insurance on my car and the health insurance cost 20% of my income but has a $2,000 deductible? What the fuck?!
Deductibles should be illegal it's like "I have insurance, but not really"
None of this is for you. This order, these laws.
So what kind of fucking idiot would stick to them?
I have that but it's pretty much cost me my entire self and identity. All I do anymore is work and sleep. I don't socialize ever and it feels sinful if I'm awake and not making a dollar of profit for the overseer.
Somewhere there's a middle ground, but I've never found it.
The purchasing of the median person power has NEVER been higher than now
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-purchasing-power-of-american-households
what time period are you referring to?
Ya know, what used to be normal?
Normal for white men in their 30s.
Edit: there is a huge caveat in my post which is I missed that these are household numbers, not individual numbers.
That would be amazing if it were true, but it's not. In 2022 the median income in USA was over $74k
Source: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html / https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/279/tableA1.xlsx
Reminder that median means "half of the samples are above this point and half of the samples are below, which means exactly what was stated in the OP "half of America"
I fully support the ideas from OP that corporations need to pay people better and wages need to at least attempt to track economic gains, but we can send that message while telling the truth and citing our sources to prove that the message is legit.
That's "Household income". Household income is the most useless and skewed statistic I can think of when it comes to equality and actual income per person.
In my mind rich people can afford to live in different homes. Poor people can not afford to do so. That means if 8 poor people who each make eg 10k a year share a household then their household earns 80k. Now if 8 less-poor people who each make eg 40k a year are split over four households then their households also make 80k each.
So now there's 4 households of 2 people each that make as much as 1 household of 8 people. Here statistically 100% of households make exactly 40k. Regardless 50% of those 16 people still make less than 35k a year.
In reality people inside one household have different incomes, which means even among the 4 slightly richer households in the example above some inhabitants would probably make less than 35k.
One question I have is how do household-statistics count people who have multiple houses? If a rich person owns 10 houses, then does it count as 10 households who earn >35k?
People with multiple homes typically have one home that counts as their residency and those living in that house count as a household.
Other homes are secondary or recreational homes and are not counted to have residents.
Sometimes, rich people will claim to live in one home in a low income tax jurisdiction, while actually spending more time in a high income tax jurisdiction. This is tax fraud and the most recent famous case I can think of is Shakira.
The median net compensation for American workers in 2019 was $34,248.45, which is less than $35,000. So, the claim in the screenshot is apparently accurate for individuals. Granted, household income is a better indication of socioeconomic standing for people with spouses.
/* Ignore my other comment if it’s not deleted for you yet *
This is specifically for combined household rate, which is different from individual earnings in that, well, it’s for two people and not a measure of how much the “average” American makes
It appears that the claim that half of Americans make under $35,000 is not accurate. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median personal income in the United States for 2022 was $40,480 (FRED - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N). Additionally, data from DQYDJ shows that at the 40th percentile, income was approximately $58,001, suggesting that less than half of the population earns under $35,000 (DQYDJ – Don't Quit Your Day Job - https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percentiles/).
Furthermore, the median household income was reported to be $74,580 in 2022, a figure that significantly exceeds the $35,000 threshold (Census.gov - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html). This indicates that the median individual and household incomes in the U.S. are both higher than $35,000, disproving the initial claim.
Only 46% of the population are working. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/whos-not-working-in-the-us-learn-the-basics So technically, technically the quote is correct. The stat you are quoting is the median salary of someone working full-time is $58,001. So it leaves out all those people un and underemployed or who just gave up on joining the workforce. Idk where you got the 40,480 because your link just goes to a broken link. Millennials are also making less money are less likely to be married and have higher unemployment numbers than gen x so our numbers would be more screwed than the overall median which is what the original tweet was referencing when saying stop asking us about buying houses or having kids.
If the median household income is 75k, assuming dual-income, then that’s probably where the 35k comes from: 75k/2 = 37.5k.
But there are significant amount of households who just have one person making 75K instead
so per worker, it's actually 59K according to the data
You're mixing measurements. Household != Individual.
For you and [email protected], isn't the Census bureau a national survey with self reporting that only covers like 1% of the population? Both "Fred" and dqydj.com use the Census bureau to calculate their viewpoints from what I understand? If I'm reading the government site wrong or looking at the wrong surveys please correct me. I understand the "Census" to be more of a judge or indicator of patterns but not to be used as concrete data in which to come to solid conclusions from.
I had ran into the census pdf as well before seeing this link, the beginning has an interesting passage which none of the authors seem to mention in the articles,
Real median household income was $74,580 in 2022, 2.3 percent lower than the 2021 estimate of $76,330. It was 4.7 percent lower than the 2019 median, the year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding recession (Figure 1 and Table A-1).6 The estimate of median household income in 2019 was the highest since 1967 source
Also an important caveat,
The income estimates in the main sections of this report are based on the concept of money income, which is pretax and does not account for the value of in-kind transfers. Estimates of post-tax income and inequality are included in Appendix B. Real median post-tax household income exhibited a substantial decline in 2022 from 2021. This was due in part to the expiration of policies introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as Economic Impact Payments and the expanded Child Tax Credit.
I've been reading over a few of the articles from www.dqydj.com and it feels very sketchy. I can pinpoint a few questionable passages that seem to pass on an intent, but in general how they dissect the data always has a "but we left out this part" footnote. It's especially hilarious with the article you linked,
What was the median household income? In 2023, $74,202 was the median household income in the United States. This is up from $70,181 in 2022 (unadjusted for inflation – see below).
They then proceed below to show a graph that completely contradicts their statement.
The paragraph above it makes a great copy-pasta though. If I'm reading any of this wrong, let me know.
are you trying to make me feel worse?
Median weekly earnings of full time workers is over $1100/week now, so the median full time worker is probably making well over $50k/year, if they can hold down a job for the full year and work full time hours.
Lots of people don't work because they don't want to work, and don't need to work: retirees, students, married to rich spouses, etc. Including them in the denominator can be helpful for measuring some things, but would be misleading to assume that the median individual income across all individuals would mean what most commenters in this thread seem to think it means.
If you look at what they count as full-time jobs, And then you compare that to how many people are actually willing to offer full-time jobs rather than just a job that takes all of your time you might better understand this.
The numbers are manipulated by what they choose to exclude. And $50,000 in today's dollars is less than an elevator operator made during the Great depression.
How the fuck is anyone alive?
Dual income, no kids, live in a basement.
Lots of roommates and/or a low cost of living location. Food and utilities are not much. Skip medical care, or just didn't pay for it.
Multi generational housing is back.
Also somehow that's true and a housing shortage is true at the same time.
Parents filling in a lot of gaps
A lot of distractions are cheaper now. Movies. Books. Steam sales. Social media is free.
Because the number is from before the pandemic when Trump was president
Surprise! People with no money dont spend money on stuff :O
"Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Sounds like commie talk to me, this guy should read Ad- Wait a minute
I'm currently making $24K as a grad student. Ain't nobody asking me shit!
The social contract:
"You get nothing. Work or die. Sleep in the barracks/pod. Eat the bugs."
Which sounds... I dunno, why? If that's the deal I'm offered I have a few questions: why do I care about your laws, your social mores, even you saying you own shit, right?
And whenever I ask them, I get the shit beaten out of me.
That’s what I made as a grad student ten years ago, damn.
And yet, that was still the most I’d ever made in my life at that point.
Stupid poor people. Simply be born wealthy, its not that hard.
“But if I pay my workers more, then I won’t get to have my third house and second yacht, and I’ll have to get rid of my secret second family. And think of the poor shareholders.”
Oh it's gotten way more overt than that. You're talking about plain old greed. Low wages are about power.
"If I pay my workers more they will have savings and that means they can quit if I treat them badly and they might open up a competing business."
The figure referenced in this tweet is likely referring to the 2021 net compensation chart we saw making the rounds a few weeks back. Indeed, it's correct, ~50% of all Americans made less than 35k per year in net total compensation in 2021.
In 2022, that figure rose to ~40k. So the trend is going in the right direction, at least. And IIRC, the chart does include teenagers, college students, people working part time or underemployed, etc.
35->40 is roughly what inflation would give you from 2021 to now.
35->38 is roughly what inflation would give you from 2021 to 2022. And that's when the 40k figure came from. So, the implication is still fairly positive.
Also, that first "stop" sentence is a bit 'ironic', considering that statistically, in the US at least, the poorer you are, the more children you have.
Shower thought: What if the journalists drawing attention to these problems are using twisted headlines to get the message past the same corporate masters? That the very voice of media is under the same yoke, struggling to get the word out?
Edit: So you change "Wage theft at all time high" to "Millennials claim fast food too expensive" to at least get people talking.
Afaik the headlines are normally not chosen by the journalists.
If they paid a living wage to all their employees, how could they afford all the lobbying and advertising?
That's half of United States rather than half of America.
If you want to be pedantic about how different countries abbreviate names and include Central and South America I bet the given figure is still accurate.
Do you correct people who say "Germany" instead of "Deutschland"? No, just typical USA hatred?
The media isn't asking these questions because they don't know the answers, they're asking because people are a lot more likely to think there isn't a clear answer when they see people asking the question over and over. If there's a clear answer, then people who want to believe that the younger generation is just lazy will have to come to terms with the fact that they're wrong, or worse yet, leave for another news channel that lets them keep denying it! No, they're going to keep on asking questions and letting the viewer answer them on their own, filling in the blanks to validate whatever biases they have.
I couldn't get link to work but I think you are looking at house hold. I looked up individual and it was 35.
Living with someone, roommate or partner, who you wouldn’t live with if you could afford the cheap solo life shouldn’t be a survival requirement.
I think you’re looking at stats for per capita income. I can’t find official data for individual income.
Yeah but I'd also start start asking why you're still voting Trump and believing he can be anyhow beneficial to your cause, or is that the other half making >35k a year who evidently then must have subconsciously self-organized like a swarm to unanimously vote for him?
But we need those billionaires, they taught me that tricke down pissanomics work and they are doing me a favour by paying me less!
Trickle down pissonomics.
Thank you, was a typo 😁
I will only ask you why you don't do something about it instead of just begging corporations.
35k I assume of dollars per year? Which is roughly 2900000 roubles month. I have another question: why the fuck everything is so expensive? 2.9M ₽/month is a lot. You can buy flat every few months in Moscow. Something is wrong with your economy and policies if THAT considered small.
Because prices for goods and services are all relative to the amount of money circulating in an economy.
The US has been operating at a deficit for over 30 years now, in addition to ~15 years of near-0% interest rates. The amount of ’new’ money flooding in is obscene, and is largely to blame for the massive rate of inflation seen across the board.
In an ideal scenario, deficit alternating would be directed towards the lower income brackets, as those funds would circulate through the economy multiple times before winding up in the back accounts of the Uber-wealthy eventually.
Unfortunately what has been happening since the 80’s in the US (and the west more broadly), is that the vast majority this ‘new’ money is issued directly to the most wealthy portion of society, who then use it to buy up essential goods and services (eg. Housing) as an investment vehicle; lifting the prices across the board without any means for the remainder of society to be able to continue to afford necessities like shelter.
Circling back around to my first sentence, imagine that the amount of roubles in the economy doubled overnight, and all of that new wealth was given to the richest 100 oligarchs.
They would likely buy out the majority of apartments in and around Moscow, skyrocketing their value due to the increased demand, jack up rent as high as possible and squeeze every last rouble out of the general population who won’t have seen any increase in their wages.
Damn, I am sad again.
It's the policies. Not enough stopping prices rising and not enough keeping the money from continuously flowing up. Taxes on large companies and the extremely rich keep going down. Politicians distract voters by making them angry about other issues so they don't realize they are voting against bringing the money back down and building the middle class back up and supporting the lower class.
and building the middle class
There should be worse? I think it's better improve baseline for everyone.
Well you see the problem is that people who make 35k USD and live in USA have CoL to mach in USD and aren't in Moscow. My rent for my 1Br is $21,600 yr. That means $13,400 is for everything else for the rest of the whole year (based off of 35k annual).
So why am I not buying several flats a year? Because your looking at how one currency works in an entirely different economy. Not within it's own economy. Your wage probably buys you a TON somewhere else in the world too. The problem is that you aren't there, you are where you are now where that wage is far less effective
cost of living is a removed
Because NIBMYs keep voting against new housing which raises the rents, raises the cost to buy a house. In places that develop, rents are trending lower, while in places that don't the rents keep going up
And ASK CAPITALISM why they are screwing the whole world and losing freedom.
Okay but the people living in poverty have more kids than the people making above median income.
Are you talking about the poverty line that moves with the number of kids you have or the median? They are two different measurements and the Poverty line for families with kids goes above the median.
This can’t be right. How does anyone survive on that?
From what I have seen, having a lot of roomates, eating very boring food and praying to a god you don't believe in that your car doesn't break down.
I looked around and the average salary Q4 last year was over $59k.. I don’t know what the meme used for the “half” metric, but if they used the entire population of the US that would certainly drive the average down by including people of non-working age. The average I cited probably doesn’t account for unemployment, but that’s only 3.7% so that’s not going to push the cited average much lower.
If half the working-age, non-disabled adults in this country were literally only making the meme wage or less it would be incredibly dire.
That website seems to be doing the mean average. The median average is 41k currently, and back in 2020 median income was 35k, so the OP post might be a few years old.
The (mean) average might be 59k now, but half of people are making below 41k. Median is generally a better stat because excessive incomes on the ends don't skew it massively. Adjusted for inflation this is essentially the exact same situation workers have been in for half a century. Wage growth is non existent, adjusted for inflation.
The average won't tell you the halfway point if the data isn't evenly distributed. The average of 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 500 is 50.9. The median is what you want for the halfway point of a set. This meme looks like it is a couple years out of date, most recent measured median from 2020 is 40,480. But the meme was accurate as of 2018.
Because it's wrong
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t02.htm
$1,145 a week is the median, do the math
98% outside of America make less than 35k.
Do 98% outside America have an equivalent cost of living?
PPP is your friend more so since some governments provide free healthcare and free education for their people
Also prices for many thing are way lower. The free healthcare and free education helps, but feeding your whole family for a few dollars a week does, too.
Including children is intentionally misleading.
I make less than $10k a year
This is why Trump is going to win. People aren't going to care that he's fascist. They're going to care that he isn't Biden.
Right, things were going much better under trump… right…?
Yeah, implementing a tax law that expires under Biden to cost the lower earners more is such a sketchy move.
It doesnt matter if they were or not. People aren’t smart. They will think wow gas was cheaper and my groceries weren’t this expensive. You can say Biden passed all these programs but it doesn’t matter if people feel their finances are worse under Biden than trump.
If your reflex argument is "My guy sucks but Trump does too" it's not an argument that's going to drive people to go vote Biden. That's an argument for apathy, which is kind of the point of the screenshot.
The post you're replying to wasn't a judgement call on who was better, they're just pointing out that these issues are what drive people's votes. If people feel like their situation sucks, they'll want to vote for a change. People don't vote by hard analysis.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted. This is what many experts cite as the reason for why Brexit happened, why Trump happened (the first time), and why so many people are siding with right-wing populism. It's basically an established fact now, and if the left/centre cannot fix these fundamental problems, the right gets in again.
There are a lot of partisan people who tend to treat the success of their side as a total moral imperative, and that mentality has led them to support some pretty crummy politicians going on 40 years.
It's why the working class and working poor have so little power. Fascism didn't just happen overnight. The 99% that always vote Democrat or Republican no matter what the candidate has done are the ones who enabled it.
Another example would be 1930s Germany. Instead of learning from history and working to resolve issues, we instead get countless articles of "actually things are better than ever and it's your fault you don't understand how good you have it". Anything to not interrupt the transfer the wealth to the rich. That's how capitalism devolves into fascism. The wealthy industrialists were great fans of the nazis (or were simply nazis themselves).
You could live like a god with that salary in south America.
You'd be earning even less
But then raw salary is less important than PPP. US PPP used to be pretty good globally, but costs have far exceeded wages over the last twenty years.
I dunno about a god.
I compared the most expensive city in Brazil (Rio De Janeiro) with a "affordable" city in US (internet told me it was Green Bay, WI).
And we're looking at a 50% difference. Which isn't much compared to the gap of say southeast Asian countries.
Dunno but 35K is kinda similar to what a non corrupt congressman earns in my country. A little bit more actually.
