Income Disparity

You are very cruel, Phyllo,to not let a poor person have a phone, access to 911, to their employers, their family and friends. Shame on you and even more shame for adding nothing legit to this conversation.

Interior heats of 90F+ can be deadly even with windows open and fans, medical professionals warn against exposure to extreme heat, so it would be unscrupulous to risk people’s well being. If you want them dead, put a bullet in their heads, that be kinder.

Insurance is corporate taxation to fund corporate control, very little different than the IRS.

While we are at it, medicine was little more than witchdoctory prior to the late 19th century.

How did people manage? :evilfun:

I’m not cruel at all. I’m just saying stuff that most people pussy-foot around. There are lots of hidden assumptions in these discussions. If you want to talk philosophy, you need to face unpleasant truths.

First, not every elected politician is a crook, but we have the option to vote them out of office and find someone who isn’t a crook to replace them. Additionally, should they commit a crime they can be convicted and jailed. Does it happen very often? No. But is OUR fault. We put them there.

phyllo, we may not agree on very many things, but I do agree that this thread is getting sprayed all over the place for a lack of declared assumptions let alone concise definitions of what is an acceptable living wage. The various causes leading to the disparity in income levels is even more complex. It might need a couple more different threads to target specific issues?

a bit of off topic history lesson:

the city and all its manifestations rise from different forces…
the modern city and its suburbs are a product of technical forces…
for example, when we talk about the city in the 1887 is a different
place then the city of 2017, but why?

for most of modern history, say 1500 past, the average worker
could only live within a mile or so of their work… or basically an
hour walk either way…this is in part, why ghettos existed or tenements existed…
it becomes a question of how one gets to work and for most people walking was the only
way until the rise of modern transportation systems such as subways and trolley cars…
then the distance to work from home to work increased a bit maybe two or three miles…
let us mark off 1900 as the rise of the car but work and home was still fairly close
to together, maybe at most 4 miles apart but for most people, work and home
was fairly close to together, a mile or two…but if the car was begun in 1900 and
became a fixture by 1925, why didn’t the suburbs begin then?

because of the modern and vastly underrated modern interstate
freeways being built in the 1950’s which allowed the rise of
modern suburbs…because of this freeway system we can travel for
hours to our work and back again…I work 10 minutes from work
but I know fellow workers who live 40 to 70 miles from work and commute
hours each day just to work…

so when one is discussing the modern worker, one needs to keep in
mind, technology and the advent of stuff like the freeway system
and the modern internet… or you will miss aspects of our industrial
society and come to the wrong conclusions…

so when discussing class or income or the middle class or the working class,
one must keep in mind the current technology as it changes how we work
and our income levels…

Kropotkin

No. A comeback is still not in sight. The opposite is true: the middle class seems to vanish.

There is a definition. The class affiliation can be measured by the income and the buying power. So that is no problem.

No. More have moved down than up.

Almost all people know this fact.

The richest 20% have moved up, all others (80%) have moved down. Exponentially! The increase of the gap between rich and poor is an accelerating one!

The brutal reality used to be that you either found some way to get to work or you moved so that you lived close to work. If you didn’t, then you would not have that job.

Yeah, people were “forced” to move. :astonished:

A quickie: Technology is making it possible to begin returning to pre-industrial modes of living. Ever larger numbers of people are"working at home" through intarwebz connectivity. Drop by the office now and then, but almost all work is accomplished through email, texting, phone, etc. A lot of people have returned to living with their families and their work in the same space. Spatial distances have much less meaning in such an environment.

That’s not true.

You mean vote them out, as in, end their term of service early? How will we know whether they are committing a crime if only their co-conspirators are present. Is misspending taxes a crime? Are corporate bribes (I mean campaign donations) criminal? How’s about creating bills that ultimately poison or injure your constituents? Show me an upstanding politician, one who lives up to his/her word, who has made positive reforms rather than reforms that protect and expand corporate greed.

Wendy -

My household income is on the high side, but I don’t have air conditioning. That’s a personal choice. But air conditioning is fairly new. Living without it is possible.

Now, I am not claiming that poor people shouldn’t have air conditioning. What I am saying is that, for this to be a meaningful discussion, we have to be careful about comparisons. Wendy and allies have been comparing the present to the post war boom years. And only in terms of income. This is just not a serious endeavor. The general standard of living throughout society has to be examined.

I think I understand that you, wendy, are living on $15,000 per year, which, again if I understand you, is your disability benefit. If that is all true and you are truly disabled, which many collecting the benefit are not, then I will say that an affluent society such as the U.S. can easily afford to provide you with a higher income. It’s an insult that your benefit is so small.

Likewise, there is no reason that minimum wage cannot be higher. In constant dollars, it has been higher in the past. The economy can handle that.

You shouldn’t have to pay $200 for health care. Plus copays. And I’ll agree that the U.S. healthcare system is an embarrassing mess and way too expensive for everyone.

But you say “No central air”. And this is indicative of part of the problem - expectations. No central air. That is an issue because it’s what many americans have come to expect, along with smart phones (of any type) and a whole host of luxury items as standard accoutrements of life. Because the overall standard of living in america is so high. Most poor people in the world would think of air conditioning and smart phones as magic.

So the system has its flaws. But it has tremendous benefits compared to much of the world. Income disparity is not a matter of poverty per se. It’s a matter of expectations.

Buy everyone a horse for X-Mas, Phyllo. I need land, a stable, and a ten year supply of hay/oats too. I’ll make my own saddle and horseshoes. :evilfun:

I wish.

True, but I’m not a resident of the Saharan desert. I’m speaking to the country I reside in. Our welfare system is the worst of all civilized/industrialized countries.

Central air is more energy efficient than window air units so it saves poor people money to have central air and heat rather than space heaters.

Disparity within a country is a very different issue than disparity across the world. Differing races, cultures, landscapes, and dominions greatly alter affluence.

The rich, the smug, really don’t give a crap about their hard working, low income neighbors who do all the shit jobs that they would never stoop to do other than temporarily if ever at all. Why are the liberals the least affected, the least caring, when the poor are suppose to be part of their do-gooder platform?

The high side of what? What is it?

The North East coast and the West coast are like separate countries within the USA.

Wendy,

Please put the blame where it belongs. Congressional reps can be voted out. They can suffer a recall from their constituents. They can be sent to jail for crimes committed. Who controls this? We do. The bad representation is OUR fault. This is still a government of the people. The issue becomes one of getting the people to pay attention. This isn’t a left or right issue, it is our whole society. To lean on an old saw, “We get the government we deserve”.