A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
ITT: the working class shitting on each other just like the billionaires intended
Only 3 718$ payments left on my car and I paid off 4/5 credit cards. Turned them all off to. Just being slow with my Best Buy credit card.
oh no. are those poor people ok? they cant budget 150k? i feel really bad for them. is there perhaps a venmo? I make less than 50k, but gosh, i didnt realize they had it so hard.
Amazing. Class war between poor and middleclass while billionaires laugh all the way to their private jet
if you make $150k but live in a HCOL area and have kids, and perhaps one or two expensive medical conditions in the family, maybe some student loan debt and a mortgage, congrats you're paycheck to paycheck
I literally know someone like this.
It's not about the numbers. Working class is working class.
$150k household income is not enough to afford a house, middle class standard of living, children, and retirement savings since you don't have a pension. at least in my area.
it'll get you lower middle class, maybe.
I'm not saying these people should be having money issues, they need to budget appropriately. but what used to be possible 20 years ago just isn't now, you need to choose one big thing to drop, whether that's a detached house, children, expensive hobbies, trips, etc
there's too much shifting of the goal posts for what middle class is, I think it has slipped too far downwards
Imo the entire concept of the middle class should be abandoned as capitalist propaganda. There's the rich and there's the working class. Anything else is a distraction to keep us from focusing on the rich stealing from the workers. Bezos owns a $500,000,000 yacht while thousands of his employees rely on government assistance programs which are funded by taxes he doesn't even pay.
Owning class, working class and then you do have a mid point of worker/owner class. Their money comes partly from their labour but also partly from their wealth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie ?
Although members of the petite bourgeoisie can buy the labour of others, they typically work alongside their employees, unlike the haute bourgeoisie. Examples can include shopkeepers, artisans and other smaller-scale entrepreneurs.
Those at the midpoint still have to work to live, so they are working class. 🤷
At some point it's more that they want the extra money than they have to work, and they own so they are also the owning class
If they don't have to work to live, they're no longer working class (Musk still works at Tesla, but clearly doesn't need to). But I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that those who derive their wealth from the labor of workers but who can't afford a yacht should be treated differently than billionaires? I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have progressive tax rates, I'm only saying that an arbitrarily defined 'middle class' exists solely so that you and I are distracted by exactly these discussions, and provides no benefit to determining what is justifiable economic policy.
children? when we've hit the climate crisis tipping point? no thanks, i'd rather not bring people into this world who are going to die a painful death from a climate related catastrophe.
It feels like the whole world has been an externalized cost for the very rich.
What this article fails to mention is that all houses within 2hrs of the San Francisco Bay Area are close to a million dollars plus at least 1k a month in property taxes. With insufficient public transportation cars are a necessity
Yeah public transit in the bay area is famously trash. You just need one more lane.
Move to sacramento and spend six hours each morning on the commute so you dont have to use amtrak like some cucked little bitch who likes to sleep and read.
POV: You’re a USian on disability benefits who is just assumed to be able to survive on 12k a year whilst being literally disabled and unable to do most things healthy people can. And now people with 150k a year, 10 times my income, are complaining. 👁️👄👁️
The system is designed to keep everyone living cheque to cheque
There's room for all of us to be angry. I think it's reasonable to complain if you work 50 hours a week for that income, have to be away from your family, who also need to be housed and clothed and to eat and care for their health, and all you have is scraps left over and aren't saving much, if any.
When you make $150k, you usually have to live in a preposterously expensive area and have your entire life structured around your job. You eat better meals and have a better car so you can work better, and if you don't you're fired because someone else will. Student loans are how you got there to begin. It costs a lot money to work.
I remember talking with some Americans a few years ago, they worked in the tech industry, so definitely on the upper side of the income range. And even they said they were feeling the crunch around 2022-2023. I can only imagine how it felt for the regular people.
Quite the contrast with the official numbers which claimed the American economy is growing. Let's just say that the election outcome was not surprising.
Well the rich are gaining obscene amounts of money. So many of the large companies are pulling in record profits. So in that sense, the american economy is growing. The peoblem is theyre squeezing the rest of us for that.
60% of Americans living pay check to pay check for whatever reason. In 2008 this number was 40%.
There is no way to tell why this is happening. 🤡
Every time you hear about 'the economy', replace it with 'rich people yacht money'.
And it only works when 'the economy' is strong, rising, booming, zooming, etc.
We don't make this much but do make enough it seems like we ought to be easily comfortable (two good salaries, cars paid off) but -
How did we get here? Nobody comes out the gate making that much, we each started out making little to nothing, then went to school, had kids, got school debt and a credit card for the monthly deficit, paid off the school debt, the credit card still paying on so long after. It's still the deficit debt, for emergency situations that come up. I funded HSA so those are not usually medical now but dogs, car repairs, house repairs. We are making progress but it's dead expensive and slow to do so.
Basically those people making so much and credit card debt may be paying off their path to making so much.
And I know better than to complain, having been in much worse situations.
About 38% of all new jobs created in the five years before the pandemic paid above-average wages, VantageScore's data shows. But this year that share has fallen to 7%, signaling that companies are creating fewer white-collar positions. That poses a challenge to higher-income Americans who suffer a job loss because it may be tougher to find new employment than in previous years.
I feels like this is very important as it actually the reason why they're struggling on repayment, because technically they aren't making 150k per year but 0 per year.
But the financial management criticism still sound.
Well that's just living beyond your means. We really need to teach financial responsibility in schools. But we won't, because then people might liberate themselves from bondage and then who'd work all the service jobs that white collar types want to abuse?
Here's how America "works":
Fuck you, there is barely any public transportation, and anyone who uses it or some non personal csr transist system is literally hated by most of society.
Oh and of course, cost of housing goes up exponentially as you try to live closer to where jobs actually exist.
Also, cars are all wildly unaffordable, and most places won't even consider hiring you if you don't have one.
I was curious what this might look like, so I ran some numbers. It would be easy to hit this in a high cost of living area where rent will easily run 5-6k per month, but what about a medium cost of living place? I assumed a family of 4 with both parents working for 75k each and a 20% total tax rate (FICA, federal, state). All of this is based on what I know of typical cost of living items in the US.
After Tax Income (monthly) 10000
Housing 2500 Child care 1500 2 Car Payments (25k each) 1000 Groceries 800 Medical (incl. insurance) 800 401k (6% deduction) 750 2 Student Loans (30k each) 700 Utilities 400 Auto Insurance 300 Total Core Expenses 8750 Leftover for Discretionary 1250
So, you'd have 1250 per month to cover clothing, auto fuel, dining out, pets, fun money, subscriptions, activities for the kids, gifts, etc. You could easily run that to zero or below every month.
Now, there may be some room to cut in this budget, like not funding your retirement and giving up your 401k match or living in a much smaller home. But I would also say some of these numbers are very generous. Rent could be over 3k, most people don't have a 25k car loan, if you own your home you can get hit with random major repair costs, and probably most parents would laugh at my estimated child care cost.
I think a key takeaway here is that kids are really expensive. Aside from the child care costs, most people with kids will want a little more living space than is doable in an apartment and kids go through food and clothes like crazy. You could probably chop at least 2-3k per month off this budget if it was a couple living in an apartment closer into the city core, with shorter commutes and maybe even options for public transit, biking, or walking.
Childcare is closer to 1500 per child, FYI, at least in Jersey.
It's $500/week/child near me.
I have friends who quit working. Two kids in daycare, you got a clear 30k take-home to make it work, and if you're barely making it work with that, on top of killing yourself, that income stream just doesn't make sense. It's dumb.
I had a friend who was the director of a YMCA daycare, and I have no idea how they kept functioning. I crunched numbers and they barely had enough to pay their teachers. She made jack shit. It was crazy. And we still paid a fortune to go there.
Yeah, I was guessing that one might be way worse than that. When my kids were born, it was cheaper for my wife to quit working than to pay infant rate child care, but that was a long time ago.
I qualified for a needs based preschool for the kid. The cutoff was 11k a month. They consider anything less to be struggling. It seemed laughably high, but it must be based on what they've surveyed.
Credit cards and car payments must be part of that. We have neither type of debt and get by with a fraction of that need cap! But the average car I see around here is either a new F150 pickup or a Dodge Charger, neither of which come cheap.
I find car insurance more outrageous than car payments.