Touché.I guess you'd know better than me what my friends and family have done
Is income inequality unjust, and if so, where is the injustice?
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Well, if you look at my previous two posts, I believe you will not find any mention of mine saying that income INequality does not exist. I think it does.
As to purchasing power between different income groups, here is an article about real household incomes per quintile. The scale may make it challenging to accurately observe changes in the bottom quintile, but I don't see any dramatic drops.
It sounds to me like you performed some very sensible financial management, which likely assisted you a great deal in navigating through the rough patch and helping you towards the success that was to follow. I think many people in many places who are in financially difficult circumstances could take heart and benefit by learning from your example.
I won't. I have no idea what those things cost in Texas, though I would guess you are not able to buy them with that amount of money. As I mentioned in my previous post, some form of government action may become necessary, and I see you've already engaged in discussion of utilising welfare schemes to help people in distress to make ends meet. Which I view to be an important discussion for society to have.
I think I briefly examined the abnormally high increase in cost of education in the United States in the same post as the previous point. A solution should be found, but I don't think making the employers pay the costs is it.Take a look there, and tell me if college rates have kept the same pace as inflation, and if it's as affordable now as it was in 1988Average undergraduate tuition and fees and room and board rates charged for full-time students in degree-granting institutions, by type and control of institution: 1964-65 through 2006-07
The primary purpose of the Digest of Education Statistics is to provide a compilation of statistical information covering the broad field of American education from prekindergarten through graduate school. The Digest includes a selection of data from many sources, both government and private...nces.ed.gov
Well, I certainly don't think helping them is too much, and a refrigerator is necessary to keep food from spoiling. I'm just worried messing with minimum wage laws too much will put more people into those cardboard boxes.
EDIT: Fixed a TYPO.
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FUUUCK this kind of attitude. This is the same pull yourself up by your bootstraps asshole mentality that leads people to believe that anyone that's poor and struggling are just not being financially smart enough and thus deserve what they get. You entirely gloss over the point where Tin says he was only able to do this -then- and would be incapable of doing it -now-. It's an incredibly short sighted, unempathetic viewpoint of got mine so anyone that didn't is just doing it wrong. Get that shit outta here.
You mean like raising the minimum wage?
Dave
Staff member
You forget that it's much more expensive to be poor than to have money. If you have nothing left over after bills (assuming you can pay all of them) then there's no way to make "sensible financial management" decisions. There's just nothing left. And god help you if you have an emergency bill or something breaks.
I think part of the problem is that you are from Finland. Finland has a strong social safety net where the US does not. This may just be something lost in the cultural translation.
figmentPez
Staff member
The graph adjusted for inflation shows that the gap between the richest and poorest grew. You literally proved my point.
Furthermore, it shows that the income for younger people rose slower, and in most years fell. Which, if you've been paying attention, is a major factor in why rich people keep getting richer, and why it's difficult to escape poverty. If you spend your 20s and early 30s investing, then compound interest puts you ahead for the rest of your life. If you spend your 20s and early 30s staving off debt and recovering from being underpaid, then you're behind from the start, no matter how much your income improves after that. Also, you get the double-whammy of young people getting paid less while also being expected to afford education, which costs more.
And those younger people making less money provides another reason why the graphs are skewed. Older people whose income slowly rose with inflation stabilize the graph, and hide the long-term effects on younger people.
FUCK OFF. I'm done with your bullshit. People who manage to succeed in a system stacked against them have to get lucky in addition to making wise decisions. There are too many setbacks that can happen that make it impossible to get by no matter how smart someone is with their finances. If you're going to continue to cherry pick examples, then there's no point in even trying. Especially right now, in the middle of a pandemic, when job loss has disproportionately effected women and minorities.
"See, one person succeeded decades ago, that means it can be done now!" Yeah, it doesn't work that way! The very articles you've quoted prove that younger people make less than previous generations did.
Heh. That was... a pretty significant typo.
I believe that, like @Tinwhistler , I've also already spoken about this sort of experience:
(link to referenced article)
Our situation was one where we suddenly went from being a two-income family to one with only a single income. To our good fortune, that single income (mine) was enough to cover all our ongoing expenses, but only barely. Once our child was born, we had to choose between either keeping two jobs and hiring a full-time nanny, or else just having one parent stay home. Since the cost of hiring a nanny would (unsurprisingly) offset the income from one full-time job, we decided to go the easier route, because paying a stranger $25k/yr to raise your kid just so you can continue to go to your $25k/yr job is... stupid. This is exactly the situation where something like UBI would have made all the difference in the world, but instead we were denied any aid (even food stamps!) because my single income happened to be just over the threshold where we could qualify for anything useful.
When my wife left work, we entered a sort of cycle. All recurring expenses got paid every month. Utilities, credit cards, food, mortgage, taxes, insurance, licenses, gasoline/maint, medicines, doctor visits, etc... these were all totaled up yearly and then split to determine how much needed to come out of every biweekly paycheck (with some slop to account for variance, such as with the heating bill). But that only accounted for the ongoing expenses, and with so little left over every month, that means credit had to be used as a buffer to soak up any spikes. Tires wear out. Our hot water heater needed replacement. I had to replace the floor in one entire room of my house. These sorts of things may have the name "Durable Goods," but there's a reason they aren't called "permanent goods," and like Terry Pratchett alludes to above, you have to spend a premium if you want them to last. Now that premium will probably be amortized over the life of the product, but a poor person is unfortunately barred from ever being able to take advantage due to their inability to pay the higher up-front cost.
As such, when I sat down one day to not only plot a year's worth of expenses and payments, I also decided out of curiosity to extend that and extrapolate how long it would take to eliminate all the finite recurring expenses (loans, etc) through a sort of Debt Avalanche strategy until there was nothing but utilities and other "forever" expenses left--basically to find out how long it would take before I could start putting money away for retirement. And the answer I got was that if I applied 100% of our disposable income to debt reduction, I would not be able to make my first retirement deposit until age sixty-three. Furthermore, this projection would only work if we could go decades without ever having any kind of large expense--in other words, we would have to forgo ALL vacations, Christmas presents, and so on, our house/appliances/car (singular!) could never break down nor have any parts wear out, none of us would be allowed to have any medical emergencies or medication changes, no new computers/phones/technology, etc., for the next 20+ years -- oh and all this without access to any kind of government/outside aid ha ha fat chance. That means 20+ years of waiting, being bored/trapped at home, all the while stressing about the plumbing, etc. Needless to say, it was... sobering.
We are MUCH better off right now, as I've also mentioned, but while my financial juggling skills have been legendary (and they unequivocally, objectively were!), the only reason we have managed to make so much progress in so little time is because we benefitted from a windfall--in other words, because we were LUCKY. If we had been forced to "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps" in order to do it all the True American Way, it would have been impossible, or else it would have effectively meant a 30yr period that would have the two of us holding our newborn child going in, but that child would be the only one coming out the other end, with his parents dead and surrounded by broken-down 30yr-old stuff.
Heh. I was composing my post for hours before I finally read yours, and it looks like we hit on many of the same points.
Also, the term for what you are describing is "Survivorship Bias."
--Patrick
We were discussing that very option, were we not? I don't think it is a good idea due to too many job losses and hardship for small enterprises. Seems like others feel differently.You mean like raising the minimum wage?
figmentPez
Staff member
You're not the only one to calculate such that number:
Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong
And that's for a single person who plans out their life from high school. I imagine it's a lot more difficult once someone has already suffered a setback.
Reality feels different.
This may help inform where TommiR is coming from:
www.theguardian.com
Nordic countries at odds with EU over minimum wage
Countries including Denmark and Finland fear one-size-fits-all plan could undermine collective bargaining
www.theguardian.com
So he's the one who gets to live in a fantasy land while the rest of us are in reality? Lame.This may help inform where TommiR is coming from:
Nordic countries at odds with EU over minimum wage
Countries including Denmark and Finland fear one-size-fits-all plan could undermine collective bargaining
figmentPez
Staff member
It's worth noting that all of the arguments TommiR is using against raising minimum wage are arguments that have been made against having unions.
"Unions will cause the price of living to go up." , "Unions shouldn't decide how much businesses should pay workers." , "Unions will make it impossible for mom & pop stores to keep up financially.", "I know that something has to be done about poverty, but Unions forcing businesses to pay people more will only result in fewer jobs.", etc. etc. We've heard it all before, and it's always been bullshit.
"Unions will cause the price of living to go up." , "Unions shouldn't decide how much businesses should pay workers." , "Unions will make it impossible for mom & pop stores to keep up financially.", "I know that something has to be done about poverty, but Unions forcing businesses to pay people more will only result in fewer jobs.", etc. etc. We've heard it all before, and it's always been bullshit.
Huh. I calculated that for our specific situation. I had no idea it was practically a constant.
—Patrick
So far this is a bit spread out across other threads but I'm going to put this take from The Hill here. I love the glee with which they report on the $GME spike.
Dave
Staff member
Wall Street Bets is currently set to private and there's talk the SEC is shutting it down for market manipulation - which it absolutely is not doing according to the definition of manipulation. There is no secret trading at all. In fact, the only market manipulation has been the Hedge Fund managers who tried to manipulate the stock to go up so they could short-sell and make a killing. But Wall Street and the government doesn't care if THEY do it, just normal people.
I'd wager (ha!) that even if WSB is completely banished, this isn't the end. $GME exposed the fragility of the sleight of hand going on in the stock market and these kinds of guerrilla tactics are going to change the game.
If using publicly available information and distributing it to the masses is market manipulation, so is the entirety of MSNBC and other stock focused tv shows, channels, and websites.
Let the mob take it's blood this one time and see how quick Wall St. learns to worry about it's actions... because the only reason -any- of this happened is because a bunch of hedge funds tried to tank GameStop on a schedule.
Let the mob take it's blood this one time and see how quick Wall St. learns to worry about it's actions... because the only reason -any- of this happened is because a bunch of hedge funds tried to tank GameStop on a schedule.
We need a political cartoon with GameStop and Express using the (reddit) Force to fight off a wave of hedgelords while force ghosts of Toys 'Я' Us, GNC, Forever 21, and others look on.
--Patrick
The subreddit reopened, it seems, and the SEC is watching but not moving on any redditors right now. https://thehill.com/policy/finance/536212-reddit-traders-cause-wall-street-havoc-by-buying-gamestop
That'd buy a LOT of used copies of NHL 2019!
I only learned that short-sellers were a thing today and I absolutely hate them. I never liked stocks or wall street because I always felt they drove companies to worry more about investors then customers, destroying risk in favor of easier profits (cough, video game industry, cough), but learning that some people basically "pre-sell" their stocks with the anticipation they can make some money off the company folding is absolutely stupid to me.
It's yet another expression of the sort of short-sighted, careless "Fuck the future, I've got mine" behavior that leads to that sort of character getting killed in some sort of schadenfreude-laden manner in all the movies.
--Patrick
In other words, all these hedge fund short sellers are the lawyer in Jurassic Park.
I was thinking of making that exact example, as a matter of fact. Either him, or Ellis from Die Hard.
--Patrick
There are stories being posted on WSB of people who suffered due to the financial crisis in '08, some really gut-wrenching stories of poverty and desperation. That lingering bitterness towards the banks, the hedge funds, the 1% is driving some people to throw their money into buying GME, just to screw the financial elite some more. They know they'll likely lose money if they hold too long, but it's not about the money. To them, this is personal. This is vengeance. This is payback for having to sleep on bare floors, or go hungry, or be evicted, or forgo their education, or watch their family and friends lose everything.
Dave
Staff member
And now Wall Street is no longer allowing people to buy these stocks. When THEY do it it's fine. Now they are just shutting down regular people who figured out how to game the system that's been gamed for decades by the rich.
And isn't what THEY are doing the real market manipulation?
And isn't what THEY are doing the real market manipulation?
All they are doing is encouraging these people to do it again. They'll find another weak stock, use gains from this to do the same thing.
From that thread:
Me, over in the Biden thread:
You know, if one person, just one person, buys GME and holds it, they may think he's crazy and they won't listen him.
And if two people do it, on an Internet forum, they may think they're both furries and they won't listen to either of them.
And if three people do it! Can you imagine three people joining RH, throwin' a bunch of their life savings into GME and hangin' on? They may think it's an Organization!
And can you imagine fifty people a day? I said FIFTY people a day signin' up, grabbin' a bunch of GME and holdin' onto it? Friends, they may think it's a Movement, and that's what it is... THE grassroots anti-hedge-fund-and-market-manipulation movement! And all you gotta do to join is to wanna help a financial firm tank the next time they try to game the market to their advantage.
With feelin'
--Patrick
Right up until RH locks these stocks because the firms that pay them probably asked nice.
It's my understanding that the reason why Gamestop is causing all this trouble is because teh hedge funds have shorted more stocks then there are, and when they come due they basically need to buy them all and then some.
I don't know if any other stocks that's in that situation.
There are unconfirmed reports that the Robinhood app is selling people's GME and AMC shares without their consent.