Why You'll Never Achieve The American Dream
Why You'll Never Achieve The American Dream
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15760475
Why You'll Never Achieve The American Dream
Why You'll Never Achieve The American Dream
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15760475
Why You'll Never Achieve The American Dream
Wow, that video is full of scare tactics and misleading information. Sources are few, and the ones that exist are misleading at best. I'm not going to go through and rebut everything, but I'll pick out a few parts I think are particularly misleading to make my point.
I put parts into spoiler tags because this got really long. I hope this helps make the post feel less imposing.
Looking at the home ownership rate, it looks like things are generally getting better. About 2/3 of households own the house they're living in.
Let's look at real wages, which are about where they were 40 years ago. That means wages have roughly kept up with inflation. That's a good thing, and it looks like we're on a slow increase.
What this shows is that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer, but everyone is at least staying consistently rich, if not increasing.
I 100% agree with this. The important thing is to focus on what you can control, and for most people, helping out their neighbors is absolutely in their control.
Also, contact your representatives and tell them what's important to you. You probably won't get it, but if enough people reach out, they'll be motivated to act on it to keep their constituents voting for them.
I'm happy to discuss any part of this with anyone who is interested, I just ask to keep things positive. I like talking about solutions, not complaining about things out of our control.
If there's something I failed to provide a source for, or you'd just like more information, please mention it and I'll do my best.
I think think this very regionally dependant. Median household income and house cost in Austin, for example, is ~$70k and ~$650k, respectively. I grew up in a very small rural town, very far from any cities, and even though houses were much cheaper, they were still unaffordable to most people unless they could land one of the few available union jobs (most jobs available were in manufacturing and paid near minimum wage).
Things may be getting better, slightly, for the median person, but inequality is soaring, and a more dangerous problem IMO. Money is power, so inequality is a direct threat to democracy. It's also inequality, not poverty, that has the largest effect on crime rates, and social decohesion in general.
But crime is actually on a downward trend:
If income inequality is, in fact, a driver for crime, there must be an explanation for what's pushing crime down.
That's certainly possible, but I think a simpler and more likely explanation is that we're getting more exposed to media, and media sells the rare events harder than the common ones, because that's what attracts eyeballs.
Yeah, and that totally sucks, but you're also probably not going to buy the median house for your first home. Here's one in Austin for $325k, which is still expensive, but half the price you quoted. I didn't do a ton of research here (literally 30s search for 3+ beds, 1.5+ baths), but it seems like a decent starter home.
The bigger issue is interest rates, because a $650k house is way more affordable at 3% than 7%. If we assume that $325k house is available and we put 5% down, that house would cost:
On a $70k salary, that's ~45% of really income, which is pretty high for a housing expense (ideally housing is more like 30%). But it's not unapproachable.
I'm not going to do a full budget breakdown, but hopefully my point is that if you look for a way, you can probably find a way. It's probably not going to with if you're making minimum wage, but if you're at the median income, it's a possibility, especially if rates come down a bit.
🤡
I almost up voted you reflexively because Second Thought often trends towards Marxist Leninist propaganda. But I didn't have to read far before the ignorance started to gleam through.
That's false on the face of it. Fascism is definitionally capitalist. Go check Wikipedia or an encyclopedia of your choice. Any reputable one will tell you that. If you don't understand that, it's likely you don't actually understand what capitalism is. Which would be very on brand for most people educated in America. The indoctrination and propaganda has been very heavy here.
The rest of your "critique" could best be described as disingenuous misrepresentation or flat out misunderstanding if one was generous. I'm not going to rebut it line by line as I generally have no desire to defend Second Thought. But despite them often being misleading and even propagandic. They get far more correct than this critique.
That really depends on how you define fascist and capitalist I guess.
Here's a definition of facism from Webster:
And Cambridge dictionary:
And the definition of capitalism in those same dictionaries. Webster:
And Cambridge:
Both definitions of facism say it involves strict, top-down control of the economy, and both definitions of capitalism say it involves private (non-government) control. When you get too much government control, it stops being capitalism and starts being mercantilism:
In fact:
The article goes on to say:
And just not just Trump, look at Biden's tariffs against China, those have the goal of increasing domestic production of EVs in a protectionist move, which is very much mercantilist.
When people say "capitalism is the problem" or "capitalism leads to fascism," what they are usually talking about is mercantilism. That's the marriage of government and capital, where government interests are served by steering the economy in a certain way, and capital benefits from the strong arm of the government protecting their profits.
So the problem here isn't capitalism, it's government control over the economy. Governments should largely restrict themselves to welfare, consumer protection, etc. The more regulations and whatnot start to look like mercantilism, the easier it will be for a strong individual to steer the country toward facism.