[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=30827019#p30827019:akmvj5uv said:
+Griz[/url]":akmvj5uv]
[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=30826847#p30826847:akmvj5uv said:
Soriak[/url]":akmvj5uv]The first two aren't particularly problematic. Food stamps are a transfer payment that isn't inherently different from the EITC, except that it's not given as cash. We wouldn't point to the percentage of people who benefit from the EITC, even though that's a welfare program as well. Medicaid just got an expansion, so even an increasing number on it isn't a sign of things getting worse. And 12% uninsured is as low as it's been.
1/3 of the population being on government aid for the poor is not very good for the richest country in the world, regardless of how much worse it used to be. also
"one in five kids below the poverty line" hasn't changed at all since Bad Religion put that line in a song from 1996.
Why is that a problem? More than half of all households in Switzerland receive assistance to pay for health insurance. That just means a household with an income of $100k and 2 kids still gets some transfer payments (they are, of course, net payers still). The percentage also relies on a pretty narrow definition of assistance, given that we could also include mortgage-related tax breaks and lower capital gains tax rates as government aid -- and eventually, just about 100% of the population benefits from some handout or another. (The cost of these things is actually accounted for as "mobility spending," even if it does more to reduce mobility.)
Only 7% say they couldn't cover an unexpected $1000 expense, according to the source of the first article. "Not having enough savings" in the article includes people who say they would reduce other spending, which seems like a perfectly legitimate response even if you have savings. Similarly, charging something on a credit card may be smarter than liquidating stocks: carrying $1k debt for 1-2 months comes with an insignificant interest cost. There's plenty of data showing that people have money in their savings account while simultaneously carrying credit card debt (a mystery in itself) so saying they would charge it does not mean they don't have cash on the side.
I can't find the details on that survey but "reduce other spending" seems to imply setting up a payment plan or putting it off as long as possible without being sent to collections instead of just paying it off immediately. I'm also assuming that this includes people like me who consider their checking account as savings because the interest rate sucks either way, so you might as well just dump everything into one bucket instead of having to micromanage two accounts with the possibility of a single overdraft fee wiping out the tiny gain you got from having an actual savings account.
That's not what the question asks -- it's linked in your article:
http://www.bankrate.com/finance/consume ... -1215.aspx (warning: auto-play video). First, the survey only asks millenials, so not households as a whole. Respondents can choose how they would handle an unexpected emergency expense of about $1,000 and the options are (1) savings, (2) reduce spending, (3) use a credit card, and (4) borrow from friends or family. Note that paying with a credit card doesn't even imply not paying it off by the end of the month... but only 12% pick that option anyway. I don't think it's surprising that people in their 20s would turn to their parents if such an expense hit -- for reasons entirely unrelated to poverty. These responses don't imply at all that people are one unexpected expense away from being homeless.
Most Americans don't own any stocks, especially not outside of restricted accounts like a 401(k). So it's not surprising that stock market performance doesn't benefit most people directly. Even when you have stocks, it's not like the value of your portfolio directly impacts your current consumption. I'd wager that nobody adjusts their retirement withholdings based on a monthly evaluation of their portfolio... you stick with some percentage of your income and expect contributions to average out. That means current consumption is fairly disconnected from the value of the portfolio -- right up until someone is preparing to retire.
where's the "trickling down" that the GOP has been promising for decades? the white working class was doing sort of ok up until the financial crisis, now they're suffering with no signs of improvement so I don't know why all the pundits are acting like they're surprised by people opting for Trump instead of more of the same lies.
"Trickle-down economics" has no connection to anything resembling economics -- it's not surprising that political propaganda ends up not actually working in practice. But it's ok, because they can always say it just hasn't been tried hard enough, or for long enough, and if people could just hold out longer, salvation is coming up... not how economics works, alas. But I also don't see that people did all that better up to the financial crisis. They might have had more access to debt (although if I add up the limits on my credit cards today, I get double my annual income), but they certainly didn't have more savings. If someone was about to retire when the financial crisis hit, they would have not only recovered their losses, but realized some decent gains by now. The only way you got screwed over is if in the middle of the crash, you just decided to sell all your stocks for no good reason.
In any case, the median 401(k)/IRA savings for a household about to retire is somewhere around $5,000. So even if they lost half their savings, it's not like that has a practical impact. It certainly did affect people with assets in the top 50%, but they're not usually the people we talk about when it comes to poverty -- or the term itself becomes meaningless and everyone gets to be poor.
