Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

Many people who live payday to payday will be the types of people who if they had there pay doubled would adjust into the same payday to payday model.

In general these will be young people who are out to enjoy life and whilst many adapt a more moderate balance lifestyle, there are always some who carry on.

Certainly with the lack of incentives for savers, this certainly does not help motivate people and why should it.

What I would be interested in is a graph of fiscal behavour done per age groups and fiscal income. Also if they are single or married or have children. Then I believe you would see a more measurable trend.

Though it is worth bearing in mind credit card companies prefer people who live like this as they make them more money than not and with that is it a testiment to how well credit card marketing is actioned I do wonder.

View on HN

> "Many people who live payday to payday will be the types of people who if they had there pay doubled would adjust into the same payday to payday model."

This is an audacious enough claim that citation is needed. It also smells a little like fundamental attribution error (i.e., assigning behavior because is is the nature of the individual, rather than situational).

> "In general these will be young people who are out to enjoy life"

I feel the same way about the above statement.

My gut says there are tens of millions of middle age families living hand to mouth, struggling.

Struggling with iPads

I keep trying to deny this, but I keep seeing it before my own eyes.

It's hard to take people seriously when they tell me about how hard up they are financially, when I know they have iPads and iPhones, and so on and so forth.

Anecdotes are not data, of course, but I am gradually becoming more and more convinced.

All you can tell by someone owning a consumer device is that ''at some point'', they had the money to pay for it.

They may not have the money anymore, and it may not make sense to sell all of their high-depreciation items at large losses when they can have the satisfaction of continuing to use the device.

Except you can buy most, if not all, consumer devices on credit, and they may still be paying for them. They may never have had the money "at some point".

iPads aren't that ubiquitous.

You mean to tell me that people struggling to live hand to mouth are also making mistakes? Ridiculous.

I think most everyone knows people who have exhibited that behavior.

Well, that's anecdotally good enough for me!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

>Many people who live payday to payday will be the types of people who if they had there pay doubled would adjust into the same payday to payday model.

Yes, only in the first case they buy mostly essentials and they are fucked if they have some emergency, where in the second they buy more stuff, can take of their children more, and can use some of their paycheck (or the next one) if a need arises.

I don't care much for the morally scathing undertone of the comment.

>In general these will be young people who are out to enjoy life and whilst many adapt a more moderate balance lifestyle, there are always some who carry on.

Spoken like a middle or upper class person who has never come in contact with the large swaths of poor people out there before, or if he ever had, has long forgot all about it.

The US is like a third world country job-wise and living conditions wise in many places. I've been to all, from Mississippi to South Dakota to Georgia and Alabama to Idaho -- and I've seen and spoken to people in similar situations all over, from NY to Seattle.

Living from paycheck to paycheck is not about some ...hipsters ("young people out to enjoy life"). It's about the declining middle class and the new masses of poor. Including millions upon millions of blacks and latinos.

Considering that the top 1% earners captured 121% of all income gains during 2009-2011 (yes, 121%, that means the other 99% of people's income went down)[1] it's also possible that many of these people used to be able to save money every month and not live hand-to-mouth before the recession and the sorry-excuse-for-a-recovery, but that their declining real incomes have squeezed their savings margins down to nothing.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/12/top-one-percent-inc...

Your statistic is shockingly meaningless. 2009 was the bottom of a recession and a stock market crash. By 2011 it recovered. If you look at an equivalent measure from 2007-2009, you'd see a negative number.

The top 1% of earners make most of their money due to the stock market and related activity by design, because if you're a shareholder in Coca-Cola, you want a CEO who actually cares about making Coca-Cola profitable over the long term, rather than someone who would collect a pretty salary for a few years and then retire to a life of leisure. You do that with equity compensation, stock options that vest over time - and, since satisfaction with money is logarithmic, you're going to need a lot of them.

Now, the overall level of justice achieved by this current system (or lack thereof) is in fact a valid topic of discussion, though largely outside the scope of the post I make here. By contrast, this cherry-picked number you present INTELLECTUALLY DISHONEST.

I call on you to be ashamed of yourself. Unprincipled yellow journalism of this nature is bad enough in the wild, but HERE of all places we ought to value REAL information and understanding, not rhetoric and obfuscation. (Alternatively, please abandon Engineering and seek employment in the scummiest Marketing department you can find.)

> Your statistic is shockingly meaningless. 2009 was the bottom of a recession and a stock market crash.

The same basic trend (a small fraction at the top go up, the rest goes down) was basically true during the "expansion" from the end of the 2001 recession to the beginning of the 2009 recession (in that period, IIRC, by quintiles the bottom four all so declines in real income, and the top quintile was flat; the top 5% had a modest increase, and the top 1% had a significant increase.)

This is why the 2001-2009 period between recessions seemed, in many ways, like a continuation of a long recession. Because for most people, it essentially was.

It's unclear the reasoning behind this assertion that a CEO needs stock compensation to do good work.

Frankly if someone isn't professional enough to do their job without some cartoon carrot hanging in their face, I'm not sure how they would be suitable for a top position in the first place over those who apparently are. -- It's also worth mentioning that there's little contention over the fact that salaries and wealth at the top of the pyramid are rising faster than the norm. The majority of GDP growth for quite a while has been going to the upper crust. I suggest reading the following if this isn't yet evident:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

> Frankly if someone isn't professional enough to do their job without some cartoon carrot hanging in their face

As the Joker said in the Dark Knight, when you're good at something,

never do it for free.

Oh, quit your hyperventilating. If you have a problem with this statistic, direct your concerns to Dr. Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. A PDF of the cited study is linked in the Huffington Post article I linked to, and his CV and contact info are on his faculty page at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/

> yes, 121%, that means the other 99% of people's income went down

Your phrasing implies the SAME PEOPLE are in the top 1% each year, which is not the case. And implies that what happens to a cohort also happens to everyone WITHIN that cohort, which is also not the case.

Lastly, we don't have income numbers for "people", we have it for "households". (The "top 1%" contains significantly more than 1% of the people.)

The "top 1%" contains significantly more than 1% of the people.

Or it contains less than 1% of people if the average household size for the top 1% is smaller than the average household size for the lower 99% (which it most likely is; wealthier people have fewer children on average).

> wealthier people have fewer children on average

I don't believe that's the case. At least not if we're using income as a proxy for wealth. Arranged by income, wealthier households in general tend to be larger households.

It's well established that the "top 20%" by income contains more than 20% of the earners - lots of dual-income couples - and also contains more than 20% of the people; the "bottom 20%" contains less than 20% of the earners and people. Seems to be true for 1% as well. If you want to check, there's a nice table of household size by income here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

I stand corrected. My cursory google search didn't turn up anything concrete, so I fell back on some things I've heard but can't quite place the origin. My understanding was that wealthier families had, on average, ~2 children, but lower income families tended to have more than that. That, of course, does not necessarily mean that the average household size will be larger (there may be more or less unwed or divorced households at lower income levels).

Of course, my point still stands: just because it's 1% of households does not necessarily mean that it's >1% of people (it may very well be, though).

I suspect that on a global scale (and excluding China due to its "one child policy") this is true, but it may not hold up as well in the USA or "first-world" countries in general. Within the US I suspect there's a high standard deviation for the number of children in wealthy families, but it may be higher than for those where resources are highly restricted during reproductive years.

Globally, I've seen references for years about high birth rates in poor countries, with (anecdotal?) indications that having multiple children was a requirement if you were going to have someone to take care of you in your old age. I suspect that also ties in heavily with youth mortality rates - you may have multiple children in hopes that some of them will actually make it through.

If most people lost wages, saying they captured 121% of gains doesn't work - you can take someone else's gain if they didn't have one.

I get the point, but the phrasing is messy.

It does work. The amount of GDP that the US economy gained from 2009-2011 is some positive value. If you look at the share of GDP gains that was captured by the top 1% earning households over that same time period, it's 121% of that value. I can see why you say the semantics are messy, but it is a sound analysis.

The other 99% has been stagnant, not ( as an aggregate measure ) going down. This is critical to understanding this issue. I will say that we don't have a clear understanding of this.

There is a general extreme preference for the present equilibrium out there. This is exhibited by employees and by employers. In the '80s, '90s, you were expected to job hop a bit to keep your skills up and to lighten the load when projects ended. That is no longer the case and I think productivity suffers for it.

> Many people who live payday to payday will be the types of people who if they had there pay doubled would adjust into the same payday to payday model.

Yes, the less surplus income people have, the greater is their marginal propensity to spend.

> Certainly with the lack of incentives for savers

The US tax system has such extreme incentives for saving and investment as opposed to spending that any statement that starts this way is worth nothing but a laugh.

There is a significant amount of government assistance that only kicks in when you run out of savings. So while not part of the tax code the disincentives are there.

> There is a significant amount of government assistance that only kicks in when you run out of savings.

Can you elaborate?

Examples:

Resource limit for SNAP: http://www.dpw.state.pa.us/foradults/supplementalnutritionas... -- translation: "Have less savings, get SNAP".

Patient Assistance Programs at hospitals: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2013/03/28/real-money-hid... -- translation: the government says your hospital has to "give back to the community" by not making you pay your bill if you say you can't.

Most of the incentives require you to have at least a moderate financial surplus to really take advantage of. IRA, 401k and the lower tax rate on long-term capital gains come to mind for saving incentives. Double taxation on dividends (taxed as profit by corporation & again as individual income) is a disincentive. Mortgage interest tax deductions are sort of a grey area, they encourage people to take on larger debt loads and since everyone needs a place to live, rising home prices don't really help anyone except banks & real estate agents (your "profit" from your home going up is meaningless because the next place you live is more expensive too). Saving for your children's college costs is penalized due to decreased eligibility for scholarships, grants and low-cost loans.

People with very little extra money to save likely can't take the risks or costs associated with equities investment anyway, so really they only get exposure to interest rates in savings accounts and CDs, which are being kept artificially low. If you only can save <$1,000 per year, you likely care a lot more about the interest rate on savings accounts than you do about how 401k matching is taxed.

That is not the case. A lot of the benefits the government provides also have income limitations that phase out.

Ex. Section 8 housing vouchers, CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program), subsidized child care, among other.

Put together there are many cases where someone is better off earning less but receiving more benefits. In the cited example a single mom will earn the same net income whether she earns $29k gross or $69k gross.

(See the bottom of the document) http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/11/taxes-and-cliffs.h...

http://www.aei.org/files/2012/07/11/-alexander-presentation_...

Even if that was true, it's irrelevant; the subject is saving vs. spending. If you are going to bring out well-worn right-wing anti-welfare propaganda points with citations direct to propaganda mills like AEI, at least try to do do when it is on topic.

*lack of incentives for savers"

Do you mean aside from the inherent motivation of being able to weather the small financial storms of life and generally being able to build wealth and have significantly more options available to you in many parts of your life?

Lack of incentives from a interest rate and it will be safe in the bank feeling being found to be not so safe.

In the past when we had consumers having too much debt interest rates would slowly rise, nowadays they do there damdest to keep them low to avoid hurting those with large debts. Bottom line is the fiscal appraoch being taken by goverments favours those in debt compared to those who save.

Heck even been talks of having negative interest rates in some countries, that is just down right crazy too me.

This with banks basicly being allowed to rob customer accounts via varous means and the protection offered being limited - the publics trust in banks has been eaten away. 10 years ago if somebody kept money under there matress, they would be laughed at and called old minded, nowadays they would not be laughed at as much and in some countries they would be utterly envied for there wisdom.

That is what I meant about lack of incentives for savers, hope that clears that up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com