How much did it cost for a cell phone back then? How's about an online community where you could talk politics and basketball? What about a big screen HD television? Who cares how much people made back then? The world has changed... some for the better, and some for the worse. It's just different. Ed O.
With some things? Almost certainly. How much more expensive, for example, is a gallon of milk? I don't know. How much more expensive is it to drive a mile in a car? I don't know. Food and energy (along with housing costs) are the three staples that are pretty easy to compare over time, and I simply don't know how those things are now as opposed to 200, 100, and 20 years ago. From a technological perspective (consumer electronics, health care, etc.) it's no contest: there are things that exist now that simply didn't then. I do find it pretty amazing that someone can work a half of an hour at a minimum wage job and be able to afford a couple of items off of the value menu at Wendy's. It's far from the healthiest option ever, but rather amazing in a historical context. Ed O.
Well, in Portland for example, a house that went for 20k in the late 70's early 80s is now going for about 200k. That seems pretty extreme.
anonymous is supposedly targeting the NYSE on October 10th. We'll see if it happens. Like I said, you can only get results with violence. in this case, cyberviolence. I doubt they'll pull it off though. Maybe they'll hack a website or leak people's PI around, but they'll eventually get caught and strung up like pigs.
So a business should be paying 150k a year for semi-skilled labor? If so, what should police, firemen/women, blacksmiths, and doctors be making? Aside from that, I like the message this group is putting out. Might head down there to see what happens.
To extrapolate on this, it seems like a reference to those factoids you always heard about Reaganomics and you started hearing again in the last several years about how the "top 1/3/5% of the population controls ____% of the wealth". And as far as these protests, I'm borderline interested in participating (though I'm in Italy for a few more months and they'll probably be non-existent by then). And I fucking HATE protests and protesters. But this is something I actually care about. It sickens me that people can be so greedy and that so many people can suffer because of blatant negligence and selfishness. It isn't surprising but we had regulations in place to prevent this type of disaster. And how does such a massive portion of the population who is being raped silly have such a small voice? Might as well speak the fuck up any way we can or else we deserved to continue to be stomped all over.
So? Just the fact that you're bringing up whether or not the "poor" can afford to purchase their own house proves we have moved forward a great deal over that time span. If the concern is whether families can PURCHASE their own home, and not whether a family has access to clean water, we're doing great.
I'm nowhere near the 300k line, but I make enough to pay taxes, so someone please enlighten me on which poor people I stole my income from. As for the "it started with Reagan" comment, didn't the chart in the OP show that it started decreasing in the 60's?
The wealth disparity is concerning but the main thing I take issue with is how the wealthy abuse their power. Lobbying, controlling the media, cronyism, etc...
You're buying into hyperbole meant to make a bogeyman where there really isn't one. There are a lot of people in the top 10% of earners who don't even make $100K a year. That's the reality of it. People who make $1M are elite doctor and lawyer types who gave years of training, advanced degrees, and big liabilities (get sued, take cases on speculation), and they do a lot of pro-Bono work. If you want to talk wealth, guys like Bill Gates (richest man in the world) owns a fraction of Microsoft, let alone much of any other big company. If the government confiscated everything he has, it'd fund obama's deficit for 10 hours. Warren Buffett paid $6M in taxes on $18M in income, and his vast fortune would fund the deficit for a few hours. There's no way these claims of so few rich people are true. Confiscate the wealth of all the billionaires in the world and we could pay off obama's debt. But some would feel better because bill gates would be eating at the soup kitchen and sleeping under an overpass in a cardboard box. Think about it. The federal government owns the vast majority of the wealth. On the social security surpluses alone, over 10 years it could have bought every last share of stock in the fortune 500 companies. It owns 80% (or some huge part) of all the land in Utah, which alone is worth more than all the individuals combined. And that's just one state.
You're not making any sense. If you honestly think the metric we should use to determine "poor" is whether or not a family can afford to PURCHASE their own home, then we are doing very well and this class-warfare garbage is ridiculous.
You can still get houses for that in Detroit. I would bet you could still build a house with 1960's technology for $50,000 today (which is $6,000, inflation-adjusted). Of course, it would cause cancer and violate codes eighteen ways from Sunday, but I bet you could do it. Ed O.
Beg to differ. Income Slides to 1996 Levels http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904265504576568543968213896.html
How many households per capita are there now compared to the past? Measuring income per household seems to be a false way to look at economic growth, given the (likely) rise in single-adult households. Ed O.
