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.
gruez · 46m ago
>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.
Epa095 · 18m ago
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.
gruez · 8m ago
>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.
Corporate profits in the U.S. have almost doubled since 2019.
potato3732842 · 25m ago
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.
ffsm8 · 14m ago
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...
gruez · 27m ago
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.
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.
robertlagrant · 15m ago
It's still a really silly comparison.
an0malous · 1m ago
This is an oversimplification but directionally correct, if you want the academically rigorous proof just go read Piketty’s papers
donatj · 39m ago
It’s really not that simple.
- 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.
aredox · 2m ago
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.
93po · 15m ago
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).
username332211 · 29m ago
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?
Ntrails · 10m ago
> 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.
rtp4me · 47m ago
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.
spot5010 · 44m ago
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?
delichon · 48m ago
... 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.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 10m ago
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.
csomar · 19m ago
> 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.
ambicapter · 48m ago
What is sickeningly upsetting is how difficult it seems to be for our news organizations and talking heads to talk openly about this fact.
93po · 10m ago
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.
Herring · 49m ago
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.
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.
techdmn · 20m ago
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.
Herring · 8m ago
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.
> 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.
basilgohar · 41m ago
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.
smt88 · 40m ago
The US is starting to reorganize by class, the union laborers are voting for anti-union candidates.
inerte · 34m ago
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.
kccqzy · 28m ago
> 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" in its intended purpose. (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.
ipython · 16m ago
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.
siliconc0w · 1h ago
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.
bluedino · 43m ago
On the other hand you can get things like million-dollar organ transplants.
93po · 7m ago
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
mathiaspoint · 1h ago
God forbid we touch Obamacare though.
Aurornis · 1h ago
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.
stackskipton · 33m ago
>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?"
rocketpastsix · 33m ago
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.
cvwright · 1h ago
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.
epistasis · 51m ago
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.
9dev · 46m ago
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?
mathiaspoint · 45m ago
It doesn't seem to me like the current configuration makes people less sick or poor.
> 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.
jrmg · 39m ago
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.
ch4s3 · 27m ago
> 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.
Taikonerd · 29m ago
> 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.
cameldrv · 25m ago
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.
toomuchtodo · 22m ago
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.
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.
Swizec · 46m ago
All you need to know about America’s health system is this graph comparing average cost to life expectancy of OECD countries.
> 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.
m0llusk · 40m ago
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.
gotoeleven · 41m ago
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?
mathiaspoint · 1h ago
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.
jrmg · 33m ago
> 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.
mathiaspoint · 23m ago
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 even if it's freebecause my QoL suffers too much either way) I'm coming out with a loss because I'm forced to subsidize car 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.
potato3732842 · 57m ago
>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.
mathiaspoint · 52m ago
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.
john01dav · 1h ago
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.
seanmcdirmid · 1h ago
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.
smileysteve · 1h ago
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.
Aurornis · 1h ago
> 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.
seanmcdirmid · 1h ago
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.
siliconc0w · 1h ago
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.
thinkingtoilet · 1h ago
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.
orwin · 1h ago
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.
phyzix5761 · 1h ago
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
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.
__turbobrew__ · 15m ago
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.
yoyohello13 · 6m ago
The end result of this logic is that poverty must exist for society to function and I just don’t accept that.
krapp · 34s ago
Poverty must exist for capitalist societies to function, yes.
ImHereToVote · 32m ago
"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.
epistasis · 1h ago
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.
conductr · 59m ago
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.
SketchySeaBeast · 1h ago
I know you said net worth and not income, but honestly, that's what taxes should be at least partly doing.
9dev · 43m ago
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!
mikae1 · 1h ago
Yup, isn't that what raising the tax in progressive way would do?
franktankbank · 1h ago
That's not how money works.
hasnd · 1h ago
You forgot the part where that causes massive inflation.
unshavedyak · 1h ago
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.
conductr · 37m ago
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.
phyzix5761 · 1h ago
These are non real estate assets so they're already circulating through the economy in some way or another. It wouldn't cause inflation.
arbor_day · 1h ago
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.
chvid · 1h ago
It does not.
knowaveragejoe · 1h ago
It's unintuitive how, but it probably would cause prices to go haywire.
Epa095 · 1h ago
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.
hasnd · 15m ago
If they could produce more they already would.
The only way of fixing this is decreasing demand by reducing the population numbers.
conductr · 33m ago
Stabilizing means we’ve done this whole thing for nothing.
franktankbank · 59m ago
It does. I'm not competing with billionaires for my bananas. A billionaire doesn't eat 10^6 times more bananas than me.
onlyrealcuzzo · 1h ago
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.
pempem · 56m ago
Food and housing would get more more expensive but also food and housing are getting more expensive without this redistribution
NotGMan · 1h ago
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.
qualeed · 1h ago
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.
gloosx · 47m ago
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.”
self_awareness · 1h ago
> 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)?
piva00 · 58m ago
> 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.
self_awareness · 50m ago
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.
ambicapter · 44m ago
??? If they earn barely enough to sustain themselves, they're not middle class by any sane individual's definition. They're poor.
self_awareness · 39m ago
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.
piva00 · 31m ago
> 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.
self_awareness · 12m ago
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.
piva00 · 34m ago
> 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.
self_awareness · 17m ago
> 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.
bsenftner · 1h ago
You just explained why they are poor too, this is what they do with any income.
Plus, let's not forget the grifter population that would instantly try to assume any and all of that, with the #1 receiver being our desperately poor Jesus Christ and his evangelical jet owning sales team.
Steve16384 · 1h ago
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?
thuuuomas · 36m ago
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.”
garciasn · 48m ago
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.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 36m ago
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.
an0malous · 3m ago
This is absolutely correct, just observe how both parties attack Zohran Mamdani in spite of his wild popularity
deadbabe · 15m ago
This is also overly simplified. It suggests the battlefield is on a two axis graph but really there’s 3 dimensions.
potato3732842 · 20m ago
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.
huhkerrf · 34m ago
> 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.
jameslk · 23m ago
> 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
huhkerrf · 20m ago
I was thinking more the fallacy of "the name I give it must obviously accurately represent something."
jameslk · 35m ago
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, …)
ImHereToVote · 34m ago
Progress towards what?
Conserving what exactly?
What is moderation between the progress goal, and the conservation of the past?
whatamidoingyo · 2h ago
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!
mattmaroon · 1h ago
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.
nemomarx · 1h ago
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.
seanmcdirmid · 1h ago
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.
nyjah · 1h ago
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.
morkalork · 1h ago
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.
gitremote · 1h ago
> 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.
tonyhart7 · 1h ago
Asian always min maxxing their whole life, the moment you hit adulthood it hit you hard that you always been capped for life
aeblyve · 1h ago
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.
pjc50 · 1h ago
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.
hansvm · 1h ago
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.
K0balt · 1h ago
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.
Aurornis · 1h ago
> 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.
scottiebarnes · 1h ago
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.
tossandthrow · 1h ago
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.
nine_zeros · 1h ago
> 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
tayo42 · 1h ago
The thing I don't get is farmers markets being more expensive.
tekla · 3m ago
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.
ac29 · 35m ago
People shopping at farmers markets are presumably less price sensitive than the general grocery buying public.
hansvm · 1h ago
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.
kasey_junk · 1h ago
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?
FuriouslyAdrift · 32m ago
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.
hansvm · 39m ago
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?
kasey_junk · 9m ago
Sure, but you can run the numbers for basically every grocery in America. The industry considers 3% margins to be outstanding.
ac29 · 37m ago
Just to clarify, that is their net margin.
Their gross margin was slightly above 30% last quarter.
kasey_junk · 6m ago
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.
mattmaroon · 1h ago
It's crazy how narrow big retail profit margins are in general. What a brutal business.
schrectacular · 1h ago
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.
whatamidoingyo · 1h ago
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.
Zaheer · 1h ago
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.
kwertyoowiyop · 1h ago
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.
freedomben · 1h ago
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.
tayo42 · 1h ago
Like heirloom tomatoes? Those are everywhere now?
anonzzzies · 1h ago
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.
dakna · 52m ago
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.
TuringNYC · 1h ago
>> 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.
ramon156 · 1h ago
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
goshx · 1h ago
Publix is expensive. Even Walmart will save you a good amount.
devmor · 1h ago
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.
aprilthird2021 · 1h ago
They make the money on the imported goods which are harder for their core audience to find and more expected to have a markup.
FuriouslyAdrift · 35m ago
Or go to Aldi...
mupuff1234 · 1h ago
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.
No comments yet
conductr · 1h ago
Wage stagnation is the root problem. When costs of all expenses go up over time but paychecks do not, it causes major stress.
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.
bravetraveler · 1h ago
Despite early success I still feel no closer to stability [in terms of housing]. With the wrong landlords, I'm still 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.
testing22321 · 24m ago
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
comrade1234 · 9m ago
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)
N_Lens · 1h ago
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.
hackrmn · 1h ago
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.
bix6 · 1h ago
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?
potato3732842 · 54m ago
>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 something along those lines.
shlant · 1h ago
> 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]
> 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.
tropicalfruit · 29m ago
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
HamsterDan · 10m ago
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.
t1234s · 1h ago
In the US insurance (of all types: car, house, health) is a major expense and only getting worse.
jvanderbot · 1h ago
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.
bombcar · 1h ago
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.
Aurornis · 1h ago
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.
bombcar · 1h ago
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.
pbmonster · 1h ago
> 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.
bix6 · 1h ago
Curious where you live that healthcare is more than housing?
jvanderbot · 1h ago
Childcare + Healthcare is more than housing.
Healthcare alone would be more than the house we had before this one.
phkahler · 1h ago
In the US if you don't own your home free and clear this is likely the case.
emushack · 58m ago
My childcare + healthcare is nearly 3x my house payment.
seanmcdirmid · 1h ago
If they are paying out of pocket for health insurance, it’s definitely possible.
lotsofpulp · 1h ago
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.
hombre_fatal · 1h ago
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!
potato3732842 · 1h ago
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.
SkyPuncher · 1h ago
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.
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.
t1234s · 1h ago
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.
pengaru · 46m ago
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)
tmaly · 9m ago
Is it correct to say that inflation is the primary cause that drives up the cost of these items?
1 out of 7 US inhabitants have food insecurity. And this is a govt website likely to underestimate the statistic
emushack · 1h ago
Well clearly the solution here is to eliminate the USDA entirely. 1 in 7 is an outrageous statistic and it will not be tolerated.
Workaccount2 · 1h ago
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.
emushack · 1h ago
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.
Workaccount2 · 35m ago
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.
huhkerrf · 24m ago
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.
tekla · 14s ago
This completely false talking point is a disease.
"Normal" foods like rice and beans are dramatically cheaper than "junk" food.
dahart · 56m ago
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.
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.
rkomorn · 1h ago
> 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.
emushack · 1h ago
Yeah! And they could sell their refrigerators too! They use way too much electricity. <eye roll>
huhkerrf · 22m ago
Is there anything someone can do to save money and stretch their budget farther, or are we saying that's all off base?
v5v3 · 1h ago
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!!!
Ylpertnodi · 1h ago
>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.
dahart · 49m ago
Smaller portion == increased price, no?
deanmoriarty · 1h ago
> 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.
redleggedfrog · 1h ago
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.
binary132 · 1h ago
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.
tossandthrow · 1h ago
No, no. The US has the strongest GDP! The world's biggest stock market! So. Much. Wealth! How can this be!?
lurking_swe · 1h ago
I know you’re joking / being sarcastic. I will say though, nobody claims wealth in the US is evenly distributed…quite the opposite.
gabrielgio · 1h ago
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
hardanonymity · 45m ago
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.
teeray · 36m ago
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.
zwnow · 34m ago
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.
ggoo · 33m ago
Fair distribution of resources is far from a solved problem unfortunately
languagehacker · 2h ago
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.
micromacrofoot · 2h ago
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.
aoskskoans · 1h ago
> 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.
Workaccount2 · 43m ago
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.
micromacrofoot · 37m ago
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.
bombcar · 1h ago
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.
micromacrofoot · 1h ago
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.
aprilthird2021 · 1h ago
A negligible portion of people are executing this strategy of yours. Most can't afford what they are buying
siliconc0w · 1h ago
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.
deadbabe · 28m ago
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.
xivzgrev · 41m ago
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.
zwnow · 50m ago
Breaking: Water is wet. Next news at 20:00 UTC
aredox · 2h ago
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."
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.
bell-cot · 1h ago
If you're an Cabal of Evil Overlords*, intent on squeezing as much as possible out of the 99.99%, then obviously you find ways to jack up the costs of essentials like education, food, health care, housing, and transportation. If you run up costs of inessentials, they can opt out. :(
*May rhyme with "capitalists"
tlogan · 45m ago
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 :)
chermi · 43m ago
Holy crap you got me good.
Did you add the /s later?
epgui · 1h ago
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.
rocketpastsix · 1h ago
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.
CalRobert · 1h ago
It’s a lot harder to earn more.
wahnfrieden · 1h ago
Median wages are nearly stagnant for decades and the jobs market growth is shrinking
pseudocomposer · 1h ago
I suspect this is a consequence of conditioning done to convert Americans’ (and anyone consuming American media’s) identities from “workers” to “consumers.”
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.
So if you had 100 million you would get 1.7 million as dividend 5-7 years ago, now it's roughly doubled, without selling any of your stocks.
Not that it really matters. Given how much faster the stock market grows compared to salaries you can sell a few percentages of your wealth every year, and still get richerer by doing nothing besides owning.
Eyeballing this chart it looks like it dropped around a third since the pandemic.
https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/spx-div-yld....
https://ycharts.com/indicators/sp_500_dividend_yield
Corporate profits in the U.S. have almost doubled since 2019.
And, as everyone who wasn't lying for various reasons predicted and anyone can see by looking at prior comparable events in history can tell you, wages are one of the last things to go up.
If anything, you'd be strengthening cameldrv and Epa095s point...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You know that the increase in price could be simply... ehm.. inflation. So no productivity increase out there.
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.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/why-americans-dont-v...
In the US, the last time democrats tried to tackle healthcare, they lost scores of seats all down the ballot.
https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...
I remember tracking Trump's poll numbers on 538 (before it got taken down) during the pandemic. They barely budged, despite not having universal healthcare. He then proceeded to get the most votes of any sitting president.
One of the big differences between Obama and Clinton in the primaries was that Clinton was in favor of an individual mandate, and Obama was not. We still ended up with an individual mandate, which is both offensive on grounds that the government is forcing you to find and pay for insurance (not always easy on the exchange), and on the grounds that the primary purpose of the mandate is to ensure that insurance companies stay profitable.
Former Al Gore running mate and future republican Joe Lieberman is often given credit for stopping the nationwide insurance exchange in favor of state-level exchanges, again tipping the market in favor of insurers.
Ending denials for pre-existing conditions was nice, as were a few of the other details, but it felt like a far cry from the hope and change voters were promised. Mostly it exposed more-of-the-same pandering to the rich and powerful. Last I checked Medicare For All polls quite favorably.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/americans-vi...
> 41% of Americans say the government should provide more assistance to people in need
> 30% say it's providing about the right amount
> 27% say it should provide *less*
41-57? If there are issues in America, it's because Americans want it that way.
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" in its intended purpose. (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.
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.
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.
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?"
The people who are mad are those who are paying more and not experiencing the benefits.
We have chosen this to have high access, high quality care, while also choosing to reduce health with the way we subsidize our food system and force indolent lifestyle with car-dependent urban planning.
The best primer on the choices that make our healthcare expensive, and where the money goes, are in this video:
https://youtu.be/QqrpFICtqpQ?si=JOR3COojPD9iLn94
Unfortunately our national discussion of health care is not centered on the reality of the discussion, and is several levels of technical depth too shallow for us to have a public discussion that could reduce costs without reducing the care level for many peopl.
That’s where those benefits go - to a functioning society where everyone gets a basic shred of dignity. Is it really so inconceivable to keep a little less of your disposable income in exchange for that?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/inside-the-mafia-of-pharm...
> 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...
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...
USA has an order of magnitude higher cost but middling life expectancy comparable to Argentina, Poland, Peru, Colombia etc.
> Unlike the U.S., similarly large and wealthy nations have long had universal or near-universal health coverage and more robust access to health care. Although the U.S. has recently reached an all-time high rate of insurance coverage, it still lags behind its peers and the ongoing disenrollments from Medicaid may cause the uninsured rate to rise. Additionally, even people who are insured in the U.S. often face such high out-of-pocket costs for medical care that they go without needed care or incur medical debt. Future policymaking in the U.S. may continue to focus on improving insurance coverage rates and addressing cost-related and other barriers to care.
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?
This is how all insurance works though. Everyone pays in, and those unlucky enough to experience catastrophic problems get a way bigger payout than those who don’t.
Pooling risk is the entire point of insurance. Without that, it’s not insurance, it’s just a payment system, and those unfortunate enough to have big problems have to pay more.
Perhaps your views of what a society should be ‘for’ means you think that the unfortunate just having to pay more is fair, but I don’t.
Even if I had an event (outside something way out in the tails where I might not even want the treatment anyway even if it's freebecause my QoL suffers too much either way) I'm coming out with a loss because I'm forced to subsidize car 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.
They're not incompetent. They looked at the laws and realized they get the same cut of a bigger number by bloating overhead costs.
- 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.
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.
Still it's a bit unfair to Obama, the real problem is Congress and the Supreme Court which mandates we allow political bribery.
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
Wealthy people would learn to structure their earnings to flow into businesses in other countries to avoid this wealth tax. This would reduce income tax in the United States. I would guess the overall effect would trend toward a net tax loss.
If you gave 40 million people an extra $15K per year to spend, the prices of the things those 40 million people buy would go up. The poverty threshold would rise.
There are many second order effects like this that are always ignored in simplistic analyses.
It’s never simple math like taking one number, moving it into another column, and problem is solved.
Most of that worth is in assets. If they leave the assets they can go.
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.
More than likely the transfer will happen and affordability will not improve due to inflationary pressures.
If so, sounds like morally something is fundamentally wrong if we require poor people to function. But i'm not an economist, so i've got zero feedback here.
It would be unstable at first, like how inflation during Covid differed by industry/product type. This is a big shock to the system. But over time as it normalized sure things will have inflated but relative affordability basically will return to what it is now or where it started.
If you make $10 and food is $1, it’s no different than if you make $100 and food is $10. What’s been happening due to wage growth (lack of), is you make $11 and food is $2, next year you make $12 but food is $3, etc. from a relative perspective food cost is growing too fast to keep up. To make people feel wealthier, we need the ratio to move the other way, $15/$2 then $30/$3 or something similar. This is how a middle class would get re-established. It’s a tough thing to accomplish is our complex global economy. Were marching towards a global income equilibrium, which only puts downward pressure on a high labor cost economy like the US/CA/EU.
If they said "income" it'd still shoot up the velocity of money, since poor people have higher spending rates.
Increased demand without increased production will increase prices. But then producers will follow, and production will increase, and prices will stabilise.
Increased tax on the rich and distributing it to poor moves a tiny bit of the combined 'voting power' we have over production as consumers to the poor, so there will be slightly less luxury cars produced and slight more food.
The only way of fixing this is decreasing demand by reducing the population numbers.
If 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.
Donating 2.5% means that you get poorer and poorer over time unless you can make more than that per year back. 2.5% of wealth also means non-liquid assets such as house, how do you donate that? Get credit?
If you are middle class and your house etc is eg 1M$ net worth you are giving 25k$ per year. At 0.5M net worth its 12.5k$ per year.
2) You assume that those people would know how to handle that money well. We see what many poor people do with money: buy trash like soda with food stamps that makes them even more ill and causes them more financial burden due to poor health.
Are you sure that money would be well spent, or is it better to invest in better technology that will benefit everyone?
3) Why would hard working responsible middle class people give their money to those that buy cola with it? Mass revolt, people care about their families only.
>.5% of wealth also means non-liquid assets such as house
But they said:
>Total U.S. household net worth (excluding real estate)
The rest of your comment, to be honest, just sounds like you fundamentally don't like poor people and have some strong biases against them.
...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.”
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)?
Because people want more comforts than just being barely above the poverty line, of course there will be freeloaders just as in anything (there are even freeloaders at many companies right now, shocker!) but it doesn't mean everyone that gets some cash to be above poverty would just stop working.
It opens their lives to pursue other stuff they wouldn't be able to while fighting to barely survive, they could go to school, take better care of their kids with the free time available, they could look for jobs that are not a dead end because they wouldn't be hostages of working for shitty pay to barely survive.
This argument comes purely from a puritan/protestant belief, the data usually shows that people who get money to cover their basic needs will have better outcomes, commit less crimes, seek education, etc.
Isn't the cost of a minority of freeloaders good enough to provide better outcomes for the whole society? Or do you prefer to keep punishing the poor just in case some of them decide to be freeloaders? Rather inhumane to think that way.
In your world, the worst place to be is to be the middle class, because they don't deserve any grants, but still they earn just barely enough to sustain themselves.
Also, the difference between freeloaders in companies and freeloaders in your model of financing the poor is that we generally want to get rid of company freeloaders and we identify them as an unwanted behavior, and you want to encourage social freeloaders and defend their existence.
So being just barely above the line means that you pay, not that you get. This is the worst place to be in.
Also, a lot of sane US citizens seem to use the "poor" word to describe someone who is not able to get the newest model of iphone. That's why it's generally hard to talk about the issue.
Why do you think that's how it would work? That's the most simplistic way of thinking about it, instead try to apply the same model of progressive taxation in reverse, you get less benefits the more you earn up to a threshold. Or just implement some form of UBI, there are many models for it as well.
Last time I've seen communism being implemented the right way was the CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle. It ended up with some actual warlord taking a gun and killing some people. In the middle of the city.
Also, who do you think would pay for the UBI. It's not like UBI is some solution that was even implemented anywhere.
Have you ever been poor? From this statement alone I'd guess not because saying life "is not bad" when it's a constant stress about how to make ends meet, not only next month but many times the next week or even next day, is far, very far from "not bad".
> In your world, the worst place to be is to be the middle class, because they don't deserve any grants, but still they earn just barely enough to sustain themselves.
If they earn just barely enough to sustain themselves they're poor, not middle class. Middle class can afford their housing, food, leisure, etc.
In my world the rich would be paying much more, they depend on the whole societal machinery to be able to even accomplish being rich, not paying their due share for that is unjust and undeserved. That requires people thinking more collectively though, and the current system doesn't incentivise people to behave that way, you get ahead by being an individualistic asshole instead of someone who is trying to make society better through your businesses, products, and skills.
Will we both race who is more poor now? I know some poor people who paid $0 for the homes they live in. And I had to sign a loan contract for 20 years. I know some poor people who read books all day and have their small youtube channels for fun. Yet I'm the one who loses the majority of the day to sit in the office. The poor people I know are very different from your imaginated vision of poverty.
> In my world the rich would be paying much more
And how would you make them to pay more? When they control the legislations. How would you make Donald Trump to pay 75% taxes of his wealth? If he'll want then he'll become the president.
Also people like you always seem to want to have the power of defining who is poor and who is not. This is poor. This is not poor. I don't want to be judged like this. Not by people who think they have seen it all, but it appears that all they've seen was just YouTube.
Plus, let's not forget the grifter population that would instantly try to assume any and all of that, with the #1 receiver being our desperately poor Jesus Christ and his evangelical jet owning sales team.
- 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.
I don't know what this logical fallacy is called, but it's a logical fallacy nonetheless.
I'm going to take you at face value, and assume you're talking about the idealized state and not the parties as they stand right now. (Because the Republicans are increasingly reactionary and not at all conservative in their governing.)
Saying that someone called conservative means that they, by definition, do not want progress is silly. First, it's better to say "change" than progress, because a lot of what has been put in place by the "progressive" party is not necessarily better and a direction forward. Second, you can want change in a conservative manner, and you can be of the belief that small changes are better for society than massive changes, Chesterton's Fence, all that.
This kind of thinking is something most people leave behind after freshman year in University.
It’s a straw man. The US is usually represented by liberals vs conservatives, not progressives. Also progressivism doesn’t simply mean “progress” conceptually
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, …)
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!
The packaged goods at Asian markets in many cases cannot be purchased anywhere other than an Asian market. No frozen pandan leaves at Costco.
So I think they just mark up the packaged goods more and the produce less.
It's only comfort keeping people going to the same store every time. And I guess the hassle of doing two trips a week or something.
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.
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.
UK supermarkets actually provide pretty cheap fresh produce, because the market is pretty competitive. I think the most ridiculous I've seen was a 1kg bag of carrots for 20p.
Many countries or locations do not have highly competitive supermarkets.
Oh, and there's both volume and self-discrimination effects at work. In my supermarket shopping in the Asian food section is often cheaper as they sell big bags of rice and spices, to more cost-conscious consumers. See also: Costco.
Colmados don’t do data driven pricing, and just do a flat markup on the stuff the suplicadoras bring them.
Data driven pricing is just selective price gouging under a different name.
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.
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.
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
What profit margin line would you suggest counts as price gouging?
Their gross margin was slightly above 30% last quarter.
Feel free to set the bar for price gouging via gross margin, but then you are just suggesting that you don’t want operational efficiency in grocery store price comparisons.
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.
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.
Cheaper, supposedly healthier (flash frozen), easy to make, zero preparation, and never need to worry about it going bad.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
I can deal with the responsibility of a leaky roof. I can't deal with another year of No Dogs Allowed.
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
To be free range you need significant wealth for the free range.
To be organic you need significant wealth for farmers market type food.
So in both cases you must be wealthy to avoid the cage or am I missing something?
It's a euphemism for white women who work an office job and shop at target/costco, or something along those lines.
it's not a trend - 99.96% of chicken sold in the US is factory farmed[1]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/almost-all-livestoc...
This is assuming the majority of chickens have a choice.
they are fed, housed and cleaned by their owners
still hoping for the WEF to confirm my livestock status and begin the UBI payments
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.
The poor either have a non-working spouse or get subsidized child care, and the rich don't know what a banana costs.
In the long run remaining employed generally comes out ahead due to the continued career growth and employment.
The one friend who quit their job now regrets a little because the expensive early childcare years were over quickly and now they’re trying to get back into the workforce in a rough economy with a resume gap.
One option is to keep working at reduced hours/ad hoc, if such is available.
I thought the same thing. We pay 5.5k for two kids per month.
But then I looked at the regulations on professional child care. You need one certified worker and 250 sq.ft. of indoor space (in an expensive city) per 4 kids. After professional insurance, healthcare and other ancillary wage costs, there's really not that much left for the salary of that worker.
So I guess I understand the price of childcare. I support it, even. I don't want my kids to be looked after by a stressed out carer on minimum wage looking after 10 kids at once.
If we want to lower the cost of childcare, the only option would be billions in subsidies. Might make a dent in the fertility crisis.
Healthcare alone would be more than the house we had before this one.
A family of four can easily be spending $30k in premiums plus a couple thousand in out of pocket expenses per year.
This info can be found by searching reports from KFF, or checking prices on healthcare.gov
And while many people’s employers pay for a large portion of the premium, the cost still exists, they just don’t receive it in their bank account first before paying it to the insurer.
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.
I have an old jeep that I use for local driving. Bought it for about $5k. I live in Michigan, where insurance premiums are top 5 in the nation. I pay $60/month for insurance. Probably could get it lower with a bit more shopping around.
Total maintenance has been $150 for a set of used tires that will dry-rot before I kill the rest of the tread.
I'll get a $6000 Mazda this weekend and put liability insurance on it. Now I can stop moping around on HN. I'll miss it though.
aka penny-wise pound-foolish
They are a lot of fun though (I rode a liter bike for years)
1 out of 7 US inhabitants have food insecurity. And this is a govt website likely to underestimate the statistic
The stat comes from people reporting that they have felt hungry without having enough food to satiate their hunger. Totally makes sense at first pass.
But here is the rub, obesity is out of control in the US, and it is especially bad in poorer populations.
So now we have two conflicting stats: Poor people are food insecure while simultaneously being overweight...
The reconciliation is easy, when you are obese, you get hungry more and eat more. A 325lb average height male has to eat ~50% (!) more food per day than a healthy weight male of the same stature.
I know this is a bit of the stick in the spokes of the stat, but its blatantly obvious that America does not have a low income hunger problem, it has a low income obesity problem.
So, in case you aren't from America, you might not know this: the food that is the cheapest also happens to be the food that is the least nutritious. Americans who are poor cannot afford fresh vegetables, fruit, meats and gym memberships. They can afford cheetos.
It is quite the spurious correlation to say that obesity causes hunger. Just wow.
Unprepared foods, in the US, are much cheaper than prepared foods.
A bag of Cheetos (16oz) is $5.
A pound of chicken legs is $2.
2 lbs of rice is $3.
I'd suggest you instead argue that low income people work multiple jobs and therefore have no time to cook. I've had this debate a lot before.
"I can't work out, I can't afford a gym! No, I'm not going to run around the park or join the YMCA!"
"I can't eat healthy, I can't afford it! No, I'm not going to buy a big bag of rice and black beans."
Before anyone comes at me: there are poor people and their struggles are real. I am 100% opposed to things like removing soda from food stamps.
"Normal" foods like rice and beans are dramatically cheaper than "junk" food.
If you think about it, it makes sense that food insecurity and obesity go together. If I didn’t know when I’d have food, I’d try to overeat when I could, like many wild animals do before winter. And most of our cheap food is low quality and very high in fat and carbs (esp. sugars).
The problem that’s bigger than both obesity and hunger is poverty, and poverty causes both of those things.
See this paper for a longer explanation: “Food insecurity as a risk factor for obesity: A review” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9549066/
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.
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.
You clearly have never been broke and are clueless!!!
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/business/buy-now-pay-late... (https://archive.is/Cmzis)
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.
Banning unsecured loans would fix so many problems.
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.
If people could just scale back and live appropriately, it’d be less stressful.
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.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/08/stock-market-us-economy-ric...
Besides... the massive crash in population coming over the next 10 years should solve most fo this without ripping up entire societies.
*May rhyme with "capitalists"
\s
( Sorry for sarcasm :)