I have to choose between getting new tires or a dentist appointment
Comment on What a life to leave your children
Emmie@lemm.ee 8 months agoUnfair stuff. I never had to work even tbh. I mean I did some because it was like an adventure with a friend. annoying that not everyone can just live and don’t worry about those things
someguywithacomputer@lemmynsfw.com 8 months ago
Emmie@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Unacceptable. This is not a choice anyone should have to make. Maybe there are dentists who also change tires so one can get a discount for the full service
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
This right here is why:
Yours is by no means the average experience. Most of your first quote there is not within the means of the average American (except for ordering cheap stuff from Amazon made in Chinese sweatshops and maybe one or two massages or similar splurges a year).
The average American works 50 hours a week between 2 to 4 jobs. Wealth inequality in 2020 was considered equal to that of France during the years just before the French Revolution, where the price of a loaf of bread reached the cost of a day’s salary for the average worker, and it has gotten worse since then. A new car and 70% of houses are considered unaffordable to the average American (up from roughly 40% of houses in 2019). Car prices (both used and new cars) alone jumped 30% between November of last year and January of this year. The number of adult children living with their parents has doubled since 2015. The leading cause of death in the US is preventable diseases because the majority of people can’t afford to go see a doctor, nor do most have sick days. Life expectancy in the US is actually declining if you make less than a six figure salary, and the national life expectancy is currently equal to the area of the UK with the lowest life expectancy. When adjusted for inflation, the pay of the average worker has gone up about 5-8% since the 70s, while CEO compensation has gone up 300x. The average American has less than $600 in their bank account. The list goes on and on. Worker safety regulations are being axed, as are minority rights and environmental regulations, and the price of a taco at Taco Bell has doubled since the 90s when adjusted for inflation. from the big stuff to the little stuff, things have gotten demonstrably worse since the 60s and the trend isn’t slowing down.
Another big part of it that I saw somebody describe really well is climate change vs the Cold War and how that affects the mentality of Boomers vs Millennials and younger. Basically, growing up under the threat of nuclear war meant that any day could be your last, so you might as well ignore it and keep doing the same old thing, whereas climate change is an ongoing catastrophe that only gets worse the longer we ignore it. So you have the people in power who want to ignore everything and keep on doing the stuff that makes them money (and makes the problem worse), while the younger generations are watching the train come barreling down the tracks at us and begging the old folks to just get off the tracks because they can’t do anything about it themselves.
testfactor@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Can you source most Americans working 2-4 jobs? I tried Googling around, and it seems the actual number of Americans with 2+ jobs was about 8mil, or 5%.
One out of twenty Americans is a far cry from “the average American.” But I’m open to being wrong. Just couldn’t find anything supporting that claim.
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
I’ll have to see if I can find it again, but I swear I got the hours and jobs from the Census Bureau website in 2020 or so.
With the rise of the gig economy and businesses refusing to schedule people enough hours to be considered full-time employees so they can avoid giving them benefits, I’d be surprised if it was as low as 8 million.
I’m getting all kinds of competing numbers even from just the Census Bureau itself, but they all seem to be around the 8% mark - one article saying that it was 7.8% in 2018 and has been on the rise in the past 20 years but notes that these numbers diverge from another census data measurement which put it at 6.3% and falling, while another from a year or two earlier says that based on recently released data from 2013, 8.3% of workers (13 million) had 2+ jobs in 2013.
Either way, it’s a far cry from the average worker. Maybe I’m misremembering it and the stat was about households or something.
Emmie@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I see. That’s a cool comment thanks, I appreciate such intelligently put information.
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
It’s like the saying “‘I don’t get into politics’ means that your rights aren’t at risk every 4 years.” If you haven’t experienced it or stepped outside your general socioeconomic class and seen how others live, you wouldn’t know. It’s just this nebulous concept that there are some people who have it bad, but nop context as to how things actually are.
This is why Republicans hate college, as that’s where most people meet people with different life experiences for the first time, and why the death of third places has been really awful. It used to be that the wealthy lawyer would be drinking with his buddy the coal miner who he first met at that bar.