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Comment by yogthos | Hacker News Reader

US on the whole is also fairly poor. For example, 40% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck can't afford an unexpected 400 dollar expense. And China has far better support for the poor than US with things like healthcare, education, and public transit.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-...

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Living paycheck to payckeck with a new phone every 2 years, a new car lease upgrade every 5, a mortgage on a 3 bedroom house, and eating out 4 times a week, and 1000 TV channels is hardly what someone would consider 'poor.' It's just sustainably stressful and largely optional. This is why I feel the paycheck-to-paycheck metric/rhetoric is obnoxious, on 100k a year I can live paycheck-to-paycheck if I so desire, on 20k a year I can live at 75% of my means and save 400$+ as well. People's personal choices are not a comment on the economy, they're a comment on the fiscal education system. I personally save about 33% of my paycheck on 32k per year in one of the top 10 most expensive global cities.

Look at health outcomes, us has a declining life expectancy, china has almost caught up and will probably overtake soon. Is that just fiscal education?

I said that not having 400$ is a failure of fiscal planning and doesn't indicate that the population is poor.

Declining life expectancy is not an indication that the population is poor either. Consider that obesity, which is linked to higher mortality rates, did not become an issue until the 1900s in countries that passed wealth thresholds allowing such a problem at scale. Similarly with allergies, car crash fatalities, lead poisoning in paint, any number of life-shortening effects come from wealth in a society and are counterbalanced by improving health care levels.

I was with you on car crashes & lead paint, but how do allergies come from a wealthy society? Or do you mean that only in a wealthy society are there resources/medical infrastructure available to diagnose them?

It would be a reference to the hygiene hypothesis, that being too "clean" leads to lack of exposure to things we evolved to encounter in the environment (worms mostly) which causes the immune system to go a bit wrong, causing allergies and autoimmune conditions.

Ah, okay. I've heard that before but thought it was basically fringe science. My assumption has simply been that allergies always existed like this, but those with more severe ones died off very young and the concept of "allergy" somewhat non existent. I'll admit the possibility though, ever if I'm very reluctant to lump it together with more obvious wealth-associatated issues.

I would expect that declining life expectancy is over-represented in the poorest stratum of society (but I will look this up to be sure). It is not going to be rich kids getting anaphylaxis that are making up the numbers. Even obesity prevalence will be a function of the SES of the individual within the population. Same with drug abuse etc, etc. If these things are getting worse while economic indicators for the country overall are positive, then it shows that inequality within the country is getting worse in real ways.

> Is that just fiscal education?

Given how small the US decline is, were China to stop the massive supplies of fentanyl they're intentionally allowing to pour into the US, that decline would probably arrest. The Chinese fentanyl is killing people at a young age, which hammers the life expectancy calculations.

Remind me how China feels about what was done to them in the Opium Wars.

The US isn't alone in this however. Britain is starting to see declining life expectancies. Is China better off than Britain? It's laughable.

"UK life expectancy drops while other western countries improve"

https://www.nhs.uk/news/medical-practice/uk-life-expectancy-...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/mar/07/life-expecta...

Life expectancy for Asian Americans is 87 years. That’s about a decade longer than China, and longer than Singapore, Japan, etc.

>US on the whole is also fairly poor.

Relative to whom exactly? Us engineers posting on HN? I'm not making light of anyone's circumstances here, but living paycheck to paycheck doesn't make you poor, and billions of people around the world would love to be that "poor" (and many of them live in China.) Very different definitions of "poor".

Dude, people in your country die regularly because they can't afford basic medicine like insulin or have an easily treatable medical condition.

"Dude", you obviously just don't want your incomplete world view challenged. Details matter here. Yes, Flint MI has a drinking water problem and it's deplorable. That doesn't generalize to the rest of the nation. Health Care is an issue as well. Our low income citizens have coverage problems and it's an issue being debated at the highest levels currently. If you care to dig further, you'd also find that we have better health outcomes for those who are covered than does most of the world. It's a complex issue, but just like your Flint comment, it doesn't generalize to "most people in the US are poor".

I'm fine with have a reasoned discussion, but you don't seem to want that, so you're not worth talking to.

I mean US income inequality is highest level ever recorded, but sure I'm the one who's unreasonable here.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/income-inequ...

You have no idea. I've been to poor parts of China. People heat themselves with the coals of wood-fired stove which they used to cook meals. I once saw a family that owned a government subsidized washing machine. They couldn't afford the electricity to operate the machine, so they use the tumbler to store household items.

Have you been to Flint where there's no drinking water?

You're making an incorrect generalization about a large country by misleadingly citing isolated examples which seem to support your point once you realize that you can't back your initial argument up in a meaningful way. You may as well be arguing that England is a poor country because London has a low income neighborhood or two. Stop grasping at straws.

There's nothing misleading about it. One percent of the population in US owns more than half the wealth in the country. Majority of the population lives in impoverished conditions without access to basic needs such as public transit, healthcare, or education. This is a well documented fact, and if you think I'm grasping at straws here's you're just utterly ignorant.

>Majority of the population lives in impoverished conditions without access to basic needs such as public transit, healthcare, or education

Where are you coming up with this nonsense? Let's see the numbers.

>This is a well documented fact

Oh, well if you say so then.

>Where are you coming up with this nonsense? Let's see the numbers.

Where do you think all the people working in Amazon gulags come from exactly. You think people work 12 hours shifts pissing in bottles because they enjoy it.

>Oh, well if you say so then.

It's like you're too stupid to use Google or something. Here you go little buddy:

>Here's another number that may surprise you – to be in the top half (50%) of all earners you need to earn more than $29,999.99 a year. The number of people earning less than $30,000 accounts for 48.06% of the population.

https://wallethacks.com/average-median-income-in-america/

here's another simple chart you might be able to comprehend https://i.redd.it/pg5w8ws3b0o31.jpg

I don't think "living paycheck to paycheck" is a good metric for quality of life since there can be a large cultural influence.

With the median income in the US being 5x higher, I imagine $400 of unexpected expenses would be much worse for a Chinese citizen, assuming they don't have something saved up of course.

> 40% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck can't afford an unexpected 400 dollar expense

The 40% claim (regarding N% of Americans that can't afford a sudden ~$400-$500 expense) is entirely fraudulent, and repeated ad nauseam as an easy - and ignorant - hit on the US.

The real number is around 12%-14% at worst. The routine Fed survey that most people reference (while ignoring what the Fed actually said) makes this clear. Numerous well-written articles have been posted over the last several years pointing out the fraudulent nature of the claim.

Here's the money line from the Fed that buries this lie:

"The Fed also asks respondents how a $400 emergency expense that they had to pay would affect their ability to pay their other bills. Eighty-five percent report that they would still be able to pay all their bills. Only 14% say that the emergency expense would result in their not being able to pay some bills."

A Bloomberg writer recently demolished it as well:

> The question comes from the annual “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households” by the Federal Reserve. The report finds, in 2018, that 61% of adults would cover a $400 unexpected expense using cash (or its equivalent).

Note: that's the origination of the error. The propagandists then remove the 61% and magically claim that everyone left (~40%) can't cover the expense.

> Instead, as the Fed report makes clear, though “the remaining 4 in 10 adults” “would have more difficulty covering such an expense,” many of them would be able to make it work by carrying a credit card balance or borrowing from friends and family.

> The report states: “Twelve percent of adults would be unable to pay the expense by any means.”

> The report also goes out of its way to make clear that some of the 39% who wouldn’t use cash might still have $400 in the bank: “It is possible that some would choose to borrow even if they had $400 available, preserving their cash as a buffer for other expenses.” In a footnote, the report even cites a 2016 study finding that 76 percent of households had $400 in liquid assets, even after taking into account monthly expenses.

> The common misinterpretation of this finding in the study is particularly strange in light of two other questions on the same survey. The Fed asks respondents whether they are able to pay all of their bills in full. Only 17% say they can’t pay some bills. Again, 17%, not 39%."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/report-economic-...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/04/middle-class-doing-ok...

https://www.cato.org/blog/it-true-40-americans-cant-handle-4...

I don’t understand how you’re well sourced comment is being downvoted.

If the definition of afford was "to manage to bear without serious detriment," then the 40% claim may have some merit if taking out the $400 in liquid assets was considered a serious detriment. In my experience, Fed figures are not good at accounting for the fluctuations in monthly spending of "real world" families. They expect monthly spending to stay static on a monthly basis throughout the entire year.

There's also that the other cases rely on being indebted, which means that they cannot afford it with their current means. Sure they can cover expenses, but the example of the debt-adverse Germans wouldn't see it as being able to afford them.

> US on the whole is also fairly poor.

No, its rich but insecure. That's not the name thing as poor, though it can feel like it.

Some reports also say families don't save money because there is insurance if you can't pay the expensive healthcare.

Don't know if it's true though.

I don't quite get this statement. Insurance generally doesn't trigger on "if you can't pay", it's so you don't have to pay to begin with. Savings don't play into it, if you have insurance coverage there is no need to save money, it's effectively already paid for.

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