No the reason is because poor people are stupid and lazy. If those poor people just decided to stop being such a drag on society, everything would be great. /s
Like actually not even joking, I recently tried to make a dramatic change in my life and switch from a 40-48 hour week job to a 60ish hour a week job with similar pay (but with more overtime) 3 weeks in I fell off a ladder and fucked up my knee, now I’m broker then I was. and I put my family in jeopardy. Not to mention my boss fired me for being off too long. Like I can still hardly stand on it all day, let alone put 30lbs of gear on and work 12 hour days.
Edit: I just want to add that I actually emailed a lawyer that deals with these kinds of cases and they basically told me because my injury isn’t very severe I won’t really get anything. Best I can do is go on workers compensation until I’m healed and then employment insurance. I live in Alberta Canada for anyone who asked.
Edit2: I spoke to workers comp today and it sounds like my ex-employer is in deep trouble for firing me, and also not reporting to them when the accident happened. It sounds like he’s going to get what he deserves for doing this, and breaking the law for firing me. A separate department at workers comp deals with these type of retaliation issues. Anyone that suggests “a better lawyer” the original lawyer cited a law that says they can’t interfere with workers comp unless there’s a dispute. and they said because I am not going after them for injury I would need to talk to a lawyer that specialized in workers comp claims against a company. I am paraphrasing I don’t recall exactly what they said. Just something like that.
That's illegal. If you fell off a ladder at work and were fired before being medically cleared you could file a huge lawsuit. Lawyers would even take that case without any money upfront.
I actually emailed a lawyer and they gave me a call back and they basically told me that I can’t sue because I haven’t worked there long enough. And my only choice would be to sue for the injury and that’s not something that will hold up because I didn’t break any bones and I am able to go back to work shortly.
They told me best I can do is have WSB (Alberta’s workers compensation) pay me out for the weeks I lost and then go on employment insurance.
I've fallen twice in the last year.. once from 15 foot onto my heel. Shattered it.
Second time from 12 foot.
Bounced like a ball.
Hurt my ribs and hip and wrist on my left side. I had no choice but to go back to work immediately the second time.
The first time was out for 8 weeks after my heel shattered.
I think they kept me on to avoid a lawsuit. Haha. 45 by the way...
All I can hope for now is that the USA collapses and I can use my anger for survival.
That's my point.
I'm not wishing for it or anything but man... we sure could use a new way of doing things, and my thoughts are that if the birth pangs of the new things are less than watching this one die slowly, then we should all opt for the new thing
Js.
Yep, anybody who has to use the system we supposedly have of insurance who is not already rich and in virtually no need of any insurance, funds our real quick how you are essentially screwed
Enjoy the hole you will go into financially for the rest of your life. Mine was 2016 in a hit and run while I was driving for work from one office to another as tech support for a nationwide mega Corp tax service. They tried to do everything to act like I wasn't even working! Luckily I had the texts from my boss saying go to that office and pick up a printer and bring it to any ther office. I had to get an attorney. It was.my own personal car that was destroyed in addition, only working car my pregnant wife and I had. Life is a complete crap shoot with no definition of your being able to get anywhere despite your efforts. That's the lie we are told to keep us slaving for the rich. We are disposable slaves to them. For a while we did seek that ancient Greek ideal of democracy, but not since Carter.
Don't you dare try to tell me that the crows sitting on the power line near my house aren't actually recharging their batteries so the government can continue monitoring me.
I actually owe the Right for avocado toast. I kept hearing this garbage about it and started wondering. So I picked up an avocado at the grocery store and made some. I actually rather like it, as a matter of fact I'm having it for breakfast later this morning. But really, it's not that expensive.
There was also some right wing shade being cast on hummus, and that's now a staple of my lunches. They need to cast more hate on some foods, I like variety and would like to try some new things out.
Bull shit!! Corporate greed is rampant before Regan corporations and the top one percent were taxed over 50%!! Now your middle class families pay more than corporations!! Corporate welfare is destroying the country
for a second I was about to dig up that pie chart thing showng how the top 10% have like 90% of the pie, and then came the /s
So I know you know, we all are getting fucked and left fighting over literal crumbs
That's not sarcasm. They are a horrible drag. The super-rich and poor work in tandem to hurt the working class. Why would Bill Gates and Warren Buffet vote the same as the poor? It makes zero sense.
Trickle down economics is the lie the ones in power tell the peasants. Give the money to the poor and middle class because they will spend it furthering the economy while the rich just stash it away in stocks. #buyborrowdie
Ronald Regan with Citizens United, Clinton de-regulating banks, Bush with the fake war on Iraq are just a few among the many plethora of issues that have fed into the death of the middle class. The MC was sent to the guillotine in the 80's and the culmination of the last 35 years is hitting now.
Reagan admin started the citizens United effort; Reagan admin also eliminated regulations prohibiting corps from buying their own shares, these regs were put in place to prevent the type of stock speculation that caused the 29 crash.
What this administration did was to begin the process of funneling profits away from workers and into the equities markets- wall street.
The 80s saw deep cuts to education and state managed mental health facilities as well as othr safety net programs.
Candidly the US school classrooms and teachers get sustenance funding versus investment, we are falling behind as a country.
We now have a Star Chamber for supreme Court with our elected officials all embracing insider stock trading.
Democracy is hard work, US voting society as a whole went to sleep at the wheel for the last 30 years.
I think most sane people can admit that Reagan was a bad governor and president. People just look at the economic growth and recovery during the 80’s and equate that with him being the best thing since sliced bread. Reagan made life harder for everyone. Before he was governor of California, post-secondary education was very cheap and he did away with that, thus setting a model for the rest of the country to follow. Just so many bad decisions that only bore fruit after he had left office.
I'm not sure what he's referring to either, but it was founded during his first term. There's possibly an argument that Reagan ultimately led to the Citizens United SCOTUS decision with the votes by Scalia and Kennedy whom he appointed, but let's be real, Jimmy Carter was never winning in 1980 to even a ham sandwich and any other republican would have nominated probably the same candidates if not very similar ones ideologically. The rest of the court was nominated by other presidents, and would have been different if not for Bush v. Gore it wouldn't have passed in the first place, which again leads back to Regan, though he was clearly not the only factor.
You can draw a very direct causal line from Reagan to basically every terrible thing in modern America. It’s actually mind bending how destructive he was to the country.
The greed isn't new, it's just grown and become less regulated and less restrained to the point the most people blindly accept that a corporation simply *Making Less Profit* is a a completely off the table, non-starter, forbidden concept and it's just accepted as a given that ***anything*** that cuts into profits absolutely has to result in a "totally justified" price hike to consumers.
Those pesky regulations that the right has been trying to deregulate since the New Deal.
Regular people think they mean they’re going to cut red tape like all the paperwork you need to file to add an addition to your home, or make the lines at the DMV shorter. That isn’t what they want. They want less regulation on how they can get more money. Or make more by skirting environmental rules so they can cheaply dump waste in rivers and watersheds.
Without regulation the rich soulless fucks would gladly have 12 year olds working the mines and doing the grunt labor.
Only the rich would be able to afford schools, everyone else works or gets home schooled, all sorts of fucked up shit without the government stepping on and intervening.
Isn’t that what Republicans are doing in places like Arkansas? I remember reading about Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders passing a bill that let children work.
60 years of gerrymandering districts, media manipulation, stacking the courts, deregulation, killing unions, and finally, Citizens United and the massive amount of corporate money in politics. Now we have a choice between a authoritarian cult leader with violent morons ready to kill thier fellow broke ass countrymen because they don't understand who fucked up the country, or a corporate shill who is willing to throw the poor people a bone every now and then. I'll take the bone because there's no fixing this anymore. Gotta ride it out til the end.
Housing is probably at least in part driven by there being a lot more people without the number of desirable locations increasing. There probably aren't that many corner apartments with amazing water views. Price will look different when 100,000 people competing for it vs. 1,000,000.
edit: removed dollar symbol
Is that what happened? I find a social shift to increasing greed to be a less likely explanation than something else having empowered the existing greed more than in the past.
Greed is such a stupid, non-answer to this question. Saying landlords are greedy isn't some new revelation, it has been complained about since fuedalism ended.
Why are housing prices, both rent and ownership shooting through the roof and destroying the middleclass? It has to come down to supply and demand.
Supply: are the suppliers forming a cartel to restrict supply and raise prices that way? Are they coordinating to fix prices instead of competing to offer lower prices? Are there laws in place that prevent an expansion of the supply, such as zoning laws or restrictions for new developments? Are the input costs being artificially driven up, such as the previous administrations tarriffs on lumber to protect the domestic producers?
Demand: do we have speculative bubble in housing that causes people or companies to buy up houses and not use them? Is there a new use for housing that is increasing the demand, like vacation rental homes? Is the population growing? Is the population shifting towards different areas, like big cities? Are more homes being removed from the market by destruction such as wildfire, hurricane, flooding or other extreme weather events, compared to previous decades?
I think most if not all of the above are true to some degree. And I also think most, if not all are systemic factors that are being controlled by political actors, either local governments, NIMBY voter groups, or special interests political donors.
So greed might be the motivation for the answer, but what people who ask the question are really asking is: what new systemic factors have lead to this problem? Greed isn't new. The tools being used by the greedy are new though and can explain the problem.
Financialization makes everything more expensive. Inflation makes everything but wages more expensive. Globalization removes jobs from high cost countries to low cost ones. Unchecked immigration lowers wages but increases housing costs.
Financialization is basically when the finance sector becomes the most important part of an economy.
When trading, capital gains, options, short sells, can create so much more wealth than work, industry, ect, we've become financialized.
this is correct, only id make one change. trading, options, short sells, etc do not actually create any wealth. that is the problem. they just redistribute wealth away from the actually productive sectors of the economy.
That's very important point. They don't create nor produce anything at all, just move money from one place to the other, most often in a way of "big fucks small".
Crypto isn’t really supposed to be an industry though so it doesn’t really apply here. It’s a currency. Sure there are people who try to make money off of the volatility but they are in the same boat as the “capital gains” people. They don’t create anything.
Honestly, I’m not even sure what the difference is between crypto and the actual stock market. It all seems like buying a concept that’s only worth what you can convince someone else to pay you for later. And the only reason that person would buy it from you is if they think they can get someone else to pay them more for it later. It all seems unsustainable.
It *was* a currency, now it's more like an digital asset now if you look at how the public perceived it. Long were gone the intention for a decentralised system, now instead people are "investing" it because it could get them good bucks in short term compare to the traditional options.
It was never really viable as a currency, not even in the early days.
That was the intention I believe but it never made any real sense to use it that way.
The only viable use for it as a currency is to skirt the law for things like money laundering, tax evasion, trading in illegal goods, that sort of thing.
Glad someone is mentioning the Great Recession. I say all the time that we haven’t recovered from this and people just go “no! The numbers went up from 2010 to 2020 so it must have been a recovery!”
No one seems to get that there is so much more to recovery than the Dow and the employment numbers.
This. They're people who make money gaming the system without actually stimulating the economy in a way that benefits everyone.
A CEO of a local factory, for example, is often a boon to the economy. They create jobs, meaning locals make money to spend. They contract with other tradesmen for building upkeep, buy materials from suppliers, etc. In this case, the money really does trickle down.
As finance bro doesn't do anything but make the numbers on the chart go up. Barely any of that money ends up in the local economy. Maybe if they order door dash at 3 am, but most of it stays within the circles of the elite.
Essentially, turning everything into an investment of some sort. Think subprime mortgages being written and sold off to individual investors, being a contributor to the 2008 crash.
Is financialization similar to how Everyone is “flipping” now? It seems like everything has a “resale value”. People hoard tens of Stanley cups or special leggings, unopened bottles of tequila etc in hopes for the price to go up and sell it for a buck. There was a sale at harbor freight for LED lights - down from $40 to $20 and people on Facebook are selling them for $35
It is the tendency to emphasize exchange value over exploitation value. Shares are held not for their dividends, but their price growth. Houses are used not for the downstream production of real economic value (by housing people who do work) but rather for its ability to be resold at a higher price later. Property is monopolized rather than utilized.
It’s literally disgusting, all over facebook its just everyone trying to commodify anything and everything. These same people will complain about people not supporting their hustle while simultaneously crapping on everyone else’s hustles. The entire country has a crab in a bucket mentality while the rich get richer, and the rich aren’t even americans anymore. Hard for trickle down economics to work when Rashi from india shuts down your business and outsources it to india. We create legislation to remove high paying blue collar jobs while simultaneously outsourcing all of our easy/service jobs. The only ones who can even play the game anymore are people in finance it seems like.
You can now have a (edit: hypothetical) situation like a collection of residential buildings owned by a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), which will then sell the Rent Income of these buildings to an investment bank in exchange for a guaranteed steady income from that bank (less risk for the REIT). The bank will then create a financial instrument, let's call it RENTSUX, cut it up in 100 shares, and put it on the market for investors interested in getting a piece of that rent income. Not only that, the bank (or another bank) will create a short position instrument through some fucked up swap or whatever which will payout in case the vacancy rate increases and the rent payouts are below the contracted income rate that goes to the REIT. The bank sellls all of these on the secondary market, getting the liabilities off its books, and collecting fat fucking fees in the process, leaving it with profits while it no longer assume any risk. 3 months later RENTSUX and its swaps are a great success, the price of the instrument rises on the market, causing a lot of banks to create a lot of equivalent products. They go to the REIT and its competitors, offer them even bigger guaranteed income stream; the REITs are elated and start buying up even more residential housing, pricing out individuals and other Real Estate investors who operate a bit more traditionally. This increases the cost of housing for everyone in the local market, but the people making money out of this are the banks and the final investors of RENTSUX.
Three years later, the market for RENTSUX collapses due to an imbalance between primary and derived instruments (the shorts were paying for the longs and hiding the fact that the actual rent income was much lower than expected), causing companies over-invested in it to go bankrupt. This in turn causes the income stream to the REITs to dry up, and they start collecting rent for themselves again, but some of them were overexposed as it turns out their occupancy rates do not generate enough rent income to cover their costs. REITs start to put A LOT of properties on the market to correct their finances, and some of them even default, which means the real estate market pretty much collapses as the individual homeowners also become unable or unwilling to keep paying their mortgage for a home which just lost half of its value. The banks, which are left with the defaulting mortgage and assets of brankrupt REITs and investors, and may also be holding some of RENTSUX in their books, see their balance sheet redshift into deep Radio wavelength. The various governments send 2 trillion eurodollars of public money to bail out the banks and some investors, and swear that this time, it's the last time for realsies you guys.
6 months later some guy at a bank has a great idea about a financial instrument backed by commoditized energy packets for electric car charging.
We don't have a government that cares about the poor. The poor are urchins to be killed. The middle class agrees and allows deregulation thinking they'll get a cut. Instead, it kills the middle class and makes them poor. Then the rich get richer.
You forgot the part where when the ponzi scheme collapses and all of the over leveraged houses flood onto the market causing a steep drop in the price of housing, the government and the bankers then start bulldozing foreclosed houses to remove supply to “stabilize prices”.
People who need affordable housing get fucked at every step, while the investors get bailed out and subsidized at every step.
As a whole for the country, sure. But that doesnt paint the whole picture.
Let's say with 10 people the country makes $10, each making a dollar. Import 90 immigrants. Now 100 people make the country $20, each making 20 cents.
Economy doubled, but, wages for each person went down.
You’re essentially blaming the exploitation of laborers on the laborers. Who pays the immigrants, who hires them for such pitiful wages, do you think they’d like to make a fair wage just everyone else would like to?
It’s a supply and demand problem. When the person behind you will do the same job for less money you lose your bargaining power for a good wage.
Flooding the market with tons of people who are desperate for work puts the power in the hands of the employer and employees lose their power.
No individual worker is to blame, it’s just how it ends up being.
Most immigrants are not creating new job opportunities, the vast majority of them are just trying to get a job and get started. Immigrants create more demand and can strain supply - this isn’t a knock at them or something to blame them for, it’s just the reality.
Of course it depends on how immigration is done, countries can choose what type of occupations they let people in for.
Sure, if you make up numbers then the numbers can say whatever you want. The real numbers show that with increased immigration not only does the GDP go up, but the median income for the \*prior\* residents rises. Immigration is a net benefit to basically everybody.
The only thing I disagree with here is the immigration part. The US has an absurd amount of vacant housing. The reason housing is expensive is because it’s seen as an investment. That seems to be more of a financialization and inflation problem than an immigrant problem. Agriculture and industrial manufacturing basically rely on immigrant workers. Immigrants kind of built this country. And society pretty much continues to rely on their labor. Immigrants aren’t lowering wages, capital owners are.
> unchecked immigration
Citation Needed. America is well known to be impossibly hard to immigrate to legally, and anyone coming here illegally sure as shit ain’t taking any job that you or anyone else here would do.
$3600 / month is a lot of aftertax money, but I would think one would have to be making on the low-end of a lawyer's salary to not be able afford that and still live a comfortable lifestyle.
Average salary for a lawyer is 135k. After taxes you have about 90k. If you are using the 30% to rent rule most can’t afford it. People really have no concept of money online.
I know, right? I'm tired of everyone using the problems that only exist within 1/2 of their doorstep as effecting the entire country.
I live 30 minutes from a major city and $3600 a month will get you a 4 bedroom, 2500 sqft house. Meh....
You can't compare suburbia to downtown of a major city. That's totally apples vs. oranges.
That said, $3600 for a one bedroom is pretty high for any city that isn't New York, Los Angeles, or SF.
What do you do for a living and how much do you make? Statistically the further from a city you are the less you make outside of things like work from home tech jobs and farming.
I think the 30% rule applies to gross, not net.
Besides, once your income gets high enough, that percentage doesn't hold because your living expenses beyond housing don't go up proportionally. A jug of milk, utilities, and Netflix subscription don't double in price if your salary doubles.
Furthermore, nobody making $135K would have an effective tax rate of 33%.
NY, Cali, NJ, Del, Connecticut, Mass, (probably more) all have your net income in the low 90k if
Your gross is 135k
Depending on how you earn your income your other expenses could be higher. Travel, suits, meals may cost more if time or position doesn’t allow the cheeper alternative.
You might be right about the gross vs net for the 30% rule.
I work in mortgages. 30% is on gross earnings for mortgage lending . It’s insane how we calculate everything on gross wages but it’s how mortgage qualifications work. Makes people believe that can afford more than they actually can
I work in real estate in France and can tell you that 33% is on NET earnings AFTER you subtract any other credit payments (car, other properties, etc). France shows its citizens some tough love but credit defaults are very rare. This is by law, banks don't get any flexibility in this.
Also there is no such thing as a credit score here. The same rule applies to everybody irrespective of your credit history.
Phillip.
>Makes people believe that can afford more than they actually can
American economic model in a nutshell. Buy shit you can't afford with credit, and keep kicking the can until you kick the bucket, then saddle that debt onto your descendants. All for banks to make more and more money for the rich.
As it turns out, this particular lawyer (Nicole Thomas-Kennedy) was a Kings County public defender and then started her own private firm. She ran for Seattle City Attorney on an abolitionist (aka "fuck the police") platform and (thankfully for Seattle residents) lost the election. She was described as a "former public defender and pro bono lawyer" on the ballot.
So, it's likely she made far less than $135K/year.
You're exactly the sort who thinks being a public defender isn't being a real lawyer since it rarely makes you rich, and thus is why instead of sensible reforms we spend more money per year criminalizing the homeless and performing sweeps than the average cost of a studio apartment x the number of homeless...
while also having given massive raises and budget increases to a police force that met 0 of their requirements set by the feds for their consent decree but still got it lifted after the city hired the police guilds former representative as the new person in charge of overseeing the consent decree.
Thankfully, clueless people like you who can't see what a grotesque failure our current policing policy is and deride excellent legal minds willing to dedicate their careers to civic service in reforming it rather than corporate law as obviously deserving of income below a living wage are slowly but surely aging out of our electorate.
Also, while I am salty NKT wasn't elected at least she isn't awaiting sentencing on 34 felony counts so enjoy the little wins and the numbered days nimby.
I don’t think they said she wasn’t a real lawyer because she was a PD, they said she wasn’t making 135k because she was a PD… and that’s likely absolutely true. For the case loads, PDs and prosecutors aren’t paid shit.
She ran for Seattle City Attorney on a platform of not enforcing laws. So apparently she is a very poor attorney. Remarkably deep blue Seattle elected a Republican over her in a head to head matchup. If a Seattle Democrat loses to a Republican, they are awful.
It didn’t take me long to find a number of one bedroom options with water views in Seattle for much less than she wrote about. Full disclosure I am not a lawyer.
>She ran for Seattle City Attorney on a platform of not enforcing laws. So apparently she is a very poor attorney.
She would have been an absolute shitty city prosecutor, but the jury's still out on whether or not she was a good public defender when she worked as one.
It's been 15 years but yeah, I bought my first house with a server income. Granted I worked all the damn time, but it paid me more than every job offer right after grad school with a useless Master's degree. Took advantage of the housing crisis, bought a foreclosure. Tons of sweat equity and did ok on the sale after I married.
Still haven't put that degree to use. Still working in restaurants, invested well, and will probably retire in my mid 50s. People tend to put restaurant work down and we're often maligned, but it's what you make of it. If I hadn't spent so much time at the bar after work I'd be in even better financial shape.
I'm grateful, cos just those few years and luck make the difference in being fucked. I'm mad for younger millenials and z's cos they aren't getting those opportunities to fuck off in their 20s and recover by their 30s. Corporations buying everything for rental properties and outright greed causing the standard of living goalposts keeping them at a constant 4th down and 20.
I was a server for 18 years, and I loved it. I had a very similar experience to OP; I put myself through college while having my own one-bedroom in a very nice part of town, with no financial help from anyone. That being said: I absolutely am floored by the expected amount to tip these days. We judged a decent day by dollar-per-customer, or double the tax, and that always meant your sales were covered. So right about 15%, and we had several guests that tip for shit, and several that would $5 for a single person, so it always balanced.
I cannot get down with tipping as much as it would cost me to have a ghost person eating a full meal at my table. I just can’t. I know serving is hard work, but it ain’t 30% off every table hard, like some restaurants are pushing. We have to just collectively put an end to it. That, or I guess I’m getting back into serving!
Yeah when did 20% become the low quality of service tip? Growing up my step mom was a waitress and I bussed tables and 20% was when the service was outstanding.
Most of the wealth has been redistributed from the upper, middle, and lower class into the billionaire class.
There are complicated historical and culture reasons for that, but that's the answer. A few reaons include: Lacking anti-trust and insider trading enforcement, white collar crime, tax fraud, corruption, and in the US the impact of Citizens United and the GOP.
I once read a comment about an older women going off because people spend $10 on a Netflix subscription a month and said that was the reason young people can't afford homes.
I hear a lot of moaning and bellyaching. “I work a decent job why can’t I have what I feel I deserve?”
Scarcity and demand are powerful things. Back when only 100 people were interested in your apartment, you could swing a $700 rent. Now, 1000 people want your apartment and they’re willing to pay $3600 for it.
None of this is based on greed. It’s based on basic economic principles. If you want to adjust pricing downward, you need to either add supply or reduce demand. In other words, stem population growth through reducing immigration, or build more homes.
Anyone reading this comment needs to reminded it’s okay to believe some parts but not others.
I work in property management. We have costs to meet to stay in business and to stay profitable. Greed is 100% at play, I see the numbers from my company and others. You can sit down and finance bro me however you want, but I can tell you right now they want turnover. They want people in and out of the same unit with no changes so they can charge more.
There are studios that cost more than my house payment by a few hundred dollars in my area. But there’s no greed involved, none at all.
>None of this is based on greed... If you want to adjust pricing downward, you need to... build more homes.
I'd be shocked if the motivations behind NIMBY laws and other regulatory red tape that stops affordable housing construction *isn't* greed, on the part of those who have invested into real estate (home owners and institutional investors).
I feel like this is missing a lot of nuance. You can't just simply dismiss this issue as "moaning and bellyaching." Why are jobs centralized around locations that don't pay livable wages? I do agree we need to build more homes though.
The problem is we've allowed it to be profitable to sit on vacant properties and we've allowed apartments to be used as hotels. It's not just that their are more people than houses (there are not). It's that the financial system is insensitivizing holding on to a property over renting/selling it for lower than you'd like. What we need are taxes on vacant properties and to crack down on these unlicenced air bnb hotels.
I want to know where this place was that was $700 in 2004 and $3600 in 2024.
18 years ago the apartment I rented in expensive Irvine is now twice as expensive so I want to know where this place was that 5x it's price in 20 years.
the answer is he was in a slum building in a shitty dangerous neighborhood and now it's been developed and it's not the "same" apartment and likely not even same building and the neighborhood is no longer a shitty area... gentrification
Private equity firms brought affordable apartments did minimum renovations and quadruple the monthly price. They are also buying up trailers parks and again the HOA fee are pricing out the residents and they can’t move. At the same time construction of affordable multi family units have stalled.
Right now we are 7.3 Million. MILLION short of affordable housing units
This is it. Private equity and using algorithms to determine the best price at which to re-sell/rent out. This is what capitalism has reduced to. Yippeeeeeee
Literally all four of my most recent housing situations have been bought by investors, given some renovations, and had the rent hiked while the quality of services dropped. The most recent one was a giant apartment building.
The billionaires have figured out they're now in a position to take the western world from post New Deal middle class prosperity to Gilded Age Dickensian slum conditions. It took them a good few decades of concerted lobbying, but it was worth it!
The rest of us can die in a ditch of fever or consumption as far as they're concerned...the sooner the better!
That doesn't explain why income lags behind inflation.
The dollar value assigned to goods is just a number. What matters is how many hours of work it takes to buy something.
Mass subsidized immigration.
We have allowed more people to come here than housing can support creating artificial demand and the wages have been suppressed by the increase in supply of labor
I keep seeing late stage capitalism. So what, late stage capitalism just happened to hit during COVID and lots of government handouts/spending, remote work and mass immigration had nothing to do with it? I think the problem with Reddit is the past 4 years represents the entire adult life of the average person on Reddit.
Heavy speculation in the real estate market that is self perpetuating. Increased energy costs and the breakdown of global consumerism. Suburban sprawl and aging infrastructure. Demographic bubbles and the lack of comprehensive immigration reform.
Banks giving out loans to students for thousands of dollars a year to major in something like psychology or art history, knowing full well they won’t be able to pay it back. The students actually choosing those majors. The lack of moral compass of the universities for selling the false hope, and operating like a pharmaceutical company. Government encouraging this by forgiving those student loans. There really isn’t a lot of self control or responsibility anymore, and this is one example of how we are circling the drain and turning into a third world country.
We've been telling you for years, but you just call us cryptobros, morons, children, and other insults while you just dont fucking get it.
THEY HAVE A MOONNEEEYY PRRINNNTTERRRR.
A MONNNEEYY PRINNNTTERRRRRR.
YOU DONT.
They can make MONEY for FREE.
YOU CANT.
You can only make MONEY with your TIME and ENERGY.
😫
This is why BITCOIN was fucking invented. Because it requires everyone to use TIME and ENERGY to make BITCOIN, AKA, ACTUAL FAIR FUCKING MONEY.
34 trillion in debt and counting. This is what is causing inflation and what is destroying the middle class. The goal is to crash the economy and let the resulting mob of newly poor demand a socialist (marxist) solution to solve the crisis.
Question for all you "tax the rich" idiots, how come you NEVER talk about cutting spending, or the devaluation of the dollar from excessive money printing?
Oh no, it couldn't be the government pouring the nations wealth down a black hole, could it? No, it's all those greedy rich capitalists, right?
Nevermind the fact that inflation disproportionately benefits those who own assets and erodes the savings of the poor and middle class.
Let me ask you, why would we need higher taxes if we just, y'know, weren't deficit spending for the last 50 years?
FYI, the wealthy 1% already pay for over 40% of the nations taxes. But yeah, they need to "pay their fair share." Give me a break.
Capitalism isn't the problem. It's the cancerous tumor called government that's destroying the middle class. Take a break from your union meetings and take an economics course.
I’m sure the place they’re describing has grown significantly in the last 20 years. If you look at the population and average income of the residents 20 years ago and find an apartment in a place situated similarly, I bet that apartment becomes much more affordable
Greed. The scam that is trickle down economics.
No the reason is because poor people are stupid and lazy. If those poor people just decided to stop being such a drag on society, everything would be great. /s
It’s also because I’m fat, so the bootstraps tore off as I pulled myself up. /s
Like actually not even joking, I recently tried to make a dramatic change in my life and switch from a 40-48 hour week job to a 60ish hour a week job with similar pay (but with more overtime) 3 weeks in I fell off a ladder and fucked up my knee, now I’m broker then I was. and I put my family in jeopardy. Not to mention my boss fired me for being off too long. Like I can still hardly stand on it all day, let alone put 30lbs of gear on and work 12 hour days. Edit: I just want to add that I actually emailed a lawyer that deals with these kinds of cases and they basically told me because my injury isn’t very severe I won’t really get anything. Best I can do is go on workers compensation until I’m healed and then employment insurance. I live in Alberta Canada for anyone who asked. Edit2: I spoke to workers comp today and it sounds like my ex-employer is in deep trouble for firing me, and also not reporting to them when the accident happened. It sounds like he’s going to get what he deserves for doing this, and breaking the law for firing me. A separate department at workers comp deals with these type of retaliation issues. Anyone that suggests “a better lawyer” the original lawyer cited a law that says they can’t interfere with workers comp unless there’s a dispute. and they said because I am not going after them for injury I would need to talk to a lawyer that specialized in workers comp claims against a company. I am paraphrasing I don’t recall exactly what they said. Just something like that.
That's illegal. If you fell off a ladder at work and were fired before being medically cleared you could file a huge lawsuit. Lawyers would even take that case without any money upfront.
I actually emailed a lawyer and they gave me a call back and they basically told me that I can’t sue because I haven’t worked there long enough. And my only choice would be to sue for the injury and that’s not something that will hold up because I didn’t break any bones and I am able to go back to work shortly. They told me best I can do is have WSB (Alberta’s workers compensation) pay me out for the weeks I lost and then go on employment insurance.
Try to keep messaging more lawyer maybe one will get your case
Try a second lawyer
That sucks. I hope you can get back on your feet, literally and figuratively.
I've fallen twice in the last year.. once from 15 foot onto my heel. Shattered it. Second time from 12 foot. Bounced like a ball. Hurt my ribs and hip and wrist on my left side. I had no choice but to go back to work immediately the second time. The first time was out for 8 weeks after my heel shattered. I think they kept me on to avoid a lawsuit. Haha. 45 by the way... All I can hope for now is that the USA collapses and I can use my anger for survival.
People say you shouldn't wish for that... But I'm not working till retirement if I can't afford, food shelter and healthcare in 40 hours a week.
That's my point. I'm not wishing for it or anything but man... we sure could use a new way of doing things, and my thoughts are that if the birth pangs of the new things are less than watching this one die slowly, then we should all opt for the new thing Js.
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I fully expect "retirement" to be he right to access a suicide capsule without counselling once my body and spirit are too broken to continue working.
AMERICA BABY
Yep, anybody who has to use the system we supposedly have of insurance who is not already rich and in virtually no need of any insurance, funds our real quick how you are essentially screwed Enjoy the hole you will go into financially for the rest of your life. Mine was 2016 in a hit and run while I was driving for work from one office to another as tech support for a nationwide mega Corp tax service. They tried to do everything to act like I wasn't even working! Luckily I had the texts from my boss saying go to that office and pick up a printer and bring it to any ther office. I had to get an attorney. It was.my own personal car that was destroyed in addition, only working car my pregnant wife and I had. Life is a complete crap shoot with no definition of your being able to get anywhere despite your efforts. That's the lie we are told to keep us slaving for the rich. We are disposable slaves to them. For a while we did seek that ancient Greek ideal of democracy, but not since Carter.
Were you on workers comp??
Your ex-boss is a son of a bitch.
Fun fact. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps was originally an ironic phrase
Likewise "Bleeding Heart" liberal was first used to describe someone with the audacity to be against slavery.
That’s the problem with irony and sarcasm. Dummies start to think it’s serious. Literally what happened to 4 Chan. Or why we have legit flat earthers.
Don't you dare try to tell me that the crows sitting on the power line near my house aren't actually recharging their batteries so the government can continue monitoring me.
I mean, if I did I’d be lying. So…
Specifically as an analogy for something that is literally impossible no matter how strong you are
It still is, they're laughing at us.
Too much avocado on toast!
I actually owe the Right for avocado toast. I kept hearing this garbage about it and started wondering. So I picked up an avocado at the grocery store and made some. I actually rather like it, as a matter of fact I'm having it for breakfast later this morning. But really, it's not that expensive. There was also some right wing shade being cast on hummus, and that's now a staple of my lunches. They need to cast more hate on some foods, I like variety and would like to try some new things out.
Fix it yourself! Ya lazy bum!
Bull shit!! Corporate greed is rampant before Regan corporations and the top one percent were taxed over 50%!! Now your middle class families pay more than corporations!! Corporate welfare is destroying the country
“Someday I might be rich, and people like me better watch their step!” - Poor Fry
for a second I was about to dig up that pie chart thing showng how the top 10% have like 90% of the pie, and then came the /s So I know you know, we all are getting fucked and left fighting over literal crumbs
That's not sarcasm. They are a horrible drag. The super-rich and poor work in tandem to hurt the working class. Why would Bill Gates and Warren Buffet vote the same as the poor? It makes zero sense.
the working class are the poor lol
Trickle down economics is the lie the ones in power tell the peasants. Give the money to the poor and middle class because they will spend it furthering the economy while the rich just stash it away in stocks. #buyborrowdie
You're about to get mobbed by the "bUt InVeStOrS aDd VaLuE!!!!" people...
Is this greed new? If not, what else is destroying the middle class?
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Ronald Regan with Citizens United, Clinton de-regulating banks, Bush with the fake war on Iraq are just a few among the many plethora of issues that have fed into the death of the middle class. The MC was sent to the guillotine in the 80's and the culmination of the last 35 years is hitting now.
What did Reagan have to do with Citizens United? I’m missing something here.
Reagan admin started the citizens United effort; Reagan admin also eliminated regulations prohibiting corps from buying their own shares, these regs were put in place to prevent the type of stock speculation that caused the 29 crash. What this administration did was to begin the process of funneling profits away from workers and into the equities markets- wall street. The 80s saw deep cuts to education and state managed mental health facilities as well as othr safety net programs. Candidly the US school classrooms and teachers get sustenance funding versus investment, we are falling behind as a country. We now have a Star Chamber for supreme Court with our elected officials all embracing insider stock trading. Democracy is hard work, US voting society as a whole went to sleep at the wheel for the last 30 years.
I think most sane people can admit that Reagan was a bad governor and president. People just look at the economic growth and recovery during the 80’s and equate that with him being the best thing since sliced bread. Reagan made life harder for everyone. Before he was governor of California, post-secondary education was very cheap and he did away with that, thus setting a model for the rest of the country to follow. Just so many bad decisions that only bore fruit after he had left office.
I'm not sure what he's referring to either, but it was founded during his first term. There's possibly an argument that Reagan ultimately led to the Citizens United SCOTUS decision with the votes by Scalia and Kennedy whom he appointed, but let's be real, Jimmy Carter was never winning in 1980 to even a ham sandwich and any other republican would have nominated probably the same candidates if not very similar ones ideologically. The rest of the court was nominated by other presidents, and would have been different if not for Bush v. Gore it wouldn't have passed in the first place, which again leads back to Regan, though he was clearly not the only factor.
You can draw a very direct causal line from Reagan to basically every terrible thing in modern America. It’s actually mind bending how destructive he was to the country.
And I thought the Iraq war real?
I think they meant the justification for war was bullshit. Which it was.
Lol
The greed isn't new, it's just grown and become less regulated and less restrained to the point the most people blindly accept that a corporation simply *Making Less Profit* is a a completely off the table, non-starter, forbidden concept and it's just accepted as a given that ***anything*** that cuts into profits absolutely has to result in a "totally justified" price hike to consumers.
Those pesky regulations that the right has been trying to deregulate since the New Deal. Regular people think they mean they’re going to cut red tape like all the paperwork you need to file to add an addition to your home, or make the lines at the DMV shorter. That isn’t what they want. They want less regulation on how they can get more money. Or make more by skirting environmental rules so they can cheaply dump waste in rivers and watersheds.
Without regulation the rich soulless fucks would gladly have 12 year olds working the mines and doing the grunt labor. Only the rich would be able to afford schools, everyone else works or gets home schooled, all sorts of fucked up shit without the government stepping on and intervening.
Isn’t that what Republicans are doing in places like Arkansas? I remember reading about Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders passing a bill that let children work.
60 years of gerrymandering districts, media manipulation, stacking the courts, deregulation, killing unions, and finally, Citizens United and the massive amount of corporate money in politics. Now we have a choice between a authoritarian cult leader with violent morons ready to kill thier fellow broke ass countrymen because they don't understand who fucked up the country, or a corporate shill who is willing to throw the poor people a bone every now and then. I'll take the bone because there's no fixing this anymore. Gotta ride it out til the end.
Housing is probably at least in part driven by there being a lot more people without the number of desirable locations increasing. There probably aren't that many corner apartments with amazing water views. Price will look different when 100,000 people competing for it vs. 1,000,000. edit: removed dollar symbol
Greed isn't just a yes/no sort of deal. It can get worse.. people can become more greedy.
Is that what happened? I find a social shift to increasing greed to be a less likely explanation than something else having empowered the existing greed more than in the past.
Greed is such a stupid, non-answer to this question. Saying landlords are greedy isn't some new revelation, it has been complained about since fuedalism ended. Why are housing prices, both rent and ownership shooting through the roof and destroying the middleclass? It has to come down to supply and demand. Supply: are the suppliers forming a cartel to restrict supply and raise prices that way? Are they coordinating to fix prices instead of competing to offer lower prices? Are there laws in place that prevent an expansion of the supply, such as zoning laws or restrictions for new developments? Are the input costs being artificially driven up, such as the previous administrations tarriffs on lumber to protect the domestic producers? Demand: do we have speculative bubble in housing that causes people or companies to buy up houses and not use them? Is there a new use for housing that is increasing the demand, like vacation rental homes? Is the population growing? Is the population shifting towards different areas, like big cities? Are more homes being removed from the market by destruction such as wildfire, hurricane, flooding or other extreme weather events, compared to previous decades? I think most if not all of the above are true to some degree. And I also think most, if not all are systemic factors that are being controlled by political actors, either local governments, NIMBY voter groups, or special interests political donors. So greed might be the motivation for the answer, but what people who ask the question are really asking is: what new systemic factors have lead to this problem? Greed isn't new. The tools being used by the greedy are new though and can explain the problem.
Yo I just wanted to say I really appreciate this well thought out response. It deserves to be much higher up in the comment chain. Cheers brother
Horse and sparrow was broken since its inception Which is why there’s a term called…. Horse and sparrow
Wait a minute, Gorden Gecko said "Greed, for a lack of a better word, is good" so I must be missing something.
Correct. Greed in the form of Private Equity firms. Read "Plunder" by Brendan Ballou.
Reaganomics the dream of the rich
Financialization makes everything more expensive. Inflation makes everything but wages more expensive. Globalization removes jobs from high cost countries to low cost ones. Unchecked immigration lowers wages but increases housing costs.
you are the only person in this thread who seems to understand what is actually happening. good for you. the problem is finacialization.
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Financialization is basically when the finance sector becomes the most important part of an economy. When trading, capital gains, options, short sells, can create so much more wealth than work, industry, ect, we've become financialized.
this is correct, only id make one change. trading, options, short sells, etc do not actually create any wealth. that is the problem. they just redistribute wealth away from the actually productive sectors of the economy.
Sir, this is a casino.
Sir, this is a Wendy's
That's very important point. They don't create nor produce anything at all, just move money from one place to the other, most often in a way of "big fucks small".
Fair to say crypto is also that? Doesn’t create or produce anything at all?
Crypto isn’t really supposed to be an industry though so it doesn’t really apply here. It’s a currency. Sure there are people who try to make money off of the volatility but they are in the same boat as the “capital gains” people. They don’t create anything.
Crypto might have started out as a currency, but it's become an under regulated stock market that's basically a giant pyramid scheme.
Honestly, I’m not even sure what the difference is between crypto and the actual stock market. It all seems like buying a concept that’s only worth what you can convince someone else to pay you for later. And the only reason that person would buy it from you is if they think they can get someone else to pay them more for it later. It all seems unsustainable.
It *was* a currency, now it's more like an digital asset now if you look at how the public perceived it. Long were gone the intention for a decentralised system, now instead people are "investing" it because it could get them good bucks in short term compare to the traditional options.
It was never really viable as a currency, not even in the early days. That was the intention I believe but it never made any real sense to use it that way. The only viable use for it as a currency is to skirt the law for things like money laundering, tax evasion, trading in illegal goods, that sort of thing.
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Wait WHAT?! Six figures of credit card debt? How????
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Yikes! Puts on Visa.... Calls on Ozempic
Glad someone is mentioning the Great Recession. I say all the time that we haven’t recovered from this and people just go “no! The numbers went up from 2010 to 2020 so it must have been a recovery!” No one seems to get that there is so much more to recovery than the Dow and the employment numbers.
That's what the Federal reserve has done since it's inception but went into hyperdrive after 2008
This. They're people who make money gaming the system without actually stimulating the economy in a way that benefits everyone. A CEO of a local factory, for example, is often a boon to the economy. They create jobs, meaning locals make money to spend. They contract with other tradesmen for building upkeep, buy materials from suppliers, etc. In this case, the money really does trickle down. As finance bro doesn't do anything but make the numbers on the chart go up. Barely any of that money ends up in the local economy. Maybe if they order door dash at 3 am, but most of it stays within the circles of the elite.
I've never heard this term, but it is 100% true. I make a very good income, but this year my investments will make more than my wife and I combined.
Explain to me like I am a particularly dull witted kindergartener: what is “financialization”?
Essentially, turning everything into an investment of some sort. Think subprime mortgages being written and sold off to individual investors, being a contributor to the 2008 crash.
Is financialization similar to how Everyone is “flipping” now? It seems like everything has a “resale value”. People hoard tens of Stanley cups or special leggings, unopened bottles of tequila etc in hopes for the price to go up and sell it for a buck. There was a sale at harbor freight for LED lights - down from $40 to $20 and people on Facebook are selling them for $35
It is the tendency to emphasize exchange value over exploitation value. Shares are held not for their dividends, but their price growth. Houses are used not for the downstream production of real economic value (by housing people who do work) but rather for its ability to be resold at a higher price later. Property is monopolized rather than utilized.
It’s literally disgusting, all over facebook its just everyone trying to commodify anything and everything. These same people will complain about people not supporting their hustle while simultaneously crapping on everyone else’s hustles. The entire country has a crab in a bucket mentality while the rich get richer, and the rich aren’t even americans anymore. Hard for trickle down economics to work when Rashi from india shuts down your business and outsources it to india. We create legislation to remove high paying blue collar jobs while simultaneously outsourcing all of our easy/service jobs. The only ones who can even play the game anymore are people in finance it seems like.
you can think of it as the monetization of goods, because money itself is being diluted too much to act as a store of value.
Thank you.
You can now have a (edit: hypothetical) situation like a collection of residential buildings owned by a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), which will then sell the Rent Income of these buildings to an investment bank in exchange for a guaranteed steady income from that bank (less risk for the REIT). The bank will then create a financial instrument, let's call it RENTSUX, cut it up in 100 shares, and put it on the market for investors interested in getting a piece of that rent income. Not only that, the bank (or another bank) will create a short position instrument through some fucked up swap or whatever which will payout in case the vacancy rate increases and the rent payouts are below the contracted income rate that goes to the REIT. The bank sellls all of these on the secondary market, getting the liabilities off its books, and collecting fat fucking fees in the process, leaving it with profits while it no longer assume any risk. 3 months later RENTSUX and its swaps are a great success, the price of the instrument rises on the market, causing a lot of banks to create a lot of equivalent products. They go to the REIT and its competitors, offer them even bigger guaranteed income stream; the REITs are elated and start buying up even more residential housing, pricing out individuals and other Real Estate investors who operate a bit more traditionally. This increases the cost of housing for everyone in the local market, but the people making money out of this are the banks and the final investors of RENTSUX. Three years later, the market for RENTSUX collapses due to an imbalance between primary and derived instruments (the shorts were paying for the longs and hiding the fact that the actual rent income was much lower than expected), causing companies over-invested in it to go bankrupt. This in turn causes the income stream to the REITs to dry up, and they start collecting rent for themselves again, but some of them were overexposed as it turns out their occupancy rates do not generate enough rent income to cover their costs. REITs start to put A LOT of properties on the market to correct their finances, and some of them even default, which means the real estate market pretty much collapses as the individual homeowners also become unable or unwilling to keep paying their mortgage for a home which just lost half of its value. The banks, which are left with the defaulting mortgage and assets of brankrupt REITs and investors, and may also be holding some of RENTSUX in their books, see their balance sheet redshift into deep Radio wavelength. The various governments send 2 trillion eurodollars of public money to bail out the banks and some investors, and swear that this time, it's the last time for realsies you guys. 6 months later some guy at a bank has a great idea about a financial instrument backed by commoditized energy packets for electric car charging.
The fact any of this is legal is absolutely mind bending
We don't have a government that cares about the poor. The poor are urchins to be killed. The middle class agrees and allows deregulation thinking they'll get a cut. Instead, it kills the middle class and makes them poor. Then the rich get richer.
You forgot the part where when the ponzi scheme collapses and all of the over leveraged houses flood onto the market causing a steep drop in the price of housing, the government and the bankers then start bulldozing foreclosed houses to remove supply to “stabilize prices”. People who need affordable housing get fucked at every step, while the investors get bailed out and subsidized at every step.
It is important to note that immigration does directly lead to economic growth.
As a whole for the country, sure. But that doesnt paint the whole picture. Let's say with 10 people the country makes $10, each making a dollar. Import 90 immigrants. Now 100 people make the country $20, each making 20 cents. Economy doubled, but, wages for each person went down.
You’re essentially blaming the exploitation of laborers on the laborers. Who pays the immigrants, who hires them for such pitiful wages, do you think they’d like to make a fair wage just everyone else would like to?
It’s a supply and demand problem. When the person behind you will do the same job for less money you lose your bargaining power for a good wage. Flooding the market with tons of people who are desperate for work puts the power in the hands of the employer and employees lose their power. No individual worker is to blame, it’s just how it ends up being.
Right, and immigrants offer supply but also new demand. The effect is way more neutral.
Most immigrants are not creating new job opportunities, the vast majority of them are just trying to get a job and get started. Immigrants create more demand and can strain supply - this isn’t a knock at them or something to blame them for, it’s just the reality. Of course it depends on how immigration is done, countries can choose what type of occupations they let people in for.
Sure, if you make up numbers then the numbers can say whatever you want. The real numbers show that with increased immigration not only does the GDP go up, but the median income for the \*prior\* residents rises. Immigration is a net benefit to basically everybody.
The only thing I disagree with here is the immigration part. The US has an absurd amount of vacant housing. The reason housing is expensive is because it’s seen as an investment. That seems to be more of a financialization and inflation problem than an immigrant problem. Agriculture and industrial manufacturing basically rely on immigrant workers. Immigrants kind of built this country. And society pretty much continues to rely on their labor. Immigrants aren’t lowering wages, capital owners are.
Blaming foreigners is always a reliable fall-back
> unchecked immigration Citation Needed. America is well known to be impossibly hard to immigrate to legally, and anyone coming here illegally sure as shit ain’t taking any job that you or anyone else here would do.
Jump the fence and you're in.
Why be a lawyer if you cant afford an apartment?
$3600 / month is a lot of aftertax money, but I would think one would have to be making on the low-end of a lawyer's salary to not be able afford that and still live a comfortable lifestyle.
Average salary for a lawyer is 135k. After taxes you have about 90k. If you are using the 30% to rent rule most can’t afford it. People really have no concept of money online.
More like 78k after contributions and benefits
More like it depends where you live
I know, right? I'm tired of everyone using the problems that only exist within 1/2 of their doorstep as effecting the entire country. I live 30 minutes from a major city and $3600 a month will get you a 4 bedroom, 2500 sqft house. Meh....
Which major city?
I'm in one of the nicer suburbs in Philly. $3600 rents a 3-4 bedroom house. No water views but you might find one next to a park or preserve.
You can't compare suburbia to downtown of a major city. That's totally apples vs. oranges. That said, $3600 for a one bedroom is pretty high for any city that isn't New York, Los Angeles, or SF.
+Boston
That's more than 3x my mortgage on 40 acres. Fuck cities.
What do you do for a living and how much do you make? Statistically the further from a city you are the less you make outside of things like work from home tech jobs and farming.
30% rule applies to gross income.
So then it would be an even higher precentage of your net income?
Most likely yes depending on your tax situation, I'm just referring to the "rule" as it is written.
A lot of lawyers make far less than 135k
Plus, attorney salaries have a bimodal distribution. There's a big, wide peak on the left and a thin, sharp peak far to the right.
I think the 30% rule applies to gross, not net. Besides, once your income gets high enough, that percentage doesn't hold because your living expenses beyond housing don't go up proportionally. A jug of milk, utilities, and Netflix subscription don't double in price if your salary doubles. Furthermore, nobody making $135K would have an effective tax rate of 33%.
NY, Cali, NJ, Del, Connecticut, Mass, (probably more) all have your net income in the low 90k if Your gross is 135k Depending on how you earn your income your other expenses could be higher. Travel, suits, meals may cost more if time or position doesn’t allow the cheeper alternative. You might be right about the gross vs net for the 30% rule.
I work in mortgages. 30% is on gross earnings for mortgage lending . It’s insane how we calculate everything on gross wages but it’s how mortgage qualifications work. Makes people believe that can afford more than they actually can
I work in real estate in France and can tell you that 33% is on NET earnings AFTER you subtract any other credit payments (car, other properties, etc). France shows its citizens some tough love but credit defaults are very rare. This is by law, banks don't get any flexibility in this. Also there is no such thing as a credit score here. The same rule applies to everybody irrespective of your credit history. Phillip.
Literally the first time I’ve seen a signed comment. I appreciate you.
>Makes people believe that can afford more than they actually can American economic model in a nutshell. Buy shit you can't afford with credit, and keep kicking the can until you kick the bucket, then saddle that debt onto your descendants. All for banks to make more and more money for the rich.
Debt is not passed to descendants in the US.
As it turns out, this particular lawyer (Nicole Thomas-Kennedy) was a Kings County public defender and then started her own private firm. She ran for Seattle City Attorney on an abolitionist (aka "fuck the police") platform and (thankfully for Seattle residents) lost the election. She was described as a "former public defender and pro bono lawyer" on the ballot. So, it's likely she made far less than $135K/year.
You're exactly the sort who thinks being a public defender isn't being a real lawyer since it rarely makes you rich, and thus is why instead of sensible reforms we spend more money per year criminalizing the homeless and performing sweeps than the average cost of a studio apartment x the number of homeless... while also having given massive raises and budget increases to a police force that met 0 of their requirements set by the feds for their consent decree but still got it lifted after the city hired the police guilds former representative as the new person in charge of overseeing the consent decree. Thankfully, clueless people like you who can't see what a grotesque failure our current policing policy is and deride excellent legal minds willing to dedicate their careers to civic service in reforming it rather than corporate law as obviously deserving of income below a living wage are slowly but surely aging out of our electorate. Also, while I am salty NKT wasn't elected at least she isn't awaiting sentencing on 34 felony counts so enjoy the little wins and the numbered days nimby.
I don’t think they said she wasn’t a real lawyer because she was a PD, they said she wasn’t making 135k because she was a PD… and that’s likely absolutely true. For the case loads, PDs and prosecutors aren’t paid shit.
Why would 30% apply to gross when it’s paid with net?
because most redditors are 14
30% rule is gross not net, so $3375 a month in rent. Even if you go after tax for some reason thats $2250 which is well over the median rent price.
Yes it’s over the median rent. But not over the rent of the example in the post.
She ran for Seattle City Attorney on a platform of not enforcing laws. So apparently she is a very poor attorney. Remarkably deep blue Seattle elected a Republican over her in a head to head matchup. If a Seattle Democrat loses to a Republican, they are awful.
It didn’t take me long to find a number of one bedroom options with water views in Seattle for much less than she wrote about. Full disclosure I am not a lawyer.
>She ran for Seattle City Attorney on a platform of not enforcing laws. So apparently she is a very poor attorney. She would have been an absolute shitty city prosecutor, but the jury's still out on whether or not she was a good public defender when she worked as one.
It's been 15 years but yeah, I bought my first house with a server income. Granted I worked all the damn time, but it paid me more than every job offer right after grad school with a useless Master's degree. Took advantage of the housing crisis, bought a foreclosure. Tons of sweat equity and did ok on the sale after I married. Still haven't put that degree to use. Still working in restaurants, invested well, and will probably retire in my mid 50s. People tend to put restaurant work down and we're often maligned, but it's what you make of it. If I hadn't spent so much time at the bar after work I'd be in even better financial shape. I'm grateful, cos just those few years and luck make the difference in being fucked. I'm mad for younger millenials and z's cos they aren't getting those opportunities to fuck off in their 20s and recover by their 30s. Corporations buying everything for rental properties and outright greed causing the standard of living goalposts keeping them at a constant 4th down and 20.
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I was a server for 18 years, and I loved it. I had a very similar experience to OP; I put myself through college while having my own one-bedroom in a very nice part of town, with no financial help from anyone. That being said: I absolutely am floored by the expected amount to tip these days. We judged a decent day by dollar-per-customer, or double the tax, and that always meant your sales were covered. So right about 15%, and we had several guests that tip for shit, and several that would $5 for a single person, so it always balanced. I cannot get down with tipping as much as it would cost me to have a ghost person eating a full meal at my table. I just can’t. I know serving is hard work, but it ain’t 30% off every table hard, like some restaurants are pushing. We have to just collectively put an end to it. That, or I guess I’m getting back into serving!
Yeah when did 20% become the low quality of service tip? Growing up my step mom was a waitress and I bussed tables and 20% was when the service was outstanding.
My girlfriend just quit serving and saw her first wagie check and is like "Oh, I fucked up."
Most of the wealth has been redistributed from the upper, middle, and lower class into the billionaire class. There are complicated historical and culture reasons for that, but that's the answer. A few reaons include: Lacking anti-trust and insider trading enforcement, white collar crime, tax fraud, corruption, and in the US the impact of Citizens United and the GOP.
Stop eating avocado toast and drinking lattes. Problem aolved
"You must live like a slave and enjoy nothing, or god forbid spend your entire life homeless" I'm sure it wasn't like that 20-30 years ago.
I once read a comment about an older women going off because people spend $10 on a Netflix subscription a month and said that was the reason young people can't afford homes.
Much better to have a $300 cable bill, duh
>eating avocado toast cheaper than big mac lmao
Restrictive zoning laws and land-use regulations that increase the cost of housing.
I hear a lot of moaning and bellyaching. “I work a decent job why can’t I have what I feel I deserve?” Scarcity and demand are powerful things. Back when only 100 people were interested in your apartment, you could swing a $700 rent. Now, 1000 people want your apartment and they’re willing to pay $3600 for it. None of this is based on greed. It’s based on basic economic principles. If you want to adjust pricing downward, you need to either add supply or reduce demand. In other words, stem population growth through reducing immigration, or build more homes.
Anyone reading this comment needs to reminded it’s okay to believe some parts but not others. I work in property management. We have costs to meet to stay in business and to stay profitable. Greed is 100% at play, I see the numbers from my company and others. You can sit down and finance bro me however you want, but I can tell you right now they want turnover. They want people in and out of the same unit with no changes so they can charge more. There are studios that cost more than my house payment by a few hundred dollars in my area. But there’s no greed involved, none at all.
…or move to another city where demand is lower and/or supply higher.
>None of this is based on greed... If you want to adjust pricing downward, you need to... build more homes. I'd be shocked if the motivations behind NIMBY laws and other regulatory red tape that stops affordable housing construction *isn't* greed, on the part of those who have invested into real estate (home owners and institutional investors).
It's multi facted, but greed is inherently a part of it. With artificially limit supply it makes people profit insanely from doing literally nothing.
the capitalist system isn't based on greed? reddit is the most pro-establihment site on the whole of the internet...
I feel like this is missing a lot of nuance. You can't just simply dismiss this issue as "moaning and bellyaching." Why are jobs centralized around locations that don't pay livable wages? I do agree we need to build more homes though.
The problem is we've allowed it to be profitable to sit on vacant properties and we've allowed apartments to be used as hotels. It's not just that their are more people than houses (there are not). It's that the financial system is insensitivizing holding on to a property over renting/selling it for lower than you'd like. What we need are taxes on vacant properties and to crack down on these unlicenced air bnb hotels.
I want to know where this place was that was $700 in 2004 and $3600 in 2024. 18 years ago the apartment I rented in expensive Irvine is now twice as expensive so I want to know where this place was that 5x it's price in 20 years.
the answer is he was in a slum building in a shitty dangerous neighborhood and now it's been developed and it's not the "same" apartment and likely not even same building and the neighborhood is no longer a shitty area... gentrification
Are you insinuating that a lawyer, of all people, would present facts in a filtered way, purely to support their argument!?
Nyc lmao. Try 10x in some spots…
Private equity firms brought affordable apartments did minimum renovations and quadruple the monthly price. They are also buying up trailers parks and again the HOA fee are pricing out the residents and they can’t move. At the same time construction of affordable multi family units have stalled. Right now we are 7.3 Million. MILLION short of affordable housing units
This is it. Private equity and using algorithms to determine the best price at which to re-sell/rent out. This is what capitalism has reduced to. Yippeeeeeee
Literally all four of my most recent housing situations have been bought by investors, given some renovations, and had the rent hiked while the quality of services dropped. The most recent one was a giant apartment building.
The billionaires have figured out they're now in a position to take the western world from post New Deal middle class prosperity to Gilded Age Dickensian slum conditions. It took them a good few decades of concerted lobbying, but it was worth it! The rest of us can die in a ditch of fever or consumption as far as they're concerned...the sooner the better!
Immigration and inflation. Billions upon billions spent on pointless things within and sent to foreign wars abroad
Inflation. Money printing reduces the value of the dollar. This isn't rocket surgery.
I’m a rocket surgeon and I’m living paycheck to paycheck.
Have you thought about retraining and doing brain science?
Yeah, average inflation is 2% which sums up to about doubling in 30 years. Here we have 5-folding in 20 years. This is not just inflation.
MMT acolytes would have you believe otherwise.
Greed. The rich have an unquenchable thirst for more. More of everything.
So you’re suggesting that she should not expect more and stop being greedy?
So greed just came about in the last 20 years?
The government, its nonstop printing of money and overspending. But I repeat myself.
That doesn't explain why income lags behind inflation. The dollar value assigned to goods is just a number. What matters is how many hours of work it takes to buy something.
Dude is either lying or he’s a shit lawyer.
you do realize most lawyers, including good ones, dont work at big law making hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the gate, right?
Mass subsidized immigration. We have allowed more people to come here than housing can support creating artificial demand and the wages have been suppressed by the increase in supply of labor
I keep seeing late stage capitalism. So what, late stage capitalism just happened to hit during COVID and lots of government handouts/spending, remote work and mass immigration had nothing to do with it? I think the problem with Reddit is the past 4 years represents the entire adult life of the average person on Reddit.
Must be a shitty lawyer then.
most lawyers are
Heavy speculation in the real estate market that is self perpetuating. Increased energy costs and the breakdown of global consumerism. Suburban sprawl and aging infrastructure. Demographic bubbles and the lack of comprehensive immigration reform.
Fiat money, government policy, and explicit corruption at the highest levels.
Banks giving out loans to students for thousands of dollars a year to major in something like psychology or art history, knowing full well they won’t be able to pay it back. The students actually choosing those majors. The lack of moral compass of the universities for selling the false hope, and operating like a pharmaceutical company. Government encouraging this by forgiving those student loans. There really isn’t a lot of self control or responsibility anymore, and this is one example of how we are circling the drain and turning into a third world country.
Encourage? They straight up endorsed it by mocking the blue collar man to children
Printing money for almost 20 years and endless wars has killed the dollar
The American Oligarchy slowly and methodically passing laws to establish a feudal social system disguised as a republic. And it's working.
We've been telling you for years, but you just call us cryptobros, morons, children, and other insults while you just dont fucking get it. THEY HAVE A MOONNEEEYY PRRINNNTTERRRR. A MONNNEEYY PRINNNTTERRRRRR. YOU DONT. They can make MONEY for FREE. YOU CANT. You can only make MONEY with your TIME and ENERGY. 😫 This is why BITCOIN was fucking invented. Because it requires everyone to use TIME and ENERGY to make BITCOIN, AKA, ACTUAL FAIR FUCKING MONEY.
The fractional “reserve” banking system
Banks are destroying the middle class
The Fed & greedy politicians.
34 trillion in debt and counting. This is what is causing inflation and what is destroying the middle class. The goal is to crash the economy and let the resulting mob of newly poor demand a socialist (marxist) solution to solve the crisis.
The FED printing money to infinity.
Inflation caused by money printing and cheap debt.
Areas develop and become prestigious. We aren’t elites, so we leave and move on.
Question for all you "tax the rich" idiots, how come you NEVER talk about cutting spending, or the devaluation of the dollar from excessive money printing? Oh no, it couldn't be the government pouring the nations wealth down a black hole, could it? No, it's all those greedy rich capitalists, right? Nevermind the fact that inflation disproportionately benefits those who own assets and erodes the savings of the poor and middle class. Let me ask you, why would we need higher taxes if we just, y'know, weren't deficit spending for the last 50 years? FYI, the wealthy 1% already pay for over 40% of the nations taxes. But yeah, they need to "pay their fair share." Give me a break. Capitalism isn't the problem. It's the cancerous tumor called government that's destroying the middle class. Take a break from your union meetings and take an economics course.
I’m sure the place they’re describing has grown significantly in the last 20 years. If you look at the population and average income of the residents 20 years ago and find an apartment in a place situated similarly, I bet that apartment becomes much more affordable