It's the Inequality, StupidFollow

Of course he is. The whole point of this thread is. The article linked in the OP is. It's titled "It's the inequality, stupid", not "It's the lack of buying power for the poor, stupid". Can you find me a single fact on that huge list of graphs and charts relating a poor person's relative economic condition to himself in the past?



And yet, that's not the argument being made here, is it? By all means, find some other source making this claim, backing it up with facts, and proposing a solution and I'll discuss it with you. I actually agree that this is a more relevant thing to look at. But that's pretty much *never* the argument actually used by those proposing higher taxes on the rich to pay for some needed benefits for the poor.

Which was kind of my exact point. Thanks for at least getting it.



Show me that this is true. From everything I've read, CPI has stayed pretty constant to the applicable wage levels being measured (typically working and lower middle class wages are indexed). But if you can find me something showing that the earnings of the typical working class professions buy (significantly?) less today than some period in the past I'd love to see it. The worst I've seen is that wages are "flat" relative to prices. Obviously, we kinda have to toss out the last few years as outliers, but I just don't see how the general trend of the time frame we're looking at shows what you're saying.


Also, CPI only looks at half the picture. While the purchasing power of staple goods has remained relatively constant, the purchasing power in terms of what traditionally were considered luxury items has risen dramatically at all economic levels. That often has a hell of a lot more to do with determining real standard of living than anything else. When the typical poor person today lives in a nicer home, with a nicer TV, and computers, cell phones, DVR cable boxes, and video games that either didn't exist or were far far out of reach for an equivalent wage earner just 30 years ago, it's hard to argue that their condition has "gotten worse" over that period of time.

Why would I sell? Now is the time to buy property in the US.

I won't argue with that. We snagged our house a year and a half ago at a fire sale price.

"Computers" aren't exactly a luxury. Try applying for a job without them.

You wanna apply for that job? ****, son, we don't have paper applications anymore.

...and fuck that "nicer home, with a nicer TV, and computers, cell phones, DVR cable boxes, and video games" when you're working two jobs to cover the rent and put food on the table.

Ever tried to get a computer at the library? There's a reason I bring my laptop, and it's not because the keyboards are nasty.

If it's busy (which it almost certainly is), you'll wait about 20 minutes to get one, and you're allotted about an hour. Don't finish one before the timer is up? Too bad. Shouldn't have been checking up on the status of your other applications, because if you even get a hold of them, the manager at the store certainly isn't going to tell you about the status of your application over the phone. Somebody's got to use it to catch up on Facebook and anime.


With cuts to library funding, it sure isn't going to get any better than this.



Edited, Sep 25th 2011 9:30am by Sweetums

Or you can evaluate the percentages of the population and see what they can afford.

comparing someone in the bottom 20% 30 years ago and someone in the bottom 30% today is also a valid comparison, and far more useful then your comparison.

if 30 years ago you take the poorest person who can buy 5 loaves of bread, and now to buy 5 loaves of bread the a person is no longer the poorest, it looks like things haven't changed or have gotten better, but in reality they haven't

Edited, Sep 26th 2011 6:09pm by Xsarus

How is it far more useful in this context though? If we're looking at some kind of delta of inequality between "rich and poor", then that question assumes that the "poor" person we're looking at has the same relative income/job/whatever as the person we look at in the past. That's what we're doing for the "rich" person, right? Isn't that what you're doing (more or less) when you compare a CEO's salary relative to the workers in his company today versus X years ago?


What you're trying to measure is really whether the total number of people we might label "poor" has grown. That's a legitimate thing to look at, but it really has absolutely nothing at all to do with the income inequality issue that started this thread.



Ok. But you'd need to provide some kind of numbers to support any argument like this. As I pointed out earlier, the link in the OP didn't even come close to touching the question of whether a poor person's standard of living has gone up, down, or stayed the same during this time period. Isn't that kind of important to the overall question though? Isn't the argument being made that the process of rich people getting richer makes poor people poorer? Shouldn't we then look at the condition of "the poor" and find out if they're actually better or worse off?

The absence of even an attempt to do that speaks volumes about the claims being made. If there were clear and undeniable data showing that folks in the bottom 20% live much worse lives today than say 30 years ago, wouldn't *that* be put front and center as exhibit A in the argument that while rich people got richer, the poor got poorer? If the best someone working so hard to make that argument can do is basically make comparisons of the ratio of earnings, doesn't that strongly suggest that they can't show any significant reduction in overall quality of life?

Again, the fact that someone else has doubled his earnings while yours stayed the same doesn't actually make your earnings half as valuable. Yet, that's basically the argument being used. It's an incredibly flawed argument though.

It does if there are a large number of people in the same space as you competing for the same resources, which drives up the price for those resources.

Inexpensive apartments are hard to find in my town, partially because the developers know they're mostly catering to a college student crowd, but also because they make more profit on high-expense luxury apartments than they do the lower priced, more economical units. The result is that some two bedroom units in town cost as much as they would in NYC, but since the cost is "split" into two rooms they advertise the space for half the price. When 30% of the population of a city is below the povery level in earnings, but 90% of the apartments cost $500 a bedroom, the result is competition for "cheap" places, driving the price up. A two bedroom I rented back in 1999 for $450 (for both rooms) is now being advertised for $700.

We have subsidized housing in town, but the waiting list for it is long and steep, and the city has discussed "moving" the public housing from its current location near the center of town (incidentally, also near the university where most of the inhabitants work) and sticking it about ten miles outside the center of town, connective via only a bus line. Why? So they can sell the housing units (or the land that it sits on) to developers, who will triple the price of the units. This means that 1. the residents will either have to pay much more money to stay where they already are or 2. they will have to move, and potentially deal with an hour long bus ride to continue to work where they are. Their purchasing power has stayed exactly the same, but the resources have diminished (or their time will.)

The free market is failing. A developer would rather have a half-empty building of luxury apartments than build a more inexpensive unit that will be guaranteed to be full 99% of the time. (This is actually why quite a few developers around here have since gone out of business. Unfortunately, another developer would just buy the property at a firesale price - and then proceed to offer the units for the original cost the first developer wanted, raking in even more profits.)

The city has tried various things to encourage more reasonably priced housing (so they can go ahead and sell now VERY valuable land under the public housing off), but no good solution has appeared yet. In the meantime, the average price of rent here has doubled in the last twenty years, and it's only going to get worse.

ITT: A brand new apartment complex is a ghetto.

Interestingly, the public housing here in town is some of the cleanest, neatest places around, the laundry hanging from lines in the backyards notwithstanding (as the Republicans point out, dryers are a luxury good the poor shouldn't have access to.) The lawns are well established and lush and green and have survived the droughts without any issues, the parking situation is under control because adequate parking was planned for the area - and few residents own cars (unlike within the university proper, where a parking spot will set you back $300 a semester), and the rows of houses are neat and tidy. Housing properties in the older private housing nearby have soared, as the city has expanded outward. Fifty years ago it may have been a ghetto; today it is prime real estate.

Must suck to live in a singlewide.

It's really obnoxious that catwho often manages to be on the right side of an argument by sheer luck, but backs it up with anecdotal evidence which is just as annoying as (but 50 times longer than) varus's tripe.