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Comment by throwaway27448 | Hacker News Reader

Are we the first state to openly care more about our rich than the people who live here?

No, but historically speaking, the societies that operate this way tend to invite revolution

Bankruptcy won't even discharge the kind of debt many/most of the lower-middle class fall broke upon. Alimony, child support, student loans, "restitution."

Bankruptcy at this point is just a way to signal to creditors not to lend more money to this individual. As you said alimony, child support, student loans, restitution are a must so the filing simply is a formal notice that "every penny this person ever earns is already earmarked, heed this warning before lending"

It's quite convenient though that it actually discharges the kind of debts rich people and businesses are more likely to accrue, while not discharging the kind of debts the middle/lower classes are likely to accrue when they're unable to pay them.

Agree. Also convenient that the warning I mentioned benefits those in the business of extending credit

This claim is simply false. The cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. has been extensively studied and absolutely none of the criteria you list comes even close to the number 1 reason that people in lower or middle class declare bankruptcy: medical bills.

What? You mean to tell me people file bankruptcy over the kinds of debt they can actually discharge and less so over the kinds of debt they can't?

That doesn't prove anything other than people filing bankruptcy aren't morons.

If the only thing you could discharge were gambling debts, there would be an equally specious claim that people aren't going broke over medical debt because 80% of bankruptcies cite gambling debts as the cause.

I'm not trying to prove anything. I am pointing out that your claim about the cause of many/most lower and middle class people's bankruptcy is false.

I did not make that claim. I made the following:

  Bankruptcy won't even discharge the kind of debt many/most of the lower-middle class fall broke upon.

The whole point was that bankruptcy wasn't a remedy discharging these forms of going broke. It's unsurprising the bankruptcy data leans towards a 'cause' that will actually discharge their debt, otherwise the incentive for a broke person to file bankruptcy is lowered.

Most of the lower-middle class do not fall broke upon the things you listed.

Looks like there's equivocation about "bankrupt" and "broke". To me you can be broke without going through the legal bankruptcy process.

They never made that claim.

This claim is false:

>Bankruptcy won't even discharge the kind of debt many/most of the lower-middle class fall broke upon.

Most of the lower-middle class do not go broke upon the listed criteria.

Average medical debt per person in 2020 was $430 per [0].

By comparison, in year 2006, there was 2.55B$ in arrears in my state of Arizona when it had ~5.5 million people, or an average of $463 per person. Not even adjusted for inflation. [1]

If you set the bar at medical debt, which you seem to have, it seems to have passed it on child support alone. And that is with a quite uncharitable handicap against me, as I'm comparing the 2006 child arrears numbers I found against 2020 dollars of medical debt.

[0]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8293024/

[1]https://www.opnff.net/Files/Admin/Assessing%20Child%20Suppor...

No, it isn’t that well studied; and I’d be interested to see your source and confirm that it doesn’t trace back to a study that says something more like “A new study from academic researchers found that 66.5 percent of all bankruptcies were tied to medical issues —either because of high costs for care or time out of work”. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most...)

What restitution is the average american on the hook for these days?

Kind of. I want to yes, but its not directly how this works or how it sounds. A large increase in poverty or loss of property is insufficient to stoke revolution on its own. The increase of poverty in favor of the rich devastates the economy for multiple reasons, such as: opportunity contraction, less spending, loss of motivation/mobility, and more. When the economy loss becomes wide spread enough, regardless of bankruptcy/poverty/homeless or whatever rates is when revolution happens.

The problem has to effect a majority of society. 12% sounds devastating (it is), but it is not a wide enough umbrella.

For America specifically, it is somehow worse.

It took 25% of the nation being out of work to, not revolt, but popularly elect someone willing to to spend a little government money on healthcare and welfare.

So it will get much worse before Americans finally read a book and figure out we should maybe do something different.

I read Grapes of Wrath recently on a recommendation from a friend and it’s one of the few great books I’ve read and felt was genuinely great. It feels incredibly relevant today with both inequality and automation. Would highly recommend it.

  > So it will get much worse before Americans finally read a book and figure out we should maybe do something different.

You better forget about the books. Don't count on the media either; the abolishment of the fairness doctrine and financial incentives via corporate ownership can and will distort reality in a strata-optimized way. Social media is overrun by bots and influence ops as we speak. New threat: people will ask their LLM. Journalists will source their LLM. Next question: Who trains the LLM?¹

______

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia

You're absolutely right, we are all being brainwashed in real time. How does this make you feel?

That's possibly every state in the last 400 years, with the possible exception of the soviet union and Maoist China, and those exceptions are arguably just a technicality.

Maoist china certainly and famously murdered many rich people. It's true that the state that emerged had deep corruption and that life remained difficult for the poor, but murdering rich people is an allegation difficult to deny.

I think what's different is that we actually have democracy, yet for whatever reason, the masses of poor people keep voting for governments that overtly and openly only care about rich people.

You forget the French, who inspired Marx's exhortations to practice "revolutionary terror," the "only way," [0] with their own public executions of the rich [1].

[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

No but maybe the first state with a constitution that is supposed to stop that kind of thing happening again.

That has been pretty normal throughout history. Caring about non-rich people has been pretty rare.

Sure, but states typically at least pretend and allege to benefit their constituents. We haven't tried to do that since at least reagan.

That's a relatively new idea. It was fundamental to the American and French revolutions, and it was brand new at the time. (The Americans were heavily cribbing off French thinkers, though it took most of a century for the French to implement it.)

It's been the basic claim of liberal democracies for the past 250 years, and they were so successful that people thought it would become universal. But it reached a peak around 30 or 40 years ago -- right about the time that the Soviet Union fell and the "tech age" really got going.

The US in particular saw that as victory for America, and in particular victory for its wealthy class. So it has been leading everything away from liberal democracy.

It should be obvious that the answer is no. So obvious that I'm not sure why the question is even being asked.

>So obvious that I'm not sure why the question is even being asked.

its a rhetorical question.

the question is asked to make a point rather than to be answered.

So obvious I don't know why you had to say it

Definitely not?

Not by far

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