Student Loans. You need to make as much money as a doctor to afford housing. So did everyone become a doctor in the past 10 years?
Personal Auto Loans, although this seems rather localized.
Business Loans used for stock buy-backs, so executives could pay themselves a nice bonus. Can some of these businesses really pay back those loans?
Municipal bonds used for funding construction in areas with no economical viability.
Only in a handful of cities.
Also, the income difference is less than a factor of two for the same person. 57% of people in San Francisco have a college degree, versus 45% of people in Kansas City. So part of the difference in median income is due to the difference in education, not the difference in local salaries.
Plenty of people who aren't doctors can make doctor money now. Just look at tech.
> Plenty
Plenty of tech folks make north of six-figures and often do better than most, but neurosurgeons make $800k, and plenty of mid-level medical types can pull $300K+. I personally know a dentist making "in the ballpark of 400" (his words) in the Washington DC 'burbs.
There are certainly IT/CS gigs paying north of $600K -- they're discussed all the time here on HN -- but those don't really exist outside of SV and maybe a handful of other areas, and generally require a pedigree that, while not a Med School, are still fairly non-trivial.
Your ITT-Tech trained Active Directory Admin isn't going to make anything near GP or Dermatologist money -- most tech, even with real degrees and certs, wont.
Lots of doctors make under $200k. I would say the majority do, because the majority don't own their own practices (partly nor in whole). Most doctors in the US are just salaried internists.
I think more than 10% of SWE with experience in the US are making that much or more when you account for compensation that is not pure salary.
I live in a big US city. We have one large tech employer which pays engineers ~125-150k (they max out at 200k for principals in specialized areas). At almost every other company in town, the going salary for a developer is 80-100k.
The latter type of job is far more representative of engineering jobs in the country. We told everyone "go do STEM and make bank at Google!" Meanwhile there aren't enough of those top-end jobs to go around, and a lot of folks who didn't go to a name-brand university or have friends in the right places work for (comparatively) little money.
An Anesthesiologist makes over $250,000 annually. Try making that as a senior tech.
A Physician’s Assistant makes over $170,000 annually. Easily beating an average senior software engineer. And they’re not even medical doctors.
Nurses make over $125,000 easily, especially with their mandatory overtime schedules baked into their union agreement.
And here’s the kicker: because women make up a larger share of medical professionals, then you have a situation where doctors end up marrying other doctors or nurses. Which is good for them, but guess what they do? They buy up the expensive houses. And then they buy their second or third houses, thus pricing normal people out of that also.
Maybe in California, but most of the US is not union and most nurses do not make anywhere close to this. $30-40/hr is much more typical. That salary is far about the top 10% of nursing salaries (which is $106k).
That’s not a thing. The debt taken on for a stock buyback would depress the stock price as much as the purchase would increase the price.