I’ve been watching a few American TV shows and it blows my mind that they put up with such atrocious working terms and conditions.
One show was about a removal company where any damage at all, even not the workers fault, is taken out of their tips. There’s no insurance from the multimillion dollar business. As they’re not paid a living wage the guy on the show had examples of when he and his family went weeks with barely any income and this was considered normal?!
Another example was a cooking show where the prize was tickets to an NFL game. The lady who won explained that she’d be waiting in the car so her sons could experience their first live game, because she couldn’t otherwise afford a ticket to go. They give tickets for football games away for free to people where I live for no reason at all…
Yet another example was where the workers got a $5k tip from their company and the reactions were as if this amount of money was even remotely life changing. It saddens me to think the average Americans life could be made so much better with such a relatively small amount of money and they don’t unionize and demand far better. The company in question was on track to make a billion bloody dollars while their workers are on the poverty line and don’t even have all their teeth?
It’s not actually this bad and the average American lives a pretty good life like we’re led to believe, right?
1 in 8 lives in poverty (<20k for a 2 person household).
1 in 4 has less than 1k in savings.
1 in 2 has less money saved than last year.
1 in 2 is living paycheck to paycheck
But thanks to massive income inequality, the average American makes 59k a year.
Fun fact: America is arguably better if you are rich or with a high income, Europe is better if you have a lower income / are poor
This. If you are fortunate to have great employment (100k+, dual income preferred (so breaking 200+), depending on location), with good healthcare, your options are great, and you’ll access a higher level of service than most of the world can get. Great schools, great doctors, great home/car/vacations.
If you don’t have that raw income, and therefore don’t have that support, america is a much much different place.
I’m fortunate enough to have gone from very low class to a much higher strata and I never get comfortable. I’m constantly surprised by shit that just happens…easily.
An example: by having good insurance, I have a very good dermatologist. I have psoriasis and use a biologic injectable to handle it completely. Once, my specialty pharmacy had some sort of shipping issue and I called my doc to check in. They said come by.
They handed me 6 doses FOR FREE, so 6 months of medication, like it was nothing. Each dose is thousands of dollars cash. I pay 25$ with my insurance. I assume a vendor rep dropped a ton off.
Point being, I know there are millions of folks on very expensive meds, who don’t have a high quality doctor relationship, who could never access that perk I did. Literally paywalled customer service.
While this may be true today, note that European countries (well, the rich ones anyways) might just be behind the curve here. We’re certainly on our way towards a U.S.-style disaster.
It’s very hard to generalise this though as cultures here are very heterogenous here. You’d never in 100 years expect the Dutch to fall for the car industry’s strategy of getting everyone dependant on cars to anywhere near the same degree as the U.S. has while you absolutely couldn’t say the same about Germany; we love sucking on those exhaust pipes (especially our politicians).
Americans absolutely need cars due to the size of the country. We like our space. We’re not being duped into buying cars for no good reason.
This is a common misbelief.
There’s a small subset of U.S. citizens who do live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and actually do need a personal vehicle to get around. The vast majority does not.
That’s just false. There are vast rural areas and communities in every state. If you think it’s only in a select few states in the middle of the country, then I have a bridge to sell you.
My argument does not hinge on any arbitrary state borders. Read again.
There’s just a lot of inequality in the US that is both socially and politically unacceptable in the rest of the developed world. Extremes are more accepted here.
There are more extremely rich people than you would see in other Western countries and and many, many more extremely poor people than in other Western countries. Alleviating that would mean implementing policies to redistribute wealth that many Americans are not willing to implement, especially conservatives.
The US basically sacrifices the good of the many for the great of the few.
And they manage to get poor people on board by tying their policies to Jesus and Family Values. And it works like a charm and it’s so weird.
Which seems even stranger. In many other countries, Christians vote left of center to promote economic equality, reduce poverty, get green policies to protect God’s green earth, make sure that everyone has universal access to healthcare and education, etc.
In the US, they vote oppotite of that.
Every American is a rich man who is temporarily down on his luck and making big societal changes would screw them over when they finally get their money.
The main problem we have here is the difference between mean and median income. The average (mean) is fine but not many actually make that. There’s a majority who are sort of poor or very poor, a smaller slice who are average and that’s reasonably well off (not in immediate danger of something dire happening) and a minority who are so fucking rich it skews the average.
All of this is exacerbated by the lack of social safety net here, we simply don’t do as much redistribution in the correct direction as most rich countries. So it’s harder to be poor here because they are preyed on rather than supported. In those shows you watched, you are correct, the stickiness of capital in the upper classes is the problem, not an overall lack of money.
It’s just not spread out right. Yes more should unionize and also we need more small to medium size businesses, more growth at the bottom to pull that money back and spread it out better.
This is an interesting take and I think you are right. Apart from unionizing and demanding better there are definitely structural problems in how capital moves though the classes because there’s clearly enough wealth to make a lot of people’s lives better. I mean, that wealth is right there on display in these shows but it’s just not shared with these workers at all except when the wealthy want to big note themselves a little bit.
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Disability (which I paid taxes for, to protect me from poverty if I became disabled) pays a whopping $914/MONTH.
I sell nudes to afford basic necessities.
They also have an asset cap of $2,000 which hasn’t changed since 1974. Basically, if I have more than $2k in my bank (or in any valuables like comics or coins) at any time, they take away my food and Medical insurance. If adjusted for inflation, it would be $13k. I’m drowning and lucky I’m an attractive girl, otherwise I couldn’t afford to survive.
There are a lot of awful things here but to focus on just one, holy shit monthly rent could go over the asset cap in a few years.
Yeah disability is intentionally designed to be awful. You can only have it of you’re dirt poor and it pays so little that you will always be dirt poor. God help you if you live in a place where it’s hard to get separate housing assistance, that has poor EBT benefits, a state that fucked over medicaid, etc. God help you if a family member tried to assist you in some way and now you have ever so slightly too much money. It’s a really messed up system considering how hard it is to get ln disability, meaning that the vast majority of people who have it aren’t scamming the system as some people might like us to believe.
I had to lawyer up and fight to prove I was disabled, even though I had medical documentation of seizures, severe Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, Tachycardia, etc. If you don’t have a lawyer, they automatically deny you. Lawyers only get paid if they win, so if you’re not lawyered up, they assume you weren’t bad enough for a lawyer to take the case.
I contacted a senator in my state and she basically told me that Social Security is going to run out, so the cap hasn’t changed because only people with no other choice will be on disability, and it’ll last longer
You know it’s pretty obvious that inequality is rampent in the US and people are hurting because of it. Yet the latest polls show just how popular Donald Trump and the Republicans are. Conservatives use to try and hide their true intentions, but today they dont care and will say exactly how much they want Americans to hate other people in the country. I truly wish I could understand why an average Americans doesnt see how much the Democrats have done under the Biden administration to try and fix these issues. I really do believe if the Democrats could finally have control of the federal government, and I mean 2008 levels, we could see some serious change.
Well when most employers can fire you at any time for almost any reason (at-will employment) and your healthcare is tied to your job then… yeah, employers can treat their employees pretty poorly and get away with it, especially if you work in something like fast food or big box retail where plenty of young, unskilled workers are entering the workforce every year that they can replace you with.
Tl;Dr: It varies very drastically by locale. Rural Americans can often live okay on “very* minimal income. Standards on what " poor” and “normal” vary about as widely between parts of America as they do between America and where you’re from.
Where I live (Dallas), I’m making around $40,000 in an area where the median is $60,000. I live alone, but I will have to buy a new car this year and I will barely be able to make my payments. I do not have a college degree, and I’m still basically entry level.
I’ve been looking at moving a lot recently. If I moved where I want to live (Oregon), I’d probably make the same or slightly less money, and my rent and expenses would probably rise by a few hundred a month. In effect, I would barely be getting by if I didn’t have a car payment.
I’ve also been looking at Chicago, where the median wage is slightly less than I make now, but cost of living is slightly lower, and I’d make slightly more. I also wouldn’t have to have a car, so my disposable income would rise drastically.
Dog if you’re thinking about moving, come to the best small-town vines rust belt city that has the lowest cost of living in the US, where I was born and raised, Pittsburgh. I love this city to death and it has deep working class roots. I bought an 1800 sq ft, 4 bedroom home that was built in 1890 for $160k in 2020. I’ve been renovating it for the past few years and still got a ways to go but it’s coming together beautifully.
For what it’s worth, our rent is still well below the national average, and I love this city to death. It’s small, but not too small, but not too large, everybody seems to know everybody, and there’s always always something to do. The geography and nature and rivers really forced this city’s hand a few hundred years ago where now everything is just built around and into mountainsides and deep woods, highways and roads and everything is a snarling maze of studio Ghibli elden ring on ketamine and I wouldn’t want it any other way
Fair warning with Chicago, it may look cheaper but taxes are much higher than Dallas, along with everything in general. Not trying to sway you, it’s a gorgeous city. But, the L has been kinda crappy the past couple years and the winters will be a drastic change taking public transit. There’s tons of job opportunities and plenty of ways to go cheaper here, so I recommend it if you think it would work for you, but plan for it to be more expensive than you think.
Don’t confuse the difficulty of unionization with the lack of need/want. Most states are “at will”, which means they can pretty much fire you for whatever, whenever. Couple that with low wages and poor social programs, and you have a vast amount of workers who can’t afford to go on strike.
However, many of us are living comfortably, with decent wages, insurance, and paid time off. Folks from other places really tend to forget how many people are here, and just how varied the situations can be. It’s not dire for many of us, but if you’re on the bottom, the struggle is nearly insurmountable. Which, unfortunately, is by design. We’re working on it though, just don’t equate tv shows to an accurate depiction of a country of 300 million.
Came here to say this. Living in New York is completely different than living in a small town in Wyoming. Might as well be two different countries. The available jobs, average wage and education can differ vastly depending on which state and which part of said state.
It really depends on where you look. In rural areas of red states (states in which the majority of elected officials are members of the Republican party), things are pretty bad. Red states tend to have fewer (read: almost no) social programs.
I have a bit of a unique perspective on the dichotomy, because one side of my family is firmly in the lower class and the other firmly in upper middle.
There’s a big difference for the two. It’s like two different countries. For the lower class, what you’ve described is indeed normal. And many in the other classes would not believe that it is that bad for them.
Are these lower classes voting to change this or are they completely brainwashed into voting against their own interests?
It almost kinda sounds like there’s an unspoken caste system going on in the way you described it.
A lot of it is decades of misinformation and propaganda paired with limited to no education and what some journalists call “braindrain” where those who do come from these areas and do get educated end up leaving.
Oh yes, these states are red because the Republican party has convinced them all to vote against their own interests.
Many may not understand this, but the single most important voting point to most in my area is abortion. The churches have convinced the masses that it is basically the ultimate sin. They will choose any candidate with an R (Republican party) next to their name on the ballot.
They’ve also convinced them that social programs are for lazy layabouts, and they should be cut. Even if the abortion issue were somehow solved, it would not change much.
Where I live we’re fortunate enough to have universal healthcare but it’s constantly under attack from the same side of politics that ultimately want to abolish it.
I have a friend who was going on about cutting taxes and especially not having to pay for others healthcare. Meanwhile, this idiot had just had a baby with his wife with the entire tab picked up by taxpayers, was now receiving family benefits and payments for starting a family and would soon need to rely on taxpayer-subsidied child care when she went back to work and school going forward. It somehow didn’t dawn on him that he himself was reliant on all of this assistance and was getting far more out of it than he was putting in.
At least he wasn’t so cooked that he was scared of others having abortions but I’ve at least had a taste of this bazaar mentality here.
Brainwashed mostly, both parties contribute, but the right wing significantly moreso. Focus is actively concentrated on culture/morality issues like gun control, abortion, sexuality, etc. so that voters make decisions based on those positions rather than material issues. Additionally, American politicians have led a smear campaign against socialism for at least a century. You can’t vote for the scary socialists, they murder babies and destroy the economy and force everyone to get sex changes.
When I moved from the UK to the US I left a fairly nice job paying £30k a year (this was back in the 2000s) and had to start again from the bottom. I earned $6 an hour, and my then bf and I sublet an apartment for $600 p/m (he was on a grad school salary that worked out to $9 an hour). We bought discount food items and everything was thrifted, we didn’t save anything, and we went nowhere and did nothing. I have a memory of us buying a sandwich from the gas station as a treat and making it last all weekend (tbf it was like a footlong sub).
Fast forward to now, we have a combined income that puts us in the top 10% of the country. We own a house, luckily got in before prices went insane, so our mortgage is actually less than our sublet was (adjusted for inflation). We still thrift and buy reduced meats from the supermarket, we travel more but because our jobs pay for it, we do eat out a lot more but I still cook most weeknights.
We’re better off now by a long shot, but we’re still careful with our money, and have crafted some neat tricks to make sure we don’t spend beyond our means. If we bought all the new clothes, groceries, cars, and vacations like the movies suggest is normal for a middle class couple, we’d go broke quickly. Also, having zero kids helps massively.
Sometimes I look at what we’ve achieved and what our net income is, and it’s wild to me that people survive on less. Sure, we enjoy things now vs. sticking to essentials at all times, but it’s wild that people are expected to live an entire life just getting by on the basics. What’s the point of having community, taxes, and law if you still live paycheck to paycheck, surviving just to work and sleep?
You’re considered “well-off” if you can manage to become a wage slave, which is where 100% of your income goes to your bills.
I’m an American and I had a pretty decent job out of college and the idea of moving out of my parents house without roommates was impossible. In fact I don’t know a single person who did it.
$5000 might not be life changing for me, but it would take me a really long time to save that much.
Americans have high salaries compared to the rest of the world, but everything is really expensive so things kind of balance out.
One thing to consider is that the higher salaries make it easier to get things like an iPhone or MacBook. But all the things that are needs like housing, food, and a car are almost too expensive to afford.
Most people have a car loan, most people don’t even dream of owning a home any longer. When you see that you will never earn enough for a home, then you don’t really save for it.
When the amount you earn that. An be saved is too little then you don’t really bother with it.
Most Americans do not live nearly as well as it is portrayed on TV or in movies.
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I’ll add on to this that most Americans have debt for some reason or another besides having a car and house. A lot of people have student debts that are oppressive some people have medical debt as well.
Gas prices are reasonably low, but everything is so far that you end up using a decent amount of gas to get around.
I’m an American and I had a pretty decent job out of college and the idea of moving out of my parents house without roommates was impossible. In fact I don’t know a single person who did it.
Not to pick on you specifically, but I’ve never understood the modern generations’ seeming aversion to housemates.
I had housemates from after college until 7 years later when I had a wife, starting in the mid-90s. My mom had housemates in the 60s after college (my dad had the GI bill, which afforded flexibility, but had other drawbacks).
It seems weird to me that people these days seem to think that’s unacceptable. That’s how people do it when they are just getting started. Either that, or they live somewhere less desirable, far from cities, small, old, crappy. Personally I did both… housemates in a rural area in a shitty place. :)
I had roommates for a few years. It was seriously one of the worst times of my life. I have a bit of social anxiety, but I had absolutely no idea how bad it would get with roommates. My roommates were generally pretty friendly and left me alone, but I had an incredibly hard time working up the courage to leave my room to eat or even go to the freaking bathroom. I was so hungry all the time, but I couldn’t eat because I was afraid they would see me. I started collecting non-perishable foods and kept them in my room so I wouldn’t starve. I also had issues sleeping because I would stay up at night when they were asleep so I could eat. But then lack of enough sleep or food made me paranoid as fuck thinking ghosts were out to get me. I was seriously going insane.
I get that 99.999% of people aren’t like this and don’t have this issue. But some of us just do really poorly living with others. Once I was finally able to move out on my own, my life changed for the better.
Yes that sounds like a you problem, not a roommate problem. Like the above poster, I had roommates until I had a family, that’s pretty standard in all places/times, living alone is an unusual situation. Glad you are able to accommodate your needed living situation though, for sure.
Yeah, my roommates were pretty nice. I was just nutso.
I will say tbf to some people not wanting to have roommates, sometimes people really do end up having a shit situation where their roommate ends up being a shitty person. Those are difficult to navigate. I’ve known some people who had gotten themselves into that situation and it can be pretty tough.
I would say in general, people in the US seem to think you’re a failure if you haven’t moved out by 18. But really in many other countries, it’s perfectly normal to live with your parents well into adulthood. If you have a good relationship with them, it shouldn’t be seen as shameful to do that either.
Yep, moved to a 2 person home after college when my wife, then girlfriend and I got serious. Before then it was a group of friends.
$5000 would absolutely be life changing for me as an American, yes.
I am 17 poor and too privileged to complain.
