- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or register to comment.
There are many things that need change, but fixing the housing prices isn’t complicated, it’s just unpopular. You just need to take make speculating on housing as an asset very expensive. This will drive down the demand from non owner occupiers (businesses). It will also reduce the value of the largest asset most people own. People who invested so much into owning a home with the expectation that it will appreciate aren’t going to support policies that do the opposite.
We should’ve been taxing homes or land that people own but are not their primary residence, from the start.
It would be super easy to implement, and flexible - if housing prices are too high for 75% of the population, you raise those taxes little by little and the problem eventually sorts itself out. If it’s no longer a problem, you reduce the taxes.
Or you keep those taxes the same and use the money to reinforce social programs to make sure no one in your area ever has to go homeless or hungry again.
Por que no los dos?
Raise taxes on 2nd homes, use the tax to fund social programs
The commenter I replied to said"when it’s no longer a problem" to lower the taxes again, I’m suggesting to not lower them again. People who have multiple homes should be paying maximum taxes on all luxury items- homes, cars, airplanes, income, everything possible, and that money should be used to support social programs.
We already have first, primary, and only home exceptions to many things. There’s no reason Frank and Martha’s house should be any less valuable. The problem is housing as speculation is causing houses to be priced higher than their real value.
Man I’m glad I was born and raised in a working class town now. Prospects looked pretty dire here when I was a kid. Local industry fell flat in the 1990s and into the 2000s so tonnes of my fellow millennials left to go to uni and get jobs in cities. That kept the cost of living here low and I was able to buy my first house at 22.
Now those deserters are saddled with student debt and unaffordable rents with no prospect of ever buying their own home. Recently the local industry started taking off again in a big way. I’m already making a pretty good wage but I’m also in track to have a Masters Degree and a high paid job after 3 years with a house that should have its value skyrocket over the next decade.
We have the ability to feed everyone in the world, but we don’t. We could house everyone, but we don’t. We could heal everyone, and we don’t.
Capitalism was great for raising a huge portion of humanity out of poverty. It has its limits however, and we are reaching them. It’s time to find a new way of doing things, not for profit, but because those things need to be done.
I am that educated couple. Wife has an associates and was just able to find a small job. I have associates, BS, and MA and can’t even get a fucking interview because I don’t have the absolutely insane list of qualifications on my resume that these companies are demanding for a half-decent paying job. I did everything I was supposed to and they still won’t fucking pay me.
At this point gen a or g or whatever is going to live in the popular democratic republic of north America
The most important thing is the rich getting richer
The Market Has Spoken: Get Fucked.
A riveting exploration of the markets and society of the 21st century that will be written in 2200 lol
Reproduction isn’t a luxury item. It’s a survival need. The only reason that it’s viewed as such in western society is because our economic system is all kinds of screwed up. People have been brainwashed to consider survival, as a society, in terms of our economic systems rather than in terms of the actual people.
Population growth can go too far, can’t it?
Last I checked the world seems to be ending around us one day at a time as we march towards an ever higher global temperature, but if you want to say that’s normal and fine and we’re gonna be ok in 250 years then overpollution from overconsumption isn’t a problem yet.
At what point does the earth become overpopulated? are we already there? if not… what’s the magic number?
Uh, we are already past resource tipping points as human beings. This means we use more resources than the Earth is producing in a single year, which also means we cut into the resources that have been generated in other plentiful years (like old growth forests, fish populations, etc). If we efficiently utilized the space we have we could raise the bar for that resource tipping point, but we don’t.
So yeah. TL;DR: it’s not necessarily that we’re overpopulated now but our population size + overconsumption = effective overpopulation.
When I saw in a video that 96% of animals are either human or living for human consumption it was the biggest what the fuck moment of my adult life.
96% of mammals, not animals. So it does not count fish, birds, reptiles, insects and etc…
I mean, it’s still a shocking number
PS: ops, someone already replied that… sorry
96% of mammals by biomass. Still a what the fuck moment, but a noteworthy difference between that and all animals.
According to Limits to Growth- 2040
We outsourced the need for reproduction to the periphery. But we’re also a deeply racially anxious nation, such that 1.4B Han Chinese and another 1.4B East Indians fundamentally terrifies us as some kind of threat to… idk, Aristotle and Elvis Western Culture? Like humanity as we know it will be irrevocably changed if we don’t live like our grandparents did in the 1950s, with all that that entails.
People have been brainwashed to consider survival, as a society, in terms of our economic systems rather than in terms of the actual people.
The thing that sticks in my brain and keeps me up at night is the idea that I’m going to die without a family, alone and abandoned, in a country that sees me as little more than a wad of cash it can squeeze dry and dispose of.
The elderly in this country are just another kind of commodity - a pass through by which some sales shits running a call center in the San Fernando Valley get enough to cover their mortgage notes. I’d like a group of people around me as I get into my senior years who see me as another human being, and I get the sense that this is going away right alongside health care and education and housing.
Han Chinese
You’ll have to forgive people for being cautious when presented with an ethnic supremacist state actively working towards global domination.
I feel like “The Han Chinese are naturally imperialist, taking over the world is in their blood” is the sort of shit I’d hear out of a Bond Villain from the 1960s.
Letts : You know the person who had the greatest positive impact on the environment on this planet? Genghis Khan, because he massacred forty million people. There was no one to farm the land. Forests grew back. Carbon was dragged out of the atmosphere. And had this monster not existed, there’d be another billion of us today, jostling for space on this dying planet.
Utopia (tv series)
Damn. Not so Utopian after all.
Yea man, that’s totally what I said. @@
Survival need for species can be vastly different to that of individuals, like mantis’ sexual cannibalism.
yeah for us thats purely recreational.
Not exactly the best example, since that’s not a typical behavior but a result of poor scientific practices. Mantises only take that action when extremely stressed, which is frankly a lesson we should be carefully considering.
Or humans being able to live well past their ability to bear children. It might not make sense for an individual to live that long, but it’s better for a species, since it means that you have members that aren’t having their own kids, but are capable of helping care for them while the parents do other things.
Help me understand please, how is it a survival need? Maybe back in the 1800s when you were working a farm and needed to produce extra pairs of hands to help? Nowadays it seems to me that while it might be nice to have a proper family having children is a financial burden that many can’t bear, whether they want to or not
It’s a need in that it’s programmed into your biology, and most people can’t thrive without it. Surveys of middle-aged people find about 1 in 5 are child-free. Out of those, about 1 in 10 are so by choice. That leaves 49 in 50 that either have or wished, but couldn’t have, children.
It’s a need in that it’s programmed into your biology, and most people can’t thrive without it.
That’s not what survival need means.
That leaves 49 in 50 that either have or wished, but couldn’t have, children.
Again, this doesn’t make it a survival need.
That ratio seems off? 49 out of 50 people wished they could have children? I highly doubt that. If going by your logic you say that 1/10th of 1/5th of folks are child free not by choice. Say out of 50 people that math equals 1 person per 50 folks regret not being able to have kids.
No. Out of 50 that’s 40 who had kids, 9 who didn’t and regret it, and just 1 who didn’t and are content.
Could you link me to those surveys?
That is not a link to a survey, and more importantly it doesn’t even say what you claim.
“One in six women and one in four men have not yet had children by the age of 45. One of the reasons is that women do not want to have children with men of lower status,” says the researcher.
“In one generation, the proportion of childless women has increased from 9 to 15 percent among 45-year-old women and from 14 to 25 percent among men of the same age. This is far more than the 5 to 10 percent who state that they do not want to have children.”
Survival? I’m just waiting to die. I can’t afford to live and the world just keeps getting worse. Oh, and the clusterfuck of conditions I’d be passing on? Not something worth cursing another human with.
Gotta tax the rich.
It’ll have two effects… 1) not as much money being dumped into real estate. 2) more money available for social programs.
Though on the other side of things some expectations may need to change. Owning a house is going to be really only possible if you live in a rural area. Having a house in the suburbs and having a couple of cars in the garage that you use for everything from commuting to work to picking up groceries will have a high environmental cost so that style of life should be expensive.
Though we can improve the livability of apartments, and lower rent (or mortgage costs for a condo) for high density apartments. Make them larger improve nearby greenspaces nearby so people can comfortable raise a family in high density residential areas.
A lot of the real estate thing is problematic politically. Everyone says they want housing prices to go down, but people that already own a house really don’t. The value of their house will drop if that happens. But given that the suburban ideal isn’t actually all that ideal considering environmental factors, having the price of a house stay high while reducing the cost while increasing the quality of high density housing feels like it should be a politically achievable goal.
But yeah tax the rich, they aren’t all that motivated to to fix housing prices given their current investments in real estate will lose value if they do that. Municipal governments aren’t likely going to zone high density housing either since they get more tax revenue per person from low density housing. If people in low density housing use cars instead of transit, tax revenue - costs of services per person is higher than for people living in high density housing. I’d suggest changing how municipalities raise taxes to avoid this, but saying we should get rid of property taxes sounds like some pro-wealthy kind of thing so isn’t politically feasible. So… tax the rich use the money for social programs, building better public transit and building high density housing.
So yeah the expectation of living the suburban dream isn’t really feasible in most places because of environmental factors. But living a different kind of dream living in a spacious apartment with a green space nearby with reliable public transit available to take people where they need to go seems achievable. And dare I say, may even be better than the suburban dream. But we gotta tax the rich to make it happen.
How do we tax the rich?
Get rid of an income tax and move to a federal sales tax on everything. Provide cost of living stipends for everyone. It could provide a safety net and stop tax avoidance schemes.
Sales tax on everything… isn’t a tax on wealth. Why not just do some of the things Scandinavian countries do?
Why is it so all-or-nothing on any one idea? There is a lot of nuance in how you tax income, and the teeth and regulation in order to effectively tax corporations. E.g. Anything over 400k, taxed at 90%… is something. Suggesting to tax it instead at 0% because you can slap on some flat sales tax… is just silly.
Doesn’t help that politics are very corrupt, politicians can do insider trading, media is owned by private interests, unions are demonised and unsurprisingly workers rights are almost non-existent, and you have a two party system that’s deeply flawed.
The US had a real shot at moving in the right direction, but the DNC saw it fit to sabotage its own candidate. I’d imagine treason charges for something like that… but, not even an apology.
Anyways…
You don’t need to tax wealth. Amased wealth will be taxed when the wealth is spent.
I understood your argument. It’s just not how it works. Even if amassed wealth was used to buy stuff as a exchange of goods, it wouldn’t be anything significant, and it would be less significant the more wealth we’re talking about. That in itself should clue you in on why this doesn’t work.
If taxes is a problem in terms of inequality, why… not tax it more progressively then? That’s the whole point of it. Reduce taxes for lower brackets, increase for higher brackets. Even if you thought 0% tax makes sense, which sort of already exists for the lowest bracket, and you want this to apply to more people… then, just do that, starting at from lower income side. Do the same starting from the upper income side, but there you increase it significantly. How far you go, is politics.
Put into place stricter regulations for the exploitation of workers. Actually enforce this stuff, not just give fines that are less than the gains. Replace your election system, it’s broken. Etc. There are soooo many things, that actually make sense, and would have a good effect. But looking at say 400k+ incomes and thinking “tax it at 0%”. Reagan’s grave would look like the classic zombie stereotype, except it would be his dick protruding from the ground.
The thing a consumption tax fixes is eliminating all the tax avoidance schemes. People living off their wealth don’t pay high taxes, they take out loans against their wealth and pay the loan back at 5% instead of the 20% capital gains tax. Carl Icahn, an investor was able to pay no income tax using this scheme. He had an adjusted gross income of $544 million but deducted it all from paying his 1.2 billion dollar loan.
People living off their wealth don’t pay high taxes
That’s… why you might want to tax wealth? Sales tax does literally nothing to address the problem of neither wealth nor income inequality. Income tax does address some of it. Removing it just because it doesn’t address all of it is absurd. Thinking it is covered by sales tax, is even more so. Those who would be in the lower tax brackets would have less buying power, and those with high incomes would be having a party, well… until the fairly immediate collapse of the economy and the riots start, that is. Just because one aspect doesn’t cover everything doesn’t mean you remove it all-together and replace it with… well, I’m still curious.
The ways to circumvent paying taxes, is what you go after, but you don’t do that by just removing existing obstacles. You do it by adding more obstacles. You can still tax income, and you adjust it to tax the high income earners much more. You evaluate wealth and tax that. You put a tax on absurd inheritances. You limit the profitability of trading necessities (e.g. housing) as goods by also high taxation.
The only thing I objected to in your original comment was to suggest 0% tax on income… and that this is compensated for by increasing sales tax… as if it solves anything at all. Income tax accounts for about 50% of the US federal budget. Tricks to avoid paying income tax are well known, but the idea of not addressing the issue, but instead just “start from scratch”, or suggest to remove something fundamental to the function of a modern state, is … tiresomely American. It’s like the Churchill quote of Americans always doing the right thing, after having tried everything else.
Everything above the neck goes.
The idea that any working class boomer could raise a family/ own a house on a single income is a myth. That was only true if you were a man, and happened to be white. The federal government built the interstates to the suburbs, the GI bill loaned the money to buy the house, and sent you to college. All to the exclusion of POC and women.
Even the labor unions told black men that you couldn’t be in a union without a job, and couldn’t get hired unless you were in a union. This “golden age” economy was also when a divorced woman couldn’t get a bank account, an apartment, or a job.
The capitalists weren’t sharing more wealth, they were sharing with fewer people.
Sorry no, you are deliberately sliding this discussion.
The capitalists weren’t sharing more wealth, they were sharing with fewer people.
A higher proportion of business’s income went to wages, so yes, they were sharing more wealth (but only because they had to, because of the strong unions).
But yes, that was only being shared with white men
Okay, and now it’s even worse.
Anytime I see “the good ole days” brought up, I remind them they were only good to them because only cishet white men were allowed to participate.
deleted by creator
Yeah… so, the record high inequality is just nothing to think about, because suddenly we don’t deserve to own a house for one life’s worth of work…? What a joke take
deleted by creator
While I agree that in general the demands of wealthy nations are frequently excessive, there was a time in those nations where, as the meme describes, relatively poor families could own a home and support a family on a single income. That disappeared not because everyone stated wanting more, but because of constant, intentional inflation of house prices and depression of wages (relative to inflation) by capitalists.
Any attempt to redirect blame onto the people this affects, by accusing them of “wanting too much” plays into the hands of those capitalists.
To me the point is more that the post WW2 boom and the resulting ability of a cashier to buy a home and support a family was somewhat an aberration, not a new normal. Something similar could happen again if the conditions were right (much more modest house building via major zoning reform, free education, healthcare, and childcare, high taxes on the wealthy) but we’re not actually achieving those necessary things politically, so here we are. And even if we did achieve all that, new homes won’t look like current new homes because 4000 ft2 suburban homes are fundamentally unsustainable.
I agree with that, certainly. I think at least the ability for everyone to buy a home should be normal.
deleted by creator
Lmao I’m sorry do only “westerners” have phones? Or clothes? Do people outside the west not have trinkets that they don’t really need? Of course they fucking do. Moving to a poorer country only works if you move with significant capital… If you are from America and you have no money, moving to Venezuela just means you still have no money but now you live in Venezuela, not sure how that’s supposed to help.
Not sure what your point is re politicians. They bear culpability alongside the capitalists, yes.
deleted by creator
When you or I bought our phones doesn’t matter because even if I bought a top of the line phone once per year that wouldn’t buy me a house. I don’t, fwiw, and I’m privileged enought to be able to afford to buy a house - but I also don’t make the mistake of thinking that being frugal is what got me here. Individuals in America and the UK (can’t speak for anywhere else, I’ll limit it to where my experience lies) do not have a choice they can make that will get them the things they need at a reasonable price. It is not their fault for wanting too much or anything else.
It’s wealth inequality. Capital accumulates capital, and it actually means something because wealth is control, and things like housing that determine control over people’s lives are forms of wealth that get concentrated away from regular people along with everything else.
IMO two main things need to happen:
- redistribution of wealth
- increase housing supply
Oh but they actively took our paychecks too. This wasn’t just government welfare for the wealthy and the stock market. When they fired Janet because they only needed one worker instead of two thanks to new software? They didn’t pay Bob extra. That’s wealth just sucked up into the Executive and Shareholder realm. Then to add salt to the wound of doing two jobs they give Bob a December raise below inflation. (because of course there is still actually more that Bob has to do, the software didn’t fix everything.) So now they get Janet’s pay and the extra revenue they denied Bob, because of course their prices damn sure went up in step with inflation.
This kind of fuckery has resulted in an estimated upwards transfer of around 47 Trillion dollars.
The thing I don’t like with that kind of argument is that it is inherently anti efficiency and anti progress. We don’t want jobs to be done in the most inefficient way just so that a lot of people can be paid to do them that way. We want them to be done efficiently and then everyone gets fed,… anyway because society values people over wealth.
That’s not what they’re saying the issue is though, the issue is how it’s redistributed. In fact, what you’re saying quite literally is the living example of anti-progress.
It could be fine in the current state if companies paid people fairly, but they don’t, any progress or efficiency that could have been made was stifled by the company pocketing the ex-employees wage. Rather than supporting the current employee by giving them a raise or a team of members to work with, it’s taken.
To put it this way: Bob and Janet are janitors who split their work equally. A new tool the company bought is able to cut their workload down by 15% each. Now Bob and Janet only have 35% of their work, instead of 50%.
A good workplace will support Bob and Janet in various ways, making them both more efficient by being able to accomplish more tasks.
A bad workplace will fire one of them, making the work load for one of them to 70%, without supplemental pay.
That 35% of value Janet brought is no longer going into the economy, it’s going into the corporate profit.
It’s very efficient. That’s why corporations do it. Now one worker is extremely overworked and underpaid, but the job still gets done and the company makes more money? Sounds like a win.
I mean with the turnabout of current generation work ethic, I personally think that the current systems anti-productivity / efficiency in the first place. There used to be a worker loyalty and high work ethic but it’d increasing trends among millennial and Gen Z to just… not, and why would they when it’s been proven time and time again that the company culture is now replace first and hope the replacement is better or another annoying trend is replace and then not fill, with the expectation that the rest of the team will take on the extra workload for no additional pay.
I think the only real solution to the issue is either an overall wealth tax, or regulation in the spectrum of the next tier has to be at within x amount of the previous or the highest tier must be within x amount of the lowest tier, which would allow for competition in the work hiring field still, raises would still be allowed to happen it’s just in order to raise one tier they have to raise the tiers below it as well.
I think you are right, and it would be better not to focus on trying to micromanage specific business practices. You cannot write a good set of regulations that will prevent companies from siphoning wealth, because profit is the entire reason for existence of a company to begin with, and they will either find a way around it or stop functioning. Instead I think they should be allowed relative free reign, and the market allowed to do what it does, except that in the end a portion of the wealth extracted is taken and given back to the people, such that the level of concentration is kept stable instead of perpetually increasing.
It’s anti progress to say “don’t improve productivity”, but it’s anti worker to say “don’t increase wages commensurate with improved productivity”.
It is not inherently anti-efficiency or anyi-progress. It is pointing out how those things have been corrupted by those in charge. In a more perfect world, Janet and Bob just work less hours due to the software while retaining their pay.
increase housing supply
It makes sense to me that governments should be providing their citizens with items at the base of the pyramid for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Air is everywhere, but governments mostly do have clean air regulations to make sure that air is breathable. Water is also typically provided by the city for every residence. It’s not free, but it’s pretty cheap. But, governments could be doing a lot more when it comes to shelter and food.
It’s a bit strange that governments do spend a lot of effort / money on employment and personal security when they’re higher up the pyramid than basics like housing and food.
It isn’t that strange if you think of us as being in a sort of situation of soft indentured servitude which is intentionally maintained.
Why? Slave owners fed and housed their slaves. Providing housing and food seems basic.
What other mechanisms exist to compel people to do work they wouldn’t choose at unrewarding wages?
I really enjoy that West is crumbling. You guys did dun dirty to us Iranians in the past 10 years, pressuring our economy and crippling it. Now you are experiencing a literal ‘Karma, Bitch!’.
It’s not far-fetched that, once Iran manages to have America fuck off the middle east, it will become the next superpower (for the 5th time over the past 2 millennia I believe and don’t say ‘Persia is not Iran’, you will show how uneducated you are, because Persia is a province in Southern Iran, it’s a Netherlands/Holland situation) and I hope I am alive to see the fall of West. Because you Westerners have been nasty to me, insulted me, been racist against me, etc. You deserve nothing but a nice fall from grace.
Let’s raise our cups to the fall of ‘jorsumeh’ that is the West.
deleted by creator
Says the guy with money. Hey if you don’t need yours, maybe I could have some?
It’s hard to have enough to eat without money.
And yet, every one seeks to rest under their own vine and fig tree. I don’t think that’s strictly capitalist indoctrination. People need places, spaces, situations, groups, creative outlets in which they have some basic autonomy. We could set up soup kitchens on every corner so that nobody is ever hungry, but for many that will fall far short of a “full happy life”. Like security from violence or shelter from the elements, a full stomach is foundational to happiness, that doesn’t mean it’s enough for most people.
Although perhaps you have hit on an essential point – until somebody has an empty dish in front of them, they may not be unhappy enough to take drastic action.
Your life depends on a full stomach, that’s the last barrier for most people. After all, the system we live in also ensures that work will take the most of you. We’re always exhausted, after a day full of work, happy to have the time to think, regenerate and be among your loved ones. But, before we have a chance of fully regenerating, we’re at work again, counting hours.
Even if you have nowhere to sleep at night?
We just need to use tarps and setup Bidenvilles. We can use these pictures for inspiration.
Genuine question: I see a lot of posts on both sides on lemmy. Does anyone have a rebuttal/counter argument to this?
The argument I’ve seen “against” this is to point out that if you want to live like they did in the 50s it’s pretty cheap. It’s a lot of canned food. A lot of stuff you might pay for now are DIY projects (such as clothes repair, house repair, car repair etc.) there’s no such thing as your fancy TV, your Internet or any modern kitchen amenities. Medical assistance is garbage so no wonder you paid less for it. The way you live today is like a king compared to the 50s.
Now it’s still an idiotic argument. Before anyone replies, I don’t agree with it. But it’s what people who can’t handle the OP tell themselves.
I know you said you don’t agree, so this argument is for the hypothetical person who holds that opinion…
With that said. My wife and I crunched the numbers recently. If we lived like people in the 50s, which is to say, we lived as poor as we could and completely wrecked our quality of life (eating as cheap as possible, no Netflix, never eating out, no luxuries at all), we would save like $10k a year. Which means that if we did that for 10 years, we would have enough for a down payment on a house that we would not be able to afford the monthly mortgage on (and a house in that price range would be a wreck in our neighborhood. A standard 3bed 2bath in good condition where I live starts at about 800k).
It’s insane. This isn’t some “just stop eating avacado toast” thing.
Yeah not only that but the obvious conclusion is “well yeah, but why should we hold our standards to the 50s?” Sure we have needs we didn’t then for things like TVs and computers but those same computers have made everything about that 50s lifestyle exponentially cheaper and easier to accomplish. It should be nearly free to live like the 50s but for some reason prices have kept rising.
Lots of the DIY stuff is harder now though. I can change the oil on a ‘00 Civic, can’t on a ‘19. Cars now have complicated and user-hostile electronics - they don’t really want you to fix your own car, phone, TV…
I mend my clothes as much as possible, but fast fashion in the last ten years have seen a race to the bottom on material quality. Clothes don’t always come with extra buttons, the fabric is shit… if you find vintage stuff from even the 90s at a thrift shop it’s obvious. Modern clothing is made to be worn a few times and then thrown away.
Cooking can be still be done cheap (if you enjoy lentils and beans!) but requires time, which is easier if you have a stay at home partner. You also need storage space. There’s been substantial declines in the quality of kitchen appliances and tools imho. I’m still upset about what they’ve done to Pyrex.
Lots of the modern fancy stuff is also somewhat necessary. Internet is required for pretty much everything nowadays. You can go to the library/McDick’s/etc for WiFi, but you shouldn’t be filling out a job app on public WiFi.
Here are five fast examples from both sides
- The average new house size went from around 1,000 sq ft in 1910 to 1,500 sq ft in 1970, to 2,000 sq ft in 2000 to aroind 2,400 sq ft today. It’s not easy to buy a new small(er) home and housing prices reflect that
- When the Corvette was launched in 1953 it cost $3,490. That’s around $39,000 in today’s money. A brand new Corvette will cost you $70,000
- A 1970 Datsun 240z was $3,500, which is $28,000 today. You can buy a brand new Mazda Miata or Toyota GR86 for that inflation adjusted amount
- A gallon of milk cost $1.32 in 1970. That’s $10
- According to the 1970 census, median household income was $8,730. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around $71,000 - which is surprisingly close to the 2022 census’s $70,784 number
So what’s going on and why are people not happy? IMO it’s a mix of
- Things are getting nicer, but they’re also getting more expensive. This seems to be a mix of consumer taste and seller side shenanigans. For example, small/mid size cars, which are typically cheap, have had decreasing sales volume for the past 20 years. Enter multiple OEMs de-emphasizing small/mid size cars and leaning into crossovers, which just so happen to cost more. To go back to the earlier housing example, house size has been going up while the average household size is going down. There were 4.5 people per household in 1910. This dropped to 3.15 in 1970 and is down to 2.51 today. In other words, today’s new larger homes have fewer people living in them than 50 years ago. New homes today also tend to be built with nicer furnishings (coming from someone with 1960s builder grade cabinets in their house). Housing is a bit of a mess for a bunch of other reasons too… Zoning, smaller parcel sizes for subdivisions, etc etc
- The wage vs productivity gap
- The… very big imbalance between worker vs CEO wage growth
It goes beyond the cost of goods and gets back to some level of fairness (or a complete lack there of).
deleted by creator
