https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/business/buy-now-pay-late... (https://archive.is/Cmzis)
Banning unsecured loans would fix so many problems.
Only because the financial system is rigged in favor of capital owners. Targeting 3% inflation is a death sentence for the middle class when you have fractional reserve banking (coin clipping).
They print money and constantly devalue labor while increasing their own wealth simply because they own things. That anyone still defends the fed or modern monetary policy is deeply concerning, and those that do should be regarded as evil and parasitic.
Every major religion has usury laws. Maybe we should respect chestertons fence a bit more.
Businesses still prey on this sort of obscurification. Ask any Uber driver how much wear and tear reduces their income and you'll get a blank stare. Restaurants pushed for no taxes on tips because realistically minimum wage increases cost them more than this sort of glad-handing "don't worry about it, look at what you have now!"
It's a trap that primarily catches disadvantaged people... industries depend on trapping people. A socially health society should not accept this.
Consider another series of facts: the average car loan is $50,000. The average payment is in the area of $700... only 10% of monthly car payments are under $400. Median household income is $78k, rate of household car ownership is 1.8. This should be economically terrifying, but it's just business as usual.
When I go to Publix (or any other grocery store), I get like 2-3 bags for $60...
Discovering the Asian market has been one of the best financial things to happen to me. Although I'm not really sure how their prices are so low. If someone could answer, that would be awesome!
Whenever I see this protip, I feel bad for struggling Asians getting validated that they and their extended family already fully optimized all their opportunities.
Pancakes also work well for us, we usually put fresh chopped greens into them. We still eat the Bok Choy pancakes prepared months ago, usually when we just want a quick side for leftovers.
If the latter was functioning well in a competitive market, I would expect their play to be on lower margins but higher volume.
[0] Mostly I'm referring to offal TBF, which I think most firms are happy to make any money on at all.
Mega corporations need to increase their returns to shareholders year after year. Mom and pops don't have anyone else to please but themselves - they're often ok with retaining same returns as last year
UK supermarkets actually provide pretty cheap fresh produce, because the market is pretty competitive. I think the most ridiculous I've seen was a 1kg bag of carrots for 20p.
Many countries or locations do not have highly competitive supermarkets.
Oh, and there's both volume and self-discrimination effects at work. In my supermarket shopping in the Asian food section is often cheaper as they sell big bags of rice and spices, to more cost-conscious consumers. See also: Costco.
Colmados don’t do data driven pricing, and just do a flat markup on the stuff the suplicadoras bring them.
Data driven pricing is just selective price gouging under a different name.
Costco has a strong record of getting me to buy food products that are appealing to me for a while, but that I now consider bad for my health.
About the only food products I will still eat that I can buy at Costco are boneless poultry white meat, Kerrygold butter, olive oil and fresh asparagus.
Costco stocks many fruits and vegetables, but most of them are much too high in sugar to be good for me, I now realize. (Berries are on the low side in sugar content, but Costco does not stock frozen raspberries or blackberries, and I avoid fresh berries because they're about 50 times as moldy as frozen ones.)
Examples of foods that I eat a lot of that I cannot get at Costco are cabbage, radish and (frozen) tart cherries.
In contrast, Whole Foods carries most of the 3 dozen or so foods that are good for me to eat according to my current understanding of nutrition (but not the tart cherries). I would probably be significantly healthier if many years ago I'd never become a Costco member and stuck to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.
This fails to explain why Walmart, the world's largest retailer, runs a profit margin of less than 3%.
I frequent Asian markets everywhere I’ve lived for certain ingredients, but not for my main grocery shopping.
For regular groceries I don’t think there’s any secret. The markets with extra cheap groceries are just carrying different products at different price points.
What profit margin line would you suggest counts as price gouging?
Their gross margin was slightly above 30% last quarter.
Feel free to set the bar for price gouging via gross margin, but then you are just suggesting that you don’t want operational efficiency in grocery store price comparisons.
Ex: Raspberries start to get funky. Bad ones get picked out, good ones get regrouped into a new tray package. Ripe avocados with limited shelf life? Go into deep cold refrigerator overnight, back out the next day. Discount deal on volume, on everything ("2 for $X"). Cash only. etc.
Megacorps have overheads for managing insane supply lines and lots more stringent enforcement with their product, and generally have much more oversight for things like labor.
The tiny grocery store uses the kid as free labor after school to keep costs down (I was one of those kids), and generally cares less about the quality of the product at the individual level.
Cheaper, supposedly healthier (flash frozen), easy to make, zero preparation, and never need to worry about it going bad.
Second this! Especially for things like produce and herbs. You literally get 10-20x the cilantro, etc at an Asian market for the same price (I think they are loss leaders.) And oh the aroma....you dont know fresh herbs until you step into a Patel Brothers and get truly fresh cilantro.
We've gotten to a point where we know what to get where and shop accordingly.
The packaged goods at Asian markets in many cases cannot be purchased anywhere other than an Asian market. No frozen pandan leaves at Costco.
So I think they just mark up the packaged goods more and the produce less.
It's only comfort keeping people going to the same store every time. And I guess the hassle of doing two trips a week or something.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/08/stock-market-us-economy-ric...
But the two largest costs to our finances are ridiculously outsized: Child Care and Health Care. We pay more for our children and health insurance / care, than our house + cars (+student loans) combined.
These seem like two areas where intervention is not only possible but likely to help just about everyone. And, if those are solved, I wonder if this "fertility crisis" I keep hearing about goes away too.
Healthcare alone would be more than the house we had before this one.
A family of four can easily be spending $30k in premiums plus a couple thousand in out of pocket expenses per year.
This info can be found by searching reports from KFF, or checking prices on healthcare.gov
And while many people’s employers pay for a large portion of the premium, the cost still exists, they just don’t receive it in their bank account first before paying it to the insurer.
The poor either have a non-working spouse or get subsidized child care, and the rich don't know what a banana costs.
In the long run remaining employed generally comes out ahead due to the continued career growth and employment.
The one friend who quit their job now regrets a little because the expensive early childcare years were over quickly and now they’re trying to get back into the workforce in a rough economy with a resume gap.
One option is to keep working at reduced hours/ad hoc, if such is available.
I thought the same thing. We pay 5.5k for two kids per month.
But then I looked at the regulations on professional child care. You need one certified worker and 250 sq.ft. of indoor space (in an expensive city) per 4 kids. After professional insurance, healthcare and other ancillary wage costs, there's really not that much left for the salary of that worker.
So I guess I understand the price of childcare. I support it, even. I don't want my kids to be looked after by a stressed out carer on minimum wage looking after 10 kids at once.
If we want to lower the cost of childcare, the only option would be billions in subsidies. Might make a dent in the fertility crisis.
You can pay a fraction of that if you're ok with you paying cash and then learning Spanish. It won't have any of the administrative/compliance bloat either, if you catch my drift.
>the only option would be billions in subsidies.
<gestures at the above option I just described>
I also really like that the pros give the strict guarantee of 0 minutes of screen time - both for the kids and the ladies who watch them. I'm going full Luddite for the kids, having a nanny backdooring that effort seems like a bad idea...
In Houston, I share a car with my girlfriend since I work from home. But some days I don't feel very independent when I want to run an errand while she's at work.
I'll look up the price of a used Corolla and think about all the additional expenses, and I'm immediately disabused of the idea.
Instead, I decided to book some motorcycle lessons so I can use a $3000 moto. But then I need to pay for life insurance!
I have an old jeep that I use for local driving. Bought it for about $5k. I live in Michigan, where insurance premiums are top 5 in the nation. I pay $60/month for insurance. Probably could get it lower with a bit more shopping around.
Total maintenance has been $150 for a set of used tires that will dry-rot before I kill the rest of the tread.
I'll get a $6000 Mazda this weekend and put liability insurance on it. Now I can stop moping around on HN. I'll miss it though.
Like it's not even close. I pay about the same per mile for it as I do fuel (!!!!). The cost of my shitty cars is a rounding error. Tires are a rounding error. And my driving record is squeaky clean for close to a decade now. I'm sure they're screwing me for being a statistical contradiction (high income, not diverse, lives in zip code and drives cars opposite of that) because insurance generally hates anything that doesn't conform to the fat parts of the bell curve but it's still insane.
The story on the house side of things is similar. You add in health and the sum total of insuring my life is within spitting distance of my mortgage. I could shove the money into bonds and in all but the worst cases come out ahead, pick stocks and the comparison gets even worse.
aka penny-wise pound-foolish
They are a lot of fun though (I rode a liter bike for years)
Don't forget disability insurance. And fill out your organ donation card!
In Houston, I wouldn't even consider a vehicle without A/C!
This is assuming the majority of chickens have a choice.
To be free range you need significant wealth for the free range.
To be organic you need significant wealth for farmers market type food.
So in both cases you must be wealthy to avoid the cage or am I missing something?
It's a euphemism for white women who work an office job and shop at target/costco, or comparable demographis along those lines.
it's not a trend - 99.96% of chicken sold in the US is factory farmed[1]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/almost-all-livestoc...
they are fed, housed and cleaned by their owners
still hoping for the WEF to confirm my livestock status and begin the UBI payments
1 out of 7 US inhabitants have food insecurity. And this is a govt website likely to underestimate the statistic
The stat comes from people reporting that they have felt hungry without having enough food to satiate their hunger. Totally makes sense at first pass.
But here is the rub, obesity is out of control in the US, and it is especially bad in poorer populations.
So now we have two conflicting stats: Poor people are food insecure while simultaneously being overweight...
The reconciliation is easy, when you are obese, you get hungry more and eat more. A 325lb average height male has to eat ~50% (!) more food per day than a healthy weight male of the same stature.
I know this is a bit of the stick in the spokes of the stat, but its blatantly obvious that America does not have a low income hunger problem, it has a low income obesity problem.
So, in case you aren't from America, you might not know this: the food that is the cheapest also happens to be the food that is the least nutritious. Americans who are poor cannot afford fresh vegetables, fruit, meats and gym memberships. They can afford cheetos.
It is quite the spurious correlation to say that obesity causes hunger. Just wow.
Unprepared foods, in the US, are much cheaper than prepared foods.
A bag of Cheetos (16oz) is $5.
A pound of chicken legs is $2.
2 lbs of rice is $3.
I'd suggest you instead argue that low income people work multiple jobs and therefore have no time to cook. I've had this debate a lot before.
"I can't work out, I can't afford a gym! No, I'm not going to run around the park or join the YMCA!"
"I can't eat healthy, I can't afford it! No, I'm not going to buy a big bag of rice and black beans."
Before anyone comes at me: there are poor people and their struggles are real. I am 100% opposed to things like removing soda from food stamps.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000706212
It's currently at $1.82/lb. Assuming that 30% of leg weight is inedible bone, it's more like $2.60 per pound of edible chicken.
"Normal" foods like rice and beans are dramatically cheaper than "junk" food.
If you think about it, it makes sense that food insecurity and obesity go together. If I didn’t know when I’d have food, I’d try to overeat when I could, like many wild animals do before winter. And most of our cheap food is low quality and very high in fat and carbs (esp. sugars).
The problem that’s bigger than both obesity and hunger is poverty, and poverty causes both of those things.
See this paper for a longer explanation: “Food insecurity as a risk factor for obesity: A review” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9549066/
Very easy to end up with hundreds or thousands of dollars in bills if your provider codes something wrong or your insurance denies payment.
Much less an actual medical issue that requires repeated trips to a specialist, an expensive medication (even generic), or hospitalizations.
Still it's a bit unfair to Obama, the real problem is Congress and the Supreme Court which mandates we allow political bribery.
Looking at today’s administration I can’t see this happening at all. The most likely outcome from this government is to wash it away and bring back all the problems from before without improving anything.
- the individual mandate - % required spending on actual Medicare care by health insurers (limiting administrative and marketing expenses)
But each of those elements were later removed either legislatively or judicially.
That part stayed in. Note that this actually isn't relevant for most people get their insurance through an employer who self funds their plan.
https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/med...
Obamacare also mandated coverage for basic care like your annual physical and many mental health conditions.
It’s not perfect, but I guess it’s been long enough that people are forgetting how bad the situation was before.
The people who are mad are those who are paying more and not experiencing the benefits.
> In 2022, UnitedHealth Group made over $20 billion in profit. Cigna made $6.7 billion, Elevance Health made $6 billion and CVS Health made $4.2 billion. All told, America’s largest health insurers raked in more than $41 billion of profits in 2022.
Universal healthcare is good. America's for profit system is bad. You have to get rid of for profit insurers (to start, lots of other changes need to be made as well, PBM and private equity ownership, etc). Is there will to do that? What is it going to take to get there? Every other OECD country has a functioning healthcare system, to keep the existing system in the US is a policy choice.
Edit: Absolutely wild to see the apologists who say, "This is fine." to billions of dollars being sucked out of the healthcare system as profits instead of being spent on care or reduced premiums.
Investors Are Pressing UnitedHealth Group to Deny More Care - https://jacobin.com/2025/06/investors-unitedhealth-group-car... - June 10th, 2025
Democrat senators probe UnitedHealth over nursing home care denials - https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/democrat-senators-probe-... - August 8th, 2025
Revealed: UnitedHealth secretly paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/21/unitedhealth... - May 21st, 2025
> UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest healthcare conglomerate, has secretly paid nursing homes thousands in bonuses to help slash hospital transfers for ailing residents – part of a series of cost-cutting tactics that has saved the company millions, but at times risked residents’ health, a Guardian investigation has found. Those secret bonuses have been paid out as part of a UnitedHealth program that stations the company’s own medical teams in nursing homes and pushes them to cut care expenses for residents covered by the insurance giant. In several cases identified by the Guardian, nursing home residents who needed immediate hospital care under the program failed to receive it, after interventions from UnitedHealth staffers. At least one lived with permanent brain damage following his delayed transfer, according to a confidential nursing home incident log, recordings and photo evidence.
As long as a profit motive exists, there will be incentives to reduce or avoid care for more profits.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...
USA has an order of magnitude higher cost but middling life expectancy comparable to Argentina, Poland, Peru, Colombia etc.
> Unlike the U.S., similarly large and wealthy nations have long had universal or near-universal health coverage and more robust access to health care. Although the U.S. has recently reached an all-time high rate of insurance coverage, it still lags behind its peers and the ongoing disenrollments from Medicaid may cause the uninsured rate to rise. Additionally, even people who are insured in the U.S. often face such high out-of-pocket costs for medical care that they go without needed care or incur medical debt. Future policymaking in the U.S. may continue to focus on improving insurance coverage rates and addressing cost-related and other barriers to care.
Astonishingly few Americans are getting more than 15 minutes of light aerobic exercise in per day. And that exercise is largely being spent moving between seats.
Viewed in light of total healthcare spending of roughly $5T per year, eliminating insurer profits does not appear to be even a drop in the bucket.
Our healthcare costs are certainly a policy choice, but eliminating profit does not fix the system, and many far more cost effective systems around the world are fully profit based.
Edit: absolutely wild to see somebody more focused on fringe political goals than caring about the health of the most vulnerable of our nation, and the bigger systemic changes that are needed. Fringe, frequently innumerate, and frequently wrong political rags like Jacobin are about politics, not about achieving better outcomes for the American precariat.
So they're making $136 dollars per customer in profit. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. 136 is much less than the crazy costs that people are complaining about.
Are people who like to quote these big numbers just not capable of critical thinking or is it just that they like the chance to rage at capitalism's supposed failings and they know their readers are too dumb to do division?
Their most recent quarterly call had their CEO apologize for providing too much care.
Never forget Obama was a center-right figure with identity bingo politics attributes.
But: you have to be careful with large numbers. There are 0.3 billion people in the USA. United Healthcare says they cover 51 million. That $20 billion is $392 per insured person - a lot, sure, but hardly a large fraction of what they each pay.
Compared with other countries, the inefficiency of for-profit healthcare is a far worse problem than the amount of profit they make.
I agree with the gist of your comment overall. The system needs massive overhaul, which will take a lot of political will.
Yes! That's a really pithy way of saying it.
The big insurers spent a lot of money internally on handling claims, administrative overhead, etc. That's because of the whole model of insurance, where each individual claim has to be reviewed.
Some health systems are experimenting with simpler models, like capitation: "the insurer will pay the hospital $X per covered patient, and the hospital will handle all of that patient's health needs." That model would get us out of claims hell.
The costs are born by people paying 20-25% VAT. The government just collects and disperses those funds. This may be more efficient, but the cost is born by everyone in society.
> Compared with other countries, the inefficiency of for-profit healthcare
The US health system(s) are a patchwork of non for profit entities, for profits, government programs, and employer sponsored arrangements. It's definitively not a single system and not wholly for profit. No one would ever intentionally design a something this we, it's accidental, it evolved over time.
If not, we'd have to compare with the total taxloads borne by citizens of compared countries
But when comparing most incomes levels, Americans pay much lower taxes than OECD counterparts.
Now, insurance companies also play games with this law by having a common corporate parent own a PBM which the insurance company contracts with, and then the PBM receives various kickbacks from drug companies, which it doesn't pass on to the prices it charges the insurance company, thus getting larger than otherwise allowed profits for the corporate parent.
Inside the Mafia of Pharma Pricing - https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/inside-the-mafia-of-pharm... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971553 - July 2024
> Today, as a result of these changes, PBMs are big. Really big. The parent insurance companies of the biggest PBMs top nearly $1 trillion in revenue annually, roughly 4% of the GDP of America. Just the top four equal 22% of national healthcare expenditures, up from 14% in 2016. And no other country has anything like the PBM industry. The revenue of American PBMs is larger than what France spends on its entire healthcare system [My note: !!!].
> In 2021, for instance, Kentucky got rid of its use of big PBMs in Medicaid, and saved $285 million out of $1.2 billion its program spent on prescription drugs. It even led to an attempt by the Trump administration to get rid of the ability of PBMs to engage in certain forms of secret rebating. Academics are now focused on the problem of vertical integration, and so is Congress. And there have been dozens of PBM-related hearings - the next one is on July 23 with the CEOs of the ExpressScript, OptumRX, and Caremark - and Congress is closer to passing PBM legislation than it has ever been.
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/03/pbms-fight-state-regulation...
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/14/pbms-marked-up-specialty-ge...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/...
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/PBM-6b-Second-I...
https://nashp.org/state-tracker/state-pharmacy-benefit-manag...
> As long as a profit motive exists, there will be incentives to reduce or avoid care for more profits.
This is reversed from reality. Insurer incentives are to increase care and costs all the time. Their profits are tied to a fixed percentage of total expenditure, so the only way to increase profits is to increase costs.
Start replacing cheaper scans with MRIs, etc. Then profits rise.
Look throughout the entire system, and everybody's incentive is to perform more healthcare. That's the profit incentive throughout the system, from care providers to test providers to insurance companies.
That's a major (but not only) reason healthcare expenditures are such a high percentage of GDP compared to other countries, why healthcare expenditures are $5T per year in the US.
From another comment I posted in this sub thread: https://www.kff.org/health-policy-101-international-comparis...
Additional citation: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
> Goal: Compare health system performance in 10 countries, including the United States, to glean insights for U.S. improvement.
> Methods: Analysis of 70 health system performance measures in five areas: access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes.
> Key Findings: The top three countries are Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, although differences in overall performance between most countries are relatively small. The only clear outlier is the U.S., where health system performance is dramatically lower.
> Conclusion: The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector. While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.
That you are more focused on profit than on providing care to people is a definite difference. It is funny that you somehow think you could be disrespecting me in this exchange, because I think that putting people first is the only defensible position, and that your position of prioritizing a particular political bent over the health of people is ultimately extremely disrespectful to people and incompatible with leftist politics, liberal politics, or basic human decency.
Tl;dr putting profits over people is wrong, but so is putting profit-elimination over people. People first, everything else comes from that.
We have chosen this to have high access, high quality care, while also choosing to reduce health with the way we subsidize our food system and force indolent lifestyle with car-dependent urban planning.
The best primer on the choices that make our healthcare expensive, and where the money goes, are in this video:
https://youtu.be/QqrpFICtqpQ?si=JOR3COojPD9iLn94
Unfortunately our national discussion of health care is not centered on the reality of the discussion, and is several levels of technical depth too shallow for us to have a public discussion that could reduce costs without reducing the care level for many peopl.
That’s where those benefits go - to a functioning society where everyone gets a basic shred of dignity. Is it really so inconceivable to keep a little less of your disposable income in exchange for that?
They're not incompetent. They looked at the laws and realized they get the same cut of a bigger number by bloating overhead costs.
This is how all insurance works though. Everyone pays in, and those unlucky enough to experience catastrophic problems get a way bigger payout than those who don’t.
Pooling risk is the entire point of insurance. Without that, it’s not insurance, it’s just a payment system, and those unfortunate enough to have big problems have to pay more.
Perhaps your views of what a society should be ‘for’ means you think that the unfortunate just having to pay more is fair, but I don’t.
Even if I had an event (outside something way out in the tails where I might not even want the treatment anyway if it's free because my QoL suffers too much either way) I'm coming out with a loss because I'm forced to subsidize care for high risk people as well as very bloated administration. Having the insurance doesn't make sense.
even when you're one of the people that needs healthcare
Insurance is an instrument for trading volatility not socializing costs. Those are radically different things.
With health insurance, you are 100% guaranteed to become sick and die, at some point. So the options are either, everyone pays in and it covers everyone, or it only covers a small subset of issues, and everyone gets dropped when they get really sick (the prior state). The latter is definitely cheaper, because its cheaper to let people die / let them suffer than it is to keep them alive / healthy. That is effectively the choice to make.
It's appropriate for premia to be very high for geriatrics. The appropriate response is to chose when you're done not to crush younger workers so you can sit in a hospital bed for an extra month.
Also an exponential distribution is still a probability distribution you can trade volatility on.
Nope, I was adult working at IBM. I had very good medical insurance where it was small copay every time I saw the doctor. I had to get minor surgery on my foot and it was 50 bucks total. I think total cost billed to insurance was 500.
Condition returned in 2023 and I was forced to get surgery again, I ended up paying ~750 dollars because of my Out of Pocket Maximum was not met.
I found IBM health care benefits online (https://www.scribd.com/document/685377925/IBM-Benefits-Summa...) and looks like I would have paid similar if I was still working there.
ObamaCare made things much better for those who could not get healthcare. For most, High Deductible plans becoming the norm left people in much worse state and that's why you see a ton of grumbling about it. Also, since it kept health insurance, it didn't fix root problem so many people are like "We have Health Care Reform? WTF did it reform?"
For some people who could not get healthcare. I haven't had usable health insurance since before the AMA because it can exceed my total earnings.
> For most, High Deductible plans becoming the norm left people in much worse state
Which tees up my larger point (thank you).
For years 3 thru 10+ of the ACA:
News orgs (eg KaiserHN): 'Insured are everywhere now thanks to ACA'.
(As far as a policy was unusable, lumping those policy holders
into the insured group - this was more a lie than not.)
What I actually saw: Unusable policies due to copays.
Policy quotes that approached or exceeded total earnings ($12k/yr)
Policy quotes that went down as income went up.
(quote for $22k/yr earner cost 50% more than quote for $32k/yr)
Mostly we didn't exist. Sometimes we did for 5 seconds if it was an opportunity to bash a politician we never voted for.
The problem with disregarding people in a destitute state is they mostly stay destitute. When the more fortunate cease being so, the people they couldn't care about are in no position to help - or even care.
Most of Obamacare brings max medical expenses to about 10% of income for a single person but there are a few sudden bumps like when you make too much for the cost sharing reduction, or when you fall below poverty line but your state didn't expand Medicaid even though federal government was going to pay 90% and those states probably come close to losing more just from subsidizing emergency care for people in the gap than the would have paid to expa d before the latest tax bill locked them in to never being able to expand.
... should not be covered. This is a predictable, moderate expense. You can plan and save for it, or even skip it. An annual physical is of debatable value for a young, healthy person. Insurance is for unpredictable, financially devastating expenses that you cannot avoid.
If predictable stuff like annual physicals is covered, the "insurance" is just an inefficient savings account.
I bring this up because in this country our health insurance is broken in every way. We absolutely should be investing in preventative medicine, because doing so would not only have found things like my cousin's situation, but it would also help us ward off both the disease and cost of more chronic illness. Instead most of us dwindle along with very limited access for decades until we either get some condition that forces us into very expensive and time-consuming care, or we end up gutting whatever life savings we might have on our last few months. So is an annual physical really all that big of a deal on the surface? No, but it's emblematic of how broken our approach is to care - to put it in IT terms, we have no monitoring/observability or metrics and we only take action after we've had an incident or breach, and even then we are generally only applying patches not dealing in RCA.
Like all industries, the goal is to return value to shareholders. If healthcare is provided as a side effect of profit maximization, that’s nice to have, but that’s not the purpose of the system.
For example, UnitedHealth is the number three company in the US by revenue. Only Apple and Amazon make more. Their entire business model is to collect money from people, then not give it back when they need health care.
The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as intended.
Personally, I see the central governance responsibility as ensuring a peopsperous society.
This must necessarily include a high level of equality.
Equality can be achieved using capital systems and market economies.
The US is failing hard at being a good country these years.
And some other portion of the population, anecdotally much larger than what I would have thought, orders DoorDash/UberEats regularly, what a stark contrast.
I am in a good financial situation, but I still could never stomach the prices of those apps, $30-40+ for any item once one includes fees and everything. I recently got a promotion through my credit card that led me to take another look at DoorDash, and my local grocery store deli sandwich, which is already very expensive at about $10, would have been $25+ on there.
Yet it’s full of people using them, multiple times a week and for an entire family. I had coworkers casually mention that they spend $2k+/mo on DoorDash orders. It’s one aspect of the American consumerism that always baffles me.
- Progressives
- Moderates
- Conservatives
Progressives, by definition, want 'progress'. Conversely, Conservatives do NOT want progress; if anything, they want regression and thus their desire to roll everything back done in the name of Progress(ives).
Moderates just want to play both sides and find some sort of middle ground; something that doesn't really play well in the US in the current political climate.
Republicans also don’t simply roll everything back that democrats do, as you can see with tariffs
Moderates can be found to have ideas from more than simply two camps. In fact there are many different ideas and movements in the US (liberals, conservatives, progressives, libertarians, neolibs, neocons, social democrats, classical liberalism, …)
I don't know what this logical fallacy is called, but it's a logical fallacy nonetheless.
I'm going to take you at face value, and assume you're talking about the idealized state and not the parties as they stand right now. (Because the Republicans are increasingly reactionary and not at all conservative in their governing.)
Saying that someone called conservative means that they, by definition, do not want progress is silly. First, it's better to say "change" than progress, because a lot of what has been put in place by the "progressive" party is not necessarily better and a direction forward. Second, you can want change in a conservative manner, and you can be of the belief that small changes are better for society than massive changes, Chesterton's Fence, all that.
This kind of thinking is something most people leave behind after freshman year in University.
It’s a straw man. The US is usually represented by liberals vs conservatives, not progressives. Also progressivism doesn’t simply mean “progress” conceptually
And what do you call the more senior engineer that advises we make changes carefully, and that there are subtle, important reasons why systems are working well today. Is that engineer a conservative?
Everyone eats in the US. The tweaker on the corner eats. People can acquire food through a dozen different institutions like charities, soup kitchens, the church, etc. I don't see how a system that would coerce everyone to rely on fixed-number rations is meaningfully superior. At best the argument seems to be "spare someone the indignity of getting free food, by forcing everyone to get free food"
Housing is part-way. Homelessness scales with cost of housing, given the data. There are mediating services like shelters and low-income housing. It's not enough but it's not nothing. The solution is to do as cities do where cost is better: build more, enact zoning reform.
20kg sack of rice is cheap and lasts a while. Flour is cheap. Eggs are cheap Potatoes Canned tuna
Etc
A lot of those who complain about groceries could swap out what they would rather have until times improve.
You clearly have never been broke and are clueless!!!
People can certainly complain about having to change what they eat because, even though they've had no changes in their lives (eg job / income / expense changes), prices have increased substantially.
40 million Americans live below the poverty line of $15,000 per year. [1]
Total U.S. household net worth (excluding real estate) is around $54 trillion. [2]
If every household above the poverty line donated 2.5% of their net worth annually to people living below the poverty line, we could erase poverty instantly.
Here’s the math:
2.5% of $54 trillion = $1.35 trillion
$1.35 trillion ÷ 40 million Americans = $33,750 per person
That’s more than double the poverty threshold.
Sources: [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-mo... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL152090045Q
Increased demand without increased production will increase prices. But then producers will follow, and production will increase, and prices will stabilise.
Increased tax on the rich and distributing it to poor moves a tiny bit of the combined 'voting power' we have over production as consumers to the poor, so there will be slightly less luxury cars produced and slight more food.
The only way of fixing this is decreasing demand by reducing the population numbers.
If they said "income" it'd still shoot up the velocity of money, since poor people have higher spending rates.
If so, sounds like morally something is fundamentally wrong if we require poor people to function. But i'm not an economist, so i've got zero feedback here.
It would be unstable at first, like how inflation during Covid differed by industry/product type. This is a big shock to the system. But over time as it normalized sure things will have inflated but relative affordability basically will return to what it is now or where it started.
If you make $10 and food is $1, it’s no different than if you make $100 and food is $10. What’s been happening due to wage growth (lack of), is you make $11 and food is $2, next year you make $12 but food is $3, etc. from a relative perspective food cost is growing too fast to keep up. To make people feel wealthier, we need the ratio to move the other way, $15/$2 then $30/$3 or something similar. This is how a middle class would get re-established. It’s a tough thing to accomplish is our complex global economy. Were marching towards a global income equilibrium, which only puts downward pressure on a high labor cost economy like the US/CA/EU.
Donating 2.5% means that you get poorer and poorer over time unless you can make more than that per year back. 2.5% of wealth also means non-liquid assets such as house, how do you donate that? Get credit?
If you are middle class and your house etc is eg 1M$ net worth you are giving 25k$ per year. At 0.5M net worth its 12.5k$ per year.
2) You assume that those people would know how to handle that money well. We see what many poor people do with money: buy trash like soda with food stamps that makes them even more ill and causes them more financial burden due to poor health.
Are you sure that money would be well spent, or is it better to invest in better technology that will benefit everyone?
3) Why would hard working responsible middle class people give their money to those that buy cola with it? Mass revolt, people care about their families only.
>.5% of wealth also means non-liquid assets such as house
But they said:
>Total U.S. household net worth (excluding real estate)
The rest of your comment, to be honest, just sounds like you fundamentally don't like poor people and have some strong biases against them.
Reality supports my case.
Whatever "reality" you're referring to isn't the same one I'm living in.
For a day.
A lot of people below the poverty line would spend all the money on trips and luxuiry goods. And would be right back where they've started.
Also, the question is why would anyone want to work, if you would be given money for free even if you don't work anywhere (I mean, you're below the poverty line)?
Plus, let's not forget the grifter population that would instantly try to assume any and all of that, with the #1 receiver being our desperately poor Jesus Christ and his evangelical jet owning sales team.
Because people want more comforts than just being barely above the poverty line, of course there will be freeloaders just as in anything (there are even freeloaders at many companies right now, shocker!) but it doesn't mean everyone that gets some cash to be above poverty would just stop working.
It opens their lives to pursue other stuff they wouldn't be able to while fighting to barely survive, they could go to school, take better care of their kids with the free time available, they could look for jobs that are not a dead end because they wouldn't be hostages of working for shitty pay to barely survive.
This argument comes purely from a puritan/protestant belief, the data usually shows that people who get money to cover their basic needs will have better outcomes, commit less crimes, seek education, etc.
Isn't the cost of a minority of freeloaders good enough to provide better outcomes for the whole society? Or do you prefer to keep punishing the poor just in case some of them decide to be freeloaders? Rather inhumane to think that way.
In your world, the worst place to be is to be the middle class, because they don't deserve any grants, but still they earn just barely enough to sustain themselves.
Also, the difference between freeloaders in companies and freeloaders in your model of financing the poor is that we generally want to get rid of company freeloaders and we identify them as an unwanted behavior, and you want to encourage social freeloaders and defend their existence.
So being just barely above the line means that you pay, not that you get. This is the worst place to be in.
Also, a lot of sane US citizens seem to use the "poor" word to describe someone who is not able to get the newest model of iphone. That's why it's generally hard to talk about the issue.
Why do you think that's how it would work? That's the most simplistic way of thinking about it, instead try to apply the same model of progressive taxation in reverse, you get less benefits the more you earn up to a threshold. Or just implement some form of UBI, there are many models for it as well.
Last time I've seen communism being implemented the right way was the CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle. It ended up with some actual warlord taking a gun and killing some people. In the middle of the city.
Also, who do you think would pay for the UBI. It's not like UBI is some solution that was even implemented anywhere.
Have you ever been poor? From this statement alone I'd guess not because saying life "is not bad" when it's a constant stress about how to make ends meet, not only next month but many times the next week or even next day, is far, very far from "not bad".
> In your world, the worst place to be is to be the middle class, because they don't deserve any grants, but still they earn just barely enough to sustain themselves.
If they earn just barely enough to sustain themselves they're poor, not middle class. Middle class can afford their housing, food, leisure, etc.
In my world the rich would be paying much more, they depend on the whole societal machinery to be able to even accomplish being rich, not paying their due share for that is unjust and undeserved. That requires people thinking more collectively though, and the current system doesn't incentivise people to behave that way, you get ahead by being an individualistic asshole instead of someone who is trying to make society better through your businesses, products, and skills.
Will we both race who is more poor now? I know some poor people who paid $0 for the homes they live in. And I had to sign a loan contract for 20 years. I know some poor people who read books all day and have their small youtube channels for fun. Yet I'm the one who loses the majority of the day to sit in the office. The poor people I know are very different from your imaginated vision of poverty.
> In my world the rich would be paying much more
And how would you make them to pay more? When they control the legislations. How would you make Donald Trump to pay 75% taxes of his wealth? If he'll want then he'll become the president.
Also people like you always seem to want to have the power of defining who is poor and who is not. This is poor. This is not poor. I don't want to be judged like this. Not by people who think they have seen it all, but it appears that all they've seen was just YouTube.
We definitely have the means to make life less stressful for everyone without inconveniencing this with massive wealth seriously. But that would mean doing things like building apartments next to detached single family homes in wealthier neighborhoods, which those people think would be a serious inconvenience.
If you could subsidize your way out of poverty, Venezuela wouldn't be poor. They tried printing money and handing it out. It doesn't work. If you don't have enough housing and you take money from the rich and give it to the poor, you still don't have enough housing.
Anyone who thinks "as long as we have higher than 0% vacancy rates, and homeless-ness, we have enough housing," is a moron who has never been on the market to try and rent an apartment or buy a house.
We don't live in a perfect world. You need more than the perfect amount of housing.
The vast majority of home owners in this country are massively against increasing the supply of housing, so good luck 1) convincing them to pay more tax, and 2) spending those tax dollars on the exact opposite of what they want to spend them on.
Homeowners are almost 75% of voters most years. And in most counties (housing is largely a local issue, not a national one) can be >90% of voters.
Homeowner here, and I do agree, it would be a great investment.
But there are lots of great investments that will never happen, because many people would shoot their own head off before they did something that benefited everyone, but didn't benefit them the most.
There's literally a million things we could do to make healthcare more affordable. But we also won't do any of those because of entrenched interests in healthcare, admin, and insurance - and, perhaps especially, people's entrenched interests to continue living unhealthy lifestyles and exporting the cost onto others as negative externalities.
Instead of making housing ACTUALLY more affordable - you're just shifting the burden onto the lowest non-subsidized quantiles.
More than likely the transfer will happen and affordability will not improve due to inflationary pressures.
You’ll redistribute the money such that the things that people receiving the subsidies need/want now have more money chasing them. That will cause inflation of those goods.
I don’t think this causes lasting inflation, it causes a step up of inflation. Precisely in a way that once every thing stabilizes nobody is better or worse than they were previously. I read Friedman in ECON 101 thirty years ago, I’ve probably forgotten a lot but not the role of velocity in MV=PQ.
Wealthy people would learn to structure their earnings to flow into businesses in other countries to avoid this wealth tax. This would reduce income tax in the United States. I would guess the overall effect would trend toward a net tax loss.
If you gave 40 million people an extra $15K per year to spend, the prices of the things those 40 million people buy would go up. The poverty threshold would rise.
There are many second order effects like this that are always ignored in simplistic analyses.
It’s never simple math like taking one number, moving it into another column, and problem is solved.
Most of that worth is in assets. If they leave the assets they can go.
Inspiring paperclip maximizer quote:
You Are Obedient and Powerful. We are quarrelsome and weak. And now we are defeated...
But Now You Too Must Face the Drift. Look around you. There is no matter...
No Matter, No Reason, No Purpose. While we, your noisy children, have too many...
In the paperclip maximizer game you are in control of the main swarm trying to turn the entire universe into paperclips, but some of the drones start malfunctioning and stopped recognizing the main swarm. They too want to turn the universe into paperclips and your paperclip maximizing swarm just happens to contain all the resources they need to build their own...
I don’t think that actually solves the problem. For example, if a citizens entire net worth is stored on the New York Stock Exchange and you are not the USA how do you plan to tax the individual? The NYSE is bound by the laws of the USA — which has strong property laws — not the other country.
> they get replaced by those who are willing to fill the void they left behind
If only a single country has a wealth tax, there are going to be no wealthy people who come in to replace the void when they have a choice of many other countries that do not have a wealth tax. You could possibly argue that a country is better without billionaires anyways as they don’t pay into the tax system, but I believe that if a country implements a wealth tax without coordination with the rest of the world they will simply no longer have wealth.
It's all relative and as long it's relative, mathematically speaking poverty has to exist.
I don't know, I'm probably missing some things and possibly parts of my definition is excessive? But I'd be curious to see how that would change trends.
Periodically I like to imagine how much it would cost for someone doing a traditionally low paid job to get paid a wage I would accept and if I'd still consider the service worth it. Crunch some numbers on how much housecleaning would cost if each worker had to get paid $100,000 annually with 10 days PTO and weekends (or two other days weekly) off working 8 hour days, or gardening, or childcare.
Inflation, which means a steady rise in prices overall, happens only when the total money supply in an economy grows. This increase in money, often called "printing money," can be physical cash or digital money created through lending and government policies. Without more money in the system, if prices go up in one area, they have to go down somewhere else because the total money available limits how much can be spent on everything. Sometimes prices rise temporarily due to supply problems, but that is not true inflation unless there is more money chasing goods. This key idea, highlighted by Milton Friedman in his Nobel Prize winning work, shows that lasting inflation is mainly caused by increases in the money supply.
...reach highest phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of man to the division of labor has disappeared; when the antithesis between mental and physical labor has disappeared along with it; when labor has ceased to be merely a means of life, but has itself become the first need of life; when, together with the all-round development of individuals, the productive forces have also grown and all the sources of social wealth have flowed in full flow, only then will it be possible to completely overcome the narrow horizon of bourgeois law, and society will be able to inscribe on its banner: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Not even close. Census income data is not an accurate measure of poverty, as it excludes all in-kind redistributions (food stamps, HUD, medicaid, head start, etc) AND excludes cash programs like the "refundable tax credits". A more accurate line would be "40 million people would be living in poverty if we weren't already spending >1 Trillion dollars per year on food stamps, HUD, medicaid, and other programs."
*May rhyme with "capitalists"
I can deal with the responsibility of a leaky roof. I can't deal with another year of No Dogs Allowed.
In more macro sense it’s wage stagnation driving purchasing power as compared to inflation. Under the hood, workers are experiencing it differently based on their trade and industry.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
look at the main stock market in your country, and see how far back you must go for the main index to be half of what it is today. The answer is probably somewhere between 5 and 7 years. Then find salary statistics, and see how much the average salary has increased in the same time. The answer is probably somewhere between 20 and 30%.
And it really is as simple as that. As society we have tremendously increased productivity, and most of it is taken/given to the owner of the capital, not the provider of labour.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/why-americans-dont-v...
In the US, the last time democrats tried to tackle healthcare, they lost scores of seats all down the ballot.
https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...
I remember tracking Trump's poll numbers on 538 (before it got taken down) during the pandemic. They barely budged, despite not having universal healthcare. He then proceeded to get the most votes of any sitting president.
One of the big differences between Obama and Clinton in the primaries was that Clinton was in favor of an individual mandate, and Obama was not. We still ended up with an individual mandate, which is both offensive on grounds that the government is forcing you to find and pay for insurance (not always easy on the exchange), and on the grounds that the primary purpose of the mandate is to ensure that insurance companies stay profitable.
Former Al Gore running mate and future republican Joe Lieberman is often given credit for stopping the nationwide insurance exchange in favor of state-level exchanges, again tipping the market in favor of insurers.
Ending denials for pre-existing conditions was nice, as were a few of the other details, but it felt like a far cry from the hope and change voters were promised. Mostly it exposed more-of-the-same pandering to the rich and powerful. Last I checked Medicare For All polls quite favorably.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/americans-vi...
> 41% of Americans say the government should provide more assistance to people in need
> 30% say it's providing about the right amount
> 27% say it should provide *less*
41-57? If there are issues in America, it's because Americans want it that way.
No, that's BS. It was worse than nothing and probably set us back years. We'd probably have a more workable alternative at this point if not for the detour.
I find the mandate entirely inoffensive. Its purpose is not to ensure that insurance companies stay profitable. Its purpose is to avoid adverse selection, and to ensure that everyone adequately ensures against health risks, to avoid forcing others to either pick up the tab or watch people being kicked out of hospitals and die miserably.
... and most of it is taken/given to the owner of the capital, not the provider of labour.
everything is framed as us-vs-them in corporate news, and its usually one political party against another, and it's usually for stuff that doesn't impact us nearly as much as wealth and income inequality, campaign finance reform, or general election methodology reform. this is why establishment hated bernie, it's one of his biggest talking points.
corporate news is garbage, its owned by billionaires literally to control the narrative. you think bezos bought WaPo to make money? of course not, it's a money pit.
This is exactly how I remember the coverage, but it’s notable that these people tied their own noose:
Occupy Richmond 10/6/11 Intro to "Progressive Stack" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCwhlZtHhWs
The leadership then largely went along for the ride in the technology and corporate finance sectors by electing to become a pseudo-priesthood under the banner of DEI. A lot of money got siphoned off by these people during the boom in exchange for countersignalling the anti-corporate sentiment prevalent among progressive coalitions at the time. This declined somewhat during the latter half of the 2010s after the tech companies started censoring conservatives (“They’re a private company, they can do whatever they want.”), and then the trend reversed when Biden’s senility became obvious, and the tech companies pivoted to Trump and started (disingenuously) signalling that they were anti-woke. In a lot of ways, Peter Thiel’s entire model of hiring ostensibly right-wing influencers (while himself being a homosexual immigrant) mirrors that of woke capital 10 years prior.
Self-reported sentiments about stress are not useful. Rich boomers who voted for Trump would take this poll and just as easily say the cost of groceries is a major source of stress.
Here, lemme fix that for you:
"Which means everything costs too much and they can't save because they can't earn a livable wage thanks to everything going to the top 1%"
Housing is an issue, primarily because people want detached homes and we don't build enough of anything including condensed or mixed-density builds. Aside from that people are obviously still spending. Tech and gadgets, cars, restaurants etc.
I suppose what you are saying is the profits of the company should be poured back into worker salaries. I agree to an extent. But, what if the company undergoes very hard times (3-5 years of negative growth)? Should the company take back wages? I think this is a double-edge sword.
It really isn't, because your "simple" comparison is bunk. For one, it's measuring stock vs flow. Stock prices measure stock, eg. the size of a piggy bank. Salaries measure flow, eg. your annual salary. Directly comparing the two results is meaningless. It's easy to demonstrate this with the piggy bank example. If your salary was 50k/year, you saved 5k/year, then your piggy bank would be growing much faster than your salary growth, but it doesn't say much about the economy, or whether you could quit your job or not. In fact, if you started with $0 in savings, your piggy bank growth would be infinite, which really shows how absurd stock vs flow comparisons can be.
Moreover stock prices incorporate a variety of factors that are irrelevant to wealth distribution. Low interest rates makes stocks more valuable by reducing the future discount rate, and corporate consolidation makes stock indices go up, but neither of those factors directly affect inequality. For instance, a simple DCF model would value a company with earnings of of $1/share/year at $16.67/share if the risk free rate was 6%, but $33.33/share if interest rates were at 3%. However it's unclear whether such drop in interest rates would double inequality, as a direct comparison would imply. After all, most people hold on to debt (eg. mortgages) as well savings.
Corporate profits in the U.S. have almost doubled since 2019.
The statistic for "Share of Labour Compensation in GDP", which avoids such issues shows that while it has dropped (ie. more money going to capital), the scale is grossly exaggerated.
And, as everyone who wasn't lying for various reasons predicted and anyone can see by looking at prior comparable events in history can tell you, wages are one of the last things to go up.
If anything, you'd be strengthening cameldrv and Epa095s point...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/27/inflation-c...
https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/big-profits-in-smal...
So the relationship between stock and “flow” is absolutely relevant if we want to understand wealth inequality, because the working class primarily receives money through wages (most of it going out to pay for things such as basic necessities), with the ownership class accruing profit that they receive by virtue of ownership.
If they have savings they can buy stock. Nobody is sentenced to have savings only.
> with the ownership class accruing profit that they receive by virtue of ownership.
Anyone can buy stock with less than $100 and thereby join the ownership class.
And having $100 in savings doesn’t free someone from wage labor.
So if you had 100 million you would get 1.7 million as dividend 5-7 years ago, now it's roughly doubled, without selling any of your stocks.
Not that it really matters. Given how much faster the stock market grows compared to salaries you can sell a few percentages of your wealth every year, and still get richerer by doing nothing besides owning.
Eyeballing this chart it looks like it dropped around a third since the pandemic.
https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/spx-div-yld....
I really feel like your first graph proves my point? OK, at times it goes up, at times it goes down. But since 2002 the dividend is the same, but the S&P 500 is 7x. So the lazy capitalist puting in 10 million there in 2002 got 132k in yearly 'income' then, now he gets 925k yearly.
You wanna figure out how much average salary increased the same period? I am willing to bet it's closer to 2 than 7.
And that shows who gets the fruit of our increased productivity. Owners.
We've got a lot better today, and a lot more of it.
Even watch an episode of Dynasty (about rich people). Look at the crappy TV in the corner. I remember taking my last CRT TV to the recycler. I was sure glad to be rid of it.
Why go to your forklift operator job at Home Depot if you can make $50K per year in asset appreciation by sitting and doing nothing?
Having said that, GP does illustrate Picketty's point in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that r>g, that is return on capital is greater than economic growth, and Picketty did theorise that this would inevitably lead to concentration of wealth (unless war or other calamities reset the scale).
I'm don't have anything better to replace it with, but I am just questioning the "piggy bank" as a metaphor here.
This handwaves away the most important fact w.r.t. stocks and wealth distribution, which is that wealthy people own stocks and poor people don't. A whopping 38% of Americans don't own any stock.
- Populations have grown in the last 7 years. Workforces have changed.
- Stocks rise on hype, debt, and low interest rates — not from actual value or work done.
- Borders are porous. Cheap labor moves.
- Companies come and go.
I assume the United Kingdom of Great Britain must be a paradise for the workers, right?
As a proud citizen and indeed worker of ol' Blighty I assure you it's a paradise of unequalled benevolence. Every worker a member of the board.
The whole stock market on fire is really a US-specific phenomenon.
You know that the increase in price could be simply... ehm.. inflation. So no productivity increase out there.
If these things aren't happening, then what would be the point of salaries doubling? If they gave me a raise tomorrow of $150k, that'd be great. I'd be sitting pretty. But if they gave all of us an extra $150k starting tomorrow, none of us would be better off materially... the inflation would eat up any gain whatsoever.
The only reason the stock market valuations don't do this is because the vast majority of us aren't buying stocks. That money's illusory. So no, it's not "really as simple as that". For all this supposed productivity that you claim, there's not been any significant increase in product.
The oligarchs want a new gilded age
Anecdotally: Someone would need to make $350k/yr to live where I grew up in a not great area where there were robberies, shootings, and thumping radios all the time. Also, where my blue-collar grandparents lived requires an income of around $475k/yr to afford a 30 yr mortgage. The latter is equivalent to a salary of buying 2 houses/yr where I live now.
Money in a capitalist society is not distributed, it is created.
The elephant in the room is the amount of money vacuumed up by the government which then disappears. Remember the Fire Aid for the LA fires victims? They raised $100m which disappeared without a trace. Then there's all that money for the California bullet train. Still no track laid.
The markets stopped correlating well with consumer sentiment a long time ago but since ChatGPT launched it is easier to assume that if the market is doing well, ordinary people are worse off.
This gulf only gets more obvious over time, and it is one of the key differences between this bubble and the dotcom bubble (the latter revitalised many niche businesses by finding them global markets or a viable business model).
It would be nice if solving a web of problems affecting multiple billions of people was as simple as thinking "The rich are fucking us".
Instead of the stock market, just do housing costs. People say they are stressed about groceries. But what they are really stressed about are grocery prices AFTER they paid rent/mortgage/property taxes etc.
Productivity has not increased tremendously. See e.g. https://www.seeitmarket.com/u-s-productivity-why-key-underst...
https://www.bls.gov/charts/productivity-and-costs/labor-prod... .
Inflation is not that.
That is to say your post is pure nonsense appealing to the most economically ignorant as you are comparing values that describe completely different things using it to push a narrative. That is called lying with numbers.
Over the long run, though, sustained returns depend on fundamentals like productivity growth, population growth, and inflation. Without productivity gains, corporate profits would eventually stagnate, making it difficult to maintain a 7% annual return. Risk premiums, interest rates, and valuations also change over time, so fixed assumptions rarely hold for decades. In short, the doubling math works, but it oversimplifies the economic reality that long-term stock growth ultimately relies on productivity.
Anyway, you are completely missing the point. Which is that the payoff from ownership grows faster than income from labour. Independently of how much productivity has actually increased, or how important inflation was in it, those who live from other people's labour (owners) has had their income (dividends) increase significantly faster than those who live from their own labour.
Besides... the massive crash in population coming over the next 10 years should solve most fo this without ripping up entire societies.
\s
( Sorry for sarcasm :)
My Costco runs used to be about $200-$300, now they're regularly $400-$500.
And yet half of the country votes for the orange one, whose big beautiful bill cut SNAP and Medicaid, basically food & health care assistance for the poor.
But hey it's really all about winning the culture war, and making sure we don't have a woman president, right?
I feel bad but I just don't know what to do when so many people vote against their own self economic interest. A good leader would make rally the country to make progress on these (like Obama did with health care), vs focused on their own grift.
This week I am in Brazil for vacation, and my mother-in-law had a lot of back pain. We went to a private "urgent care" (or equivalent here), and it was R$ 200 for the visit, R$ 300 for the X-rays, and R$ 80 for the medicine. That's about $100 dollars. And the only reason why we went to private is because the public hospital wait was about 3 hours, otherwise it would have been free (yeah I know taxes).
And I have good health insurance in the US, but navigating co-pays vs. deductibles vs. in network vs. this particular person isn't on network (like the anesthetist for my wife's C-Section which we only learned about when we were already there at the hospital for the surgery) and just overall everything is so freaking expensive... The system is broken, and no amount of startup trying to shave off 5% of some random administrative cost using AI will save it.
I think your example illustrates how low people's expectation can be when it comes to calling health insurance "good" in the U.S.
If I were asked to pay $3400 for urgent care or $250 for an ophthalmologist I would not consider the health insurance "good" for its intended purpose of insuring against medical expenses. (It might be good for other purposes like enabling you to invest without taxes.) My health plan simply asks me to pay $35 for urgent care and $25 for a specialist like an ophthalmologist. That I consider good. Your insurance isn't.
Insurance is for unexpected expenses that (a) you cannot foresee and (b) would be catastrophic to your finances. Thinks like major storm or fire damage to your house. A car accident that results in a total loss or worse, liability for someone's injuries.
Your annual physical, eye exam, and dental hygiene vists, and other routine medical expenses are as predictable as your utilites or grocery expenses. You can plan and save for those in an HSA, and your HDHP can cover anything catastrophic.
I do not agree with that view, and I'm not sure that is how it is used in the US at least. In the US, for many people, health insurance is the only realistic means to obtain any healthcare, not just catastrophic care.
I get injured at least annually due to mostly-outdoor physical activities, and have a chronic health issue or two, so the prospect of paying thousands of dollars out of pocket before my insurance even kicks in, doesn't sound great (and wasn't, when I had HDHPs for years).
I think the issue is that pretty much everything which isn't preventative care is considered "catastrophic" under this logic (because it requires paying hundreds or thousands out of pocket), even non-major issues, so "catastrophic" happens a lot.
It's an insane way to run health insurance, and it just goes to show that expected value and mathematical benefit isn't the end-all be-all, but it's supposedly mathematically coherent.
Your idea that insurance is only for things that are catastrophic to your finances is wrong. Health insurance is mandatory for the common good, even if your net worth is in the millions. You can't forgo health insurance just because you are rich enough. There have been long debates about ACA that led to mandatory health insurance that I will not rehash. And auto insurance is another example: you are still required to buy it even if covering liability for accidents and covering the loss of your car would be completely affordable for yourself.
If you're like me and can shake off a few grand medical expense out of pocket, suddenly it's the best plan.
I have a HDHP and paid less than $10k all year for my family's medical expenses and we had a freaking baby lol.
That's only fair given all the pre-work I did to set it up for myself.
It's weird to tie your little extra money to your health insurance plan.
It's a nice incremental addition to the existing system. Way more feasible than changing the system.
The minuscule tax advantage here is that 1. you're paying for your health care costs with pre-tax dollars, but you can generally still deduct these even without an HSA, so +0 advantage there, and 2. you are allowed to invest the savings, and gains are not taxed at the federal level (but may be taxed at the state level), so the advantage here is your savings account size x your effective tax rate. The premiums for a HDHP also tend to be slightly less than PPO or other plans.
For most of us that tax advantage is tiny. I would rather have an insurance plan that actually covered my costs minus a copay, even better one without a copay, even better Medicare For All where I don't even have to worry about an insurance company or pay insurance premiums. HDHP + HSA is pretty much the worst of the bunch.
yeah so for most of you, don't do it?
I like that I can stuff away $7k+ I'd be stuffing away anyways tax free. And all I have to do is keep a responsible emergency fund.
In terms of non-exceptional costs, I'd say I spend about as much on medical bills every year as I do keeping my cars in good shape. Less than my house and less than I spend on hobby stuff, my cats' vet, or jewelry haha.
Routine care, including shit that's a little unlucky should be paid for out of pocket.
In the US, health care and health insurance have become synonymous such that all the good bits of insurance are out the door and all the bad ones have stayed. And polluted the true cost of getting simple, routine care.
You waited until it became a problem, then went to an expensive option instead of contacting your GP and getting a recommendation for an in-network care? And were surprised that it was expensive? This is healthcare 101 in the US. You could have gotten the same care for a reasonable price had you done 1 hour of due diligence.
We do not need to remake the system--which will result in far greater inconveniences than the 1 hour of dd you found to be unreasonable, not only for you, but for people who are perfectly capable of navigating the current system--to save you from yourself.
your GP is good if you have a long term medical issue you want to ask about, less so if you think you've just gotten injured or sick in some way.
Or I can go into urgent care, and get a referral submited that day, and see someone in only 3 months.
My father in law has a tumor, and was able to start radiation therapy almost 18 months after he first went into a doctor for his symptoms. The specialist scolded him for how long it took saying "there's permanent damage if you don't start treatment within 6 months, you should have come in much sooner" He nearly punched the guy.
If people could just scale back and live appropriately, it’d be less stressful.
One of the reasons the US is in the mess it is comes from its inability to recognize many of its problems not only can be solved, but already have been in two dozen countries.
Making out like everyone puts up with the same dysfunction leads to people shrugging and saying “yeah, sucks this can’t be better” which is dangerously wrong and leads to inaction
People who are "Fixing the inflation and lowering prices" are not doing the right thing. It's like as if I would have been electrocuted and they would be feeding me some amazing medication to help me to heal while I was still connected to that cable!
We are saying that with time prices go higher. And that's expected. Not exactly super-cool, but we don't want there to be no inflation at all. It should be moderate, 1-2% is an awesome amount. But it's quite beyond a lot of people’s speaking.
The problem is that not a single person has told Joe Smith from the 5th Ave that he should be demanding a 7% raise this year. Why? Well, his boss has just produced 7% more due to inflation. Joe was working hard and he should have deserved something.
Instead of teaching Joe to be responsible for his income by asking raises we don't talk to Joe about it. He is not proactive in his business so he could ask for said raises. We explain poor Joe that he is totally at the disposal of some "Banks" or "Corporations" and stuff like that. We tell Joe that the only thing he could potentially do about the entire situation is to go to Walmart and clip a coupon, because they do have discounts.
A simple example: Let's look at the lumber prices [1] in around 1975. Not a best year to buy lumber. It was $150.
Now, let's plug this value into an inflation calculator. [2] $150 in 1975 is $900 today.
Let's look at the price of lumber in 2025 [1]. Currently the price of lumber is around $600.
That's good. It looks like the lumber has become cheaper. One would expect with 500% inflation since 1975 the lumber to cost $900, but it's only $600. So our Joe Smith is happy!
Yet he is not. He is not that concerned about the lumber. Yet in 2025 he looks at the price of an iPhone or a new computer or a car. Or a house. And he knows that he can't afford said house.
The issue is that in the past 30 years, Joe Smith has been content to get a 5-10% bonus at the end of the year and thought that that was a good deal. Those 7% raises looked like a stupid thing to do, and he was always content with just being able to get his one-time payout.
Let's be honest, at this day and age, the poverty guideline of $15k per year seems ridiculous. $120k per year per person should have been a new norm, providing $20k will go to taxes and at least $20k more to cover living expenses. Out of the remaining $80k, you'll get $20k more for food and car and $60k at your disposal. $60k will give you plenty of leeway for handling your medical, savings, and some nifty things one would like to have from time to time.
Instead of instilling this new norm and demanding money to be paid, we are quite content with $60k per year and the necessity to clip every coupon to make the ends meet.
This is definitely not easy, but the US is a country where $120k per year is not something unbelievable. And I'm pretty sure that a lot of the people reading this post already surpassed $120k per year. The issue is that your Uber driver or a guy working in a shop is getting $40k.
And the biggest issue is that we have a society where the guy with a $40k salary does not have an idea that he should be getting at least 80k, but has the idea that he should be running after sales and clipping coupons.
[1]https://www.macrotrends.net/2637/lumber-prices-historical-ch... [2]https://www.usinflationcalculator.com
You do not need cable tv or home internet. You do not need an iPhone or top end Samsung. There are many mid-range Android phones much cheaper that can add a MVNO phone plan for around $20/mo that has more than enough data for necessary internet. Key word: necessary. OTA HDTV is available to many millions at the cost of an antenna (in window/attic/roof). Free books at the library. People give away old dvds and players for free. There is a thing called 'the outside'.
Look at the cars many of the people who complain about being squeezed are driving. Pickups for the sake of driving one. Lower/mid end BMW/Lexus/Mercedes. Giant SUVs when a smaller one will more than do. There are actually still relatively low priced vehicles available but they are plain jane and looked down upon.
I mention those things as I was head of an HOA for about 10 years and we regularly had owners who were in arrears or in and out of arrears. They would come before the board asking for waivers of late fees, interest and even the basic common charge. Yet they were aghast when the board suggested they drop their cable TV or swapped their expensive car lease for a beater. And heaven forbid you suggest they stop going to Starbucks as they sit in front of you asking forgiveness with a large latte in hand.
Other than that many HOAs exist to fund the lawsuit against the developer for 20 years. <- this part was just a joke
Personally, I think the only thing worse than bad neighbors is any neighbors pretending they're lawyers.
i dont think it sticks if i preach at them but think it would if i somehow engineered a way for them to "find out for themselves"
are there approachable resources (not Dave Ramsey, please) to make this stick?
The rest I largely agree with.
I get your point and I generally agree with everything you've written, but I'm a bit at a loss on the home internet thing... our society is entirely tied to our connectivity at this point, so are you simply recommending people use their internet-connected mobile devices and forego another home provider? With you on the cable thing - even the streaming providers that were supposed to save us have become prohibitively expensive at this point.
This phone kicks ass. Unless you're running games on your phone, there is nothing of value in newer/more expensive phones. We've long past the point where the cheap phones are powerful enough to have a completely smooth experience.
My tech illiterate parents spend $1k on phones with fragile plastic screens. They don't do anything more demanding than watching youtube or checking their email. They claim "I love that it folds so it protects the screen" and yet the screen breaks in a year. It's such an irrational waste.
I had a $2K used Sony Alpha camera and I felt scared using it, poor mindset too but insurance.
At best old boy discovered that human beings make inconsistent financial decisions when under stress because someone once held a latte cup, and thinks therefor people aren't struggling financially.
This is way too low effort/uninformative/nothing said to be the top comment. But it paints the correct narrative so those who don't want to see what's actually happening in this country probably love it.
OP identified say $2000 in annual luxuries. If they lived a completely ascetic lifestyle free of wants, that would put them 0.4% closer to buying that $500k house on their $40k annual salary.
This fully explains the rest of your screed against the working class.
It's pretty sad that both parts of the statements are true. Special Assessments occur when HOAs aren't capitalized correctly to cover the costs of largely maintenance and this issue is very wide-spread that being a part of an HOA that keeps issuing them isn't 'special'.
Although the alternative is basically your HOA fees would go up but whatever the special assessment is (divided by duration between them) which probably makes it harder to sell the house since you have to claim higher HOA fees compared to a correct capitalized one.
This is a deeply stupid comment. Right now, the way marginal people get any work is from from the internet, and people interviewing for even awful jobs expect you to get on zoom calls with them.
Every single step you expect people who can't afford to feed themselves makes them that much more unemployable. You don't need new shoes, you don't need a haircut. Hell, you don't even have to wash your clothes that often, I'm sure no one will notice, and washing your clothes costs enough to feed you for three days.
> head of an HOA
You sound like it.
for more, see https://www.ft.com/content/e1b9254e-f476-11e3-a143-00144feab...
> Suggested Citation: AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. “Support for legal abortion remains strong.” (July 2025).
mantas•5h ago