For Migrants, New Land of Opportunity Is Mexico
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That is priceless. I hope the South Park writing team are taking note. They could do a follow up to "The Last of the Meheecans".
Now it's not even just Mexicans moving there, but Americans as well! A case of life imitating comedy and going one step further.
The wages are lower but the Mexican cost of living hasn't been bid up by severe development restrictions, badly planned infrastructure, and finance industry corruption. Middle class life south of the border is more comfortable than in the USA because prices for housing and transportation aren't driven by status bidding wars for the limited set of safe, quality locations and good school districts.
Unskilled workers still make a lot more in the USA and have a richer life there, but the smaller Mexican educated class is maintaining its quality of life as it expands. It already matches the wealth north of the Rio Grande.
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I should add an example.
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For example, imagine we're comparing LA to Guadalajara or SF to Mexico City. With a degree from a good school, a civil servant might start out making $750 a month in Mexico or $2200 a month in the USA, after taxes. A decent small shared apartment will cost $200 in Mexico or $800 in the USA. The American will need a car for at least $400 a month, but cheap, efficient, and somewhat comfortable public transit is available all over Mexico. Electronics and internet cost the same. Splurging out at a nice restaurant can be done for $15 a person in Mexico that compares to $60 a person in LA or SF. The Mexican will graduate without any student loan debt while the American is paying every month, so that nice restaurant will be out of reach in El Norte, anyway.
A fairly well paid engineer in Mexico might be making $2200 a month while his American equivalent makes $7000, after taxes (think $100k-$140k US salary) . A nice apartment in a fancy part of Mexico City suitable for a family might cost $800 a month, but development policy has kept single family homes equally affordable in central areas, too. Nice apartments in SF cost $3500 a month and houses cost much more. Most professionals in urban Mexico don't need or want a car, but in SF the engineer and his spouse will both spend so much time in one that they'll need two nice cars and dedicated parking. Okay, I already can't figure out how the US person can afford to have a family at all; maybe that's why they don't. The Mexican engineer will be living pretty and thinking about a third kid. And Gosh help the American if he ever needs health care.
On the other hand, the minimum wage for unskilled labor in Mexico is about $5 a day.
Education is complicated and very different from the USA. The local public elementary school that I walked past every day seemed to have literate students and attentive teachers working sincerely on education but there's a scandal of unqualified teacher hiring and international test results from rural areas are depressing. The neighborhood I lived in was considered activist and organized so it may have been unrepresentative. The former leader of the national teacher's union went to jail this year and the new president is working on reforms.
Free guaranteed schooling ends after eight years. Competitive testing puts a really large number of students into many different large but good public high schools with serious academic focus. Those who don't pass or who want more personalized or specialized attention can find private high schools ranging from cheap to Manhattan prices.
Several nearly free universities comparable to good top-tier and second tier state schools in the USA also take many students based on exams. More expensive private schools are also available.
So if you train your kids right and play the game, quality education is very cheap. If you let them screw up and get behind, it may cost a lot to get them back on track.
I'm looking for a rental right now. For $800 I would expect a three bedroom house (with free parking, of course), not a small shared apartment.
Some pretty cities in American flyover country are a very good deal. Eugene, Boise, Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Salt Lake, and others can have half the coastal wages and one third the cost of living. In some ways, they're an analogue to the advantages Mexico has for its local well educated class. On the other hand, the American flyover cities achieve it in a very different way and make the advantage available to a wider range of skill levels.
Mexican flyover cities don't seem have a comparable advantage over the big city, mostly because it's harder to get a high skilled job in the cheaper parts of Mexico. I've only lived for a month in a smaller Mexican city, though; my view may be incomplete.
Or course, not everyone wants to live in LA or SF or Mexico City.
that's true for any place of the world, including the US, that's why parent analogy was made with SF
Wealthy modern states rely quite heavily on the middle class for taxes. Within the middle class you'll find groups (eg single, childless, urban Europeans) that pay very high taxes while consuming very few services. They earn via highly taxable salaries. Most of their earnings are consumed and thus subject to GST/VAT and excise taxes. They also play the real estate, credit card, car financing, etc games that funnel money into finical institutions & industries which are so important to the political-economic goals politicians take on.
The net result of this is that for a middle class household in a wealthy country, wealth is somewhat of an illusion. Imagine a 30 year old unmarried couple earning €100k - well off on paper. They can expect to pay about €30-35k (depending on how the salary is split) in income tax. €1-€2k on flat taxes (car tax, tv tax, local tax). Then 25-40% of the remaining on a mortgage - say €21k. That leaves 40k-50k per year for taxable spending. Most of this will be taxed at 23%. Some stuff like petrol, alcohol, tobacco & cars will be taxed at a higher rate.
These people are still well off. It's hard not to be with to above average salaries and no expensive children. But are not near as well off as their earnings suggest they should be.
In some Eurpoean countries those taxes prop up a wasteful government. In some, they are paying for recent bank bailouts. In some, they are paying for an expensive legacy welfare state (with corresponding welfare class). In some, they are paying for past infrastructure investments. The best run countries (Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavian countries) do a good job of funneling those revenues to the same people at different stages of their life. Only a portion of most people's life is spent in this highly taxable, no need for government services state. But even in these cases it might make sense for a self interested individual to study at the countries expense and then earn outside of their tax jurisdictions.
If middle class migration and 'shopping around' for high quality of living becomes more prevalent, the tax revenue implications are enormous.
Actually, majority of other state lost jobs.
Of course, this is just a personal observation.
Most of those are from non-US migration as well (as the article indicates)
Strictly speaking, not "greater", which is an absolute measure, but more positive. -1 is absolutely greater than +1/2, but +1/2 is more positive than -1. Magnitudes don't have signs.
I'm no mathematician, but at least Mathematica disagrees with you (Greater[-1,1/2] returns False).
m = sqrt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2 ...)
In this convention, for any given value of m, the signs of the individual components are lost in the conversion, which means when discussing magnitude, only the absolute value of m matters.
But, because Mathematica has a "Greater[]" function, and because that function simultaneously uses the word I chose and pays attention to scalar signs, I must be wrong about this.
> That seems an odd definition of "greater" ...
I respect the people behind Mathematica, so I have to agree -- it's not what I thought. I should have qualified what I said more carefully.
edit: It's also feasible for the state which lost the most jobs, to still not have lost as much as all the other states combined.