In a survey, published Sunday by CBS News, 82 percent of registered voters said they think it is more difficult to purchase a home than it was for previous generations, while 76 percent said the same for raising a family.
About 70 percent of voters in the poll said securing a good job is harder than in the past, even in the wake of recent strong job numbers. According to the May jobs report, payrolls increased by 272,000 and wage growth ticked upward in a reversal of a three-month downward trend.
While young voters overwhelmingly have concerns about the current state of the world, most voters under 30 — 62 percent — still have optimism about attaining the “American Dream.” Thirty-two percent said they won’t reach it, while 6 percent said they already have.
These numbers are always a little fucky unless you really want to go combing through some incredibly dull spreadsheets, reports, statistics, etc. to find exactly what you’re looking for
EDIT #2: I’m an idiot who doesnt heed my own warnings about fucky numbers. Disregard the rest of this comment unless you want to see me being wrong, leaving it up because I own up to my mistakes. See the following comments for details
But from a couple minutes of googling, it looks to me like the top 25% of income in the US puts you at around $100k/person, give or take maybe about 10K or so depending on where exactly you’re sourcing those numbers.
That’s of course only part of the picture, net worth, investments, all kinds of creative accounting, etc. also play into that, but I only have so much patience to comb through all of it.
That’s not what I’d consider wealthy, but I’d probably consider that to be a pretty comfortable income for a lot of people. Again, a lot of variables there, but in general that would probably be enough to make sure your basic needs are all covered, and probably to save a decent bit on top of that, be able to send your kids to a decent college and pay for at least part of it out of pocket, and at least generally enough to give you a leg-up over a family making the median income at about half of that.
EDIT: My wife and I fall a bit short of that by probably about 30K each, we’re doing OK, not struggling but not making a whole lot of forward progress either. That kind of money would be almost like having a whole 3rd income for us
25th percentile for median household income is only $133,000 per year, that’s not per person, that’s the entire household. You’re still working a full time job (or likely more) for that kind of wage. You probably also live in a high cost of living area. That’s comfortable, but hardly what I’d consider “easier” than the previous generation.
Looking further into it, your numbers do seem to be more accurate and I’m going to edit my above comment to reflect that.
Serves to illustrate my point about fucky numbers though, there’s lots of bad sources out there that are cherry picking different stats and statistics that sound like but aren’t quite what you’re looking for, doing some questionable math, bullshit written for SEO algorithm purposes and AI generated content making up numbers, etc, and I’m not immune to falling for that. Whatever the hell I was googling earlier (unfortunately I keep my browser and search history wiped pretty clean and I’m having a hell of a time trying to retrace my digital steps, otherwise I’d share where I got those numbers and where I went wrong) was giving me the very distinct impression that the 75th percentile was roughly in the ballpark of 100K individual
It’s real easy to purchase your first home, all you need is a can-do mindset, an always-hustle attitude, and a small $2m loan from your dad. Anyone can do it!
They have infrastructure, but it’s only for people who are on the registered list of 1.8 million. Anyone not on that list is taking a risk that I hope is made clear to them.
This explains the anti-abortion stance of the right. Can’t allow abortions because it’s more important they grow up to suffer by their god’s hands as they make a pilgrimmage to worship that god. As thanks he lets them die suffering and miserable from the decisions of their god’s other believers. You know, the ones with all the oil and the heads of the companies that profess to believe and vote for people who will keep this shit going.
She actually needs the DA to add those hate crimes to the charges so that Abbott can pardon her later, just attempted capital murder and injury to a child aren’t going to cut it with him.
Indeed. Nothing about this addresses rental markets and general extreme cost of living. Rather, it finds new ways to prop up severely overvalued housing markets.
Housing costs are so high because it’s become an investment over a necessary place for a human to live. A correction is severely needed and long overdue, but the government works hard to keep values artificially high from zoning laws at the bottom to preventing corrections at the top.
That and most people just do the standard deductions.
So tax breaks mostly help the wealthy in mansions.
It’s like how conservatives want to move income tax to sales tax. The wealthiest make a lot more than they spend. And when they spend it’s usually thru some shady shit where they don’t pay sales tax. Like claiming seven figure personal vehicles as a “company car” from a company they own.
Like claiming seven figure personal vehicles as a “company car” from a company they own.
My parents did this kind of stuff. :/
Gas, restaurants, cars, insurance, etc. Probably so much stuff I don’t even know about. The company pays for it and they pocket the wages they pay themselves. All this while the people that work for them work part time with no benefits, and predictably have unstable financial situations.
But my parents view themselves as financially responsible and their workers as financially irresponsible. They worked hard to build their company but the rewards far exceed their work relative to their workers.
idk what I’m trying to say. I’m ashamed of the way my parents became successful but at the end of the day they played the game how it was meant to be played. Our society is fucked up on every level.
Not really, because the rental market does not behave like commodities do. Generally, you have to live within a reasonable distance of employment. For this and other reasons, renters are much more vulnerable and tend to get exploited far beyond the cost of the service.
Basically, if tenants had any more money to exploit, they would already take it. Rents are maximally high wherever possible to extract maximum money from people who need a place to live.
Consider the common joke that I pay this much in rent every month but the bank says I can’t afford a house where the mortgage would be substantially less.
Agreed, and this would be solved by sufficiently high land value tax - if wasn’t profitable to be a landlord nobody would do it and the price of land would decline sharply. Henry George saw all of this coming a long time ago.
First time I’ve heard of the idea of a separate land value tax… Frankly it seems like an awesome idea, especially for cities.
I imagine it would make dense housing more profitable than McMansions, and punish the NIMBYs who keep standing in the way of affordable housing. Maybe we could make the tax increase significantly with the number of properties an individual owns and start it at the highest rate for things like shell corps and LLCs.
That’s why you set it exponentially based on units owned by parent company, maybe break it down as a tax paid by shareholders for huge corporations landlords.
They could try to pass it on to consumers, but smaller landlords wouldn’t have to pay it.
That’s why you set it exponentially based on units owned by parent company, maybe break it down as a tax paid by shareholders for huge corporations landlords.
That might not have been clear.
Set it at the parent company level so it’s not easy.
If they have X amount invested in rental real estate, that can just be taxed then
Believe me, the tax code for the wealthy is already complicated, they can handle this
Then there is no parent company…? Just another random company. It does not need to be complicated and this is far from it. It needs to be such that they can not easily avoid the taxes.
At the very least, they should raise real estate taxes on empty units. This will penalize people for owning several vacation homes, as well as incentivize landlords to lower rates in order to fill the unit.
Difficult to enforce, but send a few people to jail for real estate tax fraud and the rest will fall in line.
The issue with this figure is that it comes from the Census Bureau, and their definition is broad and simple that it doesn’t into account for example. Here’s the definition they use:
Vacant Housing Units. A housing unit is vacant if no one is living in it at the time of the interview, unless its occupants are only temporarily absent. In addition, a vacant unit may be one which is entirely occupied by persons who have a usual residence elsewhere. New units not yet occupied are classified as vacant housing units if construction has reached a point where all exterior windows and doors are installed and final usable floors are in place. Vacant units are excluded if they are exposed to the elements, that is, if the roof, walls, windows, or doors no longer protect the interior from the elements, or if there is positive evidence (such as a sign on the house or block) that the unit is to be demolished or is condemned. Also excluded are quarters being used entirely for nonresidential purposes, such as a store or an office, or quarters used for the storage of business supplies or inventory, machinery, or agricultural products. Vacant sleeping rooms in lodging houses, transient accommodations, barracks, and other quarters not defined as housing units are not included in the statistics in this report. (See section on “Housing Unit.”)
As you can see this definition doesn’t really take into account a lot of genuine factors. For example, a lot of units are in really poor condition and require renovations in order to be livable again, but they’re counted as vacant because they still have their exteriors in place. Same goes units. They’re also counting units that are not entirely completed, units that are occupied but just temporarily like vacation homes, and mobile homes. We do have a lot of vacant units in this country, but it’s not as much as this figure would lead you to believe. In reality, we need new units, we need a lot of them, and we need them ASAP.
There’s always talk about tax breaks for home owners…
Because governments want housing prices to stay sky high. The canadian prime minister openly said he doesn’t want housing prices to drop because too many people are using their houses as a retirement strategy. That’s why there are so many government programs that support buying a house but none that support renting.
Yeah, the first time I learned about our current vice president, she was trying to allegedly give renters similar tax breaks in California.
I don’t know what happened to that, but I was an immediate fan. Seeing as it never happened, smeh… Not sure what to think. But it’s a very popular idea amongst those of us who can’t afford to buy (most people in California.)
I still sorta think we shouldn’t have killed the planet with pollution and deforestation. I know it’s the sort of outrageous position that gets ExxonMobil’s CEO in a froth, but still. It just seems wrong, somehow.
Yep, it’s not the planet’s first mass extinction rodeo. A few hundreds of thousands of years, and it’ll be right as rain again. Humanity will very likely just be a distant memory then.
True, sadly, the working class has much to continue to learn.
It doesn’t help that the owner class activily enables and helps fund people and projects to keep the working class divided!
That is why we need to be open to talk and have discussions with people with a diverse set of thinking, echo chambers and bubbles do not help us, it may only work to hinders our society.
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