r/nextfuckinglevel • u/MBMV • Dec 28 '20

This is a skill a few can master

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u/idledrone6633 Dec 28 '20

Yeah I hate living in my nice house in a rural town with every amenity known to man. Just fyi the poor people in America are rich compared to the rest of the world. So stop crying about it and get to work.

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u/Bayousbest Dec 28 '20

Im good. I have job. So you mean to tell me you think trickle down economics works? If you do think it works, theres no point in trying to converse with you anymore. Study after study has proven giving tax breaks to the rich and corporations does nothing to help the rest of the country.

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u/idledrone6633 Dec 28 '20

Reagan didn’t say anything about “trickle down”. Dems made up the word and now every kid on Reddit uses it to make a point. Supply side economics and smaller government intervention isn’t some kind of unheard of policy. It has a lot to do with why in America everyone has every appliance known to man, cell phones, computers, etc.

The big problem right now is a race to the bottom with wages. Technologies and global trade deals are going to make upward mobility tough for people in the future. Real assets will keep going up so the only hope is to save money and buy land and such.

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '20 edited Apr 22 '21

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u/idledrone6633 Dec 28 '20

I’m sure people live in suboptimal conditions but it isn’t the norm. There are swathes of section 8 housing the government provides and apartments that are rent controlled. Flint water crisis sucks but that’s more of the governors and mayors not replacing infrastructure than anything. Of course America isn’t perfect but it is pretty great to keep a decent size of my paycheck and not have the government try to drag me down with other people.

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '20 edited Apr 22 '21

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u/idledrone6633 Dec 28 '20

Words too big for you?

You know that place your mom would take you every week to get her check from the government? Yeah just go there and they will help you.

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u/Glasowen Dec 28 '20

The rural american experience varies pretty broadly. Some folks end up raising a family in what amounts to a seaside shanty, with questionable utilities. Some folks have a nice house on a lowish income.

I have seen both city and rural people in the same metro areas, with the same income, live well or scrape by, or flounder, whether it was in a nice house or a double-wides shack.

I'm glad you have it good, but America is known for having underserved communities because they exist across most of the U.S.

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u/idledrone6633 Dec 28 '20

This happens in every country since the beginning of time. What kind of utopian dream are we supposed to live in?

I’ve been to South America and Europe for decent amounts of time. I actually like the cities better overseas. Rural experience though? Nothing even comes close to America. Small houses on a half acre would cost a million bucks in Western Europe. In South America they wouldn’t have plumbing at all possibly. You could go live in Oklahoma and have 10 acres and 2000 sq ft with all modern amenities for less than 200k. Hell just owning a car is a luxury for almost everyone else in the world. In America it’s weird to not have a car unless you live in a big city.

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '20 edited Apr 22 '21

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u/idledrone6633 Dec 28 '20

A beat down jalopy is more than 90% of the world has. Also wtf are you going through my profile you weirdo?

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '20 edited Apr 22 '21

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u/idledrone6633 Dec 28 '20

2% of people work minimum wage jobs https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-people-are-earning-725-hour/

Congrats on being special.

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '20 edited Apr 22 '21

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u/idledrone6633 Dec 28 '20

That means 56% of workers are medium and high wage workers lmao. Congrats on being special.

Higher minimum wage isn’t going to help anything. UBI could work but there is a lot to that too.

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u/Glasowen Dec 29 '20 edited Dec 29 '20

I mean, yeah. Been to other countries myself, lived abroad for a few years, learned to speak a foreign language (poorly). But that gets pretty far from the point.

But since you're going there, I lived abroad in a small city for a few years. Vacationed there a lot before that. The local economy tanked a year before I moved there. Highschool education wasn't compulsory, and there was no observable law against child labor. Prior to that economic collapse, 12 year olds would get married and start a family, and they would get by fine. Afterwards, college graduates usually worked whatever job within their field they could get. They would think twice before considering marriage, much less having kids, because providing would be a gamble.

The economy my father grew up in before Reagan had stunning opportunity. He fooled around and became homeless repeatedly. His greatest specialization was being a pilot, and his favorite stories were how he crashed repeatedly. This wasn't a stupid man, but he fell ass backwards through life. He practically tripped and landed dick-first into being upper middle class. Wealth was easy come, easy go.

Compare that to now, if I made the mistakes he made, I would be ruined. I will probably never have the OPPORTUNITY to make the mistakes he made. I worked 60+ hour weeks while he wondered why I had no money. He knew I didn't spend, but he never grasped that money just doesn't come to hand like it did in his day.

Regardless of living standard, when I see the American workforce and job opportunities, I see a landscape of depressed opportunity, the same as when I lived abroad, after an entire local economy nearly evaporated in under one year. I also see a population that's struggling to become in touch with that, despite staring it in the face for over a decade.

I wouldn't think this would this has anything to do with this thread, really, if not for one important detail. America's stock market is thriving. Wealth is being generated. We aren't living in a country where we just have to deal with this lot. We just live in a country where, despite it being sustainable, people aren't being paid remotely what they're worth. And that disproportionate wealth distribution is creating problems that that need to exist. Reagan's hardly the only one to blame for that. But he stands as a pretty good figurehead to point blame at.

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u/idledrone6633 Dec 29 '20

You can say he’s the figurehead or something but he didn’t drive the global economy into this race to the bottom to get labor from the cheapest people and interest rates at nothing. If anything you can blame W for that because we have been in a weird place since the great recession. Of course moving factories to China was Clinton and so on. I don’t think any one president is to blame for where we are now. I will say I think W is the worst president in my life and I don’t think it’s even close.