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[Reelya]

Median adult wealth in the USA was about $45K in 2013. Yeah, so someone with $600K net assets is definitely in a small minority. Also from comparing median wealth to mean wealth, you can get an idea of wealth inequality. In a fairly equitable society mean wealth would be close to median wealth. You can see in the chart than for many rich countries, median wealth is greater than 50% of mean wealth. USA's median wealth is around 1/6th of mean wealth.

You can even look up the income of Sanders supporters easily and see that it's above the median and no different from Clinton supporters:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/

I'm guessing a slip of the tongue here, since the story is about Trump, not Sanders.

[Wolfhunter107]

Median adult wealth in the USA was about $45K in 2013. Yeah, so someone with $600K net assets is definitely a small minority.

You can even look up the income of Sanders supporters easily and see that it's above the median and no different from Clinton supporters:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/

I'm guessing a slip of the tongue here, since the story is about Trump, not Sanders.

The table in the story lists the incomes of Sanders and Clinton voters as well as Trump's.

[Reelya]

Ah ok, in many states Sanders does attract voters who are significantly poorer than clinton voters (in wealthier states), but it sort of evens out nationally. But the charts only included people who voted in primaries, so I'm not sure how well that would translate to overall community support.

[DJ]

Is doing bad financially a prerequisite for prioritizing economic issues when deciding who to vote for?

[mainiac]

Is doing bad financially a prerequisite for prioritizing economic issues when deciding who to vote for?

I dont really think so but you see someone was bitching here about the middle class income steadily decreasing.

[DJ]

And I'll still think that because I think the x year dollar value calculations are bogus. I'd like to see the ratio of a price of a typical house and Uni degree today and 50 years ago (not that you needed a Uni degree back then) compared to the ratio of the paycheck size today and 50 years ago.

[mainiac]

Ow, I hurt my neck trying to keep an eye on those goalposts. 

[DJ]

Well your things are improving thesis ain't looking so hot either, because penguin's link shows that it's been pretty stagnant for the working class. Meanwhile, GDP per capita has pretty much tripled.

[penguinofhonor]

You might be onto something with housing. From what I can tell, it's most likely that these numbers were adjusted using the Consumer Price Index.

The CPI specifically has some problems with housing, because it calculates average rent based on everybody paying rent. This doesn't seem bad at first, but your rent is likely lower the longer you've been living at the same place. Raising someone's rent risks pissing them off, so landlords tend to avoid it. This means someone purchasing a new apartment is disadvantaged compared to someone who already has one. Since the CPI ignores this, it seems to me to be much less useful for determining purchasing power.

That said, I have no idea how significantly this would affect the numbers. It's also possible that they could have used another system to calculate inflation, but this seems like the most readily available and commonly used one.

[DJ]

All I know is that single blue collar paycheck families could afford to live within driving distance of fairly busy cities like Detroit. Today you'd be lucky to afford a trailer in Iowa if you had to support a family on a single blue collar paycheck.

[mainiac]

Well your things are improving thesis ain't looking so hot either

And what thesis are you referring to?

[DJ]

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=159257.msg7102613#msg7102613

[Frumple]

Y... you addressed absolutely nothing that mainiac was talking about in that post, though... like, the goalposts they were using wasn't just moved, they were marched away from with enthusiasm. Things can still be overall improving despite them not changing much on certain issues.

... beyond that, cost of living issues and the changes regarding blue collar work over the last while is... a lot more complicated than just income stagnation. Standard of living is pretty notable, too -- you can definitely keep a family going on a single blue collar income in many places in the states (I personally live in one where it's fairly viable below the bloody poverty line, it's just damn sure uncomfortable), it's just you wouldn't exactly be living in the best of conditions. Mind, you wouldn't exactly have been living in the best of conditions a while back, either. People seem to like to forget what things were like a few decades ago for folks in that situation...

Personally, I get to hear from older folks talking about how things were back then, and... I like stuff like clean water, myself. AC, food that won't make you sick occasionally, not having to stuff multiple people into a single bed, healthcare that doesn't boil down to quackery, stuff like that. They talk pretty fondly about those times, but you listen to what they're saying and it's not what you'd call particularly rosy, imo.

[DJ]

The gist of it was that capitalism is working out just fine for everyone, and I'm saying that the working class is getting fucked over because increase in their productivity hasn't been reflected by an increase in their wealth, which means they're getting an ever smaller slice of the sweat of their brow. So I'd say Marx isn't as out of date as people claim.

[Frumple]

H... how did you get "capitalism is working out just fine for everyone" out of that? Most of it was about how problems with capitalism are being better dealt with than they were previously/other countries have been managing. There was pretty much no "working out just fine for everyone" involved in what... basically anyone has been saying for the last bit, so far as I can tell.