Majority of U.S. public school students are eligible for federal food program | Hacker News Reader

Majority of U.S. public school students are eligible for federal food program

washingtonpost.com

91 pointsFuturebot116 comments

For context, 87% of US children attend public schools. (10% attend private schools and 3% are homeschooled.)

In any discussion about poverty rates, the exact definition of "in poverty" is important. This article is defining anyone who qualifies for free or reduced-price school lunches as "being in poverty". The income threshold for free or reduced-price school lunches [0] is defined as 185% of the official federal poverty line. For a three-person household, the federal poverty line is $20,160/yr, so the threshold for reduced-price meals is $37,296/yr.

[0] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-03-23/pdf/2016-06463.p...

Thanks for pointing out the fallicy of equating the lunch program with poverty! It drives me up the wall when people treat this as a 1-1 equivalent.

In Charlotte, NC only 79% of students attend public school. Statewide, homeschooling has been growing at 15% per year for the last two years, and has now passed private school enrollment. Give that this is quite different than the national average, I wonder how the percentages of public school vary across the nation.

You can be above the poverty line and still be poor. Based on the document you posted, you qualify for reduced-priced meals if your family of four lives on $44,955 per year or $865 per week.

If I understand the article correctly, more than half of public school students come from families poorer than that. Wow.

Does anyone have the statistics on how many of those kids are from single-parent households?

You can live a very comfortable life in much of the US for $44,000 a year. We spent 30K last year for a family of six, not including taxes, giving, and health insurance. And that includes materials for homeschooling, and upgrading to a minivan.

I don't agree that it applies to "most of the U.S." or even very widely. Also, you are talking after taxes; the document says income is measured before taxes.

Also, recall that most poor are in cities.

Graduated income tax and child tax credit starts making a big difference in taxes for below median incomes. $48,000 before taxes with four kids is around $5,500 in taxes before any other deductions or credits. With things like EIC and a normal set of deductions and credits, I'd expect actual income tax to be between none and $2,500.

Families pay proportionally way less taxes than single people do.

You're only talking about income tax. Social Security, FICA, etc. are regressive taxes that make the working class pay higher rates overall than many people who are wealthier.

Rent in boston for a family of six would be over 30k after taxes and that's with living in ghetto. I live in a 600 sq ft home and its 21600 a year. Your budget definitely doesn't apply across the country

Yeah. I'm not saying that's a comfortable income accross the county - it certainly is not - but there are plenty of places where $44,000 a year is all you need, and some extra.

For a housing comparison with you in Boston, our 1,800 square foot house in a good neighborhood, 30 minutes from downtown Charlotte, NC is $8,100 per year, including insurance and taxes.

This may be why the whole northeast appears to be trying to move to Charlotte.

You might be interested in moving to a lower cost of living location.

2960 sq. ft., $39,400, $229/mo: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/454-Steam-Engine-Dr-Northf...

2,114 sq. ft., $35,000, $259/mo: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/63-Forest-St-Rutland-VT-05...

2,965 sq. ft., $47,500, $303/mo: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/102-N-Main-St-Plainview-NE...

2,858 sq. ft., $39,900, $264/mo: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/12-Spring-St-Northumberlan...

While those houses in Vermont and New Hampshire are well-appreciated, most people living in and around Boston probably have fairly specific reasons (ie: job, family, life history) for not moving to Nebraska or West Virginia.

"Just abandon your livelihood to go find cheaper land" is not a solution unless your livelihood is in real-estate speculation.

Like the other article on HN today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232

...I sometimes wonder if some people on HN aren't able to visualize the option of lower-cost lifestyles because they aren't given that menu option. How many articles are there per week about real-estate prices and rent control in big cities, and angst about basic income, etc.. My gift to them, small as it may be, is a window into a separate, but not so far away world.

What do you expect people to do for a living in the middle of WV?

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hn%20who%20is%20hiring&sort=by...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hn%20remote&sort=byPopularity&...

...You could also look at it as a chance to prove how entrepreneurial you are. Think of something to do with the excess labor that is available from the decline in coal mining.

I have looked at areas like those but student loan debt makes it worth living in areas with the highest wage even if the cost of living goes up. I can command a much higher salary here in boston so my student loan payments of 700/month are a small fraction of my take home pay. If I moved to an area like you listed I would certainly pay less rent but my student loan costs stay static and take up much more of my income. When you couple that with all the benefits of living in a city there's no financial reason for me to ever leave

In fact, most organizations, including the US government, use around 200% of the poverty line as their cutoff for different kinds of benefits.

185% of the poverty line is pretty much universally accepted as poor and shouldn't be used to cast doubt on the article.

"Schools, already under intense pressure to deliver better test results and meet more rigorous standards, face the doubly difficult task of trying to raise the achievement of poor children so that they approach the same level as their more affluent peers."

This is not a story about schools. Schools see only the symptoms. This is a story about how a western country has made the conscious decision to divide itself. Services are being cut, at least those services that support the poor. Legislation is being liberalized to accommodate "growth" over development, markets over sustainability. The net result is the growing divide between rich and poor. And everyone seems OK with it.

Why is this article so careful to limit itself to only public schools? They use the meals program as a proxy for poverty. Ok, but what about the number of students that have moved away from public schools in recent years? What percentage of students are now attending non-public charter schools? It isn't just the rich kids. 'Charter' /= 'private school'. But I suspect that if charter schools are included, less than 50% of US kids are "in poverty".

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=30

Thank you. Instead of only propping up poor children, which is only treating the symptom, we need to look at our social and economic policies so parents can earn a decent wage.

I am at least one adult that is /not/ a parent today because I do not feel like I can provide enough /stable/ resources to start a family. That is one of the two main factors in my not even being 'on the market' relationship wise (when traditionally someone like me should be).

> What percentage of students are now attending non-public charter schools? It isn't just the rich kids. 'Charter' /= 'private school'.

Non-public charter schools are a subset of private schools.

Public charter schools are a subset of public schools.

Yes, but those public charter schools may or may not be participation in this school lunch program. So without significant data from them it is difficult to make statements.

If I'm reading this correctly they're considering kids "in poverty" if they qualify for a free lunch. That's not the official definition of poverty by a long shot - not only can you qualify for a free lunch even if your family isn't official below the poverty line, but in some districts every child qualifies for a free lunch because they don't want the poor kids to feel singled out.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/05/when-al...

Instead of giving all kids free lunches, why not just have everyone scan/swipe their ID, those of means get charged, those who qualify either don't get charged or the tally gets cleaned at the end of the year?

Because the equipment / procedures cost more than just giving everyone lunches. Also, the people with means are probably the ones paying the majority of the school's taxes so they might as well give their kids lunch too.

non-parents pay taxes too, so your proposal does shift more of the burden from students (even wealthy students) to general population.

"non-parents pay taxes too" - yep, all taxpayers pay for education.

Its not my "proposal". Its how I have heard some school districts talk about their school lunch programs. I'm answering a question not advocating some opinion.

The kids who most need the free lunches are most likely to lose the ID. (and books, and pencils, and...)

Lunches are so cheap (a little under $3/lunch [1]), we might as well just give them away for free to all school age children.

For some of them, its the only real meal of the day they'll see.

[1] https://schoolnutrition.org/AboutSchoolMeals/SchoolMealTrend...

We should give them breakfast and dinner too.

Sarcasm is difficult to convey over the text so I'm not sure if you're serious, but you should be if you aren't. Forget about morality, ethics, or any of that think of the children bullshit, paying the cost of about $2.50-$5/student/day is downright cheap for the returns we get down the line: from not having to pay to fix the medical problems they acquired as kids from malnourishment or shitty TV dinners, the welfare they wont be collecting because their grades are better, the reduction in crime, the increase in GDP, etc..

It's a really small thing, but it really does keep poor kids from getting stuck on the C student/underachiever track when their parent's get a break an don't have to worry about food.

Source: This is one of the programs the local food bank I volunteer at does for poor families in the city.

I'm absolutely serious.

Have you seen school food?

I have been to my kids school during lunch - so much wasted food it's incredible.

Please dom't waste more money on that.

I can see myself voting for this only if I owned the local food company.

> so much wasted food it's incredible

The incremental social ROI of feeding three meals is very likely to be far greater than the cost of wasted food.

Or: Let's optimize for child-development outcomes and not for food usage.

Breakfast is already covered:

http://www.fns.usda.gov/sbp/school-breakfast-program-sbp

In my school everyone had to memorize a PIN number. How else do they know who gets free lunches or not?

When I was in school you paid cash or had a free lunch card. So it was very obvious who was on free lunch.

My kids have used PIN numbers since they started school going back over 12 years.

The article uses qualification for the Federal lunch program as the reference standard not the price students actually pay for lunch.

Being in one of the darker red states on the map in the article, it's pretty frustrating. It's a well known problem how the state ranks in the nation and the governor cuts education budgets under the pretense of reform? I only see the problem compounding.

For some friends who are new teachers, they have less and less incentive to stay longer. They're under supported and know they can get much higher pay and support in other states.

Yes the classic, "whippings will continue until morale improves." Looking from the outside in you can see it will never work. And even when results don't improve politicians and administrators double down.

The headline is wrong. Half of public school students are not below the poverty line.

The article states that 51% of students are now eligible for the federal food program. However you become eligibile at an income of 185% of the US poverty line, not the actual proverty line itself.

Secondly, access to that program has been increasing for the last several years, making it even less of an accurate historical indicatior of increasing poverty.

Thanks—we've edited the title above to include this correction.

This problem is directly connected to the true nature of the "wage gap". Women make less than men, not because they're paid less for the same work, but as a result of restricted career choices shaped by having and raising children. Where the wage gap shrinks, so does fertility. Wealthy, educated women are not going to have many kids, because it doesn't pay.

We need to recognize that raising children is vital but largely unpaid work and that this is unfair to women. Raising the next generation is a section of our economy that's not even recognized as productive labor even though everything else depends on it.

A stable society needs educated people to have kids. If you want middle-class women to have children you'd better start paying them for it like any other career.

Every thing you said was like a wild logical leap, my neck hurts from reading this.

This is very true, but awkward to implement. What do you propose?

We could pay women. Take the number of years the woman had in school, minus ten. She gets that many $thousand per year per child. One could ignore negative numbers... or not. If this takes the place of child support, educated men might be more willing to risk becoming fathers.

For tax purposes, we could divide a person's income by the number of family members. If you earn $123,000 and have 8 kids, we use $12,300 to determine your tax bracket.

There are lots of ways to do this... and there will be lots of objections from those who would be better off with the current situation.

How about a tax rebate for previous year when you have a child?

Unless it were huge, and scaled with income, it really wouldn't change things for the educated. Educated people earning 6 figures and getting taxed 5 figures are too smart to get excited about a 4-figure payment for roughly 22 years of supporting a child to a high standard.

Ignoring interest and inflation, a lump sum of $8800 to cover 22 years is only $400 per year. That's pocket change for the educated. Make it a $million to be serious.

Many countries have paid parents leave, and they give money for a long period after the child is born too.

http://www.thebump.com/a/maternity-leave-around-the-world

We also need to stop poor women having kids, because that's destabilizing to society. So maybe we should tax poor women who have kids to pay for the more desireable middle class kids.

Being a father is not easy as well, and it is unpaid work.

In most major cities, affluent parents opt-out of the public schooling system and we end up with underfunded and failing schools.

I'm consistently attracted to a system a la Finland: for K-12, tuition and selective admission are strictly prohibited[0].

I worry that this may seem to extreme to put into action, but it wouldn't be. Even Warren Buffet has pushed for banning private schools, and soon.[1]

Any thoughts on why this may not be a good idea?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland#Basic_com...

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/warren-buffett-i...

You really can't ban things like that unless there is an agreement that it is, in General, a good idea. Keep in mind that Nordic countries have a low and very homogenous population so the solutions that work there won't always work in the US

Isn't this a bit of a tautology? It isn't a good idea because there isn't agreement that it is a good idea?

The Rich can carve cities, the Park Cities in Dallas are a classic example, the upper middle class cannot, so any fiat effecting private schooling will screw the upper middle class and middle class, and I am not sure it gives any leg up for poor kids. One reason to move to burbs is exactly this, you are still part of public schooling but the ISD is oh so better because of various factors including stable households(relatively speaking).

edit: other factor that lot of people are not discussing is immigration - most immigrants are young and by American standards poor (not necessarily by their native country standards - but American standards), so this infuses into the student body, who are children of immigrants who are starting rebuilding life in a new country.

That wouldn't solve what is essentially private schooling: small suburbs that maintain their own school boards and allow only local residents. Tuition for entry is owning a house in that city. See, for example, Piedmont CA, which has its own school district. The residents of Piedmont banding together to create their own school district is just as effective at segregating their children as private school would be.

In California, at least, this is undercut by judicial decisions that limited how much local funding can affect local schools (Serrano v. Priest)[0]. And in general, this is only a problem insofar as exclusionary zoning is a problem. (Which is a problem, but which is solved through different means.)

I'm in particular concerned about the viability of public schools in urban areas-- exclusionary zoning ceases to be a mechanism that the affluent use to keep their schools to their use, so other than opting-out (either by moving away from the city or using private schools), what other choices to they have?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_v._Priest

Serrano doesn't affect your classmates, though - a student who is surrounded by affluent, driven children who are provided with every tutoring and learning opportunity will do better than if surrounded by students without those advantages. None of that is affected by direct funding.

1. It looks like public spending on K-12 education in Finland is already quite a bit less than in the United States (adjusted for PPP) [a]. Spending more doesn't necessarily get you better results.

2. Private school attendance in the US is: small, decreasing, and mostly Catholic [b].

3. The criterion for "low-income" is this article is access to free or reduced lunches, which for a family of 4 means an income of less than $45k / year [c]. That's pretty close to the median household income, so it makes sense that about half of kids would be "low-income".

a. http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-internatio...

b. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgc.asp

c. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-03-23/pdf/2016-06463.p...

I'm not sure I'd call 6% "small," but it is encouraging that it's shrinking.

I'd like to see more of this broken down between urban and suburban areas. For instance, in most major cities, the percentages are far higher[0] and the percentage of students left behind are far more likely to be poor: in Chicago, for example, 87% of students are low-income families[1].

[0] http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publications/chicag...

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/opinion/kristof-students-o...

Fun fact: In Chicago, the second largest school system is the Archdiocese of Chicago catholic schools (which has 40k students to CPS's 400k). They spent about half what CPS does per pupil.

Though consider also that:

* They benefit from the enormous selection bias of "parents who take financial pains to send their kids to Catholic school".

* They have carte blanche to dismiss problematic and challenging students back to the public school system.

* They generally don't offer programs for learning disabled and behaviorally disabled students.

* They aren't obliged to honor the CPS students per classroom maximum.

* Catholic school teachers take a pay cut to serve in that system.

* They generally have poorer facilities than the Chicago public schools.

I'm a product of Chicago Catholic schools, and I was pretty amazed to see what the local public school system offered my own kids.

That's all true. But that raises the question of whether we should be burdening public schools with providing all those social services in the first place. Maybe we should be figuring out how to provide those social services in a more systematic and formal way.

Poor schools are not underfunded, they're mismanaged. Us k-12 spending has grown faster than inflation x population since 1980, and some school districts (with lots of low income students) spend more money per pupil than it would cost to send them to competitive private schools.

what about the (vast majority) school districts that spend less than private schools?

Your data for this is... ? I would guess that a majority of private schools are parochial/religious in orientation and actually spend less per student than nearby public schools (partially due to payrolls).

Most private schools are pretty expensive, so I would bet that most school districts, spend less than the median private school. But that's not my claim. My claim was that most of the crappiest public school districts (CPS, DCPS, NYPS, LAUSD) spend more than it would cost to send the students to a competitive [to the district itself] private school.

CPS: Per-pupil cost, $14k. Archdiocese of chicago: $7k

NYPS: Per-pupil cost, $19k

DCPS: Per-pupil cost, $18k

LAUSD: Per-pupil cost, $15k (official, 7k, a rediculous number, but independent McKenna college researchers estimate 15k)

These costs don't include capital costs. An independent estimate including capital costs for LAUSD suggests $30k/pupil.

> In most major cities, affluent parents opt-out of the public schooling system and we end up with underfunded and failing schools.

Those affluent parents still pay taxes. If schools have lower enrollment, then they get less money (which makes sense: there's fewer kids). The problem is bureaucratic school administrations that will not reduce spending/staffing when there's fewer kids. That's not the affluent parent's fault.

There's an analogy to dogfooding here-- when parents take an interest in the management of their children's schools, they're more likely to improve.

Simply funding them is likely to be less meaningful than funding and also engaging with them.

Agreed, and from what I've seen, public schools could care less about parent involvement, at least compared to charter schools and private schools.

I attended a private school because public school failed me. I'd been suspended multiple times for fighting with other children who teased me. Frankly, the public school's administration didn't want me there anymore. The private school provided a much better learning environment. They helped me learn academically and emotionally. Eight years later, I graduated high school as a model student at the top of my class.

Public schools didn't care about me, and I don't trust them to care about anyone else. Nothing would be fixed by forcing me to stay at a terrible school. You help a war-torn country by getting refugees out, not by forcing people to vacation there.

I don't think it helps anybody to be forced to go to a failing school, but it only helps those with means.

I'm not concerned with forcing children to go to public schools, but rather stopping an inability to pay from keeping children from going to private school.

I agree. That's why I support school vouchers.

I could totally get behind a voucher-system, but I think it's important that ability-to-pay should not affect school choice. Do most voucher advocates agree with this?

(This is not a "response" to your comment.) In case anyone was curious, the original source for Warren Buffett's comment is the following: http://spotlightonpoverty.org/spotlight-exclusives/ending-po...

Specifically, Michelle Rhee (then Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools) quotes Buffett as follows: > He said it would be easy to solve today۪s problems in urban education. “Make private schools illegal,” he said, “and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.”

Interesting note: The map looks almost like a map of average temperatures.

http://climate.ncsu.edu/secc_edu/images/meandailytemp1961_19...

i dont know if im crazy, but what map are you referring to? i dont see a map on the article

It's in the 'reports' link. [1]

1. http://www.southerneducation.org/Our-Strategies/Research-and...

Do you have javascript turned off? There is an interactive map that looks like:

http://imgur.com/30B90f8

...and if you hover over a state, it displays the percent of children getting the free meals.

What's even more interesting is that school districts are very quickly becoming more ghettoized; the percent of school districts with less than 10% of students on frpl is increasing, and the percent of districts with more than 90% on frpl is also increasing.

Government used to be a source of leadership and innovation around issues of economic prosperity and upward mobility. Now we’re a country disinclined to invest in our young people.

Our society is corrupt, but not quite in the way many of the loudest activists proclaim. There is quite a stark cultural disconnect between groups and between socioeconomic levels in this country. The media comprises a middle class that's starkly disconnected from the lower classes. (It's also starkly ignorant of science.) Teachers also comprise a weird in-between social class.

The United States is the richest country in the history of the world, and there is no competition. Second place is the U.S. last year; third place is either the U.S. in 2014 or 2007 ...

The debate should be long over. Every person in the U.S. should have,

1) Food

2) Shelter

3) Education

4) Health care

The country can easily afford it. To leave people suffering for whatever political ideology or greed or other rationalization is absurd. It's time to stop wasting resources debating it and juggling the consequences, and time for the world's wealthiest nation to start delivering to its citizens.

But we are giving them free lunches and education. The poor get lots of subsidies in the US. I ideally would like a basic income, but it currently isn't affordable.

I disagree; it is affordable. Again, the richest nation in the history of the world, by a long shot.

I remember someone did a calculation of how much basic income we could have if we taxed corporate profits at 100%. And it would be like $6000 person. Which is not that much.

I can't help but think of:

"...takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle."

richest per capita?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

This is getting off-topic, but those with higher GDP per capita are generally special cases: Tiny, lots of oil wealth, and Switzerland is a magnet for the wealthy (if I understand their situation correctly).

A few exceptions doesn't change my point. Also, here is total annual income (GDP):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no...

And by accumulated wealth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth

However you measure it, the U.S. can't cry poverty when it comes to providing essentials to its citizens.

I wonder if public boarding schools would be a bad idea. I suppose, knowing history, it would depend highly on the implementation.

It would always be played as trying to take away poor people's children, besides who would want to pay for that?

Such schools already exist for deaf and/or blind students.

I have heavy doubts about whether the concept would scale well to larger numbers of students.

Those are private. The public school has to make special accommodations for a special needs student in district.

This is a public boarding school for the Blind or Visually Impaired:

http://www.tsbvi.edu/about-tsbvi

Good or bad idea, it's unfortunately unrelated to the article at hand. When you're in public education, like my wife is, it's easy to see the pattern.

* Public education funding gets slashed.

* Reduced funding == reduced capabilities == can't meet all of the children's needs.

* Wealthy families see a decline in quality public education so pay to send kids to private and charter schools.

* Public schools get punished for failing to live up to arbitrary, politician-set standards, and lose more funding.

It's a vicious cycle and one that we only feel the pain of many years in the future. Politicians can claim a financial win by cutting millions and even thousands from education but are actually costing this country billions in the long term.

If we don't push and support free, high quality, public education, the inequality gap is can only widen.

If you want an ear full, ask any educator about the "high school-to-prison pipeline".

Leaving out:

* We see the waste and we don't want to encourage it.

* DC has a huge per-student budget, but the student performance is horrible. Clearly, budget isn't going to do the job. Perhaps there is an inverse relationship.

I don't know what it's like in DC, but in my city the worst districts have to pay quite a bit more for personnel (teachers, admin, substitutes, everyone) and still don't usually attract the best, because working in a place with multiple violent disruptions in each classroom every week and where the 2nd graders yell at their substitutes and call them names that 2nd graders ought not know is frustrating and dangerous. It's way easier to feel like you're effective and appreciated in the good districts, even if you're making 20% less.

If DC paid the national average it's possible no one would work there, not even mediocre teachers. So yeah, there may tend to be an inverse relationship between spending and quality, but it's (likely, in most cases) not that the money is causing the problem but rather that the problem is forcing more spending just to tread water, let alone improve anything.

Where is public education funding getting "slashed" (at least in the K-12 level this article is talking about). Inflation-adjusted spending per pupil in the U.S. is up moderately since the 1990's, with a small dip in the last several years due to the recession: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/05/21/public-spending-pe.... We spend 25% more on education per student now than we did when I was a kid in the early 1990's.

You forgot the part where the wealthy family no longer want to pay for the public education because they don't see a benefit from it any more and force further funding cuts.

They pay the same taxes, and cannot opt out of paying for public education.

yes, so they lobby to cut public education and for voucher systems where they can use some credit towards the private school they use.

If we don't push and support free, high quality, public education, the inequality gap is can only widen.

That's not exactly a given.

If you want an ear full, ask any educator about the "high school-to-prison pipeline".

And how much of that is a result of the misguided "war on drugs"?

No doubt, we want everybody to have access to a quality education, but A. these are complex, iterrelated issues, and B. there's no particular reason to think that the "public school" model we have today is the objectively correct model.

Things that come to mind: Lord of the Flies. Prison gangs.

It would be better for some, but getting selected/admitted would become some sort of insult.

No doubt many of these people are having a rough time, but poverty is relative and the number is fully determined by where you draw the line.

We have a standard. Why that one? Why not the same as Sweden, Haiti, Japan, Mali, Luxembourg, or Chad? It's all political. Want to prove a point? Draw the line as required.

Maybe poverty-alleviation doesn't work.

Maybe people's attitudes need to change. When people were poor 100 years ago, they didn't wait around for government handouts. They worked hard, and got out of where they were to go to places with more opportunity. That's how poverty-alleviation actually works.

Sure, cause things haven't change at all over the past 100 years. Working hard gets you a lot less now than it used to.

Or they starved to death. With their kids. Or they started selling themselves or their children to get by.

If you go back a little further than 100 years (in the U.S. anyway). They were also relatively likely to get together a bunch of folks with guns and weapons and murder men, women, and children and take their land to make their own.

I'm not sure the hutzpa of 100 and 200 years ago is exactly what we should aspire to.

It's gotten harder to be both poor and self-sufficient. There was rampant poverty in the olden days, but you could be a lot more resourceful when you were a poor farmer in the Piedmont 60 years ago, than when you're a poor service worker in suburban Atlanta today.

That may be how it worked before, but that isn't how it works now.

It is actually incredibly, mindbogglingly, difficult for someone who can't even get a job where they live -now- to relocate to someplace completely unknown with zero resources and no job even lined up.

In the old days if you were willing to do something lower end there was always /some/ job you could get. That isn't the case today, and the jobs that used to pay enough for someone to get by don't. (I blame rampant inflation in cost and deflation in wages over time)

>I blame rampant inflation in cost and deflation in wages over time

Inflation adjusted wages are near all time highs for all quintiles [1].

[1] http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-...

> Inflation adjusted wages are near all time highs for all quintiles [1].

Nope, that's inflation adjusted household income.

Wages (what one gets paid per unit of work) are significantly down from the peak in the 1970s.

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/commentaries/Avera...

From your own source - the peak was Jan 1978, around $22/hr, which was a small blurb, and more significantly, before women entered the workforce in droves. The pay at 2014 was $19.17/hr.

Since 2014, real wages have increased (see BLS data) and are still increasing. And even the 2014 rate of $19/hr is higher than all but a few years in that entire chart.

And wages is not the same as total remuneration, which has also increased, due to many non-wage benefits companies have added since 1978. See the time series "Total cost to employ" in BLS data to see that.

Finally, demographics also change - the workforce is getting younger (as people are earlier in careers) ad boomers retire, lowering average wage while individuals are still better off. You can dig this out of census and BLS data also.

So, how is this "rampant inflation in cost and deflation in wages over time". It's nearly flat for a long time, and significantly better than the decades before that.

You called it rampant inflation as well as deflation in wages. To go from $22 to $19 over almost 30 years (completely ignoring the other relevant factors) is not a very big inflation or deflation effect whatsoever. Do the math.

> From your own source - the peak was Jan 1978, around $22/hr

1973 for the broad, cross-industry peak. (1978 was the peak for wages restricted to manufacturing.)

> which was a small blurb.

Both the broader and manufacturing measures were above their present levels at least a decade (nearly two for the manufacturing measure you fixated on) around their peak.

> And even the 2014 rate of $19/hr is higher than all but a few years in that entire chart.

Its lower than 1971-1989.

> Since 2014, real wages have increased (see BLS data) and are still increasing.

And then we can talk about the distribution of the recent gains... [0]

[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

>And then we can talk about the distribution of the recent gains

Ah, moving the goalposts. And irrelevant. The gains shown in the BLS [1] are median gains.

I just redid the data that you posted up through today (Time series CPIAUCSL [2] and AHETPI [3] from FRED like the author did). We're less than $1/hr off the all time high and trending upwards. We're higher today than 90% of all months back through 1964, and within 5% of the all time high. This doesn't seem like "rampant inflation in cost and deflation in wages over time", since the required rate to lose 5% over nearly 40 years is less than 0.13% compounded annually. That's miniscule. And it ignores all other factors that actually account for a lot of the change (like people getting more returns in the form of benefits and better regulations, which often lowers wages).

Today I learned 0.13% is "rampant inflation".

A large difference between then and now is we let minorities and women earn significantly more money than that high, while white men are earning less. Overall every income quintile is doing better. There is more competition for wages, which generally drives it lower, but the data us consistent with stable wages despite increased benefits and increased supply of labor.

There is nothing supporting your claim of "rampant inflation in cost and deflation in wages over time".

I rest my case. We're done.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm

[2] https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CPIAUCSL/downlo...

[3] https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/AHETPI#

>It is actually incredibly, mindbogglingly, difficult for someone who can't even get a job where they live -now- to relocate to someplace completely unknown with zero resources and no job even lined up.

Certainly I can't be the only one to look at that map and wonder how much of the cause for increase in the free-school-lunches is first and second generation immigrants from Mexico.

Also, the government-farm complex wants "free" food given out.

A new generation is being created that thinks that food is something that miraculously appears courtesy of the government.

The same parents who get food stamps to feed their children, are starving their own children to the point where schools are now tasked with feeding these kids (in addition to the food stamps).

>They worked hard, and got out of where they were to go to places with more opportunity.

So where are you suggesting that they go?

People who dig ditches work 10x harder than me, yet I make 10x more money than they do. So how does this fact fit into your bullshit story?

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