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Comment by charliea0 | Hacker News Reader

I’d be interested to see how this broke down by income decile. My impression is that spending usually expands to meet income. Americans have a lot of access to short-term credit and use that to cover unexpected expenses.

Unfortunately, it looks like a bunch of Americans end up carrying debt month to month.

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There is a lot of elasticity in American expenses, per both US BLS and Federal Reserve studies. The percentage of households that struggle with necessary expenses is ~12%. That is still a large number but a lot more plausible. I would take “struggling to make ends meet” with a large grain of salt.

The 38.5% threshold in the article is perhaps not coincidentally right around the percentile where Americans have excess income even after accounting for all ordinary lifestyle expenses (iPhones, nice cars, etc). The median US household has ~$12,000/year in income leftover after all of these expenses.

That's the elephant in the room. There's a lot of people who struggle to sustain a bourgeois lifestyle. However for every American like that, there's an immigrant living in an expensive city making minimum wage who somehow manages to send 50% of their income back to old country.

Is that true? Or is this just hyperbole?

It might be true in isolation (and for more middle incomes), but real income and especially buying power has declined a lot in the lower half of the population.

It seems to be mostly people who had a chance to accumulate wealth during an economic boom that go on these "just cut the avocado toast" prescriptive rants.

Perhaps, but I think that the definition of bourgeois lifestyle has expanded to include those who simply have 2 children, rent a sfh and perhaps retire at some point.

It has only expanded to mean that in the couple of most expensive cities to live in in the world.

And, really, having a single family home in, say, the middle of new york city IS a marker of wealth. You're displacing however many people could live there if there were apartments.

A single family home can be an apartment. It's a _home_ not necessarily a house. Just like a 600 sqft studio in Manhattan can be a "mansion" because it is over a million dollars.

Many people living in New York rent, with no ability to afford a down payment to own. The maker of wealth is not them.

Generally speaking, at least with in realty, a single family home is a term used to mean a specific thing.

Specifically, a single-family home has no shared property but is built on its own parcel of land. Additionally it can have no common-walls.

So townhomes and apartments do not count.

This is also called a detached-home in some places.

And based on the context from the earlier post, I'm pretty sure what they meant, but if jfghi comes back and clarifies, I'll withdraw my statement. I don't think anyone thinks renting an apartment is bourgeoisie. However, renting a detached-home in the middle of Manhattan would definitely qualify.

Edit, including a source from realtor.com about their definition:

https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/what-is-a-single-family-h...

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