Millions of Americans to Fall off an 'Income Cliff'

If they're struggling financially, then they are not 'smart'. At least not in the sense you mean. See my post above if you want to know what I mean by smart. Which coincidentally demonstrates very clearly how to avoid financial insecurity.

 

As stated in my previous post - there are many smart people who are struggling financially - for a wide variety of reasons.

There are many people who are smart 'financially" who are struggling financially - for a wide variety of reasons - some examples of which were given in my previous post.

So I have no clue what sense you think I mean these people are not smart - as no such thing was stated nor inferred.

 

Financial security isn't associated with IQ. Ergo, if someone is struggling financially because they chose to live beyond their means, they are NOT smart. They may have a high IQ, but they are not smart.

There isn't a wide variety of reasons that people struggle financially. There are only two, in the First World: Circumstances beyond your control (like a world war, or natural disaster) wiped out your nations' resources and currency. Or, you lived beyond your means.

 

Abject nonsense .. go back and read my previous post for examples other than what you mentioned. Your comment is absurd gibberish.

Some kid in University can be very smart - but struggling financially - especially while in school. Some start up business - and so on.

Your claim is false.

 

Exactly .. so we agree. IQ doesn't prevent the failures that lead to long term financial insecurity.

 

Clearly not - by what we see every day. It is easy to fail financially - even for smart people.

 

Homes are larger in North America.

A lot of people in greater Vancouver spend a large percentage of their income on housing.

 

North Mississippi.

The construction involves dry wall, painters, roofers and framers. Electricians and plumbers make more but those fields are harder to get into.. There is some control being exerted in keeping the numbers low to keep wages up. Somehow. Always been that way. My son in law as a roofer earns a bit over 300 bucks a day but he is very fast and can roof non typical roofs . The crew he runs make 12 bucks an hour. And their pay is maxed out..And that is some very hot and hard work..

My son in law owned his own construction company for years a subcontractor and employed 8 to 12 people , a small contractor that intentionally remained that size. He folded during the height of the housing boom before the crash of 08. He refused to use illegal aliens and only employed Americans. This put him at a huge disadvantage. For his competition layed off or fired their American crews and replaced them with illegals at min wage , 1099 workers. Drastically reducing labor costs where they could bid lower and take the jobs and destroy the subcontractors who would not break federal law. So he was a victim of the law breakers.

He went to work as a foreman with a large construction company a major contractor here for several years and now works for several companies on various construction jobs doing several different trades. From roofing, drywall, painting, and framing to finish carpentry. And he could work 7 days a week if he wanted to. And does work 6 days quite often. He is that skilled and motivated. He loves the work. Yet not many construction workers here has his pay rate. He is the exception rather than the rule..

But after the crash of O8 most of the illegal Mexicans vanished here and cheap labor costs left with them. But wages for construction workers is still the same for citizens as it was before the housing bubble popped..But at least Americans fill those jobs now instead of illegals. In my area.

When I was young construction workers were prosperous middle class workers earning more than a middle class factory worker. Construction was hot, dirty work but the pay was great. But that is no longer the case when pay is considered..Labor has been devalued and not kept up with the cost of living. It is systemic. Some falsely say it is now unskilled labor unless it involves plumbing or electrical work.. Lol.

Hell while in college in the early 70s I worked construction one summer and earned 5 bucks an hour as a non skilled clean up boy on the site and materials handler . I carried lumber to the cutter and then to the carpenter.. Min wage was 1.65 per hour. So I was making 3 times the min wage. If wages had kept up with inflation this job would pay over 22 bucks an hour today instead of 12. What is wrong with this picture??? Looks like working people have gotten screwed. As the gains in income went to the top but the worker saw no gain to keep up with inflation It isn't supply and demand dictating this. The demand for labor is higher today in construction not lower. It is harder to find and retain Americans to work these jobs due to the heat and hard labor involved . And the pay. And yet that supply and demand doesn't push up wages! How do the capitalist beat the supply and demand? By making us compete with illegal labor! So if you have to use Americans and cannot ship the job to slave labor sweat shops, you just don't enforce immigration laws and use illegal labor! And its been going on for a long time.. Because workers are no longer represented by the Democrat party! Self evident.. And the GOP have never represented working people.

 

Let's go with a man and wife with a couple kids.. For we are talking about adults here with a family instead of kids living together to survive since their patents kicked them out of the nest.

Start with that premise and give me the numbers then. Tell me how you save for your kids education and your own retirement?

Oh I left day care for working parents! Another expense..

Many employers report they pay more than min wage....but many times it's a quarter or fifty cents more than min so they can say they pay more than min wage! This is so common in the servant economy.

 

If so then the economic model is a failure and cannot provide for a country's citizens. And if seen in the richest nation on earth you got big problems.

Seems to me like capitalism can serve the majority of people and provide for them by their work or it can be structured to benefit the elites and their investments instead of all people who work.

Obvious which group is benefitting and who isn't. Once our economy provided for our majority and the elites too. But then it was restructured to serve the rich as it destroyed our middle and impoverished millions. This happened and is reality..

 

Do you have a source for that law?

 

There are a few other attractions as well.

 

I made $3.05/hour base pay, time-and-half after 6:00 PM, and double-time on Sundays and holidays in 1964 as a unionized grocery clerk in Southern California. The calculator below...

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

... comes up with $25.31 today. And that would be if workers were holding their own with inflation, not sharing in the much greater GDP per capita, nearly double what it was in 1980.

Neither party is serious about stopping the flow of illegals.

There you have it.

 

Well, no it really isn't 'easy'. You have to deliberately do very specific (wrong) things, and keep doing them for years on end.

FTR, no point claiming people don't know any better. Even a five year old knows 1 + 1 = 2.

 

Where I live, a 1200sqft single level 100 year old cottage with three beds and one bath, can sell for $2m. People spend a lot on housing, but the housing isn't big, or grand, or well appointed. It's just the value of property here.

 

Why did they have kids, if they couldn't afford them? Children are a choice.

 

Like it or not, the US economy since the 80s has been led by easy credit across the board meaning that much of our economy is based upon personal and public debt. Someone said being "smart" means that you are financially sound and the implication being that smart people are not faced with income insecurity. That is preposterous on the face of it but lets say this is accurate. Being "smart" means no credit card debt, no car loans, no expensive habits, no student loans, nothing but a savings account filled with six months expenses, a perfect 401k that never goes down, a old clunker car or buying a car with cash, a small mortgage in a place that matches your income regardless of where you grew up, all these things are what is meant by using the term "smart" in this context. Well if all of us were this smart, my bet is the GNP of the nation would shrink in half.

 

Unemployment checks are going to be stopping soon.

The courts are working again, there is going to be a tidal wave of evictions.

We could be seeing millions thrown out into the street, which sounds far too much like the Great Depression.

 

It's interesting how far we have come from the old Milton Friedman solutions that dominated economics for decades. Milton would have said let the market clear, let the chips fall and pick up the pieces afterwards. As Keynes said so famously to this kind of advice "In the long run we are all dead". No one is using the term market clearing anymore but it was there in spades in 2008-10. Let everyone go bankrupt, it will all work out in the end. The other very significant change is the lack of comments regarding how much money the government has on hand in order to spend money. We even heard Obama say the country was broke, no money in the Treasury. He was a relic of Milton's ideas as were many very smart people who grew up under Milton's influences. Now we see the government had all the money in the world, people still bought Tbills, inflation is no where in sight and fiscal conservatism means only one thing now, the same thing it always meant "whatever you do, don't give any more to poor people, black people, single moms, latinos, all those other people, give it to me".

 

Such a ****ing racist... Lol

 

Just picking on one item in your list...$400 a month for insurance, car insurance? Cause that's $4800 a year, and if someone is paying that for one vehicle, they are either driving a high end new model or have a couple of speeding tickets and DUIs under their belt and shouldn't be driving in the first place.

As has been brought up several times in this thread, there is a massive difference between need and want, and if someone is making minimum wage for longer than a couple of months, perhaps they need to look at themselves for the reasons why.

 

Same here if it's in Vancouver, not thirty miles away where we are. Our house in Vancouver would likely be worth $3+ million. We could live in a larger house, but who needs it?

 

I think you're leaving an incorrect impression of Friedman. We saved the economy in 2008 because of Friedman's work in monetary policy.

Don't blame Friedman for the ideologues in the Republican Party. Allowing Lehman to go broke was really stupid.

I don't recall him saying anything that ridiculous.

No, no, no.

Huh? Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. That was Friedman's contribution. We've had low inflation since the 1980s.



We don't share wealth and income in this country because the system is bought and higher income groups are greedy.

 

Friedman has been discarded as a fiscal guru by most if not all the major economies of the world. Was everything he said wrong? No. But his ideology was profoundly wrong in many ways. He did not care about the individual, he only cared about his theories. Miltons ideas got us out of 2008? How? Keynes informed us not Milton. Spend money in a downturn. Milton would have destroyed everything to clear the markets. As for inflation, what inflation? Milton lived in the world of the gold standard. While he did convince Nixon to get us out of it, he never really accepted the power of fiat currency because he was an ideologue. His TV shows were lectures on values not economics. He would go on and on about how great America was at the turn of the century when anything and everything was allowed. I remember him boasting about Hong Kong in one episode. HK was a horror for the little guy. Sure it was better then communist China but hardly something to emulate. I even heard him debate the NHS minister on radio in the 50s about the horrors of nationalized health care systems. What a joke. He is by far the most dangerous man of the last 50 years. We can thank him for the collapse of the middle class and the rise of the super class.

 

His claim to fame is his work on monetary policy. I suppose he gets some credit for the earned income tax credit, but his push to deregulate was used as a cover for looting by corporations.

Read Bernanke's Fed speech on the Depression.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200403022/default.htm

I don't agree with most of what you just wrote.

He was right about money.

The U.S. middle class disappeared because capital came to dominate the political system. It still does.