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Comment by the-dude | Hacker News Reader

I was raised on a single income and so was the majority of my peers in urrr, the 80s!

This baffles me the most.

See the Two Income Trap (TL;DR: there is limited housing in good school districts and there are limited places at good universities, so when it became possible to compete for these with two incomes, it gradually became the case that you had to have two incomes to compete for them, as prices were driven up) and the recent post on here about the bizarre cost disease affecting the West, and especially the US, making basically everything but imported cheap plastic/electronic crap cost more in real terms than it did the year before, every year, for the last few decades, including construction, infrastructure, health, and schooling.

There may also be something to do with globalization turning out to be not so much "rising tide lifts all boats" as "rising tide lifts the average elevation of all boats"; the latter is very different for someone working for a living in an already-affluent, globalizing state than the former.

I agree with the general gist of this, but I think you're down playing how much stuff people can buy now.

Furthermore, if everyone's getting paid more, isn't it natural that person intensive activities like construction, infrastructure, health, and schooling will cost more?

But stuff, stuff is ridiculously cheap at the moment.

Perhaps you yanks didn't see it so much as you were already rich in the 80s/90s, but compared to my childhood in the UK, all the children I know get mountains of presents. Literally so many they get bored opening them.

I can get cheap salad any time of year. Cheap fruit, milk, bread, etc. I can buy mounds of rice, pasta, etc. for literally pence.

TVs in every room, not just one per household. People have espresso coffee makers in their kitchens! Everyone has at least one computer, if not one per child, and another in their pocket. Everyone's got at least one console or some such device. Everyone can afford Sky or Virgin or whatever cable channel.

You're massively overvaluing toys and other consumer goods, and you're massively undervaluing real estate.

Having nice TVs doesn't make your quality of life that much better now than back in the 80s.

Living in a terrible neighborhood with crime because you can't afford to live in a decent neighborhood on a single income makes your quality of life much worse than back in the 80s when a single income could afford a nice house.

Perhaps it's worth asking why preventing crime is so much harder today than in the past. That might lead to uncomfortable conclusions, however.

Apart from the crime prevention, what does the terrible neighborhood lack that the nice neighborhoods in 1970 had?

Perhaps it's worth asking why preventing crime is so much harder today than in the past

It's not tho is it? In the United States at least crime is much lower than it was since like the 50's.

Good school. Employment opportunities. Cleanness.

By almost every metric, crime has gone down in the last 30 years.

True, though that seems unexplainable. Vox had a good piece on it a while back, concluding that it's probably the sum of a lot of small factors.

On average, sure. In specific places, no. These days, if you can't afford more than a crappy apartment, you're going to be living in a place with drug dealers and occasional murders. And with the high rents, having a single income (and worse, having to support a family on that) means that the crappy apartments now cost what, 30+ years ago, a decent but modest home in a decent neighborhood cost.

So maybe living in downtown areas isn't nearly as dangerous as it was back in the 70s-80s (when NYC's Times Square was full of prostitutes and muggings were common), but affording a place that doesn't have you surrounded by drug dealers and ex-cons is more out-of-reach and costly (and those once-seedy downtown areas are now completely unaffordable if you don't make $150k+).

> Furthermore, if everyone's getting paid more, isn't it natural that person intensive activities like construction, infrastructure, health, and schooling will cost more?

Yes, more. Not disproportionately more (except for certain things with natural limits like land and education at high-name-recognition universities). Not wildly disproportionately more.

The blog post[1] I mentioned (prominently linked on HN when it came out) covered the phenomenon pretty thoroughly, without offering much in the way of explanations, though ruling some out.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

Actually, Warren's data and the Two Income Trap shows nothing of the sort.

The Two Income Trap shows that income rose 75%. Mortgage expenses rose 70% (for a 66% bigger house [1]), two cars cost 55% more than 1 car, health insurance cost 60% more, etc. In fact, the main expense that rose faster than income was taxes (140%) - everything else rose more slowly.

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1185883980.shtml http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_04_27-2008_05_03.sht... https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118705537958296783

It's not really your fault that you made this mistake, however. Warren chose a really strange way to report tax increases - she reports them as a percentage of before and after income - a 9% increase from 24% of family income to 33%. I place the blame for this confusion on her strange data presentation choices - nearly everyone who read her book gets confused by this, not just you.

But all her other increases are in inflation-adjusted dollar percentages. If she reported taxes this way, they'd be up 140% from $9,288 to $22,374.

If she reported housing expenses the way she reported taxes, they would be down 3%. Health care would be down 9%.

She sure made such a strange choice in how she presented the data. I wonder why she did that?

[1] https://www.nar.realtor/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Op...

Indeed. A big chunk of the "cost disease" can be explained by this in my opinion. The unaccountable administrative state - largely peopled by the "knowledge worker" class - has effectively pirated a big chunk of the income of the country and redirected it to its class friends via direct government employment, government licensing, government regulation and government spending. Nearly all western governments demonstrate symptoms of this disease.

As someone who'd been a skeptic of "lawsuits are killing us!" arguments, I actually thought the most convincing explanation of the many that were offered up after that SSC post is that uncertainty bred by too little (or too inconsistently enforced) regulation that leaves too much of enforcing good behavior up to litigation is the biggest driver of the problem.

It neatly explains why the US suffers from it far worse than other OECD states, I'd say—uncertain, relatively weak regulatory environment, easy lawsuits. The uncertainty encourages, at both the personal and institutional levels, extreme risk avoidance (CYA, if not actually risk reduction) throughout private industry and government, adding a percentage to costs at every stage of any project while also slowing things down (so, more costs there too) and killing innumerable potentially-cost-saving innovations in process before they can even be attempted.

If you want to see money going to waste, look into any sufficiently large private company. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about government inspectors that inspect inspectors that inspect tools, the private sector is just as full of pointless, or even actively harmful paper-pushers.

Which we all get to pay for, through higher costs. This is also the core of the 'pointless jobs' thesis.

>the private sector is just as full of pointless, or even actively harmful paper-pushers.

1- Maybe. To what degree are these paper-pushers an artifact of government requirements? It's hard to tell the difference between a 'pointless' private paper-pusher and a private paper-pusher who is there because of some perceived liability to the government or hostile lawyers.

2- Even if so. At least private companies can ultimately be punished in the marketplace. Government typically insulates itself throughly from oversight, both economic and from the ballot-box.

1. Most of it is unhelpful middle management and non-productive people providing themselves with job security. There are a million and one incentives for this kind of behaviour in the private sector. Nobody ever got fired for failing to point out that their job is pointless.

2. Government can be punished at the ballot box, I don't have a choice in where my grocer sources its produce from, whether or not property developers in the area will choose to build small, affordable homes or McMansions, or which ISP will take my money, but not provide stable internet (Because all we have here is Comcast.)

I mean, technically I suppose I could overpay crazy amounts of money to get my food, my housing, and my connectivity sourced from somewhere else, but at that point, the ~25% of my income that goes into taxes will seem like a drop in the bucket.

The problem with that theory is that it's wrong on the facts. The federal government has consistently been about 19% of GDP since the 1950s. Your wages are no more eaten up by bureaucracy than was your grandfather's.

See epi.org. Wage income has been flat for the median earner since 1979, despite 128% productivity growth. Nearly all benefits to increased productivity went to the top 10%; 80% of that went to the top 0.1%. Return on capital is doing nicely. Return on labor, not so much.

For the 2/3 of the workforce with no college degree, real wages since 1979 fell 28%. Before you start feeling smug about getting on the right side of that divide, remember they vote, too. Ergo: President Trump, the man who promised to restore their jobs (and wages).

How to let everyone participate in a prosperity so unevenly distributed is the central problem of our time. The solution will not be found in flexible work hours. It will require a lot of work, starting with understanding that the capitalists will not give up their winnings easily.

Except your facts don't conflict with the idea that government expansion in the private sector is causing costs to rise.

It's may be true that the total share federal government spending as a share of GDP hasn't changed. I think it's more important to look at the ways government policy has picked winners in the private sector. In other words I regard government intrusion in the market as a cause of inequality you bemoan, not an effect.

Another point: did you read yummyfajita's ancestor post? He writes (quoting Elizabeth Warren): "The Two Income Trap shows that income rose 75%. Mortgage expenses rose 70% (for a 66% bigger house [1]), two cars cost 55% more than 1 car, health insurance cost 60% more, etc. In fact, the main expense that rose faster than income was taxes (140%) - everything else rose more slowly."

[1]https://www.nar.realtor/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Op...

Yup, I've had peers argue that their kid should be in school for more of the year because it's a nuisance and expensive to put him in activities during the summer months. Never mind if it even makes sense to have a kid in school more, or if it might be better for the kid to spend some time exploring the neighbourhood, spending time with his friends &c.

I completely understand that not everyone has the ability to have one parent stay at home, but I think it should be the ideal.

Thanks to stranger danger, freerange kids aren't allowed to explore the neighborhood anymore. What was perfectly acceptable behaviour in the 80s is now considered parental negligence.

My spouse and I specifically opted for the single-earner model and haven't regretted it. We had some tough years, but now our household income from my earnings is at the 83rd percentile nationwide. In our experience what studies have shown (there's more proportional wealth in single-earner households than dual-earner) has proven true. So if you want to maximize, choose one of you to work, and the other to do everything else.

I too was raised on a single income in the (late) 80's and 90's but I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.

40 hour work weeks, for both parents, are discussed.

I am just describing the world only 30 years ago. A double income is almost a requirement now.

On based on the "required" standing of living. 2 cars, $150 cable package, $200 cell phone package, 4000 square foot homes.

Single income COULD work for the vast majority of Americans, but then they need to be happy with less stuff.

We had a car and a small house, but my father returned from the office every day ... to have lunch with us!

As far as I remember, all my class mates went home for lunch ( we actually had dinner ).

$2000/month for day care or camps or lessons or whatever...

$2000/month for health insurance for family.

$2000+/month in rent or mortgage

$1000/month in groceries

And we are up to $100,000 a year in just the bare one expenses to exist.

Maybe add some retirement savings, a vacation for a week or two, maybe some college savings, and we are into $200,000+ territory.

In a single worker house, no daycare - so strike that.

$2000 for health insurance in the US? Not from a professional job. Normal employee copays for a famils are in the $200-$400 per month range.

$2000 rent? No way. Move. You can live for $1000 or less in many areas of the world with great jobs.

$1000 groceries? No way, try more like $500.

here is the spending report of a family of 3. It is about $25,000.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/01/16/exposed-the-mmm-fa...

That should be the baseline for where you think. Not some crazy fantasy land with a $2000 mortgage and $2000 daycare (despite 1 parent being stay at home)

>Normal employee copays for a famils are in the $200-$400 per month range.

Completely wrong. Mine is about $850 for two people, no kids.

Total cost on the open market for that kind of plan is 1k - 1.2k, so your work basically has no health benefit? I have never had that experience...

Yeah, my health insurance costs about $800/month before the employer portion, for two people, no preexisting conditions, no children.

The guy telling others how to live their life has no experience contrary to their own, and thus no empathy? Fancy that.

MMM's posts are all from the perspective of someone who: 1) has a paid off house, 2) has a lot of money in the bank, can get a job with benefits easily on short-ish notice and has no-one with chronic illnesses in his household (= incredibly low health insurance costs). He also gains all kinds of savings by not being dependent on a 9-5, like having enormous choice in housing location, lower transportation expenses, and so on. This is the end state of someone who's made it, and spending at that level's not realistic for a family that's still working, because their spending is necessarily much higher due to having fewer options to reduce costs.

I like the general attitude of that blog, but after going on a reading binge of it a couple years ago I came away with the impression that it's subtly misleading and kinda scummy. Stuff like "how I thrive with no job (by already having a ton of money, and actually having 3 part-time jobs, one of which is getting you to click affiliate links on this very blog)", or "Why are you paying so much for health insurance, really guys, it's cheap (if you're in an exactly perfect life situation, what, are you not?)" Clickbaity humblebragging and condescending wankery mixed with good advice about frugality (some of which is actually useful to people who don't already have a ton of money in the bank), in service of making him money via one of his not-jobs.

> Normal employee copays for a famils are in the $200-$400 per month range.

No. Maybe for one person, not a family. Yes, there are companies that deliver great benefits on health care (I'm at one) but they're exceptional. $2000 seems high, but $200-400 is low by at least half.

I agree. MMM is completely unhelpful for someone who is not already in a great position.

If you have great income and you want to retire early by saving on some big expenses, MMM probably has some good advice for you.

If you are relatively poor and you're trying to figure out how to pay off your student loans, fix your beater that you need to get to the office, and afford health insurance, while having essentially zero money left over, MMM's advice is essentially worthless. It's like telling a homeless guy with no jacket, "Why are you cold? Just put a jacket on."

Or find a company which pays the entire premium for the entire family. They do exist. I work for one and it's awesome.

I stopped taking you seriously when you said "move".

LOL and I just said the same thing.

I think these are really inflated. I've got 5 kids, my wife doesn't work, and our expenses in the categories above are:

$150/month for day care or camps or lessons or whatever...

$500/month for health insurance for family [my portion, the company has a plan]

$1500 month in rent or mortgage

$1000/month in groceries

That's just under $38,000 per year. I make more now, but we lived very comfortably when I made $80,000 per year (before tax).

Yes, completely overpriced relative to average costs across us - however these are real for major metro areas (ny, dc, sf, Boston etc).

Unless you make $250k+/year there, it's not worth being in these areas.

The median family income for those metro areas is nowhere near $100k. I spot checked Boston and its $53,657.

Yep. I've got one word of advice: move!

I am a 3rd year dev living on 70k income. Wife works >20 hrs part time. 2 kids. I live in the US between the Rocky and the Appalachian mountains where the cost of living is reasonable. Things are tight, but solid. $800/mo rent (4 bedroom house, .7 acres) $800/mo debt, 2 car payments $200/mo gas $500/mo savings $600/mo groceries $500/mo utilities, phone, internet, streaming $250/mo car, life insurance

Not even at 50k a year for essential expenses. It's doable. At 100k I'd have pretty much no financial worries, and at 200k, I'd have better problems to worry about. :)

I honestly can't tell if you are being serous or not. $2,000/month entertainment is included in "bare one expenses to exist?" No. That's pretty extravagant.

Sure, you are probably going to need 2 incomes if that's the kind of lifestyle you want but don't kid yourself its some sort of bare minimum.

Growing up my family of five (three kids, two parents) somehow managed to live in a two bedroom apartment with one car and played in public parks and other public facilities for entertainment. We wore hand-me-downs and had little in terms of "stuff," we didn't have any room to store it anyways.

I am much happier I grew up without excess toys/objects/items as most of our play was centered around imagination. Children are really good at entertaining themselves if left to their own devices. It also made me appreciate what I did have.

Basically, I didn't grew up even remotely in squalor or anything like that. It would have been nice to have my own bedroom but it wasn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

---

My family now has two incomes/jobs but only one car, we share a car ride to work, one drops the other off in the morning and picks them up in the evening. it's kinda annoying at times. I want to get a second car but every time I run the numbers in my head I can't justify the huge added expense just to alleviate a little bit of annoyance/inconvenience.

So anyways, you can do with a lot less if you actually wanted to. "This is how much I spend" isn't the same thing as "this is how much I am required to spend."

$2000/month in camps/lessons/kids activities/afterschool care (far from entertainment).

camps = entertainment

lessons = entertainment

kids activities = entertainment

None of those are some sort of bare bones living expenses. They are nice to haves if you can afford it.

afterschool care = not required if one parent stays home or works a different shift.

Daycare is not entertainment. Daycare is what stops Social Services from taking away your kids. (Which wouldn't happen in the 70s, between multi-generational families, and less moral panic about unattended twelve-year-olds.)

Uh, daycare wasn't on the list. After school care was. Different animal.

And yes, I'm going to be normative here and suggest as a society we do an awful lot of offloading our kids into the care of others. And if we're doing that, why the hell did we have them in the first place?

The alternative is kids home alone. Not even legal in many us areas.

Since when was the alternative to piano lessons and dance class leaving your kids unsupervised?

If you need bare bones supervision for your school age children you can get that at the Boys and Girls club and similar programs. Their summer program was around $1 a day per kid when I went.

Totally agree. Besides, in many states kids are allowed to supervise younger kids starting somewhere between 9 and 12. I.e., if your oldest is 9 in Utah, you can indeed legally leave them home alone with their siblings.

I'm going to disagree with you hear. The list provided is absolutely non-essential. I mean, are you kidding me? To believe otherwise absolutely astonishes me. We think of it as an extravagance if we pay $50/month for our daughter to take a dance class. $200/month maybe, if all the kids are in a single class of some sort, but $2000?! Not happening, even if we could afford it.

There are no 50s-sized cheap houses within walking distance of employment centers in good school districts in my city. Out where the good schools are, they only build McMansions. This is the typical case for cities in the US. I live in a big-ass house in the 'burbs because a big-ass house in the 'burbs is cheaper than a smaller one still capable of (more or less) comfortably housing 2 adults + 3 kids in the city, plus private school for those three kids. It's not because I love McMansions and owning cars and being far from everything.

As for entertainment spending (Netflix, cell phones, et c), it's nothing next to (especially) housing and (even cooked at home) food. Cutting all of that wouldn't get us down to a secure, responsible income level with only one parent working.

The other problem is utility bills. These anti-big-house people complain how people don't need giant houses, but they completely ignore how horribly inefficient older houses are. It probably costs a lot less to heat and cool your McMansion than it would a 50-year-old house that's half the size.

I really wish it were easy to find nice, well-built, efficient, modestly sized houses in neighborhoods where you don't have ex-cons living next to you, vicious dogs running loose, etc. That just doesn't seem to be the case.

That seems suspect. How much does it cost to heat and cool a McMansion in dollars? I live in a 2000 square foot 75 year old house and my utilities are very reasonable.

When I lived at my grandmother's house (rented from her), the utility bill was almost as much as rent through the winter (I think the highest I saw was about $500 one month). The house is from like 1890 or whatever and they did add insulation and all but the heater was on a lot.

How many square feet was the house? I don't know if that's compatible to heating a McMansion though.

I just did the math with my past bills and, amortized, I spend about $200 total on utilities a month. That's water, electricity, and oil. I have no special upgrades to my house. It gets fairly cold here. I have the aforementioned 2000 square foot (which I consider big) 75 year old house. I keep the heat on 68 when we are home. It gets hot in the summer and we use window air units.

I just looked up the realty listing and it says it's 2100 sq ft. In the summer the bill was < 100. We get a lot of snow up here and I am betting that even though they added insulation the roof leaked ridiculous amounts of heat. I don't live there anymore luckily.

In climates with seasons you really have to do a yearly amortization to get a true idea of utility costs. A lot of oil and propane companies around here actually let you sign up for a plan that lets you pay them your amortized costs year-round. A few friends of mine love those plans, I prefer to pay the upfront cost to fill the tank and not bother.

My grandma's house had exactly the same problem, the roof was rotted and actually had a hole in it, you could see the outside from the inside. She didn't have the wherewithal to get it fixed though, unfortunately. She would just put down buckets to catch the water when it rained.

All houses need regular roof maintenance!

My house was built in 1920 and I spend more on my car payment that I do on all my utilities combined. Even if you buy a house that costs a lot of heat or cool, it's at most a weekend project per room to rip down drywall or plaster, put in new/better/any insulation, and re-drywall.

You can't do that if you don't own the house. A lot of us are renters because we have no intention of staying in the same place for 10 years.

That depends. In a lot of places, if you expose any wiring (aka, rip out drywall) you need to get a building permit and inspection for the work you're doing.

You can send your kids to an average or even below-average school, be able to spend more time at home, and more than make up the difference. Education driven by the parents is always going to be better than education driven by a public school board anyway.

Which is better, having your son be the salutatorian of the average school district in a suburb nobody's ever heard of, or having him be 75/350 in an amazing school district in a suburb nobody's ever heard of?

School district quality matters of course but I think it's overblown when everybody thinks they need to live in the best school district within a 50-mile commute from the job they ended up with more or less randomly.

Stop with the standard of living shaming. You're not convincing anyone and you're ignoring the fact that even if you adjust/account for that the issues being discussed here are the same. In other words you're just doing moral finger-wagging, not making a substantive argument.

The substantive argument is that people spend a lot of money on things they don't need, then complain that they don't have the money to cut their hours and earn less money (if that's even an option).

You're the one not making any substantive arguments by just calling it "shaming"

Some people do, and a lot of other people are genuinely having a rough go.

Absolutely wrong.

No, you don't need $150 cable packages and $200 cellular packages. I don't have those myself. My cellphone bill with Ting is about $30/month for myself, and I got my 3-year-old phone on Ebay used.

And no, you don't need a 4000sf home. But most people do want a decent home in a decent, low-crime neighborhood. The problem is that it's very hard to afford that on a single income, even after you cut out extravangances like $150 cable packages.

The fundamental problem is that the rent is too damn high.

Where do you live? You should move.

Consider that the costs of those vehicles, communications devices, and shelter have increased much faster than wages have. But no, what you choose to take from that reality is "they need to be happy with less stuff"

Why do you even need a motorized wheelchair, if you have 2 working legs? It doesn't matter how much something costs if you don't buy it.

Well houses have been getting bigger at the same time families have been getting smaller. The living space per person has almost doubled since the 70s.

https://www.aei.org/publication/todays-new-homes-are-1000-sq...

Place with good school, college debt and healthcare are way more expensive. Cable and cellphone packages are pretty much irrelevant.

I have:

- 2 paid for cars, one has 200k miles on it and is sitting dead in the driveway.

- a 1200 square foot house outside of town, not in a nice area. It's the cheapest house I could find and the only one I could afford.

- Internet.

- Cell phone.

- No cable, no Netflix, very little dining out (always somewhere cheap) and no other debts other than mortgage.

I have a decent income for the area I'm in, and still barely get by on a single income. I really don't understand how other people are making it. I'm either much worse off than I think or most people are just doing so much better.

Which, I'll point out, would be a vast improvement for our environmental impact...

That's crazy. Almost every couple I know is single income, in order to better provide for the kids. It's not a requirement.

That's how we roll, too. I don't know how dual-earners do it. When the hell do you pick up the house, clean, pay bills, spend time with each other? Seems like it'd be an incredibly hectic way to live life.

That was true in the USA from the 1950s through the 1980s. Since then the middle-class has been more than decimated. Paul Krugman's book "Conscience of a Liberal" tells how/why this happened:

https://www.amazon.com/Conscience-Liberal-Paul-Krugman/dp/03...

I'm conservative in general, but I agreed with Bernie Sanders on (at least) 3 issues and have a 4th bone to pick with USA politics:

1) Privacy is paramount; the government should stay out of our lives as much as possible. "Terrorism" is no excuse for a government to monitor its citizens.

2) Taxes must be severely increased on the wealthy. "Death taxes" must be restored and income taxes raised on the wealthy. To do otherwise creates a situation where wealth accumulates to individuals w/o bound.

3) corporations must not be allowed the rights of persons. Campaign finance reform must occur and the power of special interests must be cut.

Until we restore heavy estate taxes ("death taxes"), income taxes, and reduce the political power of corporations as well, the USA will continue its long slide toward an economy like Mexico's, where there are only the poor and the rich, and no middle class.

Finally (something Sanders would likely avoid):

4) as part of (3), non-profit corporations and all foundations, public or private, (churches, foundations, organizations, etc.) should be both taxed and audited. Today they're little more than an end-run around taxation. They are too powerful politically. They're controlled by their founders and their families. They are economically inefficient - releasing their resources (by breakup, taxation, etc.) would boost the economy greatly.

During the Middle Ages the British and French took possession of the (then) Roman Catholic Church's lands, possessions and clergy. After all, the Church _was_ meddling in the political, and not the spiritual, realm. I think its time for the USA to do the same:

"Dechristianization of France during the French Revolution":

https://www.google.com/url?url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

"English Reformation - Wikipedia":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Reformation#Actions_by...

The exact

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