Why America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country

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Here is your posting pattern:

1, You post a link with no discussion.
2. You can't explain why you posted that link.
3. Your response to respondents is more links, not explanation.
4. If anyone challenges your links, then you accuse them of being fallacious with no explanation.
5. Your postings show no effort to explain yourself.

I can't remember which one of the Weinstein brothers said it, Bret or Eric, they'd both have grounds in economics and evolutionary biology to say it as well as their overarching interest in both, but the gist was that markets are good for finding out how to do things - not what to do. It seems like we've allowed them to command both the how and the what, and this is the sort of price we're paying.

I do worry as well that as automation increases as well as the number of industries going offline as far as employment we'll just see this get worse until something in the gears becomes unbearable even from those currently gaining from it. Combustible environments are scary though, in one sense that you have no idea what event will light the match which lights the powder keg, how that effects the narrative downstream or who has power over it, and you then have the future fate of the country hinging really on something like an accident.

IMHO the obscene self-contradictory term "affluent poor" belongs in the trash heap of history.

What about “wealthy hand-to-mouth” households?

"70 million Americans may live in families they describe as “wealthy hand-to-mouth” households".
https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exc ... 11942.html

I have a co-worker who bought a 8400 square foot home in a nice Chicago suburb, a BMW, has kids, maxes out his 401k, his yearly property tax bill is like 25k/yr, and likely he feels poor.

"he feels poor." what a total tone deafness on that person's part. he likely wouldn't know poverty unless it bit him in his tuchas. fortunate for him, as if he feels "poor" now just because he can't presently afford the latest and greatest thingamajig, he would absolutely DIE if reduced to genuine hand-to-mouth poverty. I am reminded of joseph welch saying to sen. McCarty, "at long last sir, have you no sense of decency?" true poor people don't have access to "retirement funds," much less a new bimmer and mcmansion in tony suburbs. this makes me want to vomit, the sheer gall exhibited here.

Does that seriously describe most struggling Americans, though?
Sure, there are probably people who are irresponsible with their money, but it's unfair to paint all struggling Americans with the same brush.

"hand to mouth" is another of those much-abused terms [abused by rich people who should have sufficient intelligence and decency to know better] these days.

I think it's fair, because I think most people are reckless with money.

Most Americans are trying to live a first world life style.

Payday loans, credit cards, student loans, consumer goods loans, shop-till-drop, vacations, keeping up with the Joneses .... 30 YEAR MORTGAGEs (freaking sign me up for 30 years of debt ).

That's how the poor stay poor.

I think it's right to blame them.

I listen to the Dave Ramsey show, when poor people call and ask him, "I'm poor, how can I pay my debts?". His typical response is, "stop being stupid".

Stupid financial decisions are at the root of the problem of poor people in America.

If everyone did that then thrift stores would cease to exist, they get their supplies from people giving them free stuff they bought and don’t want which wouldn’t happen if everyone stopped buying new stuff

Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck and don’t save. Probably at least half. Even some with college degrees.

It’s no panacea.....trust me.

But the poor of America frequently have it “better” than “third world” poor. Americans struggling don’t feel that way, though. It still sucks.

Try being homeless (even though it’s “easier” being homeless in the USA than in, say, Nigeria).

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 09 Dec 2018, 7:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Do you even live in this country? I bet you live in some posh neighborhood where you've never had to see a single real poor person or homeless man in your life and so you assume every American has just as much money as you.

My Mama grew up very poor with an alcoholic stepfather and sometimes they couldn't even afford food. Many Americans can't even afford to go to the doctor because of how ridiculously expensive health care is, many are driving ONE used car that could fall apart at any moment because they can't afford another vehicle, a lot of Americans like my Nana are working their asses off at 70 years old because they can't afford retirement.

I really don't believe you when you say that there are no poor Americans in this country. My family IS poor!

In fact you're really pissing me off to be frank. I'm done arguing with your stupid absurd logic.

Perhaps I've better things to do than engage in a battle of wits with the clearly unarmed.

I like “rugged self-reliance”.....but “puritanical cruelty” doesn’t float my boat.

Productivity in the USA has tripled over the last 30 years, but wages have been totally flat. With inflation, wages have actually dropped. And, tricking people out of their money is possibly the world's first-oldest profession -- i.e. loansharking. If a Wall Street bank does it, it's genius, but if a guy in a seedy pool hall does the same it's a crime. And there are good reasons for usury to be illegal.

The deregulation frenzy was about making it easier to steal, and the all talk about "streamlining" the regulatory environment for businesses was just bulls***.

You can say people should be more careful, but we should all also read our iTunes and other software legal agreements rather than just clicking "I agree" immediately. The just-world fallacy makes the world a better place for liara, scammers and cheats.

I have a friend who lived entirely by working fast food jobs years ago. He ended up with medical bills that left him no choice but to go bankrupt. He was not irresponsible with his money, but was a victim of circumstance. There are more Americans in such situations than I think you appreciate.

This could be my tilt but, considering how I've had to struggle to get by - even graduating college highest honors, even having an IQ in the 120's range, it's not that I haven't tried - it's more like I've found out how active the 'devil take the hindmost' aspect of things is. We don't really care about cultivating talent in a lot of places, likely more often we see it as a threat to our own survival if we're in that person's path to rise and so we play knowledge-keepaway games in the workplace, especially if we have our own niche software for accounting or the like that the person's college education can't prepare them to know inside out.

I've really had to take a much more Hobbesian view of life, again (had this in my early 20's when I had something like a full social relapse of high school at a place I worked), and I have to circle back to the sense that humanity lives with an underlying primal hatred that it seems like a large part of the animal kingdom shares, ie. kill anything that looks like me, wants the same food, might want the same job or same kind of partner, and that primal hatred just gets masked in this non-stop game of never-serious joking, evasion, and refusal to deal with problems (the nod-nod wink-wink in that seems to be that a lot of the problems are benefiting certain people and if they are they need to stay).

This is where I do think our current intellectual elite got so infatuated with their credentials, started rubber-stamping themselves in the Ivy League schools, and in that sort of generic elite-making machine actual talent and natural ability got lost along the way and replaced by entitlement. This is one of those areas where I do believe that current social media, for all of it's known problems, also gives the freakish natural talents, ie. the Goethe's of our generation, the ability to cut through the bureaucratic red tape and actually be heard. I really hope something does come of that, ie. superior ideas on economics and incentives or tweaks/tuning to culture should have enough impetus that, if launched right, they'll infect our way of doing things for practical reasons and anyone whose benefiting from shortfalls in the way of these things would have a difficult time stopping a change if it's coming up from the bottom.

I think one thing is urgent - unless we want the next decade to be a decade of pogroms in the west we absolutely have to untether economic success and 'right to live'. That sort of ugly stick might have worked when there were gainful jobs available for everyone (ie. jobs that they could make ends meet on) but that's rapidly becoming a thing of the past. I get a bit horrified to when my parents or close family members, if I mention UBI go 'gasp!! But that's... socialism!'. I ask em what their answer is to the notion that if we hit high enough unemployment numbers, ie. above 20% somewhere or beyond, that we'll have the worst kind of political revolution - they won't follow that line of thought and instead just say 'work hard and outrun em!'. What grieves the heck out of me is they're really decent people otherwise but it's like the Stockholm syndrome on this one goes all the way to their core and back out. This whole thing is still running on a lot of self-delusion for a lot of people and if anything it's not getting knocked out of enough people fast enough.