The Invisible American
gallup.com
gallup.com
I think this is due in part to your Senator/Congressman not really knowing any small businessmen. All the lobbyists he sees are from large corporations. And he doesn't interact with a local dry cleaner, barber, or auto repair, as those services are provided by the capitol complex. If they did, they'd be more aligned with their needs.
New York State:
1. When you incorporate an LLC in this state, they require you to publish your LLC's incorporation in two different newspapers, at a cost of about $1200. They choose the newspapers.
2. Their LLC incorporation website only works during business hours. Yes, that's right. The website only works 9 to 5.
3. They can only receive information by fax and mail and the fax numbers don't work.Then you register it as a foreign corporation with your state's Secretary of State.
Incorporating in your own state is unnecessary, unless you have a fixed business location that is always staffed during business hours, and are keen on avoiding registered agent fees.
Just incorporate in Delaware. Administration of U.S. corporations is their cash cow. They can't afford to make the process too burdensome, or some other state will eat their lunch.
You have to really know what you're doing and be willing to actually live there. If you're CA based, the FTB will find you. They're 10x more ruthless than the IRS.
Its easier just to do it in your own state. If it ever really matters, you'll have a ton of money and an expensive lawyer to deal with it for you.
Also, if you're not wedded to the simplicity of an LLC you can start an S-Corp in NY state inexpensively and with no publishing requirement–though with more overhead and differences in structure.
> With Stripe Atlas, entrepreneurs can easily incorporate a U.S. company, set up a U.S. bank account, and start accepting payments with Stripe.
"With Stripe Atlas, you can establish a C-Corporation for your business in Delaware."
Probably not ideal for a typical small business.
That said, it's definitely far more friendly setting up in places like Australia, Canada, etc. Also a lot less onerous in terms of requiring lawyers, accountants, tax people to stay in compliance. It costs a lot more to just exist in the US.
Thus corporate taxes tend to have an impact across the entire population, somewhat like VATs, see [1]. I feel like this is why they are popular, it sounds like you are taxing someone else to most people.
[1] http://www.pgpf.org/sites/default/files/0102_tax-rates-full....
Investment always lead to some kind of consumption, that is taxed just like plain consumption. I've never seen this taken into account when calculating VATs regressiveness.
Although it can't really be progressive, so the real question here is how regressive is the tax? Does it win over income taxes, that are also regressive?
I mean, if you know food has VAT, you simply increase the amount of money you give for food to cover that tax. And son on: Adjust poverty levels to show that. You can exclude some things, improve public transportation, and other things to lessen the burden.
Of course, the reality is that it is harder to do in some political cultures - the US, for example.
On practice, of course, things aren't this clear cut. Every place I've looked at (not many) refuses to simply deduct the already payed VAT from companies debits, and instead use some complex rules to determine what is "added value" that often enough subsidize large business on the expense of small ones.
Imagine a product which requires two processes, A and B.
Raw materials cost 1
After process A is done, the value of the intermediate output is now 11
After process B is done, the value of the finished product is now 21
you do A and B, so you collect VAT on (sale price less cost of inputs) = 21 - 1 = 20
A will collect VAT on (sale price less cost of cost of inputs) = 11 - 1 = 10
B will collect VAT on (sale price less cost of inputs) = 21 - 11 = 10
Big companies can and do manipulate transfer pricing to minimize VAT payments but this is "playing with taxes" rather than a problem with the concept of VAT.
Property tax is despicable. In effect, you rent your own property from the government. Can't pay the taxes? Then they take it from you. It happens to people on fixed incomes often enough.
How would we pay to run that bureaucracy? More taxes.
So, even if public education didn't benefit society as a whole, there is still a pretty good reason everyone should pay for it.
It seems odd to object to one but not the other on this basis.
Or you can outsource most of that to the government to do things like maintain the ground book, have a police force etc. You don't have to dispute a lot line with your neighbour because you have common resource that records that. Someone can't come and claim you didn't pay for it (or come in and claim they did) because those records are maintained.
They also manage the stuff that's harder, not simply more expensive, to maintain such as that paint factory upstream that wants to dump their waste into the water.
Sure, in theory you could try to do that all on your own but then you'd have no time to read hn.
"How will you pay for the roads?" has been posed to libertarians as a rhetorical question so frequently that it is now a warning flag that means your discussion counterpart has never bothered researching the opposing position even one iota before judging against it.
Generally speaking, the problem with this variety of debate is that the unstated premises of the opposing positions are completely irreconcilable.
A large fraction of all libertarians believe that taxation is not necessary to provide vital services usually provided by governments, and that any service that cannot be supported by any means other than taxation is, by definition, not necessary to provide at all.
Beyond that large problem with your post, I should also mention some anecdotes. My electricity, water, and garbage removal are provided by private businesses. I have no natural gas service. My local public schools are cash strapped, because one of the two counties that the school district spans won't transfer an appropriate portion of their property taxes to the school district. The local police engage in enforcement-for-profit. The town I lived in previously had a volunteer fire department with facilities and equipment paid for largely by private donations and fundraisers. One of the roads I drive on daily has been a construction zone for more than two continuous years, just so that the city can install a sidewalk to nowhere.
Besides that, property does not attend public school. Children attend school, and the number of children per hectare is not a fixed ratio. The unmetered, non-utility services that governments actually do provide are largely dependent on absolute population size and population density, not on acreage. I would think that a capitation would be more appropriate, but capitations are usually considered regressive taxes, and disproportionately burdensome to the poor. You don't provide services to property, but to the people that live on it. Why not just tax the people directly?
I'm familiar with the libertarian arguments. There is no need for me to mention them every time I make an argument of my own. Omission does not imply ignorance -- I know the libertarian arguments, but I just don't take them seriously enough to mention them every time I talk about taxes.
seibelj: Corporate taxes are regressive.
Roboprog: Stop taxing income. Tax property and imports.
RUG3Y: Flat tax, because property tax is evil.
twblalock: Property deserves to be taxed, because gov't services.
logfromblammo: Gov't services are not sufficient justification for any tax.
See also: every libertarian ever.
twblalock: I have already rejected libertarian arguments.
I, like RUG3Y, think that levying taxes based on the value of owned property is worse than other methods of taxation, particularly when failure to pay the tax may lead to seizure of the property.
The fact is that property does not enjoy the benefit of government-provided services. People do. So you tax the people, in proportion to the cost of providing them with those services, not in proportion to how much their house is worth, as it is a poor proxy for the former. Just as the Window Tax led people to wall themselves off from natural sunlight, property tax discourages people from purchasing and improving property for the long term.
Also, property tax just feels like a protection racket shakedown to me. "Nice lawn. It'd be a shame if someone took it from you and sold it just because you didn't pay me to not do exactly that." It's one of the reasons why I can't stand Georgists/geoists: property taxation is one of their foundation stones.
Edit (rate-limited): If the cost of a road does not scale to the number of users, please explain why a single-lane gravel road costs the same as a 6-lane elevated highway. Sparsely populated areas get reduced services. One guy living in the middle of a 16 sq.mi. ranch does not get city water and a sewer connection. He digs his own well and uses a septic field. He doesn't get fiber to the home; he uses a satellite dish. On the other side, city dwellers get city services because they live at high density, and it is therefore cost effective to do so.
The cost of building a road to a given property, building infrastructure for electrical and sewage services, etc., is not dependent on the number of people living in the property, nor on their incomes. It is dependent on the location and size of the property itself.
The simple truth is libertarian ideas have been tried in the real world several times and don't work.
It is also true that statist ideas have been tried in the real world countless times, and also don't work.
There are no good answers. There are only good enough for now answers.
Property tax is good enough for now. It will not be abolished until something better comes along to displace it.
If you need ideas on how to tax folks without property taxes:
1. Income taxes without so many deductions, and a simple tax code. It is perfectly acceptable to give allowances for dependents, for example, or having a smaller rate for folks that earn less. Similar could be done for businesses.
2. Automatic sales tax, preferably included in the shelf price. Including it in the price makes it easy for folks to forget and easier to increase: Exemptions are OK at times (groceries, for example). This could be extended to include many business supplies.
3. A different sort of luxury tax for non-necessary services and items - such as fast food and convenience services, jewelry, and other such things. In addition, you could extend this tax to make tiers for some sorts of things: vehicles, for example: More sales tax upfront for vehicles that are over the median price, that are less fuel efficient, newer than x years, or other such things.
4. Higher fuel tax and vehicle fees coupled with improved public transportation, increased taxes on vehicles that are harder on roads (heavier vehicles, etc). Realistically, folks in cities with mass transport could pay a higher price because it is less of a necessity.
In addition, some things could change to make the services more cost-effective. Police, for example: Indiana has 3 levels of police: State, county, and city. You could combine these and make better use of resources and have less waste. Same can be said with schools, especially funding schools. As it is, poorer areas have less money for schools when it could be pooled statewide and distributed fairly instead. Property-tax funded schools don't save us from this underfunding, and neither will other district-based taxation.
The difference in these sorts of taxes is that they depend on your income and consumption. They are a bit unfair to poorer folks, but if the welfare system is fair, it can account for these sorts of things (by giving money to cover taxes instead of expecting businesses to take away the tax). I know this list isn't perfect or all that well thought out, but gives examples around the stuff.
I'm very much in favor of redistributing school funding, but that's not a tax decision -- it's a spending decision. If something like that ever happens, the money is likely to come from property taxes, as it currently does -- it will just be distributed in a different way.
In my mind, part of the way to at least lessen the dependence on property taxes (or lower the taxes in general) would be to also redistribute the money on a larger scale. Otherwise, if you get rid of property taxes or lower them to a point, a few areas will likely become underfunded (or more so), assuming that property taxes are generally lower in places with lower incomes.
I do figure you are correct, that at least a portion of it will always come from property taxes.
Regardless, the property tax could be moved to an income or sales tax instead, so if your income drops and you can't pay your taxes you don't risk losing your home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)
Of course, this doesn't actually happen. (Rabbis don't like being lynched, I'm sure)
There is simply no way to make it revenue-neutral unless the tariffs are so high that foreign trade is almost entirely eliminated.
Businesses with small footprints would see a tax benefit. Businesses would probably start implementing mandatory work from home policies and reduce their office space. Most businesses rent so property holders would feel the tax burden and rents would go up significantly. Businesses would also start moving to locations with cheaper mileage rates. Businesses would start downsizing their office spaces at the detriment of employees. Businesses have already started the practice of selling their property assets and then renting them for other reasons, this would only increase. In the end you'd be penalizing businesses that need store fronts to operate and encouraging more teleworking.
Tariffs would only affect a small portion of business and you might see an increase in manufacturing in the US but that would depend on the property taxes.
With both you'd be missing large business segments. Service providers that don't need physical locations or produce products would have to pay no taxes? That's basically a potential free ride for any call center operator, software development firm, or any other company that can outsource or telework it's staff.
Property holders would feel the tax burden, decreasing the net revenue from rent, and decreasing property values.
Rents are already at "market rates", and property values adjust to reflect the return on renting property. There might be some short-term price fluctuations as property owners try to maintain their existing margins, but an efficient market for real estate will stabilize rents close to the existing prices. The real losers would be those who purchased real estate assets expecting a consistent future return.
Rents are at market rates given current market conditions. Increasing costs to hold property by imposing new taxes on property holders decreases supply of rental property -- that is, it reduces the quantity supplied at any given price point -- which, with a normally-shaped demand curve, decreases the quantity traded and increases the market clearing price.
Market prices aren't independent of market conditions.
That might not be a bad thing.
Not all "property" is real estate, either.
"Figure that out" isn't the issue, "afford" is. I've had my company pay to work out what it would take for my US small business to avail itself of the same advantages as "the big boys". The tl;dr is it's pay to play. Sharing what I determined:
The tax minimization techniques are initially shrouded in secrecy as individual practitioners figure out how to hack the tax regulations, and over time gradually spread out through the industry, and eventually the IRS gets around to shutting down some of them.
There are many, many levels of tax minimization. There is a minimum buy-in for each level, of professional services fees, regulatory/statutory fees, and annual maintenance fees. Your tax liability must substantially exceed these buy-in levels before it makes sense to pursue them.
The uncertainty around specific techniques' legality is always >0. Not a single firm I spoke with would vouch for any technique 100%, no matter how long it has been in place, no matter how many of their clients use it, no matter what the IRS has pronounced before upon the technique. The best I could find was if I used the firm's in-house bookkeeper, accounting system, CPA, and tax attorney to be my company's sole and exclusive accounting department and tax advisor, and my company complied with every single recommendation they made to the letter and precisely on time never missing a deadline, then if a technique was invalidated by the IRS they would defend me...up to a "reasonable point", which they declined to define, beyond which they would charge us for the tax attorney's time.
For the simpler more established techniques that were more widely-used in their client base we interpreted they would defend us in tax court whatever it took, as it was in their financial interests to do so. But they needed an out for the more complex and newer techniques which fewer clients used, which is where the "reasonable point" wording came from.
Minimum I identified was high-6 to 7-figure tax liabilities p.a. before it started to make sense to even think about these techniques, and closer to mid-to-high-7 figures to be practical and conservative. It is a far lower bar to clear on just a pure tax liabilities-to-savings basis, but the uncertainty that surrounds you compels a conservative approach to put away enough to pay for not just a tax court fight, but enough to pay sufficient penalties+interest in case you lose so that an adverse ruling doesn't immediately put your company into perilous financial straits.
A large factor why small business can't afford these techniques is due to the aforementioned secrecy: every firm I spoke with, and the one I engaged and retained (paid money to) so I could review the techniques, demanded an NDA. Take the NDA to a contracts attorney and you will determine that the practical effect is despite what you might be told in the marketing sell-side of the engagement, once you employ these techniques, you are effectively obligated to use the tax minimization firm's CPA's and tax attorneys (sometimes even bookkeeper and accounting system), and not your own. You will be told you can use your own, but you cannot divulge any of the techniques. With holes like that in your financial and tax planning picture, your own CPA and tax attorney will never sign off on the end result of any of their work, and therefore you are left with going to the tax minimization firm's services as a practical matter. When you add up all those costs, it raises the bar of how high your tax liabilities must be before you can justify hiring one of these firms (even if you were willing to take away all outside options of retaining financial advice, a completely separate matter).
No one I spoke with would agree to report a comparison between the total spend on their services and the taxes I would have paid if I hadn't retained them, without substantially more services to generate that information. In other words, they themselves had no idea of the baseline tax liability and therefore the optimal point beyond which it was costing the client more to spend on them to reduce tax liability than it was worth. It was premature optimization gone completely off the rails at the smaller scale businesses.
The big business' can afford this game because they vertically integrate their own in-house tax minimization efforts, and/or they bring a large enough book of business that any outside counsel they retain will agree to sharing the techniques with in-house staff in exchange for relatively lengthy contracts. The big business' tax liabilities are so large and complex, these tax technicians' time budget to spend on optimization was gargantuan, so there was no effective need to establish a baseline. By the time they worked out one year's taxes, it was already time for the following year, with new tax regulations to take into account.
The entire industry has striking parallels to infosec hacking. Some of the specialists I met would probably strongly identify with other (sw/hw/ham/etc.) hackers.
If it were feasible to organize a mountain of small businesses into a single, monolithic producer co-op to present the same "interface" to the tax authorities as the big business' (PEO's are one form of acknowledging scaling issues in the business regulatory environment, payroll firms another), then that might level the playing field somewhat, but until that or similar action(s) happen, yes, US small businesses do face tax regulatory environment challenges.
If someone with a small business finds a tax minimization specialist firm that didn't come with these drawbacks I outlined, I'd really appreciate it if they would post here who they retained. The 35% rate is pretty eye-watering to pay when I want to put away for a rainy day fund, or save up to add an employee/purchase capital equipment/
Especially given my experience: most small businesses I've worked with/for have made little to no profit. The owner takes a salary(or not, especially early on) and plows the rest of the revenue back into the business.
This statistic is psychological. Americans want to be middle class and tend to identify as such even if their income does not fall into what is considered a "middle class income" (lower or higher).
So, while it is significant that fewer people identify as middle class, it is not clear what that actually means. And we certainly shouldn't take it for granted that everyone who no longer identifies as middle class has seen a salary drop from 65k to 28k.
I really fear that it may. Once folks realise that they can make their lives better (in the short term at least) by using State violence to rob those who are better off (rather than through hard work), the long-term results are going to be ugly.
You may want to read up on the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" first.
I don't know what else you would call threatening people with deadly force unless they give the threatener money, other than 'robbery.'
You'll note that I didn't say that taxes aren't necessary: they are. They are, in fact, almost the textbook definition of a necessary evil: we must have them, and they are evil. We don't live in a perfect world.
What concerns me is that we have already raised the economic footprint of the State far beyond what is necessary, and that it is in fact deadweight holding us all back — to include the poor, whose ultimate interests are served not by dragging down the rich, but by being lifted up.
Would you call this robbery too? It seems to fit your definition.
For example, some younger folks today might have high incomes, but could never buy a home due to asset prices and have most of that go towards rent and student debt.
Compare against our parents generation and even low income families have a decent chance of owning a home and I'd guess lower levels of student debt.
So that said... What does it mean to be middle class in this day and age when income alone may not paint a clear picture?
And as for the long-term unemployed referred to in the article, the reality is that most of the people who have left the job market are retirees or students (http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/10/21/what-we-know-about...).
With regard to the startup decline referenced in the article, that trend reversed itself several years ago, and startups have been trending up to nearly pre-recession levels since 2013 (http://www.kauffman.org/microsites/kauffman-index/rankings/n...).
The bottom line: we've had seven straight years of real, meaningful economic and employment growth. It's not a facade or an illusion. However, growing income inequality means that a disproportionate share of the growth has gone to the upper class, and this has left many people feeling like they are falling out of the middle class.
edit: following some links, they have a real consistent focus on small businesses as being the answer to economic problems. That's actually something I believe as well, but it still seems strange to see it being pushed so heavily by a polling company.
This seems to be his key manifesto:
http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/186638/killing-small-...
Going from declining living standards to lack of identification as middle class seems like a logical, small step. Going from that to talking about small business seems a large and unjustified leap. As I'd understand it, most of the decline in American median income and living standards has come from the end of industrial union jobs and well paid corporate jobs.
While more Americans than ever survive on the "gig economy" and apparently don't make much doing that, true, successful small business people would be in the top 5% of income and just by statistic would seem to be doing well (but may be under attack in a fashion not visible by statistics for all I know).
Edit: You could say the article uses a "the cause of this problem is the lack of applying my solution to it" sort of rhetoric, which feels a bit dodgy regardless of what one might think of the solution.
When really, they should be, "don't make anyone pay to keep anyone in business"
Corporate bailouts and monetary policy are socialized risk and privatized reward, benefiting the large and entrenched firms.
I've never heard the statistics for full-time employment. I knew that it would be low, but below 50 percent? That's incredible.
EDIT: it's precisely these factors which cause US BLS to normalize unemployment numbers to exclude people who aren't seeking work.
The upper class has flourished, and is richer than ever before, including the gilded age, with fortunes the size of Rockefeller now common among their ranks. The upper middle class has taken a minor hit, but has largely recovered and is reaping the gains of their investment funds. Middle class families have fallen into instability, and must now accept a lower standard of living, worse education, and high levels of debt. Lower class families have fallen into desperation, and many have their stuff repoed and their homes foreclosed. The underclass is hopelessly trapped working in multiple minimum wage jobs if they are lucky enough to work at all, packed in with a dozen to a household. A growing population at the very bottom lives in utter squalor, frequently in the context of complete municipal anarchy such as in Detroit or Flint.
How hard is it to understand that the economic health of the majority of people in the US is very poor?
You can't expect the number of small businesses to increase if the vast majority of people in the country have no idea how to run a business.
The cultural norm in America is to entrust the doing of business to the elites of major corporations and aspire to be lifer employees for them. This worked until these companies started buying each other up, blowing their profits on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends, and laying their experienced workers off in the 1990s.
The reality changed very dramatically, but the culture did not change with it. Our education system is very much biased towards STEM and liberal arts, not business and trade. It is very, very odd contrasting with such an aggressively pro-capitalist foreign policy.
Chicken and egg problem, but most people (myself included) don't know how to prioritize the use of small businesses, either. How many days go by before you interact with a small business in any way? How much of this is due to habit and choices you made long ago?
If you've got kids, or some expensive medical condition in your family, a lot of people are going to suck it up and work for the man, for health insurance.
However, as fewer and fewer young people choose to have kids, we could at least expect those people to take a risk if they knew what they were doing.
I do all sorts of work with photography, video, multimedia, and that general intersection of tech and the arts. In my case, do I want to start up a production company or identify a market for people who want or need these sorts of services and contract with them?
Or do I find a gig with a company or university that pays a decent salary, includes health insurance, retirement investment, and the usual benefits? It's pretty obvious from my post which way I've gone despite the fact that the work isn't always inspiring or challenging or terribly lucrative.
Because at the end of the day, it pays me that middle-class salary and offers some promise of stability. Could I be laid off or my position cut? Sure. But if I had to put a wager on it, the odds of unemployment/underemployment are much lower this way.
Anyway, I don't intend to complain. My field is one of those where you may consider yourself lucky to have steady, non-gig work and I do consider myself fortunate to have a steady income, benefits, and some savings while doing something at least somewhat related to my interests and skillset.
But if we're looking for the psychological picture of why people might be trading entrepreneurship with the potential for even greater earnings and contribution to the overall economy, I'd say the major issue by far is stability. There's not a whole lot of "safety net" in place for someone who wants to start a small business.
When you constantly hear about them shutting down due to competition from big corps or dips in the economy or just shitty luck, the effect it has on most prudent adults is to make the prospect of entrepreneurship seem awfully risky and likely to leave you back on the job hunt within a few years.
Immigrants start small businesses all the time without a safety net. Restaurants, smoothie shops, tailors, cell phone stores, contractors, convenience stores, etc. are often small businesses owned by foreigners (anecdotally at least, in my experience). Why do we always say that we need a safety net when we interact with these sorts of businesses all the time?
Is it because we have big, amazing careers ahead of us as employees that we can't risk? Or is it just a cultural perception that those occupations are mostly for foreigners?
Immigrant without a career: I gotta sell something!
I think at least for me, while there's definitely some appeal in that sort of work, I was more interested when I wasn't making any headway in finding a "jobby job". Basically, I was much more willing to hustle when I didn't have other options but when given the choice between stability and a more self-directed, sink or swim route, I chose the former.
That's not to say I won't eventually feel differently. It's just the case for my recent past/present.
My two hypotheses, purely from personal experience, not at all based upon any valid statistical data. YMMV, freely-given opinions worth what you paid for it, etc.
Immigrants likely have not yet grown up in the kind of media-pumped, over-saturated hyper-aware-of-health-factors as developed-nation (especially US) native-born citizens. If this hypothesis is correct, then native-born would have an exaggerated sense of risks, while immigrants have a more proportionate sense tempered by their lives' constraints (making do without what native-born would consider necessary safety nets).
Native-born citizens might statistically be unhealthier than immigrants. Immigrants are a self-selecting group who are statistically going to exhibit certain degrees of greater perseverance than the wider population. This perseverance could be a contributing factor in diet choices, a major contributor to the rising poor health outcomes in native-born populations in the US. If so, then the immigrant group might not feel as much pressure to secure the safety net as the native-born population.
Most diet choices in the US are unhealthy. Like very poor nutrient:calorie ratios, excessively high portions, or encouraging poor convenience-oriented habits over selecting and preparing whole foods closer to raw than processed. All only possible with the kind of extravagant energy per capita spent in the US that are not generally available in the nations immigrants tend to come from, leading to catastrophic US general population health outcomes.
That's a very loaded opinion, and is likely colored by your experiences. The facts show a different story though - most businesses are small businesses, they employ about half of US workers, and 60-65% of new jobs are created by small businesses.
The unemployment figures have been that way the entire time! It was never a secret.
Never trust numbers if the one collecting the data has any inclination towards the result, no matter how trustworthy the source seems to be; bias will find a way in. Any government's numbers on unemployment and inflation will always be suspect for that reason. S&P/Moody's/Fitch? Years ago, I remember a trader in Zurich laughing at my question as to their trust-worthiness.
If I was a full-time investor with a large portfolio, I would pay to do my own tracking of prices across a wide basket of goods, as well as research to get my own numbers on unemployment, underemployment and jobless, the same with credit ratings. Any large discrepancies with the official numbers would be a sign as to what is being sold and how desperately.
<That devastated American remains counted as "full-time employed" because he still has full-time work -- although with drastically reduced pay and benefits. He has fallen out of the middle class and is invisible in current reporting.
<More disastrous is the emotional toll on the person -- the sudden loss of household income can cause a crash of self-esteem and dignity, leading to an environment of desperation that we haven't seen since the Great Depression.
I would challenge the author to prove, expand and support this.
That number is still too high. It should be about 33% (but then about 80% of Americans consider themselves "above average" drivers, too).
That devastated American remains counted as "full-time employed" because he still has full-time work -- although with drastically reduced pay and benefits.
Nonsense. 2015 saw the largest income increases ever recorded at each of the bottom four quintiles.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/press-kit...
I see you bought that propaganda item that was floating around last week. Anytime someone is talking about the "largest increase" of anything, they are usually trying to lie to you. In this case, while income may have "increased dramatically" between 2014 and 2015, real median income is still lower than 2008:
http://images.dailykos.com/images/134215/large/household-inc...
Additionally, income increases don't refute what the author said at all. If I lost a 75k a year job and replaced it with a 30k a year job, an increase of anything less than 150% leaves me worse off than I was before. You can see this if you look at real median wage information - we are still well below 2007 levels, even with the census tricks.
[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-15/deconstructing-medi...