I'm not disagreeing that there is a "lower class" of Americans that face these circumstances. What I'm disagreeing with is the article's implication that the median American somehow shares this plight. The article ignores a crucial fact: that the "median income" does not represent the "median American." The "median American" makes over $50,000 at age 35+. The "median income" reflects everyone just starting out in their career, etc. That's the basic fallacy of the article. We imagine someone with kids making $30,000 and how hard that would be. And then we see that the median income is $30,000, and are shocked to think that somehow half of all people must be in those "dire" financial circumstances. But someone making $30,000 with kids to support is in fact far below the median. The median family income in the U.S. is $73,000.
Your point about health insurance also contradicts reality. Excluding people covered by Medicare and military health care, 70% of Americans have employer-sponsored health insurance. That covers, on average, 86% of premiums for the employee and 75% for dependents. Many Americans don't have health insurance, of course. But the median American does. The person making $30,000 and getting "gouged on health insurance" out of that amount is far below the median.
> This is not even counting the fact that Americans work more for less
That's simply false. The median income in the U.S. is about 10% higher than Sweden (and much higher than the U.K. or France or Germany). Do Swedes get 36 extra days off each year to compensate? (No they don't.) Disposable income at the median is even higher in the U.S. because Sweden has extremely high tax rates on the middle class. The poor in Sweden, on the other hand, are much better off thanks to those taxes on the Swedish middle class.
> The "median American" makes over $50,000 at age 35+
TIL I should start magically making an extra 17k a year in 14 months, yay! I guess the 100ish people in my office (and the fact that no one at my level, anywhere in the country, for my employer makes anywhere near 50k) over that age, not making that much, are anomalies.
The 'median American' doesn't make over 50k$, the median household income in my state is only 54k.
Do you have statistics to back that up? OP is providing you with stats showing people over 35+ have that median income so I dont see how your gonna argue data with anecdotes..
>I'm not disagreeing that there is a "lower class" of Americans that face these circumstances. What I'm disagreeing with is the article's implication that the median American somehow shares this plight. The article ignores a crucial fact: that the "median income" does not represent the "median American." The "median American" makes over $50,000 at age 35+. The "median income" reflects everyone just starting out in their career, etc. That's the basic fallacy of the article. We imagine someone with kids making $30,000 and how hard that would be. And then we see that the median income is $30,000, and are shocked to think that somehow half of all people must be in those "dire" financial circumstances. But someone making $30,000 with kids to support is in fact far below the median. The median family income in the U.S. is $73,000.
I would certainly hope you would agree that each American in those age groups is going to have experienced different job prospects and different stages of the economy, which is why it can be misleading. For example I would easily make the argument that the average American below the age of 35 would also have considerably more debt than Americans age 35+. This is just one measure of how median income can be entirely misleading.
And my arguments against your statistics was more about the fact that you linked to a highly partisan outlet seemingly known for heavily cherry-picking statistics to prove a hard-right bias.
>Your point about health insurance also contradicts reality. Excluding people covered by Medicare and military health care, 70% of Americans have employer-sponsored health insurance. That covers, on average, 86% of premiums for the employee and 75% for dependents. Many Americans don't have health insurance, of course. But the median American does. The person making $30,000 and getting "gouged on health insurance" out of that amount is far below the median.
Premiums are only one half of an equation; with HDHPs even if your employee covers a large amount of the premiums a medical emergency still leaves you stuck with over 6k in debt, something a lot of poor families cannot afford considering how little they have in savings [1]
> Do Swedes get 36 extra days off each year to compensate? (No they don't.)
Yeah, about that. [2] Sweden gets 34 total days of paid leave per year, guaranteed. America has no such provisions and it is entirely up to the discretion of the company. For developers, we can probably expect to get around ~10-15 days off, plus occasional holidays.
> For developers, we can probably expect to get around ~10-15 days off, plus occasional holidays.
Those "occasional holidays" amount to nearly two weeks (10 business days) in the U.S. And the person you're responding to was saying that Swedes would have to get 30-something additional days off to make up for the earning discrepancy.
Considering that there are many Americans in poverty that get little to no time off, Swedes would be around 30-something additional days off.
How many days off per year do you think people in retail get? Not just time off they get on paper either, but time off they can take without being shamed. Hell, look at the 'unlimited pto' scam some software companies employ in order to reduce the amount of time off a developer can take.
Have you ever worked retail? Or do you know anyone that has?
These statistics are not "improbable"--they are fact: https://dqydj.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/average_median_....
Your point about health insurance also contradicts reality. Excluding people covered by Medicare and military health care, 70% of Americans have employer-sponsored health insurance. That covers, on average, 86% of premiums for the employee and 75% for dependents. Many Americans don't have health insurance, of course. But the median American does. The person making $30,000 and getting "gouged on health insurance" out of that amount is far below the median.
> This is not even counting the fact that Americans work more for less
That's simply false. The median income in the U.S. is about 10% higher than Sweden (and much higher than the U.K. or France or Germany). Do Swedes get 36 extra days off each year to compensate? (No they don't.) Disposable income at the median is even higher in the U.S. because Sweden has extremely high tax rates on the middle class. The poor in Sweden, on the other hand, are much better off thanks to those taxes on the Swedish middle class.