Comment by class3shock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by class3shock | Hacker News Reader

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Their methodology produces results that are not representative of the economic situation of average american families.

The average household income is 80k(ish) the average house is 420k(ish)

In Bethlehem, PA (a fairly middle of the road place tax wise) that means $5050 take home pay a month and a mortgage payment (FHA 3.5 down, 6.7 interest) of $2650 a month. That is more than half your pay just on a mortgage, not pmi, not insurance, not utilities, not anything else. Do this calculation across the country with localized numbers, do it with rent instead. Add a car and insurance for it into the mix. Then try adding in health insurance, groceries, etc. You are going to find that the numbers result in average people being squeezed and guess what? That lines up with peoples actual experience.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paycheck-to-paycheck-definition...

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2024/amid-a-resilient...

My interpretation of this is that pay has not kept up with inflation.

Edited to be less witty

There was a graphic in John Kings (CNN). Segment that showed a vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation. This is just extremely real for the 5k(ish) takehome pay guy. I noticed the 4.5 ish $ eggs and milk.

The overall situation of housing and college costs have been increasing for a while this last round of inflation really was a big part of the last straw.

>There was a graphic in John Kings (CNN). Segment that showed a vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation.

Source? Is this simply because rural counties are doing worse than urbanized counties, and there are more rural counties than urbanized counties, such that if you don't account for population you'll come to the conclusion that "vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation", even though that's not true for the country as a whole?

You responded to a statement about change by talking about state. Both things are true: that average people have it better and that they have it hard.

A $2650 mortgage in Bethlehem PA is a very, very big house. You can’t apply the average mortgage price to a place where you can get a 2000 sqft house for under $200K. Additionally Bethlehem PA is an above average area for PA when it comes to affluence.

The median price per square foot in the US is $226[0]. The insanely economically depressed rust belt area where I was born has a median price over $150 per square foot (you do _not_ want to live there). I suspect your mental model of housing prices is anchored in the past when the world has moved on.

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDLISPRIPERSQUFEEUS

Okay, but we were not talking about the median house, we are talking about Bethlehem, PA. I got my data by going to Zillow and seeing that there are many 10s of houses near the 2K sqft mark that cost around $200k. You can do the same yourself.

Pennsylvania did not experience the same uplift in housing prices in 2020-2022 that much of the rest of the nation did as people are net leaving the state.

PA is actually one of the places least affected by inflation not just in the US but in the world.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDLISPRIPERSQUFEE10900

The median home in the Bethlehem, PA core based statistical area costs $200 per square foot in October 2024. In October 2019, it cost $120 per square foot.

I'm sure you can find homes that list for half the cost per square foot just as well as someone could find homes that list for double the cost per square foot. That's why the median is useful – and it has increased 66% over the last five years.

Just fyi, I just used it for a location for a online calculator to grab tax for because PA is fairly middle of the road in taxes. If you want to do the math for Bethlehem PA specifically look up the average house sale price and the average income and take a look.

The question is supposedly whether things are better or worse, not whether they're "good enough" in some abstract way.

If you think things aren't good enough for an average person in one of the statistically best periods a capitalist economy has ever seen, there are redistributive alternatives. That doesn't seem to be what Trump voters are expecting. Instead there seems to be a nostalgia for past better times, which isn't really explained by "people are squeezed" based on math that would almost certainly have worked out just as tightly ten years ago.

Something else is going on. I don't claim to have a full explanation but none of the attempts to "fix" BLS statistics that I've seen have been more persuasive than this.

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