No trickle...
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That's by design, the money flows from the average American to the companies. Then slowly trickles into the pockets of the ceo's.
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Conversely, roughly 10%+ of the US has a negative net worth, ie, they owe more debt than they have assets.
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p70br-202.pdf
And I say 10%+ because this is from 2022, and in general, credit scores have been nose diving and car/home loan delinquencies and tenant evictions have been skyrocketing, since 2022.
We've also got roughly ~40% at least using BNPL for something.
We also know that ... having a negative net wealth is, while not exclusive to poorer people/households in terms of their yearly income... it is much, much more strongly correlated with that.
Though this may change in 'fun' ways now that the housing market is collapsing, bye bye remnants of the 'middle class'!
So anyway, I think a more realistic number for uh... people who are worse than living paycheck to paycheck, people who are actually living paycheck to loan repayment...
Its somewhere between ~10% and ~40%.
... Which is still really fucking bad, as that means something aporoximating a quarter of society sre now just literally debt slaves.
...
So basically, we have:
A ~20% debt slave class,
A ~50% exploited and struggling worker class (who is often in total denial about this being the case),
A ~25% petitie bougeois, decently paid worker / small business owner class (who routinely gaslights and belittles everyone below them, and aspirationally sucks off and praises those above them),
A ~5% capitalist owner class, that gets astonishingly more powerful and wealthy as you increment up each percent and then tenth of a percent, etc.
Oh, sorry. I'm definitely not trying to argue against the idea that the economy is shit or that the ever widening chasm between the "classes" is a massive fucking problem.
I'm fairly outspoken online about how I feel like the social justice movement (while critically important) that rose out of the ashes of Occupy Wallstreet was a ploy to get everyone below the 1% fighting each other. Won't go as far to say the only war is class war, but it's for sure the most inportant one.
I was specifically focused on the headline's claim of 60% using BNPL for groceries. We shouldn't need "alternative facts" to make our point.
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Well, it solves the problem of "I'm 25 years old with a decent paying job but no saved up capital, and need to buy <house/car/etc.>". Without taking on debt, I would need to save up for years to buy this stuff, but by taking on debt I can buy it now and "save up" (i.e. pay back) over the next years.
By all means, loans should be regulated in order to prevent people from taking on debt they can't afford, and to prevent/punish predatory practices. Debt in and of itself however can be a very good thing.
I have an apartment and a car now, with down-payments that I can afford without huge problems. Without taking a loan it probably would have taken me 25 years to be able to afford this. Except I wouldn't have, because the money I'm now using for down-payments would instead have gone to paying rent.
That's not a problem, that's a short cut.
In exchange for you being able to buy things before you can afford them, they're priced so it would take decades to save up.
Because if anyone sells their future, everyone has to if they want to compete
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That's not a problem, that's a short cut.
In exchange for you being able to buy things before you can afford them, they're priced so it would take decades to save up.
Because if anyone sells their future, everyone has to if they want to compete
In exchange for you being able to buy things before you can afford them, they’re priced so it would take decades to save up.
To some degree, you're probably right. However, no matter how you look at it, building an apartment complex or even a single house, costs much more resources than what most people have saved up at any given time. So no. It's not just a matter of "competing" or that things are over-priced. Large infrastructure is just expensive to build, because it costs a bunch of man hours and materials to build it.
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Owing someone a favour is immoral? That's a weird world you live in.
That's the thing... Owing someone is the problem
Helping is great. Counting favors is bad. Help, repay help, pay it forward... All great. Expect repayment? Now we're back at the problem
It's funny how people keep litigating debt into more and more nebulous forms, but I'm just more and more convinced I'm correct. Debt is wrong, it's evil. We should actively prevent it, in our thinking, in our language, in our laws
You all are just too debt brained to understand, no one should be allowed to sell their future. From every angle, it just plays out worse than just not doing it
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That's the thing... Owing someone is the problem
Helping is great. Counting favors is bad. Help, repay help, pay it forward... All great. Expect repayment? Now we're back at the problem
It's funny how people keep litigating debt into more and more nebulous forms, but I'm just more and more convinced I'm correct. Debt is wrong, it's evil. We should actively prevent it, in our thinking, in our language, in our laws
You all are just too debt brained to understand, no one should be allowed to sell their future. From every angle, it just plays out worse than just not doing it
"Debt brained"? Dude, "debt" has existed as long as humanity has existed. You're the one who's "debt brained" for thinking it's a bad thing. That's just society.
In a society people do favours for each-other and what makes it a society is that the person who had a favour done for them acknowledges that as a member of that society, they should try to pay the favour back at some point, otherwise they just seem like a drain on that society. That doesn't mean that you can't also have gifts, it just means that sometimes aid isn't given as a form of gift, it's given with an expectation that at some future point the giftee will become the gifter.
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When the nixon administration abandoned the gold standard, stock prices rose, too. It's the same mechanism: avoid having cash as the currency devalues.
Is it atypical to learn this in school?
In American schools?
Normal public schools?
Economics is an elective, only available at fairly good schools, usually only taken by overachievers.
Most US Public schools don't even teach the basics of taxes or finances as it applies to an average person who is going to like, work a job that is taxed, buy a car with a loan.
Our education system has been intentionally destroyed by Republican
s for decades, the result is that roughly within +/- 2 years of when I graduated college... US average adult literacy rate has been plummeting.The average US adult now reads at a 6th grade level, average math skills are also terrible.
Uneducated people are easier to lie to and trick.
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Daily reminder that "higher GDP is good for the economy" is now a wildly disproven myth from the days before economics was a science, by a guy who said we'd get a 15 hour work week.
Monetary inflation is bad. The nitwits who jump in saying "ackchually velocity" are suckers who paid to learn the lie, whose jobs may depend on the lie, and would be very embarrassed to be wrong. Bailouts weren't the exception - they're the rule.
We've been robbed by the 0.1% and don't need to take it anymore.
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Oh, sorry. I'm definitely not trying to argue against the idea that the economy is shit or that the ever widening chasm between the "classes" is a massive fucking problem.
I'm fairly outspoken online about how I feel like the social justice movement (while critically important) that rose out of the ashes of Occupy Wallstreet was a ploy to get everyone below the 1% fighting each other. Won't go as far to say the only war is class war, but it's for sure the most inportant one.
I was specifically focused on the headline's claim of 60% using BNPL for groceries. We shouldn't need "alternative facts" to make our point.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I didn't think you were arguing that, no worries m8.
I was just trying to throw in some relevant numbers to attempt a more realistic estimate of the situation.
I agree with you that the 60% figure for BNPL is not actually evidenced, and is likely an exageration, so I tried to do the author's work better than they did and come up with a more defensible figure.
I used to be a copy editor for a while, and oh man, yeah, it absolutely annoys me to no end when a person tries to argue in a direction I generally agree with, but they do so sloppily, with bad citations, logical leaps, lack of approoriate levels of knowledge leading to them making inferences and deductions that do not actually follow.
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In exchange for you being able to buy things before you can afford them, they’re priced so it would take decades to save up.
To some degree, you're probably right. However, no matter how you look at it, building an apartment complex or even a single house, costs much more resources than what most people have saved up at any given time. So no. It's not just a matter of "competing" or that things are over-priced. Large infrastructure is just expensive to build, because it costs a bunch of man hours and materials to build it.
I totally agree. But no individual should be building an apartment complex, should they? Who should build it? The city, the community, the future occupants... People should get together and put their money in a pile
This should not be an investment to extract rent and profit, it should be an investment today into the future, not through debt, but to plant trees for the future
Houses are too expensive to build as an individual? Then we're doing something wrong. Maybe we don't run electricity to every corner. Maybe we build them out of stone, so they last forever. Maybe we make them out of wood and plaster so they can last centuries. Maybe we make them out of glorified paper, so they're easy to build. Maybe we don't have central air, but use passive cooling and run an AC to certain rooms. Maybe they should be smaller and easier to build
There are other ways of doing things, better ways that will mean slower progress but stability
You shouldn't be able to leverage the future, we should always be investing into tomorrow today
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It's like Robin Hood in reverse.
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Idk about you, but while I was getting my free engineering degree in Norway I still had to pay for rent and food.
In principle, I could have studied part-time instead of full time, while working some job that doesn't require a degree, but I don't see how that would benefit anyone. Regardless, even if you have housing and food covered while studying, you still need money for books, paper, a computer, etc. so either you need a job (which, for a lot of degrees, means you'll be studying part-time), or you need a loan.
You don't need a loan, you need somewhere to live and food
Maybe students just get free dorms and a meal plan by default, and we work that into the cost of education and pay for it as a society
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There are many examples of this being essentially the status quo in many places and historical eras and essentially it just makes housing availability worse since only the ultra wealthy can afford to build expensive structures and they just accumulate more wealth and power. Think about in the middle ages when a local lord would have to foot the bill to build townhouses completely up front but he and his descendants would retain ownership of them and demand payment to live in them for hundreds of years to come. There are places where access to credit is poor today where people basically live in makeshift shacks if they don't rent because they can't afford to buy houses otherwise. There are a lot of ways to fix land ownership and exploitation by landlords, but historically speaking, this was not it. I know nobody likes living in debt and debt can be used for exploitation, but completely abolishing credit simply will not have good outcomes as a whole.
Feudalism had a lot of good points structurally, replace the lord with public servants and I don't see the problem. The city builds the housing, and it becomes part of the tax revenue forever. If the city prices basic housing too high, economic activity falls, tax revenue falls, and the city declines
Shanty towns aren't good, but we haven't fixed the problem, we just have homelessness now
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Feudalism had a lot of good points structurally, replace the lord with public servants and I don't see the problem. The city builds the housing, and it becomes part of the tax revenue forever. If the city prices basic housing too high, economic activity falls, tax revenue falls, and the city declines
Shanty towns aren't good, but we haven't fixed the problem, we just have homelessness now
Debt is bad, fuedalism is good. Got it lmao.
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"Debt brained"? Dude, "debt" has existed as long as humanity has existed. You're the one who's "debt brained" for thinking it's a bad thing. That's just society.
In a society people do favours for each-other and what makes it a society is that the person who had a favour done for them acknowledges that as a member of that society, they should try to pay the favour back at some point, otherwise they just seem like a drain on that society. That doesn't mean that you can't also have gifts, it just means that sometimes aid isn't given as a form of gift, it's given with an expectation that at some future point the giftee will become the gifter.
That's just totally incorrect. Most people throughout history didn't even use money, let alone debt. Taxes were paid in grain, livestock, and essentially community service
Debt created money, but money is not as old as humanity. It's not required, it's not coded into our genes
And counting favors is widely accepted to be shitty behavior. It's transactional, it's low trust
You can just do favors, and call the guy who never helps out a lazy asshole. They're unreliable so people eventually don't want to help them, and we have all sorts of fairy tales about it
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Debt is bad, fuedalism is good. Got it lmao.
Feudalism didn't make us destroy the entire world, did it?
What were doing clearly isn't working, maybe there's something to democratic feudalism. Seriously, it fixes a lot of issues and all I see are engineering problems
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It's like Robin Hood in reverse.
Robin Socks
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That's just totally incorrect. Most people throughout history didn't even use money, let alone debt. Taxes were paid in grain, livestock, and essentially community service
Debt created money, but money is not as old as humanity. It's not required, it's not coded into our genes
And counting favors is widely accepted to be shitty behavior. It's transactional, it's low trust
You can just do favors, and call the guy who never helps out a lazy asshole. They're unreliable so people eventually don't want to help them, and we have all sorts of fairy tales about it
That's just totally incorrect. Most people throughout history didn't even use money, let alone debt.
You need to read "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber. Debt goes back a lot longer than money, and has been part of human existence for as long as that existence has been recorded.
There is no human civilization without debt.
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That's by design, the money flows from the average American to the companies. Then slowly trickles into the pockets of the ceo's.
"Slowly"
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Canadian here, what's "AfterPay"? and PLEASE don't tell me it's like layaway or a payday loan or something.
Yeah, basically a payday loan you can do from your phone. I'm sure this won't crash the economy.
