Household income surged in April despite record unemployment | Hacker News Reader

Household income surged in April despite record unemployment

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38 pointsjoeyespo30 comments

It's pretty sad that $600-$900 a week is a massive improvement for most people.

With state benefits and $1200 its nearly $45k a year, which is quite a bit more than $15 an hour. Its no wonder people have more money given around 30 million Americans make <$10 an hour. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/11/05/making-more... (older source, but I am sure its in the ball park)

I am curious how long until US congress starts blaming anyone who is unemployed for "being lazy", and stop providing financial assistance, or only provides the bare minimum $7.25 an hour.

For those of us who live in high cost of living areas, its easy to forget just how cheap most of the US is: the median mortgage payment in the US is $1100.month (2017 data) [0]. That's 151 minimum wage hours, or about a month of ~40 hour weeks (before taxes, which are very low at that income level). So, a household with two minimum wage earners probably would struggle to afford the median mortgage, but remember half of mortgages are less than that.

This is not me attempting to justify the current minimum wage - I think it should come up. I just think many on this site live in areas where renting a small 1 bedroom apartment is more expensive than $1100/month, or even significantly more than that, much less owning a home.

[0] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/data/interactive...

The price of real estate in an area is set pretty exactly to the level of productivity (i.e. what kinds of jobs you can hold) in that area.

So yeah, it all “works out” in that it doesn’t matter if the median person is producing $10 or $15 or $2000 worth of value per hour. The median person will always be “barely making it” given what they must spend to have access to jobs in which they can produce that much value. Look at Palo Alto’s consideration of housing welfare for people earning $150k - $250k/yr.

Inequality grows as more people max out their individual productive potential, but real estate prices keep rising because the few hyper-productive peoples’ ceilings have not been hit yet.

This doesn't need to happen, but this is the logical conclusion when we ensure most of the housing market is controlled by landlords rather than owned directly by the people living there. Also, when you turn housing into an investment vehicle. Also, remove any and all public housing alternatives. Also fail to build enough housing to create competition in the housing market. Also demolish housing stock serving poorer residents. Also fail to provide the transportation network to make transit from the suburbs cheap and easy. Also concentrate a bunch of upper-middle-class people in an area suffering from all of the above problems.

> Palo Alto’s consideration of housing welfare for people earning $150k - $250k/yr.

This sounds like an exaggeration, this 2020 article puts "low income" housing at a household income of less than ~$70k: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/01/17/palo-alto-boo...

My experience in looking into this in the past is that there are maybe tens of units of this sort in development at any given time, orders of magnitude less than the number of people who would qualify. With wait lists easily exceeding 10 years, for all practical purposes these units dont exist.

I only remember this from when I was living in Palo Alto: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/22/250k-per-year-s...

Wasn’t able to quickly find what the actual current number is (or if it just varies by development). But yes, obviously qualifying on even $70k would sound insane in most of the country. The point is that higher productivity = higher rent = real lifestyle gains that are nowhere near proportional to real productivity gains.

In San Francisco, San Mateo, and in Marin households making $117,000 would actually qualify to live in low-income housing projects

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/06/26/hud-117000-low-...

The price of real estate is set to pretty nearly the salary of two people. The college educated live in different sections of the city from the high school educated. In nearly all instances families survive on two incomes.

> I am curious how long until US congress starts blaming anyone who is unemployed for "being lazy", and stop providing financial assistance, or only provides the bare minimum $7.25 an hour.

That sentiment was certainly there from the start, several were talking about how they need to de-rate the benefits based on income.

There's a time limit on the additional federal funds for unemployment insurance, it runs out at the end of July.

Anecdotally, I run a website for a specific hobby that's monetized by Amazon affiliate program. I saw holiday season-like traffic and revenues in April (before Amazon cut the commission rate).

Was thr strangest thing because I had already assumed that my revenue from Amazon this year would be drastically lower. But so far, I'm up nearly 100% YoY

My father runs a Woodcraft franchise, and the past few months have been significantly better than average for him. Since people aren't spending much time and money on activities and dining out, they are investing some of that in hobbies they can do at home instead.

To add another data point, I got into hydroponics and indoor gardening since I was sitting at home all day, and I guess a lot of other people did too. Everything is sold out everywhere. Seeds, nutrients, even just potting soil is harder to come by. I tried to order some seed potatoes last week to try a hydroponic grow of them and almost every supplier is completely sold out. I found one seller that had 2/100 of their products in stock, but won't ship until mid-August.

Yeah. Another point: my wife fosters kittens for the local animal shelter and almost all of the shelters are just straight up out of adoptable animals. Everyone is getting pets now.

I’m getting into electronics and microcontrollers for exactly that reason. Can’t go out, might as well do something painstaking, expensive, and pointless!

>That’s because of government stimulus benefits, both the $1,200 checks that went out to most people and, even more importantly, the $600-a-week increase in unemployment insurance benefits ... But the message of this data is that, on the whole, it worked.

It sort of worked, but unfortunately the dialog has centered on the talking point that "people are making more not working than they could by working."

It's temporarily true for a lot of people suddenly out of work that weren't making a whole lot to begin with.

Now that it's ending soon things are about to get much worse for everyone.

Note this was reported on May 29, 2020 for data in the April calendar month.

It's likely that a good proportion of households got their one-time $1200 federal check in the April timeframe. I'm more interested to see how much of a cliff happened after April.

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