A few months ago I had a persistent irritation on my right eye, as if some dust was stuck there. Worried about it, I went to Urgent care and got billed $3400 (dollars) for antibiotics, WHICH WERE WRONG, an actual ophthalmologist said I had it scratched and just had to apply some drops. $250 for the ophthalmologist and about $50 for the drops.
This week I am in Brazil for vacation, and my mother-in-law had a lot of back pain. We went to a private "urgent care" (or equivalent here), and it was R$ 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.
Au contraire, that is much closer to the definition of insurance. We don't want people to get bankrupt with an unforseen medical issue like cancer. Insurance should cover that.
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 need to broaden your horizons then - look at the medical plans that are on offer in India. Or the travel medical insurance that every EU country requires you to carry. They are classic insurance.
Having a kid without complications should not cost $50K. It should be a few grand at the most. If the kid now needs NICU, then yes, that's what insurance is for.
>>- look at the medical plans that are on offer in India.
The one's that companies offer are quite good, actually.
I'd have depleted my life savings, and gone bankrupt several times around COVID years with my parents health, if I didn't have company health insurance.
Good for me, because I knew people in hospital sitting in the waiting lobby literally crying because they were done financially. Like finished for life.
Having said, this in India the market for this things is still building up, and given how big India is it will take years before it reaches the US stage of profit seeking.
So, I exanped my horizon
Besides the states there is south Africa who treat having a kid as some catastrophic event that might bankrupt you.
In EU countries the spirit of health insurance is socializing the cost / solidarity which we explicitly do not consider in the thread - please read the parents of that was not clear.
3k out-of-pocket for a random mishap could easily get many people bankrupt.
I did scratch an eyeball recently. The cost turned out to be €50 for drops which ain’t covered by single-payer insurance. 3k out of pocket would be pretty bad even naming nice salary. And could cause big issues to a massive portion of people.
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.
So, in other words, the typical American "Hope and pray that my health costs don't outrun my savings/investment rate" philosophy. Different strokes for different folks, hope it works out for you.
My health care costs have a pretty clear soft upper bound given how HDHPs (and most plans) are structured. Deductible and out of pocket max makes it easy to be responsible and budget into an 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.
Right, but it's also nuts that a lot of people are on a health insurance plan that encourages avoiding medical care because it offers tax-advantaged investing. You get how that's nuts, right?
Exactly. I also think conflating health insurance and investment is a terrible idea. It should just be a simple credit system for accumulating unused deductible.
It doesn't seem nuts to me? I have a good emergency fund and a stable job and no big debts (cuz I'm good with money generally), so I can choose to use my health insurance to make a little more money.
That's only fair given all the pre-work I did to set it up for myself.
That's why it's not the only option. It's a benefit not a restriction. The powers that be saw an opportunity for insurers to cover less and insurees to leverage that into a different benefit. It's all just about shifting risk around and taking a little off the top.
It's a nice incremental addition to the existing system. Way more feasible than changing the system.
They're (slightly) subsidizing the fact that I am covering more of my medical expenses out of pocket. Remember it's only tax free if I eventually spend it on health care.
Feels like the equivalent of other things we give tax benefits for. Various things for your and your dependents' well being.
Why not? Do you expect to not pay any part of your normal, expected annual heath care costs?
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.
It's not that people don't expect to pay. It's that plans like HDHP do not have predictability. An average person getting an average number of injuries cannot reasonably work out how much it will cost them to treat these injuries and whether the HSA is enough. The fact that there is the distinction between in-network and out-of-network means the deductible isn't a constant.
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.
What we have in the US is the opposite of insurance; the insurance companies tend to pay for normal health-care and then suddenly find a reason to not pay when something catastrophic happens.
Insurance is for unexpected expenses that (a) you cannot foresee and (b) would be catastrophic to your finances
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.
I guess the idea is that you put a deductible amount of money into the account annually, and the tax-advantaged investment makes up for any difference between the deductible and the savings you get on premiums for having a HDHP (I.E. HDHP premiums + deductible - tax savings ≈ normal premiums + deductible).
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.
It's mathematically coherent, but it's value relies upon the assumption that we are already spending thousands out of pocket (but it's not taxed).
I prefer the option of don't spend thousands out of pocket, pay taxes on the unspent income. If I'm paying 100% of my healthcare costs, what good is the health insurance?
Here I think it boils down to whether one thinks it's okay for everybody to spend tens of thousands of dollars per year on medical care, as long as they (probably) aren't bankrupted.
If so, then they are probably more likely to view "don't bankrupt me bro" as the use case for health insurance, rather than "I need affordable medical care".
I would demand an itemized bill from that urgent care and play hard ball with that provider. That's absurd, even by US standards. I've had ER visits that total less than that. My son had a cast that fell off while on travel in Florida, and we stopped by an ER (only place that was open and could fit a new cast). Total cost out the door _at the ER_ was less than $500, which while expensive, is nowhere near what you're talking about.
Just got my bill for a recent 20 minute doctor visit (with one of the best HC insurance coverages in my state: $1,600 cost, $1,400 adjustment, $200 out-of-pocket given my $3,000 OOP limit was not reacehd). Absurd. The USA will likely never get to an efficient govt. single pay system (unlike every other industrialized company). Given this, the option I hope for is that the FedGov passes a law that requires all Master Charge prices to be based on "Acitivty Based Accounting". ABC would provide insights for greater operational efficiency, and the 1600>1400>200 magic hand-waving would disappear. There would be a great loss of employees for health insurance portfolio analysts, but most of them could move into cost accounting roles for hospitals. Please GOP/DEM consider this.
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.
It takes about 6 months for me to get an appointment with my GP, and then it takes up to a month for their referral to a specialist to be approved, and only then can I make an appointment with my specialist, which is usually booking a few months out, making it about 9 months before I can see someone.
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.
> It takes about 6 months for me to get an appointment with my GP, and then it takes up to a month for their referral to a specialist to be approved, and only then can I make an appointment with my specialist, which is usually booking a few months out, making it about 9 months before I can see someone.
That is radically below par. The nice thing about the American system is that if your GP sucks (as yours clearly does), you can go out and get yourself a new GP! I'm able to get an appointment within a month for a checkup, a couple of days for pressing issues, and have gotten an in-network (non-specialist) referral for a same-day appointment the one time I needed urgent attention. The one time I got a specific referral whose office had a months-long waitlist, I found an in-network alternative, got an updated referral from my GP, and saw someone the following day. My wife regularly gets appointments with her GP or an in-network alternative within a day when she's sick and needs attention. It's worth noting that altering our system wouldn't improve your access to match mine, but would rather would diminish mine to match yours! Surely it's better for both of us if you just find a new GP?
> 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.
> in-network (non-specialist) referral for a same-day appointment
My HMO takes 5-10 business days to approve a non-emergency referral; 3-days for an emergency one doesn't matter what my GP does. Though it's partly moot by the fact that I would have to drive hours to find a specialist that isn't booking many weeks out, it's exacerbated by the fact that no specialists let one schedule an appointment prior to the referral being approved.
> Surely it's better for both of us if you just find a new GP?
Or I can just go to urgent care if I have an urgent issue?
...in what world does it make sense to charge the cost of a motorcycle for a few minutes of a doctor/NP's time and $15 worth of drugs? Jumping through bureaucratic hoops to avoid this is a waste of everybody's time.
Urgent care is pretty widely known to be a scam that preys on those too impatient to "jump through buerocratic hoops (make an appointment in the future with a highly-paid professional instead of paying the premium for the surplus staffing it takes to always have someone available for walk-ins)"
That's interesting because my co-pay at urgent care is the same as with my GP. Maybe there are regional differences? (ER on the other hand I know I won't walk away without many thousands of dollars in bills, on top of a much larger copay, because even though the ER is "in network" none of the contractors working there are)
I thought by adding the bit about "navigating the complexities" it would prevent comment like yours. You're blaming the victim here.
"it is YOUR FAULT for not reading the fine print"... yeah I know. I am stupid regular guy who would rather NOT have to understand the fine print and have things just work better like the rest of the developed world.
You're an adult. You paid dearly for the convenience of an urgent care, and you clearly learned your lesson. You were not a victim, you were a sucker. In America, we do not reorganize entire industries to soothe the bruised egos of suckers. We just encourage them to do a quick Google search next time.
We shouldn’t call it a health care system. That’s an aspirational term that doesn’t match reality. We have a medical industry.
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.
yes it's nice of our overlords to not let us literally die in certain circumstances, even though organ transplants are sometimes denied by insurance for really fucked up, evil reasons
>Did everyone just forget what it was like before Obamacare?
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.
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?"
High deductible plans are the norm because HSAs are basically free money. Maybe Obamacare really is to blame for shittier health insurance, but it's also possible that IBM is just paying relatively less than it used to. Employers can deposit into your HSA, which effectively lowers your deductible below the minimum required to qualify as a high deductible plan.
> ObamaCare made things much better for those who could not get healthcare.
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)
During ACA's lifetime, news orgs, the insured and politicians haven't given the slightest crap about the many millions of uninsured.
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.
At $12K a year you were at the poverty line, silver cost sharing reduction and you have something like $1K-1.5K max copays and deductibles. You might have not known about it and tried to buy a bronze plan instead, but the silver cost sharing reduction removes almost all of the deductible and the premium credits at the low end bring the premiums to near zero.
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.
> You might have not known about it and tried to buy a bronze plan instead,
I always looked at every plan there was. Most of the work was getting thru the qualifications. After all that, every plan got examined multiple times.
> Most of Obamacare brings max medical expenses to about 10% of income for a single person
During the 2010s my wife and each brought in ~$10k/yr. That was in line with most folks we knew, in the $10k-$35k range. A typical month made 80% of minimal bills.
In searching for policies in the $12/yr range there might have been 'catastrophic' policies that were just most of my income instead of all of it.
I want thru the qualification 2x more for $24k and $32k. The latter being the cheapest polices I saw all that day. I took a few screenshots back then. I'm searching my archives and if I find them I'll post back.
as someone with a pre-existing condition (that I didn't ask for), Obamacare was such a huge relief. Before I got into tech I was teaching guitar lessons and really enjoying things. My condition requires more than a once a year physical and my specialist got on me about not having health insurance because we weren't able to get the full panel of bloodwork done. I was routinely denied healthcare because of the condition. I had to pivot into tech as it was one of the few paths available that gave me health insurance. As you said its not perfect but its so much better than what we had prior to Obamacare becoming law.
Same here, but without a known pre-existing condition. Before Obamacare, health insurance companies would not even write me a policy, and they would not tell me why. Just "nope, go away". So every day, I was rolling the dice, hoping to not get seriously injured or sick. The problem with Obamacare is it didn't go far enough, the insurance companies stuck around like barnacles, leeching off the medical industry, with the government mandating we do business with them and they do business with us. I say scrap the whole lot of them.
The costs also used to be a lot lower - at least for most people who just pay the premium and don’t need much care. Now it’s not uncommon for a family’s health insurance to cost more than their housing.
The people who are mad are those who are paying more and not experiencing the benefits.
The rises in health care costs were happening long before Obamacare, and if anything Obamacare reduced the rate of rises or kept them at the same level.
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:
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.
Those people seem incapable of considering that being surrounded by healthy people is a lot more enjoyable than being surrounded by the sick and poor. You don’t live in a vacuum. You interact with a lot of people every day, consciously or not, that probably earn less than you do, and clean your streets, wash your car, care for your elders and children, handle your food, serve your beer, and do a myriad of other things they can only do at good health.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
I'd argue that the insurers are a big part of the problem, but not for the reason you state. Their profit is capped as a percentage of revenues by law (Obamacare). In order to get more profits, they have to increase costs, so it's the complete opposite of normal market forces. It's to their benefit that you have things like hospital monopolies that overcharge, because as long as all of the insurance companies are being overcharged equally, the insurance company makes more money with out of control costs.
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.
I agree PBMs are also a problem, as my comment mentioned. Several states are working to aggressively regulate them, but until there is more progress in that regard, people who need medication through these systems will experience maximum extraction.
> 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.
I’m no lover of the US healthcare system - other countries get better outcomes for less than is spent by the US government - and basically all their costs are borne by the government, unlike in the US.
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.
> and basically all their costs are borne by the government
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.
> 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.
Well, yes, all costs ‘borne by the government’ are in fact borne by people paying taxes - or government borrowing.
[You could follow the chain even further and say that, of course, the cost of those taxes, borne by people, is people’s income, borne by their employers (or investments) but that obviously gets pointless and ludicrous pretty fast because the chain never ends…]
Anyway, that’s not my point - the point is that the US government, in per capita terms, spends more (public money collected in taxes or borrowing) on healthcare than governments of countries where (almost) all healthcare spending comes from the government (public money collected in taxes or borrowing). Private spending is in addition to this.
Again, spending by the US government is more than spending by other countries governments, even though the US supposedly has a private insurance based system (that also costs a huge amount in addition to government spending!)
…and it turns out I’m slightly wrong - US government healthcare spending per capita is beaten by the governments of Norway, Luxembourg, and perhaps the Netherlands. But even they spend vastly less than the US if private spending is also considered.
The US system is unarguably hugely more expensive - less efficient - than the systems of the entire rest of the developed world, for worse health outcomes.
It varies country by country and funds are essentially fungible. France for example nominally has special payroll taxes that go towards healthcare. Some OECD nations have mandatory insurance schemes where you pay some premium monthly. It really varies a lot. It is however true that VAT is pretty much universal to OECD nations with single payer systems and make up a significant chunk of government tax receipts. Its essentially impossible to dodge.
But when comparing most incomes levels, Americans pay much lower taxes than OECD counterparts.
> Compared with other countries, the inefficiency of for-profit healthcare is a far worse problem than the amount of profit they make.
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.
> 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.
But one can very easily argue that American health outcomes are significantly driven by the average number of steps they take per day relative to other geographic peers.
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.
The actually sad part is that when you split data by race, white American health outcomes are pretty great and in some areas significantly ahead of other countries (if you have a rare cancer, America is the place to be) whereas not-white American health outcomes are ... not great.
> AIAN (67.9 years) and Black (72.8 years) people had a shorter life expectancy compared to White people (77.5 years) as of 2022, and AIAN, Hispanic, and Black people experienced larger declines in life expectancy than White people between 2019 and 2022
Your comment has been edited extensible since you first posted some misleading numbers, so I'm adding this new comment on one of your additions:
> 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.
I mean no disrespect whatsoever, but we have no common ground if the belief is a continued for profit system or more profits are going to fix any of this, based on the overwhelming evidence. At some point, one must admit that the US has entirely failed at a functional healthcare system considering the costs compared to care delivered and outcomes. If for profit insurer incentives are to increase costs as you say, we must eliminate insurers and fulfill any need for that function through public systems, where cost controls can be implemented to drive down costs. Incentives drive outcomes. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
> 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.
I literally do not care at all if there's a profit based system or not. It is completely immaterial to me. Both profit driven system and non-profit systems are successful around the world at delivering universal care.
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.
Big numbers with no context come across as a way to misinform.
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.
If maga will eat shit just so a liberal has to smell it than “communist” jacobin readers will take third world health care just to force MAGA to deal with it.
That is a sloppy generalization. The Heritage Foundation plan for market based universal medical coverage was put in place in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney and mostly works with related issues like low supply of doctors. There are many options being left of the table for political reasons and comprehensibility.
UnitedHealth has 147 million customers, according to google. 20 billion / 147 million = $136
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?
I don't think you're making contact with what the other commenter is saying. Explaining that a health insurer makes a little over $100 in profit per person over the course of a year is meant to disprove the argument that removing profit from the health insurance system is all it will take to make everything affordable. Philosophical arguments around the economic value of a life is separate from how to reduce costs of a healthcare system in a mixed market economy.
> Philosophical arguments around the economic value of a life is separate
No, you're missing the point that it's totally inappropriate to treat healthcare as a profit-center by arrogantly trivializing my response, gaslighting, and applying seriously sociopathic cognitive dissonance while avoiding the greater concern.
... 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 acknowledge I'm using anecdata and deliberately telling a story to pull at your emotions, but my cousin died suddenly at 45 of a heart attack, having been skiing and surfing just weeks prior, IE: seemingly great health. But, because he had been a (successful!) self-employed person but was in a bit of a bad time (wife cheated, divorce, sudden economic shift...) he didn't have health insurance so put off going to the doctor when he had a weird symptom a week or so before he passed.
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.
He didn't say it's not a big deal, he said checkups are relatively predictable. Those mean very different things. Moving the predictable costs behind insurance and administration artificially inflates it because there's less pressure on providers to compete.
If people weren't doing dumb things with insurance to try and socialize healthcare costs there's a good chance your friend would have been able to afford going to the doctor whether or not he was insured.
Heh I wasn't an adult then. All I've experienced is being forced to buy insurance with a premium so high my risk adjusted return for self insuring is actually higher. I was so happy when the individual mandate was finally killed. That was just straight theft by incompetent health care administration.
> being forced to buy insurance with a premium so high my risk adjusted return for self insuring is actually higher
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.
That infact is not how insurance works. You don't charge low risk people insane premia because it isn't fair. My car insurance is far cheaper than my sister's for this reason for example.
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.
Right but you'll quickly see that analogy doesn't work in another way. With car insurance, its possible I can pay into it my entire life and NEVER have an accident (my current trajectory). I deserve a lower rate!
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.
Healthcare costs will grow without bound near the end. Your model only works if everyone choses every treatment available in the end which is just dumb because the outcome is the same.
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.
Charging what they do for what they do and insisting it can't get lower? Yes incompetence is absolutely the correct word. Just because we can't choose to go elsewhere isn't a excuse.
The only credible plays to modify obamacare since it was enacted were trying to make it worse. I'd be very happy to see it replaced with something better, like medicare for all.
The ACA was a huge compromise and didn’t really do anything to tackle why American healthcare costs are so high. I can see it being washed away for a plan that is actually better, and that isn’t going back to the way things were before it.
Also they removed the requirement to have end of life care discussions ahead of time. Demonized as "death panels" by the right IIRC. Which was ironic given it would surely have saved a ton of money.
> I can see it being washed away for a plan that is actually better
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.
Yes, I don’t expect anything to happen during this administration, but who knows, maybe things will become broken enough later that something will actually happen in my lifetime.
Where does this come from? People are happy if you want to improve it. However, for literally a decade now the Republicans have tried to repeal it without any sort of replacement.
Obamacare was a gift to insurance and healthcare providers. It mandated buying government subsidized plans that enabled both sides - to continuously increase costs.
Still it's a bit unfair to Obama, the real problem is Congress and the Supreme Court which mandates we allow political bribery.
I encourage everyone to do the following simple exercise:
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.
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.
Feel free to look at dividend yields, but I can pretty much guarantee that it has not halfed in the period the stock market doubled. Most likely it stayed relatively flat, somewhere between 1.5% and 2%.
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.
>Feel free to look at dividend yields, but I can pretty much guarantee that it has not halfed in the period the stock market doubled. Most likely it stayed relatively flat, somewhere between 1.5% and 2%.
Eyeballing this chart it looks like it dropped around a third since the pandemic.
If yields stay the same actual dividends still grow in a rising market. Of course dividends aren’t a good representation of increased wealth. Stock price + dividends is. Companies generate profit which gets added to the balance sheet or paid out as dividends. It’s basically two ways of accounting for the same income (with some minor differences like tax implications).
(First, I apologise that this message must be hasty, I must do life stuff).
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.
I fully agree. Additionally, stock price is driven also by expectations of further growth, which in order to keep happening, something's gotta give so it must chip away at quality of the final product too (cheaper materials, cheaper manufacturing, etc) with a consequent enshittification. My parents, who live in Italy, could afford a stone house from the 1800s in their thirties. I live in Canada and everything's made of wood and snot and and costs a fortune.
In most places, residential real estate prices are driven mainly by land values rather than construction quality. But if you want to live in Italy they're literally giving away free houses.
>I fully agree. Additionally, stock price is driven also by expectations of further growth, which in order to keep happening, something's gotta give so it must chip away at quality of the final product too (cheaper materials, cheaper manufacturing, etc) with a consequent enshittification.
???
You're omitting some steps here. While "enshittification" probably happens to some extent, it's unhinged to suggest that's the only explanation for growth, as opposed to more mundane explanations like "better technology".
>My parents, who live in Italy, could afford a stone house from the 1800s in their thirties. I live in Canada and everything's made of wood and snot and and costs a fortune.
Seems like a stretch to blame this on "enshittification" when North American houses have been made of wood for centuries.
I didn’t mean it’s the only explanation, but it sure is a knob that companies use to tune “growth” (or fake growth, for that matter), among other things like better technology.
Just for fun, watch a movie from the 30s, 40s, 50s, etc., and take a look at the interiors of houses.
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.
Notice that I am not saying that labour is not getting more purchasing power, just that owners is getting more quicker. Luckily our increase in productivity is high enough that both can get more in absolute terms, although owners gets a larger part of the growing cake.
You realize you're an enormously privileged, wealthy individual telling other people that don't have your wealth and privilege how they should feel the same as you? You don't even say "in my experience" you just condescend to others that they should recognize how great the world is for the 0.1%, completely unaware that it isn't great for people that can't afford food and housing. Nobody gives a shit about their TV when they're hungry on the street.
I was born into a lower middle class family with several siblings. My dad skirted bankruptcy. My first car literally came from a junkyard in pieces, bought with money I earned from my paper route. Hardly 0.1%.
(I didn't know how bad things were for him until I went through his papers after he died.)
I began investing with my first real job, with another crappy car I repaired with junkyard parts.
A good friend of mine grew up in a family that qualified for welfare but wouldn't accept it. He didn't get past high school. He managed to make himself $10m before his tragic death. Yes, the US is the land of opportunity. Other countries can emulate it if they want to.
A couple years ago, I booked an Uber ride. The driver was a refugee from Afghanistan. He arrived in the US with nothing but his skin. Within a few months he had a thriving business, driving the Uber in whatever extra time he had left. It was fun talking to him - he was hella ambitious!
This is the definition of an asset bubble in my books. In 2007 +/-, this is exactly what happened with housing prices. People would buy an asset and watch it appreciate doing nothing.
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?
It is substantially more difficult to acquire a large amount of stock if you don't earn a lot of money, since there is naturally far less leftover after your expenses are paid.
And further, stock can be purchased with dividend payments. So the rich can afford an ever increasing piece of the pie even if they don't labor at all.
Careful with "can". It is possible for the homeless guy on the corner to buy stock in the sense that he is not prohibited from doing so. But on the other hand, the actual fact is that he can not purchase stock.
Right, ability to buy stock is predicated on having the money to do it, after paying for basic necessities. People who work for a living have less money than those who don’t. So when stock prices rise, even workers who can save see less absolute benefit than owners.
But this is not meaningful. If I buy 10 dollars of stock, at 10% return I am earning 1 dollar per year. This amount is not relevant to my life in any way and is probably dwarfed by variation in the amount of cash I find lying on the ground annually.
It's like saying everyone has access to clean water, look over there, there's a drop.
The point is that workers have far less money to save. Therefore when stocks go up due to increased productivity, even workers who have enough money to save still don’t benefit, in absolute terms, as much as owners.
Becoming an owner by founding a company is the way to reach the top tier. Jobs, Gates, Bezos, Musk, etc.
BTW, I know a person who worked as a fruit picker as a young man, he's now a multimillionaire. And a woman who grew up in a mobile home who is now worth 9 figures.
America is a great country.
P.S. my first business was selling greeting cards door to door.
Unfortunately our society’s structure is such that only a small number of people can ever be wealthy. They do this by belonging to the ownership class. There is not enough room there for everyone, because owners make money simply through owning, because others do the work for them, while the owners pay themselves with the profits these workers generate for them.
> Unfortunately our society’s structure is such that only a small number of people can ever be wealthy.
History says otherwise. The mass immigration to the US in the 1800s was all poor people arriving with nothing but a suitcase. They moved up into the middle class and beyond en masse.
Middle class people live better than medieval kings.
Living standards have risen due to productivity gains being distributed across society. Factors such as wise policy and labor unions contributed to this effect. These factors are largely absent today. Productivity gains have flowed mostly to the ownership class since the mid 1970s (this is the pay-productivity gap). As the article notes, 50% of people identify groceries as a major cause of stress, which doesn’t sound like a medieval king. Society has the capacity to make life better for everyone. It requires collective action to redistribute wealth from the ownership class across society however.
Even raising living standards for the poor through redistribution wouldn’t solve all our problems. Concentration of wealth is itself a net negative because it is concentration of power. Greater wealth concentration makes society more undemocratic, even if the bottom 50% were to become richer. Today billionaires have so much money that a group of them has gotten together to fund the abandonment of democracy in the US. They are largely succeeding. We are collapsing into “illiberal democracy” - a phenomenon that has been spreading across the globe in recent years. Our greatest problems, like climate change, worsen as wealthy interests prop up policies of denial rather than effective solutions.
A medieval king had political control. If society was heading in a direction that was going to harm them, they could do something about it. But members of the modern day middle class have virtually no political control. That is concentrated in the hands of the few and harms us all.
That's not the definition of wealthy. Wealthy is a relative term. It's meaningless to say that a lower middle class person today is wealthy just because people 500 years ago could only dream of the things they have. If other people in the society they currently live in have a million times more, they are not wealthy.
I'm sure you understand how capitalism works. If you do, you should understand that not everyone can be an owner, someone has to do the actual work.
That's like saying anyone with legs can be a professional runner. In theory yes, but not in practice, not in a meaningful way.
Defining poverty as bottom quintile is also useless, yes. Defining poverty by comparing to the average or median income is the most useful definition. Someone earning less than half of average, for example. That tells you how well they can afford the limited resources of any society, as those track the average purchasing power.
That has other issues. For instance change in ownership structures (eg. mom & pop shops selling up to private inequality) would change this figure without anything else changing.
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.
All these "doubled since 2015/2019/20whatever" stats tie back to a dirty word that starts win In and ends with "flation"
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.
You do realize that inflation hits at least as much for employees though right? (Likely even more, because all things equal, you're still better off if numbers are bigger)
If anything, you'd be strengthening cameldrv and Epa095s point...
Inflation is typically better for the wealthy. Cost of living goes up. This hits you if you are a worker. But if you’re wealthy this is a small dent in your budget at best. On the contrary, you hold many assets, which generally appreciate with inflation, effectively hedging away the negative effect.
It's not quite as bunk as that. If you take the time-derivative of the stock price it becomes a flow, and as stock prices are approximately exponential, the growth rate will be half of what it is today at approximately the same time range that the value itself was half of what it is today. (Obviously, with a lot more noise added).
Good point. Doubling in 7 years means around 10% growth per year. So, if someone took out 10% of their stock nest-egg per year, it wouldn't have grown at all.
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 am sure the point must be more sophisticated as even with 0% growth there would still be significant return on capital (risk free rate + acceptable risk premium).
That is to say the world where return on capital is not greater than economic growth doesn't make any sense.
The point is not whether or not it makes sense. The point is that it is fairly natural for a capitalist system to have r>g and that causes concentration of wealth. If you look historically the increasing concentration of wealth only really gets reversed by wars or revolutions. So what Piketty is arguing for is a more gentle way of redistributing wealth, because typically when one gets to 1914 levels of inequality, well… we know what happens.
> because typically when one gets to 1914 levels of inequality, well… we know what happens.
When it comes to resource sequestration this is a fundamental law of nature. There's no safety in a world where random people on the street see your death as a biological imperative.
At the risk of being pedantic, is a "piggy bank" really the right metaphor for this? A piggy bank has actual money within it, regardless of what I think of the piggy bank, it still has money within it. While a stock's total market cap technically only represents the last transaction price multiplied by the number of outstanding shares (kinda). Anyway, just making the point that it isn't like a "bank" in that there is not money in a container of any sort (obviously, banks lend out their own deposits so even my correction is also wrong).
I'm don't have anything better to replace it with, but I am just questioning the "piggy bank" as a metaphor here.
> Moreover stock prices incorporate a variety of factors that are irrelevant to wealth distribution.
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.
Isn't the point still valid if you consider just the return on capital? If the market cap of the S&P500 was about 18 trillion in 2015 and returns 10%, the income going to to the owners of that capital is 1.8 trillion. In 2025 the market cap is 53 trillion, and a 10% return is then 5.3 trillion. That's an increase of almost 300%.
Now if the average salary was 48,000 in 2015 and there were 150 million people employed in the us, that's 7.2 trillion. The 2025 average is about 66,000 with 160 million employed. That's about 10 trillion. Around 40% increase in income going to labor. Am I missing something?
People who have less flow and no stock can increase their savings less than those with stock and the same flow. Many are not able to save at all. Those without stock receive only flow. Those with stock receive both flow and stock, and those with more stock profit more from rising stock.
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.
Workers savings doesn’t change the fundamental dynamic. Their savings are dwarfed by those of their bosses. So when stocks double, workers, even accounting for savings, benefit far less in absolute terms than owners. Assets under capitalism follow a Pareto distribution - a minority owns a majority of the wealth.
And having $100 in savings doesn’t free someone from wage labor.
Indeed. At the bottom of the income ladder, $100 is critical. Lots of surprise bills can be more than that, and failing to pay them can cause further income reductions. This is why I support a strong welfare system: it lets everyone survive when things hit the fan.
But if you can put aside $100 per month, for a while now it's been possible to put even that little into the stock market. Exact growth is highly variable and depends on what you actually invest in, but it's not implausible that over 20 years, less than half a normal working lifespan, this would have turned $24k spend into $70k present value. It's not the millionaire's club, but it's a lot for someone who only had $100 they could stand to put aside each month.
I wouldn't recommend anyone puts their last $100 into the stock market, or even to let themselves dip bellow $1000 in cash at any point unless they're in an extremely low cost of living nation.
- 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.
And there's far more to it than that. Saying it is "really that simple" is nothing but call to outrage.
it doesnt really matter if there are bars of gold to backup the value of a company's market cap. the point is that you can sell the shares for money, and to further emphasize this, you're literally taxed on that gain just like income tax (though annoyingly much lower, which further reinforces mistreatment of working class).
This doesn't contadict that rich renters have it better than actual workers - sucking the riches they produce. You are just pointing out some of the reasons why.
... and most of it is taken/given to the owner of the capital, not the provider of labour.
I predict that AI will amplify this trend, because it lowers the demand for routine human labor and raises the return on the agentic (e.g. founder) labor that leverages routine labor.
It's going to get dicey when millions are no longer needed for labor or to consume goods (keep the economic engine going). Oh and amoral robots can do the dirty work ...
Speaking as someone from the US, how is this a meaningful comparison in anyway? Honest question. Sure, wage growth sounds good in an upward trending market, but let's say the market has gone down 30% over the past five years. Would you expect everybody to take a 30% pay cut? If Walmart had a blockbuster year because their suppliers charged less (more efficient means of production), how are Walmart employee wages interconnected to the supplier charges?
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.
Layoffs contribute to the average worker taking a paycut. And we are seeing layoffs even in a market that is soaring. Why do you think that workers wouldn't be affected during a downturn?
Once you factor in P/E ratio inflation on those higher equity prices and replace salary with total benefits (i.e. including healthcare benefits), the scenario is revealed to be decidedly NOT simple.
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".
Why would stock market valuation be a good metric? If Walmart's valuation doubled in that period, does it mean they sold twice as many goods? How could salaries hope to double, if the things people buy with salaries didn't also double? Did Ford's vehicle sales double in that period?
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.
Right now if indexes show massive gains it's based in large part on developments in AI, which is a corporate-friendly development predicated on destroying jobs by replacing people with AI tools and human effort with AI effort.
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).
> 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
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.
Go back 50 years, and 95% of Americans should be raising Cain. Of OECD countries, the US has ridiculous income inequality distribution and effective reductions in purchasing power over time. https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
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.
Going back 50 years is the mid-late part of the post-WW2 economic boom. Sure, you can have that kind of growth back but only if you're willing to go through World War 3 to get to it.
The tax cuts and other regulatory shifts allowing things like share buyback and the carried interest loophole (might be closed now) have shifted up the share of the GDP held by the top 10%. This has slowed the velocity of income, as a wealthy person doesn't spend their income the same month the way a person in lower quin-tiles does. This has caused a stagnation in middle class standards of living. This is a headwind that didn't exist 60 or 70 years ago. There was also a demographic advantage as WW2 had thinned the heard and there was a once ever level of economic prosperity. The tax code encouraged big business to invest in labor, which isn't happening 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.
It's probably not that simple because at a cursory glance I see quite a few points in history where my country's main stock index was about 50% of its current valuation: January 1998, February 2006, January 2015, July 2016, April 2020.
Sure compared to the last time (2020) or before that (2016) it's a big difference, but compared to the first time we're pretty close to a 100% increase in median salary. Compared to the second time it's still close it 60%.
> 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.
You know that the increase in price could be simply... ehm.. inflation. So no productivity increase out there.
Inflation is important yes, but it hits the stocks and salaries the same. So the ratio between them are the same, and the moral of the story, that most of the wealth goes to the owners, remains.
But yeah, how amazing the productivity increase actually is is a bit more complicated.
If the stock price is primarily reflective of real productivity, then stock market crashes would have to be caused by sudden drops in productivity. Are they?
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.
Now more and more people in red states are asking about healthcare. Seems like they could or should be capitalizing on this, unless the parties are going to flip on this issue to keep their power balance.
Can't speak for anyone but myself of course, but I was pretty disappointed with the way Democrats under Obama tackled healthcare.
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.
Whatever is worth doing is worth doing badly. Obamacare wasn't perfect, but it had tons of positive effects and could later be improved. Republicans seem to be the only ones with a 50-year plan and the discipline to see it through.
>Whatever is worth doing is worth doing badly. Obamacare wasn't perfect,
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.
> with an individual mandate, which is both offensive
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.
its not difficult - it's that they very clearly HATE class consciousness. just look back at occupy wallstreet. it got coverage that was nearly universally mocking it and sneering at it, and the second they were able to ignore it and pretend it didnt exist anymore, corporate news moved on.
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.
> it got coverage that was nearly universally mocking it and sneering at it, and the second they were able to ignore it and pretend it didnt exist anymore, corporate news moved on.
This is exactly how I remember the coverage, but it’s notable that these people tied their own noose:
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.
Real wages are up and quality of life is on average better than it's ever been. But news organizations do in fact report on self-reported data periodically like living paycheck-to-paycheck (which just means they spend everything and don't save).
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.
Except the data doesn't reflect that at all. Americans on average are among the richest people in the world. People who make the median income just often spend it all.
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.
The math in the statement is correct in the short term. If the risk-free rate is around 3% and the equity risk premium is about 4%, the expected return on stocks would be roughly 7% a year, which would double values in about 10–11 years using the Rule of 72. That doubling could occur for a time even without productivity growth, as companies can boost earnings through pricing power, cost-cutting, or financial engineering.
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.
My point was that is that even without any economic growth stock indexes grow quickly because they are cumulative (that is include profits of companies by either dividend paid or stock buybacks).
Some indexes are not fully cumulative but they are still close enough because companies often prefer buybacks to dividends these days (for good reasons).
They do in expectations of course.
It's like saying "overall businesses make money and money accumulates over the years".
You are rewarded for not spending your money right now. Taking some risks (risk premium over risk free rate) and not being an idiot (keeping your money in a bank or mattress or whatever). Market puts price on that reward. Unless you believe market is completely wrong about everything then yes - stonks will go up.
Sometimes I feel the reason for many political views presented on HN is misunderstanding of very basic of finance and economy. The whole discussion here that started with absolutely nonsense comparison (stonks go up faster than wages) is one example of that.
So, talk me through where I am wrong. I will use the example in my sibling post you did not reply to.
If you put 10 million into the S&P 500 in 2002 you would get a dividend of roughly 132k (1.32%). That's your share, as a owner, of the wealth produced that year across all the companies you own tiny parts of. Keep the money there, do absolutely nothing, and in 2025 it has grown to 70 million. Your yearly payout is roughly 925k, 7 times what it was 20 years ago.
You agree with this? And then we compare that to wages, and see that they have grown significantly less. You agree to this as well? For sake of argument, let's say they doubled.
From this I conclude:
- Income from capital grows exponentially faster than income from salaries.
- The person who invested 10 million in 2002 gets a larger fraction of what the economy produces compared to a salaried person today than 20 years ago.
- That difference will increase if the stock market continues as it has done in the past.
Please help me understand which conclusion you disagree with, and why.
Protip: look for an Asian market in your area for food. I get an entire shopping cart full of food for $60-100 and that lasts for ~2 weeks.
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!
I believe Asian markets are basically an inversion of the regular grocery store pricing model. Regular grocery stores sell all the stuff around the perimeter (meat, dairy, produce, baked goods, etc.) at relatively high margins and all the shelf-stable packaged stuff in the middle at relatively low margins. It makes sense, one store may have better or worse produce or meat or bakery items or deli items etc. than another, but their Heinz Ketchup can only be cheaper or more expensive.
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.
You can get a nice deal if you alternate, yeah - generic "staples" at your local giant or whatever, Asian market for fresher or unique stuff, dry spices from an Indian grocery...
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.
I would love to learn more about the unit economics of groceries. How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation? [0]
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.
The megacorp can provide cheap food, it just doesn't want to. In practice they adjust the margins in a data-driven way on individual goods.
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.
It’s just price gouging. There is an item I sometimes buy that is about $1.60 at supermarkets, but is consistently $.85 at nearly all rural Colmados. Same brand, same product , shelf stable , mass produced, large volume mover, imported product. Supermarkets have just collectively decided to sell it for 2x the “rational” market price because it went up with Covid and people kept buying it.
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 is an interesting one to me. They're widely touted as being cheaper, but most foods there have some sort of upscaling factor -- "organic", some sort of regional variation like "sockeye" salmon instead of farmed atlantic, a few extra steps of processing, etc. Rice, pasta, and fruit are all usually more expensive than other alternatives, even at bigco grocery competitors. You have to be a little careful if that's where you do all your shopping.
Costco used to be cheaper bc of the bulk factor, but nowadays I think of it as a good curator. The products are usually good quality. Even if more expensive
A good example of this is their meat department, specifically beef as an example. You will generally find that Costco is not any cheaper than your regular supermarket, but the product you’re getting is graded USDA Prime or better.
There was a great comment on Reddit from someone who worked in the meat department that highlighted this comparison with specific examples but alas I am unable to find it.
>curation . . . The products are usually good quality.
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.
I also largely go there for Kerrygold butter, meats, oils, and other bulk household goods. But the occasional furniture purchase, automotive thing, car rental, etc. It's a good deal for the price of the annual membership
> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?
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.
> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?
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.
> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?
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
A lot of manual labor and optimization on the marginal things.
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.
Farmers markets are incredibly shitty inefficient ways of getting food from farm to consumer. Also the people who shop at them tend to be much much richer.
When you control most of the market it works out a little differently. People can only eat so much food, but you can price gouge them relatively easily.
And they do $150B - $200B of gross per year. It's a massive business. I worked at Kroger Central Marketing decades ago when they rolled out the savings cards (which was a way for them to raise prices across the board AND track purchases in real time per shopper) and the strategizing over milk prices for a 1/2 a cent per gallon change was insane.
Doesn't that also count the investment losses they made last year, the cost of gobbling up other companies, the interest from the debt they acquired with previous expansionary practices, etc?
You can get the same numbers out of small scale grocers too. It’s a brutal retail business with low margins and easy replacement. It’s probably the last industry I’d look to for price gauging accusations.
The typical argument against monopoly grocer situations is that they are problematic for how they deal with _vendors_ not customers.
Grocery stores have lots of operations costs. Real estate, employees (Kroger employs ~400k people), cold chains, logistics, etc.
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.
>> Protip: look for an Asian market in your area for food.
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 produce quality is often a bit lower. But in the last 5 years, all the grocery stores at least here in the Seattle area have had produce degrade, and they are pretty much the same as H-mart with higher prices.
Where I live, if I don’t shop at fancy grocery stores 30-40min away, it’s generous to call the produce ‘produce’. Literally never knew onions could look this bad. A lot of the citrus is like deflated in the inside, the bananas are trash, and a single bell pepper is $3. I could go on and on. Just think we enshittified the food situation and now it’s more expensive and way worse quality.
Something unique to the city I'm in is there are some stores that only sell produce. I have no idea how they make it work economically other than locations with cheap rent and being an outlet for distributors but they manage to to have better quality and prices than grocery stores.
My local Asian grocer does one key thing I know of to save/make money: lots of the workers live in a local dorm that he rents and are fed with leftovers from the bakery and nealy spoiled produce.
I find the produce prices often to be absurdly lower. These items are cheaper to begin with but if you're making fresh food consistently then it probably adds up. The biggest difference I've observed is that the asian grocery stores buy tier 2/3 produce rather than the big supermarkets that have perfect looking produce.
Exactly! The big supermarkets have tomatoes that look perfect, but taste like wax. The Asian groceries have lumpy odd-colored tomatoes that actually taste good.
We've had a garden and orchard for most years for quite some time now (several decades) and this is one of the most stark and interesting things I've observed as well. Garden produce is nearly always smaller, lumpy-looking, and by appearances alone looks to be quite inferior. However, they taste great compared to those "perfect" veggies and fruits in the grocery stores. In mid-winter when the home-grown produce is gone and we go back to buying from the store (or when on trips and such), it's often a big disappointment. If you're willing to spend $$$ on organic produce at mid to higher end stores, you can get close to the quality (though never on strawberries and raspberries IME), but the cost can be pretty ridiculous to the point of feeling wasteful.
I've recently had some of the best strawberries and it costs $1/each. Grown in the same city I live in: in fact Google Maps says the distance between the grocery store and the strawberry farm is four miles.
> Protip: look for an Asian market in your area for food. ... Discovering the Asian market has been one of the best financial things to happen to me.
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.
I don't care if it saves me money, I'm not giving my hard earned cash to Walmart/Kroger/Albertsons/OtherMegaCorp. Not to mention that what they sell at Walmart is mostly unhealthy garbage that I would be a negligent parent if I fed that to my family.
I do make an exception for Costco because from everything I've read they're a pretty standout company as far as treating their employees go, and they curate well. We get some stuff there.
But mostly we shop at small(er) local grocery stores when possible, especially for things like meat, eggs, milk, all of which we can get local (better quality and why ship stuff like that around the world; luckily we're in the PNW). And of course that includes local Asian stores for rice, fresh fish, etc.
We don't buy "fancy" food (no wagyu steaks and the like; we eat a lot of legumes) but we do try to get the healthiest local option when possible (not fanatically so, we're not on Portlandia), and we could probably cut our monthly food bill by at least 30% if we bought the cheapest food at Walmart/Safeway.
So we cut back spending in other ways - rarely eat/drink out, entertainment, etc.
I'm sure we could do better. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that it really costs in both time and money to eat healthy. We're lucky that we can, but it's also a matter of what we prioritize in our spending.
I pickle, ferment and sauce a lot of things. Then I look for things that can be made in very large quantities and then preserved frozen/cooled (a lot of times just in the cellar). A lot of these things are from Asia and are great and very cheap and I'm love them for taste as well; curry's (I make 10 liters at a time; from scratch, very very cheap except my time but I like cooking), auntie dumplings (prep + freeze; just watch tv while making 100s of them) etc. Lovely food and cheaper than most things.
Same here, our freezer has lots of home made dumplings in dinner size packages.
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.
In my country its called an international market. It's a beautiful place where you buy an entire bag of garlic for ~8 euros. There's also vegetables I hadn't heard of before I entered there
Publix is expensive for general items but the sales are often incredible, I will stop by just to get BOGO items and return to Kroger or Lidl for everything else.
You're talking about getting in a car and driving to a specialized grocery store to "save money". I'm saying you could also just by produce and save money.
That was the point of my post. I'm not buying potato chips and dip; I'm buying produce, meat, and herbs. These items are way cheaper at the Asian markets I go to.
In my country healthcare is not an issue still, and in the countryside where I live housing costs are 'low enough'. But food cost used to be something only students or long term unemployed had to worry about somewhat. Now minimum wage workers and elderly have the same issues I had as a student, and I can't imagine how I would do as a student or as an unemployed. Bank of MomAndDad are probably the only way out. Social mobility should be t it's lowest in decades if I had to guess.
Exactly the things that a well meaning society should provide to its citizens. What's the point of "progress" if we can't provide the basics to the majority?
In the United States, the working poor are considered deserving of their burdens in an immutable, moralizing, Calvinist way.
“They make bad choices.”
“They have bad culture.”
“They have bad genes.”
If market forces were allowed to operate, these needs would be fulfilled. Instead, the usa and a lot of europe have an enormous amount of regulation and government involvement in housing, healthcare, and food.
Those of us who want progress and the world to be a better place to live should politically push for deregulation in these three markets/industries.
An unregulated (or just less-regulated) free market is not going to fix health care cost. The problem is we treat it as a market, full of middle-men spooning away profit, and where people get care generally proportional to the amount they spend.
This is a No True Scotsman fallacy. If America, the #1 champion of free market capitalism cannot get it right, then it may be impossible. Communists claimed the same: they say it didn't work because we haven't tried "true communism" yet.
The US is the only odd one out in the first-world for healthcare, so we'll leave that aside (most people are covered through their employer, but many people aren't)
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.
Just look at the name of each of the primary groups in the US:
- 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.
This is not the right framing. The left vs right battle was invented so people wouldn't think about the up vs down battle. It's wealthy people vs everyone else but the wealthy people convinced everyone else that it's red vs blue.
The wild popularity of... checks... getting 56% of ranked-choice votes (44% of first place votes) in a Democratic Party primary in one of the most reliably Democratic cities in the US.
Taking political labels at face value is stunningly naive. Parties' rhetoric is similarly untrustworthy to the point of irrelevance. In reality, major parties are just different combinations of graft, which for obvious reasons is not shared with the public. But even if that were not the fact, taking some label that arose a century ago (progressive) or four centuries (conservative, in England) -- under circumstances that are barely remembered and may have been mendacious even at the time -- and have changed continuously since -- is common enough, I guess, but sheer childishness.
> 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).
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.
> I don't know what this logical fallacy is called, but it's a logical fallacy nonetheless.
It’s a straw man. The US is usually represented by liberals vs conservatives, not progressives. Also progressivism doesn’t simply mean “progress” conceptually
so if a junior dev checks in 4k lines of crap code in the codebase, is that progress?
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?
The "we oughtta run society in a way that <bible mumbo jumbo>" stuff that "conservatives" spew is literally textbook "progressivism", just not in a direction that anyone who self identifies as a "progressive" wants.
The progressive movement is not representative of the whole Democratic Party (it’s widely liberals vs conservatives, not progressives)
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, …)
Americans confuse need with 'nice to have' which leads to the "I don't have money for food/rent/hc" problem.
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.
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.
Home internet is a luxury if you already have a data plan on your phone to accomplish the necessities - that is for access to government and corporate web sites and educational (school related) needs. Social media, in its basic forms are text and photos which also should fit in most included MVNO data plans such as this one from US Mobile which is $22.50/mo or $228/yr (19/mo)
Unlimited High-Speed Data
Unlimited Talk & Text
20 GB Hotspot Data
FYI - I live in a fairly rural area and have coverage. The standard home internet plan here runs about $90/mo after all taxes and tithes are paid.
Lazy Americans conflate anecdotes with reality. Make sure to hit the tropes though. The poor person with a Starbucks cup. The 'leased BMW bros are financial idiots'. The iPhone you have no idea where the person got (my son get's them as a christmas gift from his auntie). The cable bill (who under 50 has cable TV? What year is this post from?).
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.
I hope you realize that the people that are feeling "stressed" are not just the ones making minimum wage but also those making considerably more yet, somehow not managing to make ends meet.
No you see, the poors are bad people and deserve to be poor.
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.
So implicit in this is that the poor should have no luxuries at all. Water + a crust of bread. When not working for their betters, can sit in the darkness inside their hovels so as to not be seen.
The median USA income is $40k. Most (not all) people are fully capable of living within their means. They can balance housing+food+medical and even some non essential luxuries. However, they have little slack. A shock to the system (loss of job, car failure, medical problem, or 20% increase in consumer goods within a few months) can force them to make tough choices. Which is where we are now. Basics have gone up, so whatever slack that might have existed has been cut short and people are stressed about how to adapt.
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”
I hope people advocating this realize that the lower 50% of Americans are waking up to the fact that their quality of life based on America's PPP is actually the same as third world nations, and the upper levels still want them to 'cut back more'. How long do you think people will go for that?
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.
try downloading an os update over your 5g connection, or maybe watching some instructional videos on youtube, now your out of gb and have an offer for purchasing 1gb additional data for 10 bucks a pop
No, but you can get elected to the HOA and move to dissolve it. Of course this isn't always advisable, some HOAs aren't awful, and some actually provide necessary services to homeowners.
so who is in charge for organizing repairs/replacement of common area things? Fences, parking lots, elevators, roof, pool, dog park, interior carpets, re-painting walls, etc?
I guess i’m thinking of a condo HOA. Maybe some of that is less relevant in a neighborhood with single family homes?
I do agree some HOAs are awful. But many actually help keep a place from looking shitty and from collapsing like the condo tower in florida a few years ago.
That is not always an easy thing to do and every HOA will vary. In general it will usually require a very high number (like 80%) of owners to agree, there are often multi-year waiting periods and sometimes poison pills which offer common areas to the local municipality on dissolution.
The people I know who can't afford food or housing don't lease their cars (nor have they ever bought a car that was less than 5 years old) nor own a house, so I think we are considering a very different class of people.
When I started as head of the HOA, I was out of work and not exactly cup runeth over with money myself as it was 2009 so please, take your snark elsewhere.
The point being that you are a stickler for rules and, like most sticklers, lack the capacity to understand the life situations of people unlike you. Hence the tone-deaf, factless, compassionless screed.
I have been poor and made all the sacrifices you suggest (heck, even gave up a car for public transportation), and, looking back, it made very little difference. Housing and food are just too expensive and dwarf other concerns.
I waited until they were phasing out the pixel 6a, so there were loads of great sales to clear out the old inventory. I managed to get a pixel 6a new for $94 total. No trade-in, no contract obligations, just $94 total.
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 did watch the most recent JerryRigEverything samsung fold phone test and man it is so thinnnn but nah, $2K for a phone is too much for me, maybe I'm just poor but yeah.
I had a $2K used Sony Alpha camera and I felt scared using it, poor mindset too but insurance.
This is anecdotal but here is the truth: I have a home that I bought around 20 years ago in Cali, and the HOA tripled during that time and is now rapidly approaching $700/mo. And that's with less benefits since we lost the earthquake insurance. And not to mention the special assessments that started showing up in 2025. You could make all sort of assumptions, but there is nothing special about the community.
> And not to mention the special assessments that started showing up in 2025. You could make all sort of assumptions, but there is nothing special about the community.
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.
So many, many HOAs and condo assocs. are poorly managed and have no capital plans (I even had a condo once where the agreement prohibited a capital fund!).
Two points - first to yours on it being more difficult to sell. In fact, it can be the opposite. To get a mortgage these days it often requires the hoa/condo to have at least 10% of the annual budget in reserves. While often not the case, buyers should also be comparing the relative reserve states too and realize low reserves means specials
The second point is that failure to reserve the majority of the cost of expected capital needs can result in a situation of liens and foreclosures (to get a paying owner in) and the HOA going cup in hand to a bank who may or may not loan the shortfall at a terrible interest rate. Or the project is put on hold and the cost may rise because of inflation or further deterioration of whatever was being renovated.
When homeowners gripe about the dues and 'look how much is in reserves' I always ask: so when the roof needs to be replaced, you'll be good to cut a $5 or 10K check within 30 days? No? That is why the HOA reserves the vast majority of the cost.
I think this is something that's very difficult to learn. It's a set of attitudes more than anything, and it's very countercultural (and not in a cool way).
Mr money mustache isn't my favorite for various reasons, but he's pretty good at evangelizing the diy/fire sprit. Just take it with a grain of salt.
It wouldn't be America if people didn't blame the poor for everything. Surely, the housing crisis is just stupid poor people drinking too many lattes, there is certainly no greater issue there, nope.
Health care costs are only a concern in the one developed country where it’s not universal and paid for by taxes (or completely free if you don’t work or don’t work much)
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
We have an insurance system similar to Obamacare here in Switzerland but not the same problems as the USA. (Healthcare is expensive here but everything is expensive here so it's difficult to make the comparison)
> About half the public identify the cost of groceries as a major source of financial stress.
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.
Despite early success I'm truly no closer to stability [in terms of housing]. With the wrong landlords, I'm practically living with Mom/Dad while nearing my 40s. Fiefdom-building isn't helping at all.
I can deal with the responsibility of a leaky roof. I can't deal with another year of No Dogs Allowed.
The current financial system and various corporations see the majority of consumers like livestock - a kind of resource to be exploited. It's better to be free range organic though, in my humble opinion, but the majority seem to be trending towards battery/cage chickens.
With "free range organic" are you describing people or food? As in, "it's better to be a free range organic human [vs. battery/caged livestock human-like resource for exploitation]", or "it's better to _eat_ free range organic [food]"? These are two different things, and in either case I'd argue not an option for the people who struggle affording food that is health(ier) by modern standards.
Without in any way drawing a direct comparison, my impression is that everyone is stressed out by whatever is next on their Maslov pyramid. If it's food and housing, it will be food and housing. If it is achieving great showbiz success rather than moderate, it will be that.
Of course it's not the same, and being well fed and rested makes whatever psychological stress easier to bear.
But look at all the rich people seeing their shrinks. Or look at poor people in the UK, who really have it tough, but at no point seek to think, gee, we're better off than 90% of the world population, arent we lucky.
I am not equating the objective lack of basic life necessities to far fetched flights of fancy, but I have a feeling (huh) the subjective psychological feeling might feel the same.
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
If you put a 2.5% annual tax on net worth, that net worth would very rapidly find its way to other countries.
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.
The $15k is being transferred from entity A to entity B. Both entities are not spending the $15k so there wouldn't be any effect on inflation. If you printed an extra $15k then that would cause inflation because both entity A and entity B would be spending $15k.
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.
This completely ignores Friedman's concept of the velocity of money (MV = PY). If that $15k is being saved by someone versus immediately spent, that has a different effect. A transfer isn’t neutral if the two parties have different propensities to consume (marginal propensity to consume).
Similarly how quickly and what the money is being spent on will have an effect.
Most money (M2) is not created directly by the treasury but rather indirectly from large banks lending against fractional deposits. This is money created on the balance sheets of banks but has real effect on the economy.
This I think is going to be a great problem that humanity must solve to move forward. Currently, wealth can become overwhelming concentrated and that wealth has mobility across jurisdictions which makes it nearly impossible to implement a wealth tax.
The only way I see this ever working is enough powerful nations agree on a uniform wealth tax (say 1%/year) and those nations use their economic strength to pressure other nations to adopt the wealth tax as well.
If the USA and EU got on board with a wealth tax I believe they could get the majority of the world to come onboard by implementing high tariffs on any country that does not implement the wealth tax.
Of course the problem here is that the US is probably one of the least likely countries to implement a wealth tax, so I think this change will only come with major upheaval or violence.
You implement demurrage and land value taxes and it's game over. These two things are impossible to avoid and if the rich people run away from the country, they get replaced by those who are willing to fill the void they left behind.
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...
> demurrage and land value taxes and it's game over
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.
A wealth tax is just not feasible because almost none of the rich will accept it. See almost any response to your comment as evidence. What we need is strong labor laws and the will for unions in the working class. A wealth tax doesn’t actually change any power dynamics. The rich are still powerful and the poor reliant on them. If the working class can band together, the power dynamics change and we can see some actual progress.
Poverty isn't hard to solve because "society needs it" but because it is a statistically likely outcome. If you live in a world where everyone has $100, and every day, each person randomly gives $1 to a random another person, you end up with a highly unequal society within a year.
I mean it's necessary to have some system to allocate jobs and resources. Someone has to do the shit work, and someone has to do the easy work, and there are jobs that it's probably not worth paying someone properly to do in their current form.
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.
The OPM from the US government is defined as a relative wealth function, so technically it has to exist.
Also you can compare the standard of living of someone above the poverty line in 1910 vs someone below the poverty line 2010, and 99% of people wouldn't trade places. Access to running water, toilets, air conditioning TV, Internet, mobile phones, etc makes life a lot better than what we called middle class 100 years ago. [source https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/air-c... ]
It's all relative and as long it's relative, mathematically speaking poverty has to exist.
Do we have a definition for "has stable access to basic necessities"? In 2025 I'd call this healthy varied food, private sheltered sleeping space that's protected from extreme temperature, clean water to drink and bathe, Internet, public outdoor recreation space, health care, at least a day off a week and let's say 5 days combined PTO or vacation, enough extra to cover emergencies, and enough left over to slowly save for retirement or education or retraining or other opportunities.
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.
Wealth and income are stocks and flows, respectively.
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.
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.
Low income people chase goods with all their money. High income people squirrel it away or spend on luxury goods.
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.
Good thing the republicans just enacted the Big Bewildering Bill that did the absolute opposite thing, and ensures even more wealth is redistributed from the bottom to the top!
> 40 million Americans live below the poverty line of $15,000 per year.
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."
Throwing more dollars into a system with out of control costs will not resolve the fundamental cost issue. For the same reason that you can't out-exercise a terrible diet or out-earn a terrible business model, solving this problem will require addressing the cost component.
1) After how many years of 2.5% annual donation would their own wealth drop until they thenself become poor?
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.
You may find it unfathomable to do so, but I already donate quite a bit more than 2.5% of my salary, as well as hours of my time every week, helping people less fortunate than myself.
Whatever "reality" you're referring to isn't the same one I'm living in.
That would simply make food and housing more expensive, as it would devalue money, as it increases circulation, because it wouldn't produce more housing and food - just increase demand - unless they "donated" (tax) that 2.5% to increase production, and not to subsidize poverty.
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.
...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.”
Honest question, but it sounds like you're describing that if ~11% (based on the parent numbers) of people weren't very poor the economic system would fail? Eg inflation would spiral out of control? (i assume spiral since they'd have more money, but money would be worth less, there by making them have less effective spending power - thereby needing them to have more money, etcetc.)
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.
Inflation and affordability are different concepts. I think affordability is the term I’ll use as it’s best for casual/lay economic discussions.
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.
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.
Inflation is caused by a greater number of dollars chasing the same number of goods and services. Look at the used car market, or the housing market, or the GPU market during the crypto craze several years back. It all falls back to basic supply versus demand mechanics. Inflation can be caused by printing, but it can also be caused by redistributing money from location X (Microsoft stock) to location Y (food spending).
It could, at least temporarily. But there is no reason to belive it won't stabilise again.
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.
Why would they produce more if they could? It must meet the demand at the current price point. More money goes to poor people, more demand for food at the current price. That will increase the price, which will increase production. Short term the price might go up a lot, but then new production will come online, and the prices will fall back to today+delta.
In Mexico, many people argued that raising the minimum wage would lead to massive inflation, but that did not happen when the increases were implemented.
> 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.
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)?
> 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)?
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.
It always comes down to the same set of arguments. The rich doesn't pay the price because money is nothing to them. The poorest have additional grants, so life is not that bad for them, even if they don't work. And who pays the most expensive fee for this? Middle class. The actually working class. The class that nobody thinks about, and the class that always funds everything.
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.
> The poorest have additional grants, so life is not that bad for them, even if they don't work.
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.
> 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
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.
Well, you can use the "poverty line" definition to separate people who will get grants (below the line), and people who will pay for the grants (above the line).
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.
> So being just barely above the line means that you pay, not that you get. This is the worst place to be in.
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.
Don't jump directly into the red scare through a slippery slope fallacy, it's just intellectually dishonest while being the most boring thought-terminating cliché on this type of discussion.
Wanting to live in a better and more just system, even if we can most realistically just work towards an improved version of capitalism, is probably something most of us can agree upon.
I don't think anyone sane is against people having their needs fulfilled so I don't think anyone sane would look at any system we live under and think "yeah, this is it, we found the perfect system".
So instead of deflecting into communism as a gotcha, why don't we behave as adults, and agree that discussing how to find ways to improve our systems of production, distribution of wealth, how we view the less fortunate, how society can be better overall for all of us, is quite fucking important?
Going directly into the pigeon hole of ideology is just lazy and unimaginative. Humanity did unthinkable achievements already, we can always try to do better, don't be lazy and unimaginative...
We probably can agree on lots of things, about inefficiencies in current system and the like, but some elementary things between us are too far apart.
The ideas you identify as solutions, for me are the problems.
You can promote artificial redistribution all you want, but I will want to stop it however I can. If a global redistribution system would be implemented, then all your wealth would go to Africa and Russia, and you will be left with nothing. I'm sure this is not what you want, which in my POV makes you a hipocryte. If you don't agree that your wealth should go to Africa or Russia then we're in the area of choosing who is worthy of getting money and who isn't. And this is not at all different from a rich guy deciding where to put money to. So wealth redistribution from my POV just means that a poor guy wants to be in charge of the money now. But after he'll be in charge, it only means that he'll be the new rich guy. Nothing changes at all.
Pro-redistribution people are always talking about cash flowing from someone else to them. It's always the same story. And this is against what I stand for with all my determination, because I don't like thievery. Especially legal thievery.
You go to absolute loaded language to talk about concepts that should be discussed in a more leveled language. You consider thievery just wealth redistribution but don't consider thievery the products of the exploitation of labour, for example.
Why is it thievery to redistribute wealth from elites who are exploiting societal developments (education, skills training, etc.) so they pay their share back into the society which enabled them to become rich in the first place? Why is it ok that they can exploit a whole society's work for their own personal gain while gaming the system to not pay back to the thing that gave all foundations so they could play their game?
You talk about redistribution in a black-and-white way, no nuance, you go to the extremes such as:
> You can promote artificial redistribution all you want, but I will want to stop it however I can. If a global redistribution system would be implemented, then all your wealth would go to Africa and Russia, and you will be left with nothing.
Which is a strawman, I did not touch on this point whatsoever, I did not talk about "global redistribution", you are the one bringing this up, in an utopic sense, yes, we could talk about it but I'm trying to discuss in realistic terms what could be improvements in enclosed societies (aka: national states) to improve the system.
That's where we fundamentally disagree, you cannot talk in nuanced terms, it's either "communism!" or "you will be poor and give your money to all the poor in the world" instead of a level-headed discussion on the flaws of our current systems, how we could search for solutions to it.
And even worse, you talk about "artifical redistribution" as if the current form is the "natural" one, what is natural about a few people who found ways to exploit the system for personal gain instead of the natural way of living collectively since we all depend on each other for societies to function since time immemorial?
Your view is very conservative, it's unimaginative, it just states that what it currently is is what's natural and supposed to be. Challenge a bit more your thoughts, you are just repeating the same trope over and over...
Housing and health care are really expensive and are increasing in price in the usa. And yet, the prices of almost everything else (entertainment, clothes, cosmetic surgery, etc) is going down over time in the usa. I wonder if it has something to do with how much the local, state, and federal governments involves themselves and regulate housing and healthcare? (hint: it does)
More interesting analysis of where things stand: "Spending is being held up by the wealthy, while consumption from middle and lower income groups continues to fade."
I have a bit of a gripe with this "food insecurity" metric.
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.
So if I don't eat the bones too, I'm leaving nearly a whole dollar on the table? Damn. I can't believe it! I could be saving even more!!! I'm such an idiot.
You know, you make such a good point here. The easiest solve for this is for the fat poor people to simply eat rice & beans. That will surely fix both problems.
These are two symptoms of the same problem, I don’t see any issue with the statistics. Plus, of course, not everyone who’s poor or hungry is obese.
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.
It was a loose analogy, but it is thought Neanderthals may have hibernated (or gone into a state of torpor). Your comment offers no reasoning nor evidence; is something wrong with it, and if so what, exactly? Food scarcity in winter time is something humans have historically been exposed to and evolved with in much of the world. And clearly over-eating in humans corellates somewhat with food insecurity. Regardless of the mechanism, my point was that it’s not hard to imagine why obesity and hunger might go together.
And yet, the very study you linked to concluded that despite 5 years of research on the topic, it still isn't clear what the actual causes are. But you know, I definitely think your arm-chair reasoning probably contains the one true reason.
Research has mostly focused on explaining the paradox
at a household level. Farrell and colleagues reviewed the
literature pertaining to low- and middle-income countries and
focused on the bigger picture, that is, analyzing the issue
at an individual, household, community, and country level.
They proposed 5 context-mechanisms factors that could modify
the association between an individual’s food insecurity and
obesity risk: affordability of energy dense, processed foods,
quantity & diversity of food consumed, spatial temporal access
to nutritious food, interpersonal distribution of food and non-
dietary behavior. Nevertheless, affordability of energy dense
foods was identified as the main mechanism since the authors
had limited evidence to support the other mechanisms (26).
Other authors have proposed that social support can also play
a role since they found that food insecure women who reported
lower levels of social support were more likely to be obese (28)
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.
Real wages didn't track with increases in productivity, which is sort of the long-standing problem, since the late seventies or early eighties. (the problem for workers, I mean)
I disagree.
The root problem that causes high prices of food/housing/healthcare is the lack of supply for food/housing/healthcare. The root problem that causes low supply of food/housing/healthcare is government regulation. There is enormous market incentive to provide more food/housing/healthcare, increase supply, and decrease prices. However, governments have made it difficult or impossible for the market to provide more food/housing/healthcare.
Even if someone's paycheck is the same over 30 years, if the prices of things go down (as they have for nearly all products and services except food/housing/healthcare), their purchasing power would increase and they are by definition wealthier.
You can't discount Baumol's cost disease. While it's true that government regulation is some part of it, like real declines in home building productivity in the previous decade or two, that certainly is not the root of the problem.
Beyond limits to theoretical growth in productivity for these areas, there absolutely are perverse incentives in all of those industries.
For example, 40% of corn in the US goes towards <10% of of gas via ethanol. Even without subsidies, refiners would likely use some ethanol because it's a cheap octane booster.
Insurers weren't regulating healthcare prices before the ACA and now face a profit limit tied to payouts -- which creates another perverse incentive. Doctors are incentivized to specialize instead of entering family medicine. They're also incentivized to run more tests defensively because they charge more and it reduces liability for malpractice.
Even in areas that are more builder-friendly, there is still incentive to build denser housing (which is more efficient) that maximizes return per sq ft. So you get studios, 1 bedroom, and 2 bedroom homes. And larger homes (built outside of onerous zoning areas) that more amenable to raising families end up creating unsustainable costs for local municipalities through sprawl.
Some of these areas can be addressed by a free market but maintaining a healthy market that minimizes perverse incentives requires significant tweaking (i.e. regulations)
I don't think building homes is really prohibitive due to regulations. I know it varies a lot by region of course. But I'm in an area that isn't really effected by earthquakes and has no frost line/need for basement/etc. I've built a few houses as a GC. It's land more than anything that's gone up in the past ~15 years since I first started in it. That's purely a market force. Second is skilled labor, even unskilled labor honestly. There's just a massive shortage of people doing manual labor/sweaty work, and I typically have access to a major pool of immigrants as we border Mexico. In terms of materials, there's some regulated things we have to do more of now, like insulation and other energy efficiency things but it's rather small in the scope of things. I currently own a 1950s built mid-century modern that was built in a time of low regs here. If I were to build it exactly as it is (to past codes) and simultaneously build it again (to current codes), the current code version would only be about 10% more. Likewise, if I demolished it and just sold the land, I'd still get about 90-100% of what it's market rate is right now. That market rate has ~quadrupled in the 15 years I've owned that house and to reiterate, the home itself is nearly worthless. I'm not in a fastly gentrifying area either. I'd say it's affluent but it always has been since I owned it, it's become more common to just knock down the original homes and build new.
We just need to automate wealth accumulation with AI. We had decades of wage work outsourcing and automation. We just need to automate the wealth accumulation to balance the books.
I'm surprised that the cost of groceries is a bigger source of stress for most people than the cost of housing. I guess, generally, it's weird to break these things into categories because money is fungible, but food vs housing is the one that stood out to me.
Also: Of course people under financial stress rely on credit more! Of course younger people use newer sources of credit that older people are less familiar with!
I'm a fairly well to do/employable person, and so is my wife.
Together, we should be all kinds of financially stable.
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.
> But the two largest costs to our finances are ridiculously outsized: Child Care and Health Care.
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.
I kind of like the compliance. It comes with infant first aid courses and theory in child education, psychology and nutrition. Meals are prepared from scratch. I'm sure it's much more than strictly necessary, but that's much better than to little compliance.
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...
There's a "middle class dip" where one spouse working barely makes enough to cover the increased costs from child care and other incidentals (like eating out more often).
The poor either have a non-working spouse or get subsidized child care, and the rich don't know what a banana costs.
Many of my parent friends have gone through the debate about having the lesser-earning parent quit work for a few years to care for children or to pay for daycare.
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.
Health insurance premiums are $500 to $2,000 per person per month in the US (price goes up with age). Annual out of pocket maximums are usually $5k to $15k (varies based on individual or family plan). Annual deductibles are usually $2k or may even just match the annual out of pocket maximumum.
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.
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!
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.
It doesn't have to be a expensive. Buy an older cheaper car, don't put comprehensive insurance on it. If you don't drive it much, there's really not that much maintenance work. Pretty much just an annual oil change.
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.
You're not really going to come out ahead on a $3000 motorcycle. Factor in gear, maintenance (more intensive per mile than a corolla), and it's hard to make the math work. You have to enjoy riding.
In Houston, I wouldn't even consider a vehicle without A/C!
In Florida there are "Lottery Winner" style billboards everywhere for auto accident lawyers and other ambulance chasers. This is what helps keep insurance premiums high for everyone and unless you are flat-broke. Good luck gambling not having enough insurance.
This is the case because government regulation makes it difficult, illegal, or impossible to increase supply of food/housing/healthcare and drive down prices.
I read it more like that people should start tracking success of country not based on how much health it produces and start caring about the actual quality of live of its people. People can't eat GDP or sleep under it
> Equality can be achieved using capital systems and market economies.
Sure, it is just going to be a eternal battle between the need of capital for infinity growth and the need of working class for better wealth distribution.
> A lot of those who complain about groceries could swap out what they would rather have until times improve.
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.
>20kg sack of rice is cheap and lasts a while. Flour is cheap. Eggs are cheap Potatoes Canned tuna.
Where i am canned tuna hasn't gone up in price, but there is considerably less of it in the can, and noticeably more seawater.
US has tensions (lack of broad social agreement) in its regard for several subjects, so those areas absorb infinite money as the incoherent regulations and rent seeking around those black holes festers. Housing, Medicine, Education, Justice/Policing/Prison system. Denial of reality is always expensive. If you ask the median voter questions about any of these areas it is certain that there will be many basic misunderstandings about them.
Why is food still a source of stress? Food is a solved problem. The amount of food waste alone is just staggering. Healthcare and housing are harder problems. There's no abundance there. But there is something seriously wrong with the link between food production and food consumption.
Food is far from a solved problem. There are many food deserts in the US, where the best you can hope for for groceries is a gas station mini mart. “They can just drive further to a real grocery store.” Yes, but they start cutting into their grocery budget driving there and back, limiting what they can buy. In extreme cases, it obviates the purpose of the trip entirely.
Food is a solved problem? You cant be serious. How many animals are unnecessarily slaughtered every year for food? How many people still cant access clean drinking water? How are we going to provide for a ever growing population? Food is an insane issue we have no real solutions for without causing incredible amounts of suffering to animals while also heavily damaging nature in the process. Solved problem my ass.
I think quite a bit of this stress is self inflicted. People spend a lot of money eating too much (shitty) food. That results in health problems. And at the same time people are way too ambitious about where they want to live.
If people could just scale back and live appropriately, it’d be less stressful.
This does seem like "Sky blue and water wet" sort of reporting, but that's just because of the daft headline. When most people are challenged with affording the basics, that points to a severe economic risk. We've lived through a period of incredibly cheap credit due to where we are in the monetary cycle of the USD as a reserve currency. We sort of brought it on ourselves though, given the vicious cycle of buying cheap junk we don't need on credit, and then the parties selling us that cheap junk buying our debt. We're overdue for some considered and precise deleveraging. Without it, this problem will only get a lot worse.
It's getting pretty bad, I wonder where the floor is. A growing number of people are using credit to purchase groceries — buy now pay later schemes are also resulting in people putting ubereats on credit
It's important to note that using credit isn't purely an indication of struggling. A lot of those payment programs offer 0% incentives, and from a purely logical standpoint, the correct thing to do is put everything you buy on a 0% loan for as long as possible.
It's the "correct" thing until it isn't... because there's an entire industry designed to profit off of punishing you for it. Without regulation it used to even trick you into getting over your head... credit card bills wouldn't even do you the basic courtesy of warning you about how much interest you're paying in an effort to obscure real costs.
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.
> and from a purely logical standpoint, the correct thing to do is put everything you buy on a 0% loan for as long as possible.
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.
I think the biggest failure is not having economics and finance classes be part of core curriculum. The amount of confusion and misunderstanding from forcing people to personally figure out the system is totally crazy.
While this is a common refrain, I think we should also live in a society where governance isn't so bad that you have to educate yourself to avoid the rampant scams in literally every aspect of life. What good is a government that doesn't care for it's most vulnerable citizens.
We could have used our position to offer healthcare and childcare for all like many less prosperous countries. Instead we started pointless wars, cut taxes for the very rich, and embraced a politics of grift.
I'd like to advertise deregulating housing construction as a very clear way to help solve desperate housing problems in many countries (such as in the USA and much of Europe). You can check out more about it here.
https://www.econlib.org/build-baby-build-now-under-construct...
I’m literally going to stop going to the doctor again for checkups until I can change my medical industry insurance payment plan. My current plan covers a yearly checkup but there was an issue and now I’m having monthly follow up calls with my doctor to describe results for $50 a pop. Just insane, I hope someone takes a stand against these companies even if it is Luigi-style.
Understandable. I guess our only recourse is to do austerity / wage suppression about it! See, it’s actually their fault for making too much money and getting too many handouts, or something. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with all the middlemen taking more profits wherever they can squeeze them from. THAT has to keep happening so we can have Good Paying Jobs, see. Also there’s a labor shortage so we need to suppress wages more.
Well, I am a bit surprised. How could groceries be a bigger concern than housing/income/childcare?
Surely rent is the big ticket, you have to work to have an income, and you need childcare if you're going to work?
I mean of course you have to eat, but food is the one thing you can adjust more or less continuously in whatever increment you need. You can't just move house, you can't just change jobs, and you can't not have the kids taken care of.
Quite a sound article. Although, I want to add one thing.
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.
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.
That is not accurate. Research consistently shows that gas line pollution, lack of bike infrastructure, racial inequality, and climate change are the most significant stressors.
Has there ever been an example in history where this has been true? All of the largest famines were caused by socialist attempts at controlling the food supply.
Besides... the massive crash in population coming over the next 10 years should solve most fo this without ripping up entire societies.
I find it interesting that people worry much more about how much things cost than how much money they make. I would think these two numbers would be much closer together.
The cost of living has significantly outpaced salary growth. And given how quick companies are to do layoffs, even when things are going well; makes people a little less confident in a job switch. And that doesn't even account for the current state of the market which is brutal. I saw a thing the other day that said people can't even really budget for groceries because the costs are changing drastically week to week. You arent going to get a new job and feel the effects of (hopefully) the larger paycheck as quick as prices can and will change currently.
I suspect this is a consequence of conditioning done to convert Americans’ (and anyone consuming American media’s) identities from “workers” to “consumers.”
A few months ago I had a persistent irritation on my right eye, as if some dust was stuck there. Worried about it, I went to Urgent care and got billed $3400 (dollars) for antibiotics, WHICH WERE WRONG, an actual ophthalmologist said I had it scratched and just had to apply some drops. $250 for the ophthalmologist and about $50 for the drops.
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.
> And I have good health insurance
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.
Yeah, I wouldn't consider any HDHP (High-Deductable Healthcare Plan) to be "good insurance".
Au contraire, that is much closer to the definition of insurance. We don't want people to get bankrupt with an unforseen medical issue like cancer. Insurance should cover that.
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.
In that vain health insurance is never insurance.
Getting a kid is not an accident for most modern people, and should never be seen as an event that could bankrupt anybody.
Hence, deferring to the definition of insurance is futile.
Then again - the US is the only country I know of that insists that health is something you insure.
You need to broaden your horizons then - look at the medical plans that are on offer in India. Or the travel medical insurance that every EU country requires you to carry. They are classic insurance.
Having a kid without complications should not cost $50K. It should be a few grand at the most. If the kid now needs NICU, then yes, that's what insurance is for.
>>- look at the medical plans that are on offer in India.
The one's that companies offer are quite good, actually.
I'd have depleted my life savings, and gone bankrupt several times around COVID years with my parents health, if I didn't have company health insurance.
Good for me, because I knew people in hospital sitting in the waiting lobby literally crying because they were done financially. Like finished for life.
Having said, this in India the market for this things is still building up, and given how big India is it will take years before it reaches the US stage of profit seeking.
So, I exanped my horizon Besides the states there is south Africa who treat having a kid as some catastrophic event that might bankrupt you.
In EU countries the spirit of health insurance is socializing the cost / solidarity which we explicitly do not consider in the thread - please read the parents of that was not clear.
3k out-of-pocket for a random mishap could easily get many people bankrupt.
I did scratch an eyeball recently. The cost turned out to be €50 for drops which ain’t covered by single-payer insurance. 3k out of pocket would be pretty bad even naming nice salary. And could cause big issues to a massive portion of people.
It is when you take into account the tax advantages of an HSA.
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.
> tax advantages of an HSA
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.
> for most of us
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.
So, in other words, the typical American "Hope and pray that my health costs don't outrun my savings/investment rate" philosophy. Different strokes for different folks, hope it works out for you.
My health care costs have a pretty clear soft upper bound given how HDHPs (and most plans) are structured. Deductible and out of pocket max makes it easy to be responsible and budget into an 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.
Right, but it's also nuts that a lot of people are on a health insurance plan that encourages avoiding medical care because it offers tax-advantaged investing. You get how that's nuts, right?
Exactly. I also think conflating health insurance and investment is a terrible idea. It should just be a simple credit system for accumulating unused deductible.
It doesn't seem nuts to me? I have a good emergency fund and a stable job and no big debts (cuz I'm good with money generally), so I can choose to use my health insurance to make a little more money.
That's only fair given all the pre-work I did to set it up for myself.
Of course it's fair, my criticism isn't with your outcome but with designing an insurance plan to work this way.
It's weird to tie your little extra money to your health insurance plan.
That's why it's not the only option. It's a benefit not a restriction. The powers that be saw an opportunity for insurers to cover less and insurees to leverage that into a different benefit. It's all just about shifting risk around and taking a little off the top.
It's a nice incremental addition to the existing system. Way more feasible than changing the system.
But the additional benefit is a tax benefit, also known as "all the other taxpayers subsidize this behavior"
They're (slightly) subsidizing the fact that I am covering more of my medical expenses out of pocket. Remember it's only tax free if I eventually spend it on health care.
Feels like the equivalent of other things we give tax benefits for. Various things for your and your dependents' well being.
Why not? Do you expect to not pay any part of your normal, expected annual heath care costs?
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.
It's not that people don't expect to pay. It's that plans like HDHP do not have predictability. An average person getting an average number of injuries cannot reasonably work out how much it will cost them to treat these injuries and whether the HSA is enough. The fact that there is the distinction between in-network and out-of-network means the deductible isn't a constant.
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.
What we have in the US is the opposite of insurance; the insurance companies tend to pay for normal health-care and then suddenly find a reason to not pay when something catastrophic happens.
Insurance is for unexpected expenses that (a) you cannot foresee and (b) would be catastrophic to your finances
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.
I guess the idea is that you put a deductible amount of money into the account annually, and the tax-advantaged investment makes up for any difference between the deductible and the savings you get on premiums for having a HDHP (I.E. HDHP premiums + deductible - tax savings ≈ normal premiums + deductible).
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.
It's mathematically coherent, but it's value relies upon the assumption that we are already spending thousands out of pocket (but it's not taxed).
I prefer the option of don't spend thousands out of pocket, pay taxes on the unspent income. If I'm paying 100% of my healthcare costs, what good is the health insurance?
Here I think it boils down to whether one thinks it's okay for everybody to spend tens of thousands of dollars per year on medical care, as long as they (probably) aren't bankrupted.
If so, then they are probably more likely to view "don't bankrupt me bro" as the use case for health insurance, rather than "I need affordable medical care".
It's pretty good when your employer funds a good chunk of the high-deductable.
I would demand an itemized bill from that urgent care and play hard ball with that provider. That's absurd, even by US standards. I've had ER visits that total less than that. My son had a cast that fell off while on travel in Florida, and we stopped by an ER (only place that was open and could fit a new cast). Total cost out the door _at the ER_ was less than $500, which while expensive, is nowhere near what you're talking about.
Your country is crazy. I wouldn't want to end jobless there, that's a potential death call.
Just got my bill for a recent 20 minute doctor visit (with one of the best HC insurance coverages in my state: $1,600 cost, $1,400 adjustment, $200 out-of-pocket given my $3,000 OOP limit was not reacehd). Absurd. The USA will likely never get to an efficient govt. single pay system (unlike every other industrialized company). Given this, the option I hope for is that the FedGov passes a law that requires all Master Charge prices to be based on "Acitivty Based Accounting". ABC would provide insights for greater operational efficiency, and the 1600>1400>200 magic hand-waving would disappear. There would be a great loss of employees for health insurance portfolio analysts, but most of them could move into cost accounting roles for hospitals. Please GOP/DEM consider this.
>> The USA will likely never get to an efficient govt. single pay system (unlike every other industrialized company).
Not really efficient.
Due to low pay there is a huge shortage of medical workers.
Also for non life treating conditions there are waiting lists for the next few years.
Had a light knee injury during football game? Your surgery is scheduled for 2027. Real story of my friend from Poland.
And you pay 9% of your income for this "care".
> persistent irritation > went to Urgent 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.
It takes about 6 months for me to get an appointment with my GP, and then it takes up to a month for their referral to a specialist to be approved, and only then can I make an appointment with my specialist, which is usually booking a few months out, making it about 9 months before I can see someone.
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.
> It takes about 6 months for me to get an appointment with my GP, and then it takes up to a month for their referral to a specialist to be approved, and only then can I make an appointment with my specialist, which is usually booking a few months out, making it about 9 months before I can see someone.
That is radically below par. The nice thing about the American system is that if your GP sucks (as yours clearly does), you can go out and get yourself a new GP! I'm able to get an appointment within a month for a checkup, a couple of days for pressing issues, and have gotten an in-network (non-specialist) referral for a same-day appointment the one time I needed urgent attention. The one time I got a specific referral whose office had a months-long waitlist, I found an in-network alternative, got an updated referral from my GP, and saw someone the following day. My wife regularly gets appointments with her GP or an in-network alternative within a day when she's sick and needs attention. It's worth noting that altering our system wouldn't improve your access to match mine, but would rather would diminish mine to match yours! Surely it's better for both of us if you just find a new GP?
> 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.
What took so long?
> in-network (non-specialist) referral for a same-day appointment
My HMO takes 5-10 business days to approve a non-emergency referral; 3-days for an emergency one doesn't matter what my GP does. Though it's partly moot by the fact that I would have to drive hours to find a specialist that isn't booking many weeks out, it's exacerbated by the fact that no specialists let one schedule an appointment prior to the referral being approved.
> Surely it's better for both of us if you just find a new GP?
Or I can just go to urgent care if I have an urgent issue?
...in what world does it make sense to charge the cost of a motorcycle for a few minutes of a doctor/NP's time and $15 worth of drugs? Jumping through bureaucratic hoops to avoid this is a waste of everybody's time.
Urgent care is pretty widely known to be a scam that preys on those too impatient to "jump through buerocratic hoops (make an appointment in the future with a highly-paid professional instead of paying the premium for the surplus staffing it takes to always have someone available for walk-ins)"
That's interesting because my co-pay at urgent care is the same as with my GP. Maybe there are regional differences? (ER on the other hand I know I won't walk away without many thousands of dollars in bills, on top of a much larger copay, because even though the ER is "in network" none of the contractors working there are)
"make an appointment for several months for now or get treatment this week" is maybe a better explanation.
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.
I thought by adding the bit about "navigating the complexities" it would prevent comment like yours. You're blaming the victim here.
"it is YOUR FAULT for not reading the fine print"... yeah I know. I am stupid regular guy who would rather NOT have to understand the fine print and have things just work better like the rest of the developed world.
You're an adult. You paid dearly for the convenience of an urgent care, and you clearly learned your lesson. You were not a victim, you were a sucker. In America, we do not reorganize entire industries to soothe the bruised egos of suckers. We just encourage them to do a quick Google search next time.
Our health system is so amazingly bad. Even if you have insurance, you roll the dice getting even basic care.
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.
We shouldn’t call it a health care system. That’s an aspirational term that doesn’t match reality. We have a medical industry.
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.
On the other hand you can get things like million-dollar organ transplants.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/organ-transplants-afford/story...
yes it's nice of our overlords to not let us literally die in certain circumstances, even though organ transplants are sometimes denied by insurance for really fucked up, evil reasons
Google "UFC fighter Ben Askren lung transplant".
God forbid we touch Obamacare though.
Did everyone just forget what it was like before Obamacare? Apparently you didn’t know anyone excluded for pre-existing conditions
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.
>Did everyone just forget what it was like before Obamacare?
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?"
High deductible plans are the norm because HSAs are basically free money. Maybe Obamacare really is to blame for shittier health insurance, but it's also possible that IBM is just paying relatively less than it used to. Employers can deposit into your HSA, which effectively lowers your deductible below the minimum required to qualify as a high deductible plan.
> ObamaCare made things much better for those who could not get healthcare.
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:
During ACA's lifetime, news orgs, the insured and politicians haven't given the slightest crap about the many millions of uninsured.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.
At $12K a year you were at the poverty line, silver cost sharing reduction and you have something like $1K-1.5K max copays and deductibles. You might have not known about it and tried to buy a bronze plan instead, but the silver cost sharing reduction removes almost all of the deductible and the premium credits at the low end bring the premiums to near zero.
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.
> You might have not known about it and tried to buy a bronze plan instead,
I always looked at every plan there was. Most of the work was getting thru the qualifications. After all that, every plan got examined multiple times.
> Most of Obamacare brings max medical expenses to about 10% of income for a single person
During the 2010s my wife and each brought in ~$10k/yr. That was in line with most folks we knew, in the $10k-$35k range. A typical month made 80% of minimal bills.
In searching for policies in the $12/yr range there might have been 'catastrophic' policies that were just most of my income instead of all of it.
I want thru the qualification 2x more for $24k and $32k. The latter being the cheapest polices I saw all that day. I took a few screenshots back then. I'm searching my archives and if I find them I'll post back.
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as someone with a pre-existing condition (that I didn't ask for), Obamacare was such a huge relief. Before I got into tech I was teaching guitar lessons and really enjoying things. My condition requires more than a once a year physical and my specialist got on me about not having health insurance because we weren't able to get the full panel of bloodwork done. I was routinely denied healthcare because of the condition. I had to pivot into tech as it was one of the few paths available that gave me health insurance. As you said its not perfect but its so much better than what we had prior to Obamacare becoming law.
Same here, but without a known pre-existing condition. Before Obamacare, health insurance companies would not even write me a policy, and they would not tell me why. Just "nope, go away". So every day, I was rolling the dice, hoping to not get seriously injured or sick. The problem with Obamacare is it didn't go far enough, the insurance companies stuck around like barnacles, leeching off the medical industry, with the government mandating we do business with them and they do business with us. I say scrap the whole lot of them.
The costs also used to be a lot lower - at least for most people who just pay the premium and don’t need much care. Now it’s not uncommon for a family’s health insurance to cost more than their housing.
The people who are mad are those who are paying more and not experiencing the benefits.
The rises in health care costs were happening long before Obamacare, and if anything Obamacare reduced the rate of rises or kept them at the same level.
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.
Those people seem incapable of considering that being surrounded by healthy people is a lot more enjoyable than being surrounded by the sick and poor. You don’t live in a vacuum. You interact with a lot of people every day, consciously or not, that probably earn less than you do, and clean your streets, wash your car, care for your elders and children, handle your food, serve your beer, and do a myriad of other things they can only do at good health.
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?
It doesn't seem to me like the current configuration makes people less sick or poor.
https://penncapital-star.com/uncategorized/americans-suffer-...
> 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.
I'd argue that the insurers are a big part of the problem, but not for the reason you state. Their profit is capped as a percentage of revenues by law (Obamacare). In order to get more profits, they have to increase costs, so it's the complete opposite of normal market forces. It's to their benefit that you have things like hospital monopolies that overcharge, because as long as all of the insurance companies are being overcharged equally, the insurance company makes more money with out of control costs.
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.
I agree PBMs are also a problem, as my comment mentioned. Several states are working to aggressively regulate them, but until there is more progress in that regard, people who need medication through these systems will experience maximum extraction.
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...
https://www.46brooklyn.com/
I’m no lover of the US healthcare system - other countries get better outcomes for less than is spent by the US government - and basically all their costs are borne by the government, unlike in the US.
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.
> and basically all their costs are borne by the government
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.
> 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.
Well, yes, all costs ‘borne by the government’ are in fact borne by people paying taxes - or government borrowing.
[You could follow the chain even further and say that, of course, the cost of those taxes, borne by people, is people’s income, borne by their employers (or investments) but that obviously gets pointless and ludicrous pretty fast because the chain never ends…]
Anyway, that’s not my point - the point is that the US government, in per capita terms, spends more (public money collected in taxes or borrowing) on healthcare than governments of countries where (almost) all healthcare spending comes from the government (public money collected in taxes or borrowing). Private spending is in addition to this.
Again, spending by the US government is more than spending by other countries governments, even though the US supposedly has a private insurance based system (that also costs a huge amount in addition to government spending!)
I looked up a source…
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/health-costs-how-the-us-...
…and it turns out I’m slightly wrong - US government healthcare spending per capita is beaten by the governments of Norway, Luxembourg, and perhaps the Netherlands. But even they spend vastly less than the US if private spending is also considered.
The US system is unarguably hugely more expensive - less efficient - than the systems of the entire rest of the developed world, for worse health outcomes.
Does VAT really go entirely to healthcare?
If not, we'd have to compare with the total taxloads borne by citizens of compared countries
It varies country by country and funds are essentially fungible. France for example nominally has special payroll taxes that go towards healthcare. Some OECD nations have mandatory insurance schemes where you pay some premium monthly. It really varies a lot. It is however true that VAT is pretty much universal to OECD nations with single payer systems and make up a significant chunk of government tax receipts. Its essentially impossible to dodge.
But when comparing most incomes levels, Americans pay much lower taxes than OECD counterparts.
What I'm saying is that the better comparison metric would be (total tax load + total direct healthcare spending) per capita
> Compared with other countries, the inefficiency of for-profit healthcare is a far worse problem than the amount of profit they make.
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.
All you need to know about America’s health system is this graph comparing average cost to life expectancy of OECD countries.
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.
https://www.kff.org/health-policy-101-international-comparis...
> 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.
But one can very easily argue that American health outcomes are significantly driven by the average number of steps they take per day relative to other geographic peers.
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.
The actually sad part is that when you split data by race, white American health outcomes are pretty great and in some areas significantly ahead of other countries (if you have a rare cancer, America is the place to be) whereas not-white American health outcomes are ... not great.
> AIAN (67.9 years) and Black (72.8 years) people had a shorter life expectancy compared to White people (77.5 years) as of 2022, and AIAN, Hispanic, and Black people experienced larger declines in life expectancy than White people between 2019 and 2022
https://www.kff.org/key-data-on-health-and-health-care-by-ra...
Your comment has been edited extensible since you first posted some misleading numbers, so I'm adding this new comment on one of your additions:
> 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.
I mean no disrespect whatsoever, but we have no common ground if the belief is a continued for profit system or more profits are going to fix any of this, based on the overwhelming evidence. At some point, one must admit that the US has entirely failed at a functional healthcare system considering the costs compared to care delivered and outcomes. If for profit insurer incentives are to increase costs as you say, we must eliminate insurers and fulfill any need for that function through public systems, where cost controls can be implemented to drive down costs. Incentives drive outcomes. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
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.
I literally do not care at all if there's a profit based system or not. It is completely immaterial to me. Both profit driven system and non-profit systems are successful around the world at delivering universal care.
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.
Big numbers with no context come across as a way to misinform.
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.
If maga will eat shit just so a liberal has to smell it than “communist” jacobin readers will take third world health care just to force MAGA to deal with it.
…what?
That is a sloppy generalization. The Heritage Foundation plan for market based universal medical coverage was put in place in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney and mostly works with related issues like low supply of doctors. There are many options being left of the table for political reasons and comprehensibility.
RomneyObamacare and Project 2025 anarcho-chrony-kakisto-capitalism.
Never forget Obama was a center-right figure with identity bingo politics attributes.
UnitedHealth has 147 million customers, according to google. 20 billion / 147 million = $136
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?
Hard to say what a life is worth, which is part of the problem of for-profit healthcare.
Their most recent quarterly call had their CEO apologize for providing too much care.
I don't think you're making contact with what the other commenter is saying. Explaining that a health insurer makes a little over $100 in profit per person over the course of a year is meant to disprove the argument that removing profit from the health insurance system is all it will take to make everything affordable. Philosophical arguments around the economic value of a life is separate from how to reduce costs of a healthcare system in a mixed market economy.
> Philosophical arguments around the economic value of a life is separate
No, you're missing the point that it's totally inappropriate to treat healthcare as a profit-center by arrogantly trivializing my response, gaslighting, and applying seriously sociopathic cognitive dissonance while avoiding the greater concern.
> your annual physical
... 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 acknowledge I'm using anecdata and deliberately telling a story to pull at your emotions, but my cousin died suddenly at 45 of a heart attack, having been skiing and surfing just weeks prior, IE: seemingly great health. But, because he had been a (successful!) self-employed person but was in a bit of a bad time (wife cheated, divorce, sudden economic shift...) he didn't have health insurance so put off going to the doctor when he had a weird symptom a week or so before he passed.
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.
He didn't say it's not a big deal, he said checkups are relatively predictable. Those mean very different things. Moving the predictable costs behind insurance and administration artificially inflates it because there's less pressure on providers to compete.
If people weren't doing dumb things with insurance to try and socialize healthcare costs there's a good chance your friend would have been able to afford going to the doctor whether or not he was insured.
Heh I wasn't an adult then. All I've experienced is being forced to buy insurance with a premium so high my risk adjusted return for self insuring is actually higher. I was so happy when the individual mandate was finally killed. That was just straight theft by incompetent health care administration.
> being forced to buy insurance with a premium so high my risk adjusted return for self insuring is actually higher
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.
That infact is not how insurance works. You don't charge low risk people insane premia because it isn't fair. My car insurance is far cheaper than my sister's for this reason for example.
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.
Right but you'll quickly see that analogy doesn't work in another way. With car insurance, its possible I can pay into it my entire life and NEVER have an accident (my current trajectory). I deserve a lower rate!
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.
Healthcare costs will grow without bound near the end. Your model only works if everyone choses every treatment available in the end which is just dumb because the outcome is the same.
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.
>incompetent health care administration.
They're not incompetent. They looked at the laws and realized they get the same cut of a bigger number by bloating overhead costs.
Charging what they do for what they do and insisting it can't get lower? Yes incompetence is absolutely the correct word. Just because we can't choose to go elsewhere isn't a excuse.
The only credible plays to modify obamacare since it was enacted were trying to make it worse. I'd be very happy to see it replaced with something better, like medicare for all.
The ACA was a huge compromise and didn’t really do anything to tackle why American healthcare costs are so high. I can see it being washed away for a plan that is actually better, and that isn’t going back to the way things were before it.
It originally did a substantial number of things to limit cost increases
- 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.
> % required spending on actual Medicare care by health insurers (limiting administrative and marketing expenses)
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...
Also they removed the requirement to have end of life care discussions ahead of time. Demonized as "death panels" by the right IIRC. Which was ironic given it would surely have saved a ton of money.
> I can see it being washed away for a plan that is actually better
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.
Yes, I don’t expect anything to happen during this administration, but who knows, maybe things will become broken enough later that something will actually happen in my lifetime.
Where does this come from? People are happy if you want to improve it. However, for literally a decade now the Republicans have tried to repeal it without any sort of replacement.
Obamacare was a gift to insurance and healthcare providers. It mandated buying government subsidized plans that enabled both sides - to continuously increase costs.
Still it's a bit unfair to Obama, the real problem is Congress and the Supreme Court which mandates we allow political bribery.
I encourage everyone to do the following simple exercise:
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.
>And it really is as simple as that.
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.
Feel free to look at dividend yields, but I can pretty much guarantee that it has not halfed in the period the stock market doubled. Most likely it stayed relatively flat, somewhere between 1.5% and 2%.
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.
>Feel free to look at dividend yields, but I can pretty much guarantee that it has not halfed in the period the stock market doubled. Most likely it stayed relatively flat, somewhere between 1.5% and 2%.
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....
https://ycharts.com/indicators/sp_500_dividend_yield
If yields stay the same actual dividends still grow in a rising market. Of course dividends aren’t a good representation of increased wealth. Stock price + dividends is. Companies generate profit which gets added to the balance sheet or paid out as dividends. It’s basically two ways of accounting for the same income (with some minor differences like tax implications).
(First, I apologise that this message must be hasty, I must do life stuff).
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.
I fully agree. Additionally, stock price is driven also by expectations of further growth, which in order to keep happening, something's gotta give so it must chip away at quality of the final product too (cheaper materials, cheaper manufacturing, etc) with a consequent enshittification. My parents, who live in Italy, could afford a stone house from the 1800s in their thirties. I live in Canada and everything's made of wood and snot and and costs a fortune.
In most places, residential real estate prices are driven mainly by land values rather than construction quality. But if you want to live in Italy they're literally giving away free houses.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/19/travel/italian-village-ollola...
>I fully agree. Additionally, stock price is driven also by expectations of further growth, which in order to keep happening, something's gotta give so it must chip away at quality of the final product too (cheaper materials, cheaper manufacturing, etc) with a consequent enshittification.
???
You're omitting some steps here. While "enshittification" probably happens to some extent, it's unhinged to suggest that's the only explanation for growth, as opposed to more mundane explanations like "better technology".
>My parents, who live in Italy, could afford a stone house from the 1800s in their thirties. I live in Canada and everything's made of wood and snot and and costs a fortune.
Seems like a stretch to blame this on "enshittification" when North American houses have been made of wood for centuries.
I didn’t mean it’s the only explanation, but it sure is a knob that companies use to tune “growth” (or fake growth, for that matter), among other things like better technology.
Just for fun, watch a movie from the 30s, 40s, 50s, etc., and take a look at the interiors of houses.
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.
Notice that I am not saying that labour is not getting more purchasing power, just that owners is getting more quicker. Luckily our increase in productivity is high enough that both can get more in absolute terms, although owners gets a larger part of the growing cake.
You realize you're an enormously privileged, wealthy individual telling other people that don't have your wealth and privilege how they should feel the same as you? You don't even say "in my experience" you just condescend to others that they should recognize how great the world is for the 0.1%, completely unaware that it isn't great for people that can't afford food and housing. Nobody gives a shit about their TV when they're hungry on the street.
I was born into a lower middle class family with several siblings. My dad skirted bankruptcy. My first car literally came from a junkyard in pieces, bought with money I earned from my paper route. Hardly 0.1%.
(I didn't know how bad things were for him until I went through his papers after he died.)
I began investing with my first real job, with another crappy car I repaired with junkyard parts.
A good friend of mine grew up in a family that qualified for welfare but wouldn't accept it. He didn't get past high school. He managed to make himself $10m before his tragic death. Yes, the US is the land of opportunity. Other countries can emulate it if they want to.
A couple years ago, I booked an Uber ride. The driver was a refugee from Afghanistan. He arrived in the US with nothing but his skin. Within a few months he had a thriving business, driving the Uber in whatever extra time he had left. It was fun talking to him - he was hella ambitious!
Setting aside everything else I'd normally say, I do respect that you make an earnest attempt to engage with almost anyone.
Thank you for the kinds words, I appreciate them.
Most companies moved to stock buybacks instead of dividends for tax reasons.
This is the definition of an asset bubble in my books. In 2007 +/-, this is exactly what happened with housing prices. People would buy an asset and watch it appreciate doing nothing.
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?
Keep in mind that anyone can buy stock. And stocks in the US historically outperform passive real estate investing.
Anybody can legally buy stock.
It is substantially more difficult to acquire a large amount of stock if you don't earn a lot of money, since there is naturally far less leftover after your expenses are paid.
And further, stock can be purchased with dividend payments. So the rich can afford an ever increasing piece of the pie even if they don't labor at all.
It's amazing how much you can accumulate by steady investment, and reinvesting what you have.
Careful with "can". It is possible for the homeless guy on the corner to buy stock in the sense that he is not prohibited from doing so. But on the other hand, the actual fact is that he can not purchase stock.
Right, ability to buy stock is predicated on having the money to do it, after paying for basic necessities. People who work for a living have less money than those who don’t. So when stock prices rise, even workers who can save see less absolute benefit than owners.
You can buy fractional shares from robinhood for $10. The internet has brought a great democratization of access to the stock market.
If you don't have an investment program, the best time to start is right now.
But this is not meaningful. If I buy 10 dollars of stock, at 10% return I am earning 1 dollar per year. This amount is not relevant to my life in any way and is probably dwarfed by variation in the amount of cash I find lying on the ground annually.
It's like saying everyone has access to clean water, look over there, there's a drop.
The point is that workers have far less money to save. Therefore when stocks go up due to increased productivity, even workers who have enough money to save still don’t benefit, in absolute terms, as much as owners.
Becoming an owner by founding a company is the way to reach the top tier. Jobs, Gates, Bezos, Musk, etc.
BTW, I know a person who worked as a fruit picker as a young man, he's now a multimillionaire. And a woman who grew up in a mobile home who is now worth 9 figures.
America is a great country.
P.S. my first business was selling greeting cards door to door.
Unfortunately our society’s structure is such that only a small number of people can ever be wealthy. They do this by belonging to the ownership class. There is not enough room there for everyone, because owners make money simply through owning, because others do the work for them, while the owners pay themselves with the profits these workers generate for them.
> Unfortunately our society’s structure is such that only a small number of people can ever be wealthy.
History says otherwise. The mass immigration to the US in the 1800s was all poor people arriving with nothing but a suitcase. They moved up into the middle class and beyond en masse.
Middle class people live better than medieval kings.
Living standards have risen due to productivity gains being distributed across society. Factors such as wise policy and labor unions contributed to this effect. These factors are largely absent today. Productivity gains have flowed mostly to the ownership class since the mid 1970s (this is the pay-productivity gap). As the article notes, 50% of people identify groceries as a major cause of stress, which doesn’t sound like a medieval king. Society has the capacity to make life better for everyone. It requires collective action to redistribute wealth from the ownership class across society however.
Even raising living standards for the poor through redistribution wouldn’t solve all our problems. Concentration of wealth is itself a net negative because it is concentration of power. Greater wealth concentration makes society more undemocratic, even if the bottom 50% were to become richer. Today billionaires have so much money that a group of them has gotten together to fund the abandonment of democracy in the US. They are largely succeeding. We are collapsing into “illiberal democracy” - a phenomenon that has been spreading across the globe in recent years. Our greatest problems, like climate change, worsen as wealthy interests prop up policies of denial rather than effective solutions.
A medieval king had political control. If society was heading in a direction that was going to harm them, they could do something about it. But members of the modern day middle class have virtually no political control. That is concentrated in the hands of the few and harms us all.
That's not the definition of wealthy. Wealthy is a relative term. It's meaningless to say that a lower middle class person today is wealthy just because people 500 years ago could only dream of the things they have. If other people in the society they currently live in have a million times more, they are not wealthy.
I'm sure you understand how capitalism works. If you do, you should understand that not everyone can be an owner, someone has to do the actual work.
> not everyone can be an owner
Anyone with $10 and a phone can be an owner of the means of production (by buying stock).
> It's meaningless to say
The meaning is the massive improvement in the standard of living due to free markets.
BTW, if being "poor" means being in the bottom quintile of income, there will always be "poor" people, regardless of how well they live.
That's like saying anyone with legs can be a professional runner. In theory yes, but not in practice, not in a meaningful way.
Defining poverty as bottom quintile is also useless, yes. Defining poverty by comparing to the average or median income is the most useful definition. Someone earning less than half of average, for example. That tells you how well they can afford the limited resources of any society, as those track the average purchasing power.
If you want a flow, here you go: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A053RC1Q027SBEA
Corporate profits in the U.S. have almost doubled since 2019.
That has other issues. For instance change in ownership structures (eg. mom & pop shops selling up to private inequality) would change this figure without anything else changing.
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.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
All these "doubled since 2015/2019/20whatever" stats tie back to a dirty word that starts win In and ends with "flation"
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.
Bro, the CEOs said on conference calls it wasn't about inflation and bragged about their profits.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/27/inflation-c...
https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/big-profits-in-smal...
Bro, they have to. If they said they were making double because dollars worth have stonk no go up.
Bro, they account for the dollars worth in their calls though.
You do realize that inflation hits at least as much for employees though right? (Likely even more, because all things equal, you're still better off if numbers are bigger)
If anything, you'd be strengthening cameldrv and Epa095s point...
Inflation is typically better for the wealthy. Cost of living goes up. This hits you if you are a worker. But if you’re wealthy this is a small dent in your budget at best. On the contrary, you hold many assets, which generally appreciate with inflation, effectively hedging away the negative effect.
It's not quite as bunk as that. If you take the time-derivative of the stock price it becomes a flow, and as stock prices are approximately exponential, the growth rate will be half of what it is today at approximately the same time range that the value itself was half of what it is today. (Obviously, with a lot more noise added).
Good point. Doubling in 7 years means around 10% growth per year. So, if someone took out 10% of their stock nest-egg per year, it wouldn't have grown at all.
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 am sure the point must be more sophisticated as even with 0% growth there would still be significant return on capital (risk free rate + acceptable risk premium). That is to say the world where return on capital is not greater than economic growth doesn't make any sense.
The point is not whether or not it makes sense. The point is that it is fairly natural for a capitalist system to have r>g and that causes concentration of wealth. If you look historically the increasing concentration of wealth only really gets reversed by wars or revolutions. So what Piketty is arguing for is a more gentle way of redistributing wealth, because typically when one gets to 1914 levels of inequality, well… we know what happens.
> because typically when one gets to 1914 levels of inequality, well… we know what happens.
When it comes to resource sequestration this is a fundamental law of nature. There's no safety in a world where random people on the street see your death as a biological imperative.
At the risk of being pedantic, is a "piggy bank" really the right metaphor for this? A piggy bank has actual money within it, regardless of what I think of the piggy bank, it still has money within it. While a stock's total market cap technically only represents the last transaction price multiplied by the number of outstanding shares (kinda). Anyway, just making the point that it isn't like a "bank" in that there is not money in a container of any sort (obviously, banks lend out their own deposits so even my correction is also wrong).
I'm don't have anything better to replace it with, but I am just questioning the "piggy bank" as a metaphor here.
> Moreover stock prices incorporate a variety of factors that are irrelevant to wealth distribution.
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.
Isn't the point still valid if you consider just the return on capital? If the market cap of the S&P500 was about 18 trillion in 2015 and returns 10%, the income going to to the owners of that capital is 1.8 trillion. In 2025 the market cap is 53 trillion, and a 10% return is then 5.3 trillion. That's an increase of almost 300%.
Now if the average salary was 48,000 in 2015 and there were 150 million people employed in the us, that's 7.2 trillion. The 2025 average is about 66,000 with 160 million employed. That's about 10 trillion. Around 40% increase in income going to labor. Am I missing something?
People who have less flow and no stock can increase their savings less than those with stock and the same flow. Many are not able to save at all. Those without stock receive only flow. Those with stock receive both flow and stock, and those with more stock profit more from rising stock.
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.
> People who have less flow and no stock can increase their savings less than those with stock and the same flow.
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.
Workers savings doesn’t change the fundamental dynamic. Their savings are dwarfed by those of their bosses. So when stocks double, workers, even accounting for savings, benefit far less in absolute terms than owners. Assets under capitalism follow a Pareto distribution - a minority owns a majority of the wealth.
And having $100 in savings doesn’t free someone from wage labor.
Indeed. At the bottom of the income ladder, $100 is critical. Lots of surprise bills can be more than that, and failing to pay them can cause further income reductions. This is why I support a strong welfare system: it lets everyone survive when things hit the fan.
But if you can put aside $100 per month, for a while now it's been possible to put even that little into the stock market. Exact growth is highly variable and depends on what you actually invest in, but it's not implausible that over 20 years, less than half a normal working lifespan, this would have turned $24k spend into $70k present value. It's not the millionaire's club, but it's a lot for someone who only had $100 they could stand to put aside each month.
I wouldn't recommend anyone puts their last $100 into the stock market, or even to let themselves dip bellow $1000 in cash at any point unless they're in an extremely low cost of living nation.
To get big money, you need to start your own successful business. But still, investing in stocks can make you quite comfortable.
It's still a really silly comparison.
Another way to say that is comparing velocity to distance traveled is not meaningful.
It’s really not that simple.
And there's far more to it than that. Saying it is "really that simple" is nothing but call to outrage.it doesnt really matter if there are bars of gold to backup the value of a company's market cap. the point is that you can sell the shares for money, and to further emphasize this, you're literally taxed on that gain just like income tax (though annoyingly much lower, which further reinforces mistreatment of working class).
This doesn't contadict that rich renters have it better than actual workers - sucking the riches they produce. You are just pointing out some of the reasons why.
It's going to get dicey when millions are no longer needed for labor or to consume goods (keep the economic engine going). Oh and amoral robots can do the dirty work ...
Speaking as someone from the US, how is this a meaningful comparison in anyway? Honest question. Sure, wage growth sounds good in an upward trending market, but let's say the market has gone down 30% over the past five years. Would you expect everybody to take a 30% pay cut? If Walmart had a blockbuster year because their suppliers charged less (more efficient means of production), how are Walmart employee wages interconnected to the supplier charges?
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.
Layoffs contribute to the average worker taking a paycut. And we are seeing layoffs even in a market that is soaring. Why do you think that workers wouldn't be affected during a downturn?
Every company that goes down 30% cuts a ton of workers, that's way worse than just a pay cut.
they lay people off they don't give pay cuts
[dead]
On the 8th of August 2018, the FTSE 350 closed at 4320. The current level is 4980 giving us a 7-year rate of return of around 15%.
I assume the United Kingdom of Great Britain must be a paradise for the workers, right?
> 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.
China is flat compared to 10 years ago so yeah I think this argument checks out?
The whole stock market on fire is really a US-specific phenomenon.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/stock-market
Once you factor in P/E ratio inflation on those higher equity prices and replace salary with total benefits (i.e. including healthcare benefits), the scenario is revealed to be decidedly NOT simple.
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".
This is an oversimplification but directionally correct, if you want the academically rigorous proof just go read Piketty’s papers
Why would stock market valuation be a good metric? If Walmart's valuation doubled in that period, does it mean they sold twice as many goods? How could salaries hope to double, if the things people buy with salaries didn't also double? Did Ford's vehicle sales double in that period?
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.
Right now if indexes show massive gains it's based in large part on developments in AI, which is a corporate-friendly development predicated on destroying jobs by replacing people with AI tools and human effort with AI effort.
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).
> we have tremendously increased productivity
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.
> 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
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.
Go back 50 years, and 95% of Americans should be raising Cain. Of OECD countries, the US has ridiculous income inequality distribution and effective reductions in purchasing power over time. https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
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.
Going back 50 years is the mid-late part of the post-WW2 economic boom. Sure, you can have that kind of growth back but only if you're willing to go through World War 3 to get to it.
The tax cuts and other regulatory shifts allowing things like share buyback and the carried interest loophole (might be closed now) have shifted up the share of the GDP held by the top 10%. This has slowed the velocity of income, as a wealthy person doesn't spend their income the same month the way a person in lower quin-tiles does. This has caused a stagnation in middle class standards of living. This is a headwind that didn't exist 60 or 70 years ago. There was also a demographic advantage as WW2 had thinned the heard and there was a once ever level of economic prosperity. The tax code encouraged big business to invest in labor, which isn't happening now.
> income inequality distribution
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.
It's probably not that simple because at a cursory glance I see quite a few points in history where my country's main stock index was about 50% of its current valuation: January 1998, February 2006, January 2015, July 2016, April 2020.
Sure compared to the last time (2020) or before that (2016) it's a big difference, but compared to the first time we're pretty close to a 100% increase in median salary. Compared to the second time it's still close it 60%.
> 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.
You know that the increase in price could be simply... ehm.. inflation. So no productivity increase out there.
Inflation is important yes, but it hits the stocks and salaries the same. So the ratio between them are the same, and the moral of the story, that most of the wealth goes to the owners, remains.
But yeah, how amazing the productivity increase actually is is a bit more complicated.
Oh, I know what to do: give the means of production to the workers. I'll selflessly volunteer to lead the movement (and eventually be crowned king).
If the stock price is primarily reflective of real productivity, then stock market crashes would have to be caused by sudden drops in productivity. Are they?
There are waves and eddies in a river, but overall the water still flows downhill.
Agreed, but I suggest that's only part of the story. For some reason, workers in the west don't organize/vote by class any more.
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.
Now more and more people in red states are asking about healthcare. Seems like they could or should be capitalizing on this, unless the parties are going to flip on this issue to keep their power balance.
The US is starting to reorganize by class, the union laborers are voting for anti-union candidates.
Can't speak for anyone but myself of course, but I was pretty disappointed with the way Democrats under Obama tackled healthcare.
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.
Whatever is worth doing is worth doing badly. Obamacare wasn't perfect, but it had tons of positive effects and could later be improved. Republicans seem to be the only ones with a 50-year plan and the discipline to see it through.
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.
>Whatever is worth doing is worth doing badly. Obamacare wasn't perfect,
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.
> with an individual mandate, which is both offensive
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.
Also look at the wealth inequality graphs
The oligarchs want a new gilded age
What is sickeningly upsetting is how difficult it seems to be for our news organizations and talking heads to talk openly about this fact.
its not difficult - it's that they very clearly HATE class consciousness. just look back at occupy wallstreet. it got coverage that was nearly universally mocking it and sneering at it, and the second they were able to ignore it and pretend it didnt exist anymore, corporate news moved on.
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.
> it got coverage that was nearly universally mocking it and sneering at it, and the second they were able to ignore it and pretend it didnt exist anymore, corporate news moved on.
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.
Real wages are up and quality of life is on average better than it's ever been. But news organizations do in fact report on self-reported data periodically like living paycheck-to-paycheck (which just means they spend everything and don't save).
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.
> which just means they spend everything and don't save
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%"
Except the data doesn't reflect that at all. Americans on average are among the richest people in the world. People who make the median income just often spend it all.
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.
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Please edit out swipes and name-calling from your posts to HN, as the site guidelines request: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: You did it elsewhere in this thread too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840174. That's not cool, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Fortunately, your recent comment history looks fairly free of this kind of thing (that's good), so it should be easy to fix.
The math in the statement is correct in the short term. If the risk-free rate is around 3% and the equity risk premium is about 4%, the expected return on stocks would be roughly 7% a year, which would double values in about 10–11 years using the Rule of 72. That doubling could occur for a time even without productivity growth, as companies can boost earnings through pricing power, cost-cutting, or financial engineering.
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.
My point was that is that even without any economic growth stock indexes grow quickly because they are cumulative (that is include profits of companies by either dividend paid or stock buybacks). Some indexes are not fully cumulative but they are still close enough because companies often prefer buybacks to dividends these days (for good reasons).
Stonks always go up.
They do in expectations of course. It's like saying "overall businesses make money and money accumulates over the years". You are rewarded for not spending your money right now. Taking some risks (risk premium over risk free rate) and not being an idiot (keeping your money in a bank or mattress or whatever). Market puts price on that reward. Unless you believe market is completely wrong about everything then yes - stonks will go up.
Sometimes I feel the reason for many political views presented on HN is misunderstanding of very basic of finance and economy. The whole discussion here that started with absolutely nonsense comparison (stonks go up faster than wages) is one example of that.
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Please edit out swipes and name-calling from your posts to HN, as the site guidelines request: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I realize you didn't start it, but we need commenters here to follow the rules regardless of what others are doing. (Otherwise we end up in a downward spiral: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...)
Edit: You did it elsewhere in this thread too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44842213. That's not cool, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Fortunately, your recent comment history looks mostly free of this kind of thing (that's good), so it should be easy to fix.
It's hard when people call me confused :-/ But I would edit it away if I could! But it seems like I can't edit this post anymore, should I be able to?
The edit window has passed. But don't worry! all that matters is to correct things going forward.
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So, talk me through where I am wrong. I will use the example in my sibling post you did not reply to.
If you put 10 million into the S&P 500 in 2002 you would get a dividend of roughly 132k (1.32%). That's your share, as a owner, of the wealth produced that year across all the companies you own tiny parts of. Keep the money there, do absolutely nothing, and in 2025 it has grown to 70 million. Your yearly payout is roughly 925k, 7 times what it was 20 years ago.
You agree with this? And then we compare that to wages, and see that they have grown significantly less. You agree to this as well? For sake of argument, let's say they doubled.
From this I conclude:
- Income from capital grows exponentially faster than income from salaries.
- The person who invested 10 million in 2002 gets a larger fraction of what the economy produces compared to a salaried person today than 20 years ago.
- That difference will increase if the stock market continues as it has done in the past.
Please help me understand which conclusion you disagree with, and why.
This was not a good moment to start the argument all over again.
Please don't harangue other users, regardless of how badly they're missing a point or you feel they are.
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Protip: look for an Asian market in your area for food. I get an entire shopping cart full of food for $60-100 and that lasts for ~2 weeks.
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!
I believe Asian markets are basically an inversion of the regular grocery store pricing model. Regular grocery stores sell all the stuff around the perimeter (meat, dairy, produce, baked goods, etc.) at relatively high margins and all the shelf-stable packaged stuff in the middle at relatively low margins. It makes sense, one store may have better or worse produce or meat or bakery items or deli items etc. than another, but their Heinz Ketchup can only be cheaper or more expensive.
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.
You can get a nice deal if you alternate, yeah - generic "staples" at your local giant or whatever, Asian market for fresher or unique stuff, dry spices from an Indian grocery...
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.
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I would love to learn more about the unit economics of groceries. How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation? [0]
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.
The megacorp can provide cheap food, it just doesn't want to. In practice they adjust the margins in a data-driven way on individual goods.
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.
It’s just price gouging. There is an item I sometimes buy that is about $1.60 at supermarkets, but is consistently $.85 at nearly all rural Colmados. Same brand, same product , shelf stable , mass produced, large volume mover, imported product. Supermarkets have just collectively decided to sell it for 2x the “rational” market price because it went up with Covid and people kept buying it.
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 is an interesting one to me. They're widely touted as being cheaper, but most foods there have some sort of upscaling factor -- "organic", some sort of regional variation like "sockeye" salmon instead of farmed atlantic, a few extra steps of processing, etc. Rice, pasta, and fruit are all usually more expensive than other alternatives, even at bigco grocery competitors. You have to be a little careful if that's where you do all your shopping.
Costco used to be cheaper bc of the bulk factor, but nowadays I think of it as a good curator. The products are usually good quality. Even if more expensive
A good example of this is their meat department, specifically beef as an example. You will generally find that Costco is not any cheaper than your regular supermarket, but the product you’re getting is graded USDA Prime or better.
There was a great comment on Reddit from someone who worked in the meat department that highlighted this comparison with specific examples but alas I am unable to find it.
>curation . . . The products are usually good quality.
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.
I also largely go there for Kerrygold butter, meats, oils, and other bulk household goods. But the occasional furniture purchase, automotive thing, car rental, etc. It's a good deal for the price of the annual membership
> The megacorp can provide cheap food, it just doesn't want to.
This fails to explain why Walmart, the world's largest retailer, runs a profit margin of less than 3%.
> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?
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.
> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?
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.
> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?
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
A lot of manual labor and optimization on the marginal things.
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.
It is likely partly due to cost optimization (the shelf are rarely that organized in these stores) and the fact that they don't sell fresh produce.
The thing I don't get is farmers markets being more expensive.
Farmers markets are incredibly shitty inefficient ways of getting food from farm to consumer. Also the people who shop at them tend to be much much richer.
People shopping at farmers markets are presumably less price sensitive than the general grocery buying public.
Farmers markets are often just diverting goods from the grocery store closer to you, for an upcharge (bc moving the goods one more time)
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When you control most of the market it works out a little differently. People can only eat so much food, but you can price gouge them relatively easily.
Kroger, the largest grocery in America and one that routinely sets of anti-monopoly interdictions have a profit margin of 1.76%.
What profit margin line would you suggest counts as price gouging?
And they do $150B - $200B of gross per year. It's a massive business. I worked at Kroger Central Marketing decades ago when they rolled out the savings cards (which was a way for them to raise prices across the board AND track purchases in real time per shopper) and the strategizing over milk prices for a 1/2 a cent per gallon change was insane.
Doesn't that also count the investment losses they made last year, the cost of gobbling up other companies, the interest from the debt they acquired with previous expansionary practices, etc?
Sure, but you can run the numbers for basically every grocery in America. The industry considers 3% margins to be outstanding.
That reads more as an indictment against hyperscaled grocers than an argument that the current price gouging is unavoidable.
You can get the same numbers out of small scale grocers too. It’s a brutal retail business with low margins and easy replacement. It’s probably the last industry I’d look to for price gauging accusations.
The typical argument against monopoly grocer situations is that they are problematic for how they deal with _vendors_ not customers.
It's crazy how narrow big retail profit margins are in general. What a brutal business.
Just to clarify, that is their net margin.
Their gross margin was slightly above 30% last quarter.
Grocery stores have lots of operations costs. Real estate, employees (Kroger employs ~400k people), cold chains, logistics, etc.
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.
>> Protip: look for an Asian market in your area for food.
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 produce quality is often a bit lower. But in the last 5 years, all the grocery stores at least here in the Seattle area have had produce degrade, and they are pretty much the same as H-mart with higher prices.
Where I live, if I don’t shop at fancy grocery stores 30-40min away, it’s generous to call the produce ‘produce’. Literally never knew onions could look this bad. A lot of the citrus is like deflated in the inside, the bananas are trash, and a single bell pepper is $3. I could go on and on. Just think we enshittified the food situation and now it’s more expensive and way worse quality.
Something unique to the city I'm in is there are some stores that only sell produce. I have no idea how they make it work economically other than locations with cheap rent and being an outlet for distributors but they manage to to have better quality and prices than grocery stores.
My local Asian grocer does one key thing I know of to save/make money: lots of the workers live in a local dorm that he rents and are fed with leftovers from the bakery and nealy spoiled produce.
Smart. The one in my area also has a restaurant and they also sell baked goods. I think they're definitely doing well for themselves.
I find the produce prices often to be absurdly lower. These items are cheaper to begin with but if you're making fresh food consistently then it probably adds up. The biggest difference I've observed is that the asian grocery stores buy tier 2/3 produce rather than the big supermarkets that have perfect looking produce.
Exactly! The big supermarkets have tomatoes that look perfect, but taste like wax. The Asian groceries have lumpy odd-colored tomatoes that actually taste good.
We've had a garden and orchard for most years for quite some time now (several decades) and this is one of the most stark and interesting things I've observed as well. Garden produce is nearly always smaller, lumpy-looking, and by appearances alone looks to be quite inferior. However, they taste great compared to those "perfect" veggies and fruits in the grocery stores. In mid-winter when the home-grown produce is gone and we go back to buying from the store (or when on trips and such), it's often a big disappointment. If you're willing to spend $$$ on organic produce at mid to higher end stores, you can get close to the quality (though never on strawberries and raspberries IME), but the cost can be pretty ridiculous to the point of feeling wasteful.
I've recently had some of the best strawberries and it costs $1/each. Grown in the same city I live in: in fact Google Maps says the distance between the grocery store and the strawberry farm is four miles.
Like heirloom tomatoes? Those are everywhere now?
> Protip: look for an Asian market in your area for food. ... Discovering the Asian market has been one of the best financial things to happen to me.
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.
Asian always min maxxing their whole life, the moment you hit adulthood it hit you hard that you always been capped for life
Protip #2: frozen veggies and fruit.
Cheaper, supposedly healthier (flash frozen), easy to make, zero preparation, and never need to worry about it going bad.
They make the money on the imported goods which are harder for their core audience to find and more expected to have a markup.
I don't care if it saves me money, I'm not giving my hard earned cash to Walmart/Kroger/Albertsons/OtherMegaCorp. Not to mention that what they sell at Walmart is mostly unhealthy garbage that I would be a negligent parent if I fed that to my family.
I do make an exception for Costco because from everything I've read they're a pretty standout company as far as treating their employees go, and they curate well. We get some stuff there.
But mostly we shop at small(er) local grocery stores when possible, especially for things like meat, eggs, milk, all of which we can get local (better quality and why ship stuff like that around the world; luckily we're in the PNW). And of course that includes local Asian stores for rice, fresh fish, etc.
We don't buy "fancy" food (no wagyu steaks and the like; we eat a lot of legumes) but we do try to get the healthiest local option when possible (not fanatically so, we're not on Portlandia), and we could probably cut our monthly food bill by at least 30% if we bought the cheapest food at Walmart/Safeway.
So we cut back spending in other ways - rarely eat/drink out, entertainment, etc.
I'm sure we could do better. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that it really costs in both time and money to eat healthy. We're lucky that we can, but it's also a matter of what we prioritize in our spending.
I pickle, ferment and sauce a lot of things. Then I look for things that can be made in very large quantities and then preserved frozen/cooled (a lot of times just in the cellar). A lot of these things are from Asia and are great and very cheap and I'm love them for taste as well; curry's (I make 10 liters at a time; from scratch, very very cheap except my time but I like cooking), auntie dumplings (prep + freeze; just watch tv while making 100s of them) etc. Lovely food and cheaper than most things.
Same here, our freezer has lots of home made dumplings in dinner size packages.
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.
In my country its called an international market. It's a beautiful place where you buy an entire bag of garlic for ~8 euros. There's also vegetables I hadn't heard of before I entered there
Why Fruits and Veggies Are So Crazy Cheap in Chinatown: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981063
Publix is expensive. Even Walmart will save you a good amount.
Publix is expensive for general items but the sales are often incredible, I will stop by just to get BOGO items and return to Kroger or Lidl for everything else.
Or go to Aldi...
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Huh? I'm guessing you didn't mean to reply to me?
You're talking about getting in a car and driving to a specialized grocery store to "save money". I'm saying you could also just by produce and save money.
That was the point of my post. I'm not buying potato chips and dip; I'm buying produce, meat, and herbs. These items are way cheaper at the Asian markets I go to.
It's probably a bot.
In my country healthcare is not an issue still, and in the countryside where I live housing costs are 'low enough'. But food cost used to be something only students or long term unemployed had to worry about somewhat. Now minimum wage workers and elderly have the same issues I had as a student, and I can't imagine how I would do as a student or as an unemployed. Bank of MomAndDad are probably the only way out. Social mobility should be t it's lowest in decades if I had to guess.
Exactly the things that a well meaning society should provide to its citizens. What's the point of "progress" if we can't provide the basics to the majority?
In the United States, the working poor are considered deserving of their burdens in an immutable, moralizing, Calvinist way. “They make bad choices.” “They have bad culture.” “They have bad genes.”
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Define "strong". sipstea
If market forces were allowed to operate, these needs would be fulfilled. Instead, the usa and a lot of europe have an enormous amount of regulation and government involvement in housing, healthcare, and food. Those of us who want progress and the world to be a better place to live should politically push for deregulation in these three markets/industries.
An unregulated (or just less-regulated) free market is not going to fix health care cost. The problem is we treat it as a market, full of middle-men spooning away profit, and where people get care generally proportional to the amount they spend.
This is a No True Scotsman fallacy. If America, the #1 champion of free market capitalism cannot get it right, then it may be impossible. Communists claimed the same: they say it didn't work because we haven't tried "true communism" yet.
The US is the only odd one out in the first-world for healthcare, so we'll leave that aside (most people are covered through their employer, but many people aren't)
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.
Just look at the name of each of the primary groups in the US:
- 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.
This is not the right framing. The left vs right battle was invented so people wouldn't think about the up vs down battle. It's wealthy people vs everyone else but the wealthy people convinced everyone else that it's red vs blue.
This is also overly simplified. It suggests the battlefield is on a two axis graph but really there’s 3 dimensions.
This is absolutely correct, just observe how both parties attack Zohran Mamdani in spite of his wild popularity
The wild popularity of... checks... getting 56% of ranked-choice votes (44% of first place votes) in a Democratic Party primary in one of the most reliably Democratic cities in the US.
Yes exactly. It doesn’t matter that it’s a democratic city because, as you said, it was the democratic primary so every candidate was a democrat.
Taking political labels at face value is stunningly naive. Parties' rhetoric is similarly untrustworthy to the point of irrelevance. In reality, major parties are just different combinations of graft, which for obvious reasons is not shared with the public. But even if that were not the fact, taking some label that arose a century ago (progressive) or four centuries (conservative, in England) -- under circumstances that are barely remembered and may have been mendacious even at the time -- and have changed continuously since -- is common enough, I guess, but sheer childishness.
> 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).
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.
> I don't know what this logical fallacy is called, but it's a logical fallacy nonetheless.
It’s a straw man. The US is usually represented by liberals vs conservatives, not progressives. Also progressivism doesn’t simply mean “progress” conceptually
I was thinking more the fallacy of "the name I give it must obviously accurately represent something."
Progress towards what? Conserving what exactly? What is moderation between the progress goal, and the conservation of the past?
so if a junior dev checks in 4k lines of crap code in the codebase, is that progress?
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?
The "we oughtta run society in a way that <bible mumbo jumbo>" stuff that "conservatives" spew is literally textbook "progressivism", just not in a direction that anyone who self identifies as a "progressive" wants.
The progressive movement is not representative of the whole Democratic Party (it’s widely liberals vs conservatives, not progressives)
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, …)
Americans confuse need with 'nice to have' which leads to the "I don't have money for food/rent/hc" problem.
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.
>You do not need cable tv or home internet.
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.
Home internet is a luxury if you already have a data plan on your phone to accomplish the necessities - that is for access to government and corporate web sites and educational (school related) needs. Social media, in its basic forms are text and photos which also should fit in most included MVNO data plans such as this one from US Mobile which is $22.50/mo or $228/yr (19/mo)
Unlimited High-Speed Data Unlimited Talk & Text 20 GB Hotspot Data
FYI - I live in a fairly rural area and have coverage. The standard home internet plan here runs about $90/mo after all taxes and tithes are paid.
Lazy Americans conflate anecdotes with reality. Make sure to hit the tropes though. The poor person with a Starbucks cup. The 'leased BMW bros are financial idiots'. The iPhone you have no idea where the person got (my son get's them as a christmas gift from his auntie). The cable bill (who under 50 has cable TV? What year is this post from?).
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.
I hope you realize that the people that are feeling "stressed" are not just the ones making minimum wage but also those making considerably more yet, somehow not managing to make ends meet.
No you see, the poors are bad people and deserve to be poor.
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.
Even if it is just 2K (I think closer to 3), that is 5% of their $40K that could go towards food, healthcare and rent (or mortgage).
So implicit in this is that the poor should have no luxuries at all. Water + a crust of bread. When not working for their betters, can sit in the darkness inside their hovels so as to not be seen.
The median USA income is $40k. Most (not all) people are fully capable of living within their means. They can balance housing+food+medical and even some non essential luxuries. However, they have little slack. A shock to the system (loss of job, car failure, medical problem, or 20% increase in consumer goods within a few months) can force them to make tough choices. Which is where we are now. Basics have gone up, so whatever slack that might have existed has been cut short and people are stressed about how to adapt.
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”
I hope people advocating this realize that the lower 50% of Americans are waking up to the fact that their quality of life based on America's PPP is actually the same as third world nations, and the upper levels still want them to 'cut back more'. How long do you think people will go for that?
> You do not need cable tv or home internet.
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.
Is there a reason they can't use the internet that is available from their phone data plan?
try downloading an os update over your 5g connection, or maybe watching some instructional videos on youtube, now your out of gb and have an offer for purchasing 1gb additional data for 10 bucks a pop
better to have an unlimited home internet
I'd drop the HOA first, I sure as _hell_ don't need one of those.
HOAs come with the house. You can't just cancel them like you can cancel your netflix subscription.
Depends on the jurisdiction and state / local laws. HOA enforceability can vary from "that's cute" to lien on a house.
Personally, I think the only thing worse than bad neighbors is any neighbors pretending they're lawyers.
No, but you can get elected to the HOA and move to dissolve it. Of course this isn't always advisable, some HOAs aren't awful, and some actually provide necessary services to homeowners.
I am with you there - the only HOA fees that absolutely need to exist is to service an elevator if it's a required part of your building.
Other than that many HOAs exist to fund the lawsuit against the developer for 20 years. <- this part was just a joke
so who is in charge for organizing repairs/replacement of common area things? Fences, parking lots, elevators, roof, pool, dog park, interior carpets, re-painting walls, etc?
I guess i’m thinking of a condo HOA. Maybe some of that is less relevant in a neighborhood with single family homes?
I do agree some HOAs are awful. But many actually help keep a place from looking shitty and from collapsing like the condo tower in florida a few years ago.
That is not always an easy thing to do and every HOA will vary. In general it will usually require a very high number (like 80%) of owners to agree, there are often multi-year waiting periods and sometimes poison pills which offer common areas to the local municipality on dissolution.
The people I know who can't afford food or housing don't lease their cars (nor have they ever bought a car that was less than 5 years old) nor own a house, so I think we are considering a very different class of people.
> I was head of an HOA for about 10 years
This fully explains the rest of your screed against the working class.
When I started as head of the HOA, I was out of work and not exactly cup runeth over with money myself as it was 2009 so please, take your snark elsewhere.
The point being that you are a stickler for rules and, like most sticklers, lack the capacity to understand the life situations of people unlike you. Hence the tone-deaf, factless, compassionless screed.
I disagree with home Internet, I think that's pretty important these days.
The rest I largely agree with.
I have been poor and made all the sacrifices you suggest (heck, even gave up a car for public transportation), and, looking back, it made very little difference. Housing and food are just too expensive and dwarf other concerns.
It's crazy how cheap a decent phone can be, I'm talking a $160 Motorolla phone with 8GB of RAM
I waited until they were phasing out the pixel 6a, so there were loads of great sales to clear out the old inventory. I managed to get a pixel 6a new for $94 total. No trade-in, no contract obligations, just $94 total.
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 did watch the most recent JerryRigEverything samsung fold phone test and man it is so thinnnn but nah, $2K for a phone is too much for me, maybe I'm just poor but yeah.
I had a $2K used Sony Alpha camera and I felt scared using it, poor mindset too but insurance.
This is so out of touch it is almost comical.
Best to look at the data rather than relying on anecdotes.
This is anecdotal but here is the truth: I have a home that I bought around 20 years ago in Cali, and the HOA tripled during that time and is now rapidly approaching $700/mo. And that's with less benefits since we lost the earthquake insurance. And not to mention the special assessments that started showing up in 2025. You could make all sort of assumptions, but there is nothing special about the community.
> And not to mention the special assessments that started showing up in 2025. You could make all sort of assumptions, but there is nothing special about the community.
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.
So many, many HOAs and condo assocs. are poorly managed and have no capital plans (I even had a condo once where the agreement prohibited a capital fund!).
Two points - first to yours on it being more difficult to sell. In fact, it can be the opposite. To get a mortgage these days it often requires the hoa/condo to have at least 10% of the annual budget in reserves. While often not the case, buyers should also be comparing the relative reserve states too and realize low reserves means specials
The second point is that failure to reserve the majority of the cost of expected capital needs can result in a situation of liens and foreclosures (to get a paying owner in) and the HOA going cup in hand to a bank who may or may not loan the shortfall at a terrible interest rate. Or the project is put on hold and the cost may rise because of inflation or further deterioration of whatever was being renovated.
When homeowners gripe about the dues and 'look how much is in reserves' I always ask: so when the roof needs to be replaced, you'll be good to cut a $5 or 10K check within 30 days? No? That is why the HOA reserves the vast majority of the cost.
this is something i strongly desire for people close to me to learn
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?
I think this is something that's very difficult to learn. It's a set of attitudes more than anything, and it's very countercultural (and not in a cool way).
Mr money mustache isn't my favorite for various reasons, but he's pretty good at evangelizing the diy/fire sprit. Just take it with a grain of salt.
It wouldn't be America if people didn't blame the poor for everything. Surely, the housing crisis is just stupid poor people drinking too many lattes, there is certainly no greater issue there, nope.
Health care costs are only a concern in the one developed country where it’s not universal and paid for by taxes (or completely free if you don’t work or don’t work much)
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
We have an insurance system similar to Obamacare here in Switzerland but not the same problems as the USA. (Healthcare is expensive here but everything is expensive here so it's difficult to make the comparison)
> About half the public identify the cost of groceries as a major source of financial stress.
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.
That's not at all who the article is talking about. You're piers are not representative, and what you describe is not the issue.
Despite early success I'm truly no closer to stability [in terms of housing]. With the wrong landlords, I'm practically living with Mom/Dad while nearing my 40s. Fiefdom-building isn't helping at all.
I can deal with the responsibility of a leaky roof. I can't deal with another year of No Dogs Allowed.
I'm curious, where do folks place dogs/pets on the necessity-to-luxury spectrum, or in the hierarchy of needs?
Pretty close to personal agency. Let me ask the 'rents [again].
Either absolutely critical or completely irrelevant, it seems
The current financial system and various corporations see the majority of consumers like livestock - a kind of resource to be exploited. It's better to be free range organic though, in my humble opinion, but the majority seem to be trending towards battery/cage chickens.
With "free range organic" are you describing people or food? As in, "it's better to be a free range organic human [vs. battery/caged livestock human-like resource for exploitation]", or "it's better to _eat_ free range organic [food]"? These are two different things, and in either case I'd argue not an option for the people who struggle affording food that is health(ier) by modern standards.
> the majority seem to be trending towards battery/cage chickens.
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...
What does free range organic mean in this context?
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?
>What does free range organic mean in this context?
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 better to be free range organic though, in my humble opinion, but the majority seem to be trending towards battery/cage chickens.
This is assuming the majority of chickens have a choice.
you could argue most livestock have it better
they are fed, housed and cleaned by their owners
still hoping for the WEF to confirm my livestock status and begin the UBI payments
Without in any way drawing a direct comparison, my impression is that everyone is stressed out by whatever is next on their Maslov pyramid. If it's food and housing, it will be food and housing. If it is achieving great showbiz success rather than moderate, it will be that.
Of course it's not the same, and being well fed and rested makes whatever psychological stress easier to bear.
But look at all the rich people seeing their shrinks. Or look at poor people in the UK, who really have it tough, but at no point seek to think, gee, we're better off than 90% of the world population, arent we lucky.
I am not equating the objective lack of basic life necessities to far fetched flights of fancy, but I have a feeling (huh) the subjective psychological feeling might feel the same.
I did some math a while ago on this topic:
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
If you put a 2.5% annual tax on net worth, that net worth would very rapidly find its way to other countries.
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.
The $15k is being transferred from entity A to entity B. Both entities are not spending the $15k so there wouldn't be any effect on inflation. If you printed an extra $15k then that would cause inflation because both entity A and entity B would be spending $15k.
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.
This completely ignores Friedman's concept of the velocity of money (MV = PY). If that $15k is being saved by someone versus immediately spent, that has a different effect. A transfer isn’t neutral if the two parties have different propensities to consume (marginal propensity to consume). Similarly how quickly and what the money is being spent on will have an effect. Most money (M2) is not created directly by the treasury but rather indirectly from large banks lending against fractional deposits. This is money created on the balance sheets of banks but has real effect on the economy.
This I think is going to be a great problem that humanity must solve to move forward. Currently, wealth can become overwhelming concentrated and that wealth has mobility across jurisdictions which makes it nearly impossible to implement a wealth tax. The only way I see this ever working is enough powerful nations agree on a uniform wealth tax (say 1%/year) and those nations use their economic strength to pressure other nations to adopt the wealth tax as well. If the USA and EU got on board with a wealth tax I believe they could get the majority of the world to come onboard by implementing high tariffs on any country that does not implement the wealth tax. Of course the problem here is that the US is probably one of the least likely countries to implement a wealth tax, so I think this change will only come with major upheaval or violence.
You implement demurrage and land value taxes and it's game over. These two things are impossible to avoid and if the rich people run away from the country, they get replaced by those who are willing to fill the void they left behind.
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...
> demurrage and land value taxes and it's game over
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.
A wealth tax is just not feasible because almost none of the rich will accept it. See almost any response to your comment as evidence. What we need is strong labor laws and the will for unions in the working class. A wealth tax doesn’t actually change any power dynamics. The rich are still powerful and the poor reliant on them. If the working class can band together, the power dynamics change and we can see some actual progress.
Democracy should in theory put needs of the majority over the minority but our representatives would never and we don’t hold them accountable.
The end result of this logic is that poverty must exist for society to function and I just don’t accept that.
Poverty isn't hard to solve because "society needs it" but because it is a statistically likely outcome. If you live in a world where everyone has $100, and every day, each person randomly gives $1 to a random another person, you end up with a highly unequal society within a year.
I mean it's necessary to have some system to allocate jobs and resources. Someone has to do the shit work, and someone has to do the easy work, and there are jobs that it's probably not worth paying someone properly to do in their current form.
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.
The OPM from the US government is defined as a relative wealth function, so technically it has to exist. Also you can compare the standard of living of someone above the poverty line in 1910 vs someone below the poverty line 2010, and 99% of people wouldn't trade places. Access to running water, toilets, air conditioning TV, Internet, mobile phones, etc makes life a lot better than what we called middle class 100 years ago. [source https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/air-c... ]
It's all relative and as long it's relative, mathematically speaking poverty has to exist.
Do we have a definition for "has stable access to basic necessities"? In 2025 I'd call this healthy varied food, private sheltered sleeping space that's protected from extreme temperature, clean water to drink and bathe, Internet, public outdoor recreation space, health care, at least a day off a week and let's say 5 days combined PTO or vacation, enough extra to cover emergencies, and enough left over to slowly save for retirement or education or retraining or other opportunities.
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.
Poverty must exist for capitalist societies to function, yes.
"If you put a 2.5% annual tax on net worth, that net worth would very rapidly find its way to other countries."
Most of that worth is in assets. If they leave the assets they can go.
Wealth and income are stocks and flows, respectively.
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.
This assumes the wealth transfer doesn’t affect the price of assets and services which is of course bonkers.
More than likely the transfer will happen and affordability will not improve due to inflationary pressures.
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.
Low income people chase goods with all their money. High income people squirrel it away or spend on luxury goods.
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.
I know you said net worth and not income, but honestly, that's what taxes should be at least partly doing.
Good thing the republicans just enacted the Big Bewildering Bill that did the absolute opposite thing, and ensures even more wealth is redistributed from the bottom to the top!
Yup, isn't that what raising the tax in progressive way would do?
> 40 million Americans live below the poverty line of $15,000 per year.
Not even close. Census income data is not an accurate measure of poverty, as it excludes all in-kind redistributions (food stamps, HUD, medicaid, head start, etc) AND excludes cash programs like the "refundable tax credits". A more accurate line would be "40 million people would be living in poverty if we weren't already spending >1 Trillion dollars per year on food stamps, HUD, medicaid, and other programs."
Throwing more dollars into a system with out of control costs will not resolve the fundamental cost issue. For the same reason that you can't out-exercise a terrible diet or out-earn a terrible business model, solving this problem will require addressing the cost component.
That's not how money works.
1) After how many years of 2.5% annual donation would their own wealth drop until they thenself become poor?
Donating 2.5% means that you get poorer and poorer over time unless you can make more than that per year back. 2.5% of wealth also means non-liquid assets such as house, how do you donate that? Get credit?
If you are middle class and your house etc is eg 1M$ 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.
You say:
>.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.
You are free to give them 2.5% of your money, see how it works out.
Reality supports my case.
You may find it unfathomable to do so, but I already donate quite a bit more than 2.5% of my salary, as well as hours of my time every week, helping people less fortunate than myself.
Whatever "reality" you're referring to isn't the same one I'm living in.
Good for you. Doesn't change the reality that most of them don't know how to handle money.
It is a bit funny that you said "see how it works out", I told you I already do it, so you go with a dismissive "Good for you"
Anyways, I doubt anything I can say will ever convince you otherwise, you sound very entrenched in your beliefs.
That would simply make food and housing more expensive, as it would devalue money, as it increases circulation, because it wouldn't produce more housing and food - just increase demand - unless they "donated" (tax) that 2.5% to increase production, and not to subsidize poverty.
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.
Food and housing would get more more expensive but also food and housing are getting more expensive without this redistribution
The impact would be - subsidized people would find food and housing more affordable, and non-subsidized people would find it more expensive.
Instead of making housing ACTUALLY more affordable - you're just shifting the burden onto the lowest non-subsidized quantiles.
Yes I did some maths and we should be able to...
...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.”
You forgot the part where that causes massive inflation.
Honest question, but it sounds like you're describing that if ~11% (based on the parent numbers) of people weren't very poor the economic system would fail? Eg inflation would spiral out of control? (i assume spiral since they'd have more money, but money would be worth less, there by making them have less effective spending power - thereby needing them to have more money, etcetc.)
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.
Inflation and affordability are different concepts. I think affordability is the term I’ll use as it’s best for casual/lay economic discussions.
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.
These are non real estate assets so they're already circulating through the economy in some way or another. It wouldn't cause inflation.
They said "net worth" which is assets not cash that's being spent. M0 would shoot up which causes inflation.
If they said "income" it'd still shoot up the velocity of money, since poor people have higher spending rates.
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.
Inflation is caused by a greater number of dollars chasing the same number of goods and services. Look at the used car market, or the housing market, or the GPU market during the crypto craze several years back. It all falls back to basic supply versus demand mechanics. Inflation can be caused by printing, but it can also be caused by redistributing money from location X (Microsoft stock) to location Y (food spending).
But it would reduce demand somewhere else if you have a fixed money supply. Therefore, the overall inflation rate would stay the same.
It does not.
It's unintuitive how, but it probably would cause prices to go haywire.
It could, at least temporarily. But there is no reason to belive it won't stabilise again.
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.
Stabilizing means we’ve done this whole thing for nothing.
No, because more poor people get to eat, which is a good thing.
If they could produce more they already would.
The only way of fixing this is decreasing demand by reducing the population numbers.
Why would they produce more if they could? It must meet the demand at the current price point. More money goes to poor people, more demand for food at the current price. That will increase the price, which will increase production. Short term the price might go up a lot, but then new production will come online, and the prices will fall back to today+delta.
It does. I'm not competing with billionaires for my bananas. A billionaire doesn't eat 10^6 times more bananas than me.
In Mexico, many people argued that raising the minimum wage would lead to massive inflation, but that did not happen when the increases were implemented.
> 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.
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)?
> 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)?
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.
It always comes down to the same set of arguments. The rich doesn't pay the price because money is nothing to them. The poorest have additional grants, so life is not that bad for them, even if they don't work. And who pays the most expensive fee for this? Middle class. The actually working class. The class that nobody thinks about, and the class that always funds everything.
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.
> The poorest have additional grants, so life is not that bad for them, even if they don't work.
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.
> 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
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.
??? If they earn barely enough to sustain themselves, they're not middle class by any sane individual's definition. They're poor.
Well, you can use the "poverty line" definition to separate people who will get grants (below the line), and people who will pay for the grants (above the line).
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.
> So being just barely above the line means that you pay, not that you get. This is the worst place to be in.
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.
Or we do communism, the right way this time.
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.
Don't jump directly into the red scare through a slippery slope fallacy, it's just intellectually dishonest while being the most boring thought-terminating cliché on this type of discussion.
Wanting to live in a better and more just system, even if we can most realistically just work towards an improved version of capitalism, is probably something most of us can agree upon.
I don't think anyone sane is against people having their needs fulfilled so I don't think anyone sane would look at any system we live under and think "yeah, this is it, we found the perfect system".
So instead of deflecting into communism as a gotcha, why don't we behave as adults, and agree that discussing how to find ways to improve our systems of production, distribution of wealth, how we view the less fortunate, how society can be better overall for all of us, is quite fucking important?
Going directly into the pigeon hole of ideology is just lazy and unimaginative. Humanity did unthinkable achievements already, we can always try to do better, don't be lazy and unimaginative...
We probably can agree on lots of things, about inefficiencies in current system and the like, but some elementary things between us are too far apart.
The ideas you identify as solutions, for me are the problems.
You can promote artificial redistribution all you want, but I will want to stop it however I can. If a global redistribution system would be implemented, then all your wealth would go to Africa and Russia, and you will be left with nothing. I'm sure this is not what you want, which in my POV makes you a hipocryte. If you don't agree that your wealth should go to Africa or Russia then we're in the area of choosing who is worthy of getting money and who isn't. And this is not at all different from a rich guy deciding where to put money to. So wealth redistribution from my POV just means that a poor guy wants to be in charge of the money now. But after he'll be in charge, it only means that he'll be the new rich guy. Nothing changes at all.
Pro-redistribution people are always talking about cash flowing from someone else to them. It's always the same story. And this is against what I stand for with all my determination, because I don't like thievery. Especially legal thievery.
You go to absolute loaded language to talk about concepts that should be discussed in a more leveled language. You consider thievery just wealth redistribution but don't consider thievery the products of the exploitation of labour, for example.
Why is it thievery to redistribute wealth from elites who are exploiting societal developments (education, skills training, etc.) so they pay their share back into the society which enabled them to become rich in the first place? Why is it ok that they can exploit a whole society's work for their own personal gain while gaming the system to not pay back to the thing that gave all foundations so they could play their game?
You talk about redistribution in a black-and-white way, no nuance, you go to the extremes such as:
> You can promote artificial redistribution all you want, but I will want to stop it however I can. If a global redistribution system would be implemented, then all your wealth would go to Africa and Russia, and you will be left with nothing.
Which is a strawman, I did not touch on this point whatsoever, I did not talk about "global redistribution", you are the one bringing this up, in an utopic sense, yes, we could talk about it but I'm trying to discuss in realistic terms what could be improvements in enclosed societies (aka: national states) to improve the system.
That's where we fundamentally disagree, you cannot talk in nuanced terms, it's either "communism!" or "you will be poor and give your money to all the poor in the world" instead of a level-headed discussion on the flaws of our current systems, how we could search for solutions to it.
And even worse, you talk about "artifical redistribution" as if the current form is the "natural" one, what is natural about a few people who found ways to exploit the system for personal gain instead of the natural way of living collectively since we all depend on each other for societies to function since time immemorial?
Your view is very conservative, it's unimaginative, it just states that what it currently is is what's natural and supposed to be. Challenge a bit more your thoughts, you are just repeating the same trope over and over...
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Housing and health care are really expensive and are increasing in price in the usa. And yet, the prices of almost everything else (entertainment, clothes, cosmetic surgery, etc) is going down over time in the usa. I wonder if it has something to do with how much the local, state, and federal governments involves themselves and regulate housing and healthcare? (hint: it does)
More interesting analysis of where things stand: "Spending is being held up by the wealthy, while consumption from middle and lower income groups continues to fade."
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/08/stock-market-us-economy-ric...
According to https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
1 out of 7 US inhabitants have food insecurity. And this is a govt website likely to underestimate the statistic
Well clearly the solution here is to eliminate the USDA entirely. 1 in 7 is an outrageous statistic and it will not be tolerated.
I have a bit of a gripe with this "food insecurity" metric.
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.
Wow. I'm at a loss for words with this comment.
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.
I don't know where you get this from
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.
People like the ones you're replying to like to make excuses for their lack of agency.
"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.
It's still victim blaming.
LoL! https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000FF1101 Current price/lb for chicken is $4.23. But of course that's from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, soooo.... can't trust that can we!
The parent comment said chicken legs, not chicken breast. That's this data series:
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.
So if I don't eat the bones too, I'm leaving nearly a whole dollar on the table? Damn. I can't believe it! I could be saving even more!!! I'm such an idiot.
This completely false talking point is a disease.
"Normal" foods like rice and beans are dramatically cheaper than "junk" food.
You know, you make such a good point here. The easiest solve for this is for the fat poor people to simply eat rice & beans. That will surely fix both problems.
I think we are both in agreement.
These are two symptoms of the same problem, I don’t see any issue with the statistics. Plus, of course, not everyone who’s poor or hungry is obese.
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/
Did you really just compare human beings to wild animals who hibernate?
It was a loose analogy, but it is thought Neanderthals may have hibernated (or gone into a state of torpor). Your comment offers no reasoning nor evidence; is something wrong with it, and if so what, exactly? Food scarcity in winter time is something humans have historically been exposed to and evolved with in much of the world. And clearly over-eating in humans corellates somewhat with food insecurity. Regardless of the mechanism, my point was that it’s not hard to imagine why obesity and hunger might go together.
And yet, the very study you linked to concluded that despite 5 years of research on the topic, it still isn't clear what the actual causes are. But you know, I definitely think your arm-chair reasoning probably contains the one true reason.
Research has mostly focused on explaining the paradox at a household level. Farrell and colleagues reviewed the literature pertaining to low- and middle-income countries and focused on the bigger picture, that is, analyzing the issue at an individual, household, community, and country level. They proposed 5 context-mechanisms factors that could modify the association between an individual’s food insecurity and obesity risk: affordability of energy dense, processed foods, quantity & diversity of food consumed, spatial temporal access to nutritious food, interpersonal distribution of food and non- dietary behavior. Nevertheless, affordability of energy dense foods was identified as the main mechanism since the authors had limited evidence to support the other mechanisms (26). Other authors have proposed that social support can also play a role since they found that food insecure women who reported lower levels of social support were more likely to be obese (28)
Food isn't calories.
Wage stagnation is the root problem. When costs of all expenses go up over time but paychecks do not, it causes major stress.
It's more Baumols cost disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
I don’t think either of us is wrong
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.
Paychecks did go up though, +50% nominal[1], +11% real (inflation adjusted)[2], over the past 10 years.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Real wages didn't track with increases in productivity, which is sort of the long-standing problem, since the late seventies or early eighties. (the problem for workers, I mean)
I disagree. The root problem that causes high prices of food/housing/healthcare is the lack of supply for food/housing/healthcare. The root problem that causes low supply of food/housing/healthcare is government regulation. There is enormous market incentive to provide more food/housing/healthcare, increase supply, and decrease prices. However, governments have made it difficult or impossible for the market to provide more food/housing/healthcare. Even if someone's paycheck is the same over 30 years, if the prices of things go down (as they have for nearly all products and services except food/housing/healthcare), their purchasing power would increase and they are by definition wealthier.
You can't discount Baumol's cost disease. While it's true that government regulation is some part of it, like real declines in home building productivity in the previous decade or two, that certainly is not the root of the problem. Beyond limits to theoretical growth in productivity for these areas, there absolutely are perverse incentives in all of those industries.
For example, 40% of corn in the US goes towards <10% of of gas via ethanol. Even without subsidies, refiners would likely use some ethanol because it's a cheap octane booster. Insurers weren't regulating healthcare prices before the ACA and now face a profit limit tied to payouts -- which creates another perverse incentive. Doctors are incentivized to specialize instead of entering family medicine. They're also incentivized to run more tests defensively because they charge more and it reduces liability for malpractice.
Even in areas that are more builder-friendly, there is still incentive to build denser housing (which is more efficient) that maximizes return per sq ft. So you get studios, 1 bedroom, and 2 bedroom homes. And larger homes (built outside of onerous zoning areas) that more amenable to raising families end up creating unsustainable costs for local municipalities through sprawl.
Some of these areas can be addressed by a free market but maintaining a healthy market that minimizes perverse incentives requires significant tweaking (i.e. regulations)
I don't think building homes is really prohibitive due to regulations. I know it varies a lot by region of course. But I'm in an area that isn't really effected by earthquakes and has no frost line/need for basement/etc. I've built a few houses as a GC. It's land more than anything that's gone up in the past ~15 years since I first started in it. That's purely a market force. Second is skilled labor, even unskilled labor honestly. There's just a massive shortage of people doing manual labor/sweaty work, and I typically have access to a major pool of immigrants as we border Mexico. In terms of materials, there's some regulated things we have to do more of now, like insulation and other energy efficiency things but it's rather small in the scope of things. I currently own a 1950s built mid-century modern that was built in a time of low regs here. If I were to build it exactly as it is (to past codes) and simultaneously build it again (to current codes), the current code version would only be about 10% more. Likewise, if I demolished it and just sold the land, I'd still get about 90-100% of what it's market rate is right now. That market rate has ~quadrupled in the 15 years I've owned that house and to reiterate, the home itself is nearly worthless. I'm not in a fastly gentrifying area either. I'd say it's affluent but it always has been since I owned it, it's become more common to just knock down the original homes and build new.
We just need to automate wealth accumulation with AI. We had decades of wage work outsourcing and automation. We just need to automate the wealth accumulation to balance the books.
I'm surprised that the cost of groceries is a bigger source of stress for most people than the cost of housing. I guess, generally, it's weird to break these things into categories because money is fungible, but food vs housing is the one that stood out to me.
Also: Of course people under financial stress rely on credit more! Of course younger people use newer sources of credit that older people are less familiar with!
>I'm surprised that the cost of groceries is a bigger source of stress for most people than the cost of housing
Most people pay for groceries more often than they pay rent, and the cost of food rises more quickly than rent.
Also, you can survive being homeless, but no one survives being foodless.
In the US insurance (of all types: car, house, health) is a major expense and only getting worse.
I'm a fairly well to do/employable person, and so is my wife. Together, we should be all kinds of financially stable.
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.
> But the two largest costs to our finances are ridiculously outsized: Child Care and Health Care.
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.
>We pay 5.5k for two kids per month
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 kind of like the compliance. It comes with infant first aid courses and theory in child education, psychology and nutrition. Meals are prepared from scratch. I'm sure it's much more than strictly necessary, but that's much better than to little compliance.
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...
There's a huge "not grey market" tax for everything from childcare to construction
There's a "middle class dip" where one spouse working barely makes enough to cover the increased costs from child care and other incidentals (like eating out more often).
The poor either have a non-working spouse or get subsidized child care, and the rich don't know what a banana costs.
Many of my parent friends have gone through the debate about having the lesser-earning parent quit work for a few years to care for children or to pay for daycare.
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.
The resume gap issue is why many never return (which may be a better life overall, hard to say, life isn't only financial decisions).
One option is to keep working at reduced hours/ad hoc, if such is available.
Curious where you live that healthcare is more than housing?
Health insurance premiums are $500 to $2,000 per person per month in the US (price goes up with age). Annual out of pocket maximums are usually $5k to $15k (varies based on individual or family plan). Annual deductibles are usually $2k or may even just match the annual out of pocket maximumum.
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.
Childcare + Healthcare is more than housing.
Healthcare alone would be more than the house we had before this one.
Ah the combo I see. So if someone is also renting or paying a mortgage they’re toast.
In the US if you don't own your home free and clear this is likely the case.
If they are paying out of pocket for health insurance, it’s definitely possible.
My childcare + healthcare is nearly 3x my house payment.
Vehicles in general.
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!
Insurance is the problem.
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.
It doesn't have to be a expensive. Buy an older cheaper car, don't put comprehensive insurance on it. If you don't drive it much, there's really not that much maintenance work. Pretty much just an annual oil change.
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.
Yeah, good point. My friend just sent me this: https://dzautocenter.com/ (cheap used cars, Houston)
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.
> Instead, I decided to book some motorcycle lessons so I can use a $3000 moto. But then I need to pay for life insurance!
Don't forget disability insurance. And fill out your organ donation card!
You're not really going to come out ahead on a $3000 motorcycle. Factor in gear, maintenance (more intensive per mile than a corolla), and it's hard to make the math work. You have to enjoy riding.
In Houston, I wouldn't even consider a vehicle without A/C!
What is the purpose of life insurance or you have no kids (or dependent parents/spouse I suppose)?
I guess to pay for your funeral costs if cashing out all your savings and possessions wouldn't cover that?
Motorcycles are better at making your cost of living permanently higher via serious injury than any minor cost savings over automobiles.
aka penny-wise pound-foolish
They are a lot of fun though (I rode a liter bike for years)
In Florida there are "Lottery Winner" style billboards everywhere for auto accident lawyers and other ambulance chasers. This is what helps keep insurance premiums high for everyone and unless you are flat-broke. Good luck gambling not having enough insurance.
Louisiana too.
No, no. The US has the strongest GDP! The world's biggest stock market! So. Much. Wealth! How can this be!?
This is the case because government regulation makes it difficult, illegal, or impossible to increase supply of food/housing/healthcare and drive down prices.
I know you’re joking / being sarcastic. I will say though, nobody claims wealth in the US is evenly distributed…quite the opposite.
I read it more like that people should start tracking success of country not based on how much health it produces and start caring about the actual quality of live of its people. People can't eat GDP or sleep under it
First, my comment was overly snarky - I can see the karma counter jumping up and down like a rabbit which is fair.
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.
> Equality can be achieved using capital systems and market economies.
Sure, it is just going to be a eternal battle between the need of capital for infinity growth and the need of working class for better wealth distribution.
There are times when I have been broke and just meant I ate more plainly.
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.
> A lot of those who complain about groceries could swap out what they would rather have until times improve.
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.
>20kg sack of rice is cheap and lasts a while. Flour is cheap. Eggs are cheap Potatoes Canned tuna. Where i am canned tuna hasn't gone up in price, but there is considerably less of it in the can, and noticeably more seawater.
Smaller portion == increased price, no?
Yeah! And they could sell their refrigerators too! They use way too much electricity. <eye roll>
Why would they do that? Refrigerators are incredibly efficient and cheap to run and are a modern miracle of extending food shelf life/
Because "POOR PEOPLE" have so much stuff! Why do they have so much stuff if they're poor!
https://youtu.be/Al5E3KbIfeo?t=24
I mean they should really be more frugal. Having a refrigerator is clearly a ridiculous luxury.
Is there anything someone can do to save money and stretch their budget farther, or are we saying that's all off base?
I'm saying it's blaming the victim to assume the problem is that they aren't frugal enough.
No. Actually should get more freezer space if possible. So can buy in bulk on offer and freeze.
You clearly have never been broke and are clueless!!!
US has tensions (lack of broad social agreement) in its regard for several subjects, so those areas absorb infinite money as the incoherent regulations and rent seeking around those black holes festers. Housing, Medicine, Education, Justice/Policing/Prison system. Denial of reality is always expensive. If you ask the median voter questions about any of these areas it is certain that there will be many basic misunderstandings about them.
Why is food still a source of stress? Food is a solved problem. The amount of food waste alone is just staggering. Healthcare and housing are harder problems. There's no abundance there. But there is something seriously wrong with the link between food production and food consumption.
Food is far from a solved problem. There are many food deserts in the US, where the best you can hope for for groceries is a gas station mini mart. “They can just drive further to a real grocery store.” Yes, but they start cutting into their grocery budget driving there and back, limiting what they can buy. In extreme cases, it obviates the purpose of the trip entirely.
Fair distribution of resources is far from a solved problem unfortunately
Food is a solved problem? You cant be serious. How many animals are unnecessarily slaughtered every year for food? How many people still cant access clean drinking water? How are we going to provide for a ever growing population? Food is an insane issue we have no real solutions for without causing incredible amounts of suffering to animals while also heavily damaging nature in the process. Solved problem my ass.
I think quite a bit of this stress is self inflicted. People spend a lot of money eating too much (shitty) food. That results in health problems. And at the same time people are way too ambitious about where they want to live.
If people could just scale back and live appropriately, it’d be less stressful.
We desperately need zoning reform in the US so that housing supply is allowed to increase.
This does seem like "Sky blue and water wet" sort of reporting, but that's just because of the daft headline. When most people are challenged with affording the basics, that points to a severe economic risk. We've lived through a period of incredibly cheap credit due to where we are in the monetary cycle of the USD as a reserve currency. We sort of brought it on ourselves though, given the vicious cycle of buying cheap junk we don't need on credit, and then the parties selling us that cheap junk buying our debt. We're overdue for some considered and precise deleveraging. Without it, this problem will only get a lot worse.
It's getting pretty bad, I wonder where the floor is. A growing number of people are using credit to purchase groceries — buy now pay later schemes are also resulting in people putting ubereats on credit
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/business/buy-now-pay-late... (https://archive.is/Cmzis)
It's important to note that using credit isn't purely an indication of struggling. A lot of those payment programs offer 0% incentives, and from a purely logical standpoint, the correct thing to do is put everything you buy on a 0% loan for as long as possible.
It's the "correct" thing until it isn't... because there's an entire industry designed to profit off of punishing you for it. Without regulation it used to even trick you into getting over your head... credit card bills wouldn't even do you the basic courtesy of warning you about how much interest you're paying in an effort to obscure real costs.
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.
This is exactly how they trap people. That a few bogleheads escape with a few hundred dollars doesn't bother them at all.
Banning unsecured loans would fix so many problems.
A negligible portion of people are executing this strategy of yours. Most can't afford what they are buying
> and from a purely logical standpoint, the correct thing to do is put everything you buy on a 0% loan for as long as possible.
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.
I think the biggest failure is not having economics and finance classes be part of core curriculum. The amount of confusion and misunderstanding from forcing people to personally figure out the system is totally crazy.
While this is a common refrain, I think we should also live in a society where governance isn't so bad that you have to educate yourself to avoid the rampant scams in literally every aspect of life. What good is a government that doesn't care for it's most vulnerable citizens.
We could have used our position to offer healthcare and childcare for all like many less prosperous countries. Instead we started pointless wars, cut taxes for the very rich, and embraced a politics of grift.
I'd like to advertise deregulating housing construction as a very clear way to help solve desperate housing problems in many countries (such as in the USA and much of Europe). You can check out more about it here. https://www.econlib.org/build-baby-build-now-under-construct...
I’m literally going to stop going to the doctor again for checkups until I can change my medical industry insurance payment plan. My current plan covers a yearly checkup but there was an issue and now I’m having monthly follow up calls with my doctor to describe results for $50 a pop. Just insane, I hope someone takes a stand against these companies even if it is Luigi-style.
Good news! AI will soon fix all of this -- that's why BigTech is spending 2% of GDP on it; they know, and they care.
How has no one (here or at this organization) picked up on this gaffe?
> Suggested Citation: AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. “Support for legal abortion remains strong.” (July 2025).
>Fifty-three percent of adults report that grocery expenses are a major source of stress
What an absolute embarrassment. Income inequality will lead to societal collapse
Finding food and housing is a source of stress for literally all life on earth. Only for a fortune few humans is it not a source of stress.
Understandable. I guess our only recourse is to do austerity / wage suppression about it! See, it’s actually their fault for making too much money and getting too many handouts, or something. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with all the middlemen taking more profits wherever they can squeeze them from. THAT has to keep happening so we can have Good Paying Jobs, see. Also there’s a labor shortage so we need to suppress wages more.
Is it correct to say that inflation is the primary cause that drives up the cost of these items?
Well, I am a bit surprised. How could groceries be a bigger concern than housing/income/childcare?
Surely rent is the big ticket, you have to work to have an income, and you need childcare if you're going to work?
I mean of course you have to eat, but food is the one thing you can adjust more or less continuously in whatever increment you need. You can't just move house, you can't just change jobs, and you can't not have the kids taken care of.
r > g
for more, see https://www.ft.com/content/e1b9254e-f476-11e3-a143-00144feab...
Quite a sound article. Although, I want to add one thing.
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
Obligatory establishment and realist responses: https://x.com/ChamathWarriors/status/1712504415012208962
I didn't know food was so high but I believe it.
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.
Breaking: Water is wet. Next news at 20:00 UTC
More news at 11
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That is not accurate. Research consistently shows that gas line pollution, lack of bike infrastructure, racial inequality, and climate change are the most significant stressors.
\s
( Sorry for sarcasm :)
Holy crap you got me good. Did you add the /s later?
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What is the point of this comment?
socialism could help us here.
Has there ever been an example in history where this has been true? All of the largest famines were caused by socialist attempts at controlling the food supply.
Besides... the massive crash in population coming over the next 10 years should solve most fo this without ripping up entire societies.
I find it interesting that people worry much more about how much things cost than how much money they make. I would think these two numbers would be much closer together.
The cost of living has significantly outpaced salary growth. And given how quick companies are to do layoffs, even when things are going well; makes people a little less confident in a job switch. And that doesn't even account for the current state of the market which is brutal. I saw a thing the other day that said people can't even really budget for groceries because the costs are changing drastically week to week. You arent going to get a new job and feel the effects of (hopefully) the larger paycheck as quick as prices can and will change currently.
You directly control what you buy, not how much money you make.
It’s a lot harder to earn more.
Baumols cost disease... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Median wages are nearly stagnant for decades and the jobs market growth is shrinking
I suspect this is a consequence of conditioning done to convert Americans’ (and anyone consuming American media’s) identities from “workers” to “consumers.”