1 in 4 Americans are jobless or earning poverty-level wages, new study finds

Too bad people are more focused on social identities than poverty. If the unrest was more about poverty there would be a lot more people involved, and people would have a harder time painting it as thing for restless black people. If the demonstrations were about poverty, and every group could see “people who look just like me” I bet there would be more success.

Unemployments statistics also differ heavily on what the specific statistic consider unemployment to be.

Furthermore income isn’t everything. If wealth inequality wasn’t so great than even those unemployed would be able to weather C19 must more comfortably.

My understanding is that it's all the deductions that make the US system on the whole quite regressive.

In any case US taxpayers don't appear to be getting good value for their money.

They do have a pretty insane military though...

The Economist article is paywalled so I can't read beyond the intro. But the headline is intriguing: "gov't spending is not." That seems to be me to be the crux of it; Canada's tax system isn't terribly effective and we've been running deficits for seemingly forever, but at least all that debt is on the whole focused on things like health and education; while the US has an absolutely huge debt that seems to produce little of value for its population.

EDIT: I'll add that Canada is no worker's paradise. Inequality here is still very pronounced, and the gov't is also involved in all sorts of stupid subsidies on failing industries, and seems unable to effectively build new infrastructure. And our housing market just gets more and more irrational every year.

I was astonished to discover earlier in my career, after a pay raise, that I got to stop paying FICA at a certain point. I didn't even realize there was an upper limit. It's a tax that only applies to "lower" income workers. Highly regressive.

Also, US income taxes are only nominally progressive. There are so many loopholes that very wealthy people (most infamously the POTUS) can end up paying no taxes whatsoever. Tax dodging is a science and an art. Didn't Warren Buffett say he paid a lower rate than his secretary?

This is a common misunderstanding of how taxes work, or specifically what refunds mean. Getting a refund does not mean you paid zero or negative tax. Getting a refund simply means that you had more tax withheld than you should have. The tax withheld from your regular paycheck is not authoritative, it's just a prepayment of your estimated tax bill for the year, and it is almost always slightly inaccurate.

You can see this for yourself assuming you earn above the poverty line. Your tax return has three fields related to this: total tax withheld, total taxable income, and the tax owed given your taxable income. Getting a refund just means the tax withheld is greater than the tax owed. The total tax owed on your tax return is the tax you actually paid for the year, and for the vast majority of people it is >$0 even if they get a refund. In fact, the approximate tax paid on the median US household income (~$68k) would be ~$13k (assuming the household files a joint married return) which is decidedly non-zero.

What income range do you define as middle class? And What's lower class in the US income wise?

Also for a bit of context what government services do people receive welfare for in the US? What are the big sercices that are driving those net negative tax payments?

The HN guidelines [1] mention:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's important to understand that the value of the unemployment rate is not the absolute number but its change over time.

We also have other metrics published alongside the unemployment rate, like labor participation.

Another route, similar to the one in this study, may be considering people who are actively searching for work and where the household income is below a certain threshold (likely based upon the composition of the family).

Is it meaningless? Isn't it important to get as accurate an assessment as possible of the current situation? Arguably that's even more important than historical comparisons.

> The majority of what you term as “hopeless” is seniors that are let go and eventually decide to retire rather than entering the work force at wages less than they earned previously.

Is there a citation for this? Millions of people are newly out of work now as a result of pandemic-related shutdowns, so it seems highly unlikely that primarily seniors are affected by an inability to find work.

The people in power always use the most optimistic measures and the people who want power always use the most pessimistic measures. I'd personally argue the more pessimistic measures are closer to reality, as would many others. BLS found a way to serve us and the people in power, simultaneously, without getting themselves replaced. They didn't just do an ultra-important, thankless job, they also found a way to square a political circle in order to do it. I have nothing but respect for them.

The way the U.S. is structured it's as if the only route to success is becoming a professional basketball player in the NBA. Oh, you don't happen to be extra-tall or able to shoot a basket? You must not be working hard enough.

And that leads to real political risks: no matter what they will be tarred with the brush of their most radical element, while the radicals feel that they aren't being listened to. As a sibling comment to yours put it, the party is "largely funded by the same people" as their opponents.

So they're unable to put forward a radical program, and seem to get little traction on incremental changes. That, I believe, manifests as what the OP thinks of as "unable to focus".

Common ground can be found with everyone. I've found you can get those who hate capitalism to suggest capitalist ideas. I've found you can get those who hate socialism to suggest socialist ideas, especially around the ideas of safety nets regarding children, cancer and other health concerns.

Statistical measures of poverty are set in terms of being able to afford the basic necessities of life, such as food, housing, medical care, transport, education and communications. Relative standing is irrelevant.

Further, having 10 times more income (or wealth) than subsistence farmer in sub-Saharan Africa is meaningless if your cost of living is 1000 times higher than that of a subsistence farmer in sub-Saharan Africa. Poor Americans aren't paying sub-Saharan African prices; they're paying American prices, and that means their income does not go very far.

FWIW, that's only true in America, which is only 5% of the world's population.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world have it much better.

Those kings lacked modern luxuries, to be sure. They even lacked most modern comforts. Those kings of the past did not have to worry about being homeless and were unlikely to worry about putting food on the table. When it comes to the essentials, their needs were met and (for the most part) they did not have to concern themselves with losing it due to their economic position. While they may be concerned with losing those essentials due to the politics of the era, that is something entirely different.

Edit: for clarity.

For example, owning a functioning automobile was a huge luxury only for the rich 100 years ago.

For another example, the terms of the debate have shifted. It used to be about the objective state of the poor people. Today it is less about that and more about the subjective state of poor people relative to the state of wealthy people, i.e. "inequality".

A stupid person will fall for get rich quick schemes. A stupid person will believe grinding it out at a job they hate will eventually lead to something better. A stupid person will lack the will to try hard enough to better themselves.

Sorry, what? I must've missed this.