Comment by taeric
2 hours ago
I'm going to go on a limb and say half of the US is not living in abject poverty? Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.
2 hours ago
I'm going to go on a limb and say half of the US is not living in abject poverty? Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.
I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers, who earn $12-18hr which is higher than minimum wage, absolutely struggle. We have created food banks and housing assistance because even working people are a few sick days or one car repair away from homelessness.
I would encourage you to go work with average Americans in average towns. The facts on the ground are stark and eroding.
I would fully get behind us paying service providers far more than we do. To wit, it baffles me when people are upset about how much we allocate to pay for services that go to older people, but then we don't do any effort to make sure the services are provided by younger people. Indeed, we seem to go out of our way to make sure the people providing these services are, themselves, low income. It is baffling.
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.
Median income in the US is much higher than $12-18/hr, it is about $30/hr. 25th percentile make $20/hr. 10th percentile make $15.58. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.htm
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.
Someone could interpret that as a lack of capitalism rather than the opposite.
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.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
> A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough
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.
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> Someone could interpret that as a lack of capitalism rather than the opposite.
In Capitalism surplus economic value goes to the Capital class, so it seems like it is working as designed.
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>I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers
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.
> There's an extreme selection bias there.
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?
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If you read the rest of the comment you’ll find it’s about their employees rather than their clientele.
I think “abject poverty” is probably overstating the case a bit. I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse.
>I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse.
???
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.
That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising can be explained by things like more dual earner households (more women working since the 70s), more hours worked, etc. The household income can rise while the wages can theoretically remain flat or even fall.
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.
> Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.
There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
If you have negative net worth and the bank's money, not yours, is buying your food and housing, you are in abject poverty, just that the system is propping up your survival for a while.
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
> 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
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.
> So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright?
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.
Medicare is a different thing, the government should be providing medical care for everyone to begin with, regardless of what they make.
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.
Mississippi, the poorest state, has similar median income to Germany. I’m pretty sure 50% of the people there are not in abject poverty.
Yes, but German society is structured to require much less energy, just as Dutch society is structured to use much less land.
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.
>Here in Sweden I can walk to work.
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
Per Wikipedia, in 2018:
* 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...
This doesn't actually seem to be true based on a quick googling, i.e. Germany has somewhat higher median income.
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.
Totally understand that; but it counters the assertion of “abject poverty”. Perhaps relative poverty is a better descriptor but abject poverty is someone living in cardboard tents by the riverbank. Regular poor is living in section eight housing or subsidized housing. I don’t think we have 50% of Mississippians living in abject poverty.
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Okay and what exactly do you get for that income? What are the material outcomes for having a "higher" income than Germany? Because I know very few people that would openly choose to live in Mississippi versus Germany.
The GP claimed that 50% of the US lives in abject poverty. Mississippi our poorest state compares with Germany in terms of median income and Mississippi itself does not suffer from 50% rate of abject poverty. So by extension the US as a whole doesn’t suffer from a 50% rate of abject poverty (begging, trinket selling, selling off relatives, shitting in public, etc.) rates of abject poverty. That’s stuff you’d see in the Great Depression or Weimar Germany level stuff.
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