Wage growth has flatlined for 30+ years!
What happened to the middle class and the American dream? There it is.
What happened to the middle class and the American dream? There it is.
Putting it that way is very misleading, though. The "total compensation" has increased only because health care costs have increased massively, and health insurance has increased to cover it. (Or vice versa; causality's tricky in a system like this, and there are definitely feedback loops.)
One could also argue that those drugs should be cheaper, but without the profit motive they likely wouldn't have been developed in the first place. And socialized funding of drug development hasn't worked out well either.
Ghouls have managed to privatize the profits, but every drug, technique and device ever developed is standing on the shoulders of giant public funding.
0.1% of the population is getting richer and 95% of the population is getting poorer.
The middle class is quickly disappearing, the low-income class is growing fast.
Do you have any data to support this? Fed data shows household wealth doubling for the bottom 50%, just since 2008. Households in the 50-90th percentiles also nearly doubled.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
I went years post Obama care passing where I would be working 75 hours a week but with no healthcare because each job would cut me off at 38.5 hours on the dot. Managers would walk out and escort you to the time clock if you were coming up on full time hours
The problem is that now many workers are paying more and actually getting less. They're essentially subsidizing healthcare for the indigent and patients with expensive chronic conditions. Personally I think those subsidies ought to be funded by progressive income taxes, but that's a matter of debate.
You are gonna have to cite some sources for this because my understanding is that total federal taxes is the majority of total taxes, if only by a slim margin.
The government is very involved in restricting the supply side of healthcare.
The money that pushes this regulatory capture comes largely from health insurance companies, which might be the most vile industry I'm obligated to interact with on a regular basis. This is an industry that for a long period of time would refuse to cover health conditions simply because you were born with them.
Go all public and expand Medicare and move to a single-payer system like Canada and the UK. Or go all private by killing Medicare altogether, fixing Medicaid as a public backstop, and heavily regulating pricing and doctors' salaries and insurance premiums like Germany and Switzerland. But anything is more humane than the weird mix the US has come up with.
Citation needed.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america...
The US has the 5th highest median income in the world, so I don't think mass exodus is likely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
This is a common trope but only kinda-sorta true.
It's definitely true that there is no sign of mass exodus. Net immigration number remain positive (3% ish) but they are well below historic highs, and currently declining YoY. See e.g. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/net-...
It's interesting I think that per capita Canada (e.g. another "new world" immigration target) has fairly consistently been much higher, and is currently near 2x. The approx 10x population size dwarfs this in total numbers though (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/net-migrati...)
It seems that until you get a green card, the state barely tolerates your presence.
So nothing to do with the fundamentals, for me anyway.
I've actually heard good things about the AU system too - apparently Canada considers AU&NZ their biggest competition in attracting immigrants.
That seems to be pretty variable; I've met people on both sides of that border that decided against the other one for "societal issues" of various types.
It's not all about income, and it's really as simple as that. IIRC marginal tax rates in some parts of US are higher than some parts of Canada. So, as usual, it depends.
On average I don't think you are wrong, btw - but it's hardly cut and dried.
Probably obvious, but : and it's really not as simple as that.
And good luck even getting to that point. If you have a family, you'll have to live without them for upwards of 10 years while you work alone in the US waiting for your number to come up in the lottery.
It's got to be a mix of both, no?
> that my original claim isn't just "kinda sorta true" but rather, "strictly true".
I don't think we are really disagreeing. My point was that the common trope about US being the only place everyone wants to go has never really been true, but that especially by net amounts, it has been and remains a popular immigration target, albeit not as much as it has in the past.
Not as far as I can tell. The rate of immigration is the lesser of “how many people are willing to migrates the host country” and “how many migrants the host country will accept” and I would be shocked if the latter number was not many multiples of the former number.
> My point was that the common trope about US being the only place everyone wants to go has never really been true
I’ve heard some outlandish things under the rubric of American exceptionalism, but I’ve never once heard anyone—not even my most nationalistic acquaintances nor Fox News/etc—say that the US was the only place anyone wants to go. Who are the people who believe/espouse this?
It depends a bit if you have absolute quotas, or thresholds/scoring.
> some outlandish things under the rubric of American exceptionalism,
I was unclear, apologies. The idea isn't that nobody goes anywhere else, obviously. The idea, which I have heard many times in the US, is that once someone has decided to immigrate, all else being equal they would obviously choose the US. Clearly most times all else isn't equal; but it also doesn't seem to be true...
Fair enough, but even still I’ve never heard that even among “Fuck yeah, ‘merica” types.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/top...
America still has more to offer than a lot of the world, but it's not some shining peak in a valley of despair - it's more "middle of the table, some good, some bad". If you're here already, it's easy to look out, see, and decide to move where it's better, if you can.
Me ? I'm a Brit, been living here for the last almost two decades. I came here for the money and the weather, nothing more. Recently, the weather is a bit crap; the money's still good, but once I get to where I can FIRE, I'm out of this country. There's plenty of places better.
Arguably the American Dream is very much intact, it's just that it's mostly brown & yellow people achieving it. I have a lot of friends who left their home country because there were no opportunities for them there, and now have the suburban house with a yard, 2 kids, white picket fence, neighborhood Trick'or'Treaters, good savings, and vacations whenever they need a break. They work very hard for what they have, which has always been part of the American Dream, but they get a good life in exchange for it.
1. People leave worse places (by some metric, usually poverty or opportunity) to come to US since its big and rich and full of potential. That is why immigrants come here. Its the richest big nation with lots of jobs. You can try to move to china or brazil or india which have massive populations, but the jobs pay better here. You can move to Switzerland or some EU nations that have higher avg salary, but the COL is high and immigration is even harder with less lucrative job openings available.
2. People leaving aren't the immigrants who arrived (not including returning to old country). People who "have the american dream of leaving" are the middle class white kids who don't see their own growth into top 10% of society (because they perceive their social mobility decreasing or gone), and see the exploding debt and health costs across america (often they haven't experienced directly), so they want to move to a socialized nation and "free healthcare". This is almost always a white euro nation, not eg. china or inida. Do they move? Not always.
TLDR. People still want to move to america, but some americans are basically chasing some ideal/privilege they think they can get better elsewhere.
Economic opportunities in america are great if you're willing to work your ass off and smartly. Smartly is the keyword to avoiding exploitation. That said, the wages here are way higher than in other countries. Here in Colombia, the minimum wage comes out to around $250/month. People here don't have much choice given the language barrier and lack of skills for the international market. Their skillset and ability to endure absolute crap gives them an edge when they immigrate to the US and get paid relatively descent wages for their work.
Now I'm on the other end. I have skills as a software engineer, fluency in english and connections. Those are all things I can take with me to maintain the smae wage I'd be making in america in a country where the average wage is a fraction of what I make. Thus I get to live like a king.
TLDR: both sides are moving to maximize their living potential and they increase for different reasons.
TL;DR: many of these economic problems are tied to disconnecting the currency from gold, which screws up interest rates and incentives throughout the economy.
By tied, you really mean correlated. There is at minimum no consensus on the idea that this was causal.