https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006173

Corporate profit vs Labor income divergence (only up to 2018)

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/08/corporate-profits-ve...

I think in the case of US literally killing workers and union people is a huge part of why US workers lack power and why US unions are so impotent.[0]

[0] see Battle of Blair Mountain and what work Pinkerton mainly did from its founding to WW2, as examples.

That is, if they're successful.

Why would someone want to collect promises? That seems rather silly, right? What having a lot of promises gives you is social standing. People treat you differently — better — when they give you their promises. If traditional labor goes away, the economy simply becomes you promising to hold those who have things in the highest regard; to be there as their friend when they call for you to. That is the same modern economy we already have but with less steps.

Do you have a source?

Ie, why can one guy who is insanely wealthy due to stock valuations take loans against that to pull various levers of power. We didn't elect him, we need a way to control that outsized influence.

No political administration in my lifetime (!) has made policy decisions against the interests of tech monopolists. The closest we got was Lina Kahn's FTC.

One would assume the difficulty of building housing has gone down with the general progress of technology - and if all else fails, you can just do what they did 50, 100 years ago where affordability was far less a struggle - people, who had less income in real terms spent proportionally less on it.

So did society devolve that an unit of industrial output has become more expensive? Or did money and resources just go into a parallel 'rich people economy', that has created a constant drain on the resources of average people?

Why would you own them, instead of some well capitalized billionaire?

To the extent that you do have capital, why do you assume that your 'minimal direction and guidance' would outcompete a full time specialist working for that billionaire?

Parking and speeding tickets should have income brackets, at least.

In the early Internet I saw this thing, no idea if it’s true but it sounds good (someone can math check it), goes something like:

A person pays $2 to play basketball on a public court.

Michael Jordan gets paid $2k to play on the same one.

A person pays $100 for basketball shoes.

Michael Jordan gets paid $100k to wear the same ones.

A person pays $40 to go see a basketball game.

Jordan gets paid $400k to attend the same game.

Michael Jordan makes about $5 per second.

If Michael Jordan saved all his money without spending a penny for 250 years…

He wouldn’t even have half as much as Bill Gates!

It made me think differently about money and consumer spending.

How deeply puerile.

His worldview is primarily that capitalists 'steal' the valuable labor. However it doesn't seem that that is actually the world we are in. Instead the intrinsic value of human labor seems to be slowly trending towards zero.

And it kind of makes sense, same has happened with oxen labor, horse labor, etc.

Labour theory of value is useless. Falling rate of profit is not empirical. Capitalism didn’t go away as he predicted.

Workers enjoy highest living standards of any time in history.

There will be a few who brand themselves as such. But actually seizing the means of production and handing them over to the people? -- The oligarchs will burn this country to the ground before they permit that to happen.

Software engineers are a special kind of stupid: the kind that thinks they're smarter than everyone else.

How much of an effect it has at the national statistical level I'm not sure.

Such as? They might have managed to maintain it for privileged subgroups of the workforce but not for the average worker.

We shouldn't just be pointing at the (very much real) stupid greed, there are many rotten components occurring simultaneously.

I'm not sure if this addresses the point you're trying to make though. If not, please clarify your argument for me.

AFAIK in some countries this exist but my case is more capitalist oriented. Rich people obviously can pay more since they keep accumulating wealth. It is an obvious sub optimal pricing since the low and even middle class rent/mortgage and other services quickly approaching the most they can pay so they can’t actually save and make wealth.

Sounds like we should start imagining a world where we don't treat people like literal livestock, and then figure out how to get there fast

What's changing is how much of that surplus value is captured by the workers doing the labor.

It's entirely possible for someone to be paid a lot in absolute terms, while at the same time paid very little relative to the value that they produce which is monetarily captured by their organization. The truth of the first does not invalidate the injustice of the second.

Provider organizations spend a huge amount of effort dealing with Medicare and Medicaid, which are pretty close to being a "single-payer solution" already in many cases. From an administrative overhead perspective they aren't always easier to work with than commercial health plans. Plus they have enormous problems with fraud, waste, and abuse.

i am not familiar with universal system. In that system if your doctor thinks something is medically necessary then thats the end of it and its gets done?

"Related to or marked by Hysteria" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hysterical

Hysteria being "behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess" which seems to be exactly what OP was trying to say.

Without data, it just sounds like "my social circle is more indicative of reality than yours". Maybe it is! But maybe not, so it's not particularly convincing

It has nothing to do with the IRS or taxes.

> landlord

If you think these two things are compatible you need to talk to more people outside of your bubble.

That is a very common reality.

If you landscaper had one like the plumbers do he'd have his own yacht.

Or he wouldn't exist because you'd buy about as much of his services as you do a plumber's.

How many man-hours are spent dealing with insurance paperwork? How much do hospitals and doctors spend each year just dealing with that interaction, rather than treating patients?

> Plus they have enormous problems with fraud, waste, and abuse.

I'd say "enormous" requires some evidentiary proof. Obviously there is fraud and waste. But almost all large scale systems have that. We should certainly try to minimize it wherever we can but I don't think "waste and fraud exist" are a reason to not pursue a path.

That said!

1) In the big picture isn't the US clearly paying more than other countries? I'm sure some of this is eg a janitor in the US costs more than a janitor elsewhere, but still...

2) Isn't the cap for the margin that insurance companies can take 20%? That is, they have to pay out 80% as claims take 20% for overhead

3) Doesn't insurance also induce more work done by everyone else who has to deal with them? So the margin the insurance company itself takes is not the only cost they add. Maybe they make providers do more paperwork, or let patients order tests etc that they would not if they were not spending other people's money, or some other reason. Say insurance pays out 80%, but 30% of documentation or actual work is not done by insurance but only exists because of them, now we're down to 56%.

I say this because literally yesterday, my wife, a pediatrician, after she spent the day seeing patients and got home to go through notes, had to leave a message with an insurance company: she saw they faxed her clinic on Saturday, when the clinic was closed, to cancel care for a patient with an ongoing chronic condition with no changes unless the insurance company got a reply in 48 hours (again, while the clinic was closed!). Now she has to schedule some kind of I don't even know what with them, to confirm the condition is the exact same, except she sees patients all day so it's a pain to schedule...

idk the fact that BCBS is a non profit and has no margin in some technical sense does not seem like a big consolation, something is rotten no?

(edit - the insurance company in the anecdote is not BCBS)

So in my book since we get to speculate about what the system should look like, it should absolutely result in people getting care without all of this run-around. It's about eliminating as much misery as possible from the system and letting people just get treated and providers just get paid. We can talk about efficiency once the misery is gone.

In most countries where there is universal coverage with a single payer, certain expensive treatments have long waiting lists or are simply unavailable at any price. Thus we see wealthy Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists and paying cash for procedures like MRI scans or joint replacements in order to avoid the queue back home. There are always trade-offs, it's just a matter of what we want to prioritize.

I would encourage you to go work with average Americans in average towns. The facts on the ground are stark and eroding.

There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

A lot of the US looks like they're doing great but fits into the category above.

Non-poverty would look like:

* You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent

* You make enough money to be on trajectory to save up to pay for your own food, housing, transportation, and medical expenses in retirement when you are physically unable to serve the workforce

I assure you that when your basic housing and nutrition are uncertain and missing even a few days of income will result in cascading effects of hunger and homelessness, the underlying stress is overwhelming.

It doesn’t have to be this way, we don’t let bullies steal all the toys on the playground and destroy the very ecosystem that they want to have fun in, why are we letting capital accumulate in the hands of the most effective capitalists at the risk of destroying the very markets that let them succeed.

I say that as a capitalist, if we lose the system because we allow unchecked Monopoly and wealth concentration, we won’t get it back.

Well, that's (at minimum) what you need to raise a family and replace yourself in the labor pool.

Rents in general are part of this. Both for housing and commercial property. Somehow getting profit from both rent and appreciation is the goal of the system.

Well that is what population voted for and choose not to overthrow system for so maybe they deserve it.

You can say restaurant workers need to be paid more, and ok sure, but where is that money coming from? You pay labor, food suppliers, rent, utilities, taxes, and... where exactly is the money to pay workers more coming from?

With the number of empty storefronts in my city (not to mention restaurant closures) it's clear owners aren't making money hand over fist or there would be many more restaurants.

Restaurant workers in my experience are more likely to go to more restaurants and they can't because... their rent is too high and the price of food at restaurants is too high.

The common denominator with all of it is money being sucked away from people doing work and people hiring work by... rent seekers.

The "labor share of income" is exactly this. How much money is getting sucked out of the rest of the economy to prop up the do-nothing class. Retired people whose retirement investment was selling a house for much more labor than they bought it for and real estate owners doing as little as they can to maximize income they aren't earning.

https://sdhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/107_Workshop_RAN...

Office buildings sit mostly empty for the same reason.

Tax the owners to punish the bad bets and eternal growth expectations of banks to force them to use the space to the benefit of the community or be forced to sell when they run out of money. Use zoning laws to prevent the destruction of units to avoid taxes.

The US Federal Housing and Urban Development Department was intimately involved in the Savings and Loan collapse of the late 1980s. It was punted around and repeated in the 1990s, but the stock market gains of the late 1990s diluted the news in public. That phase culminated with a dot-com bubble collapse and ultimately, the 2007 dollar credit crisis. Leveraged purchases of real estate were part of that financial soup. Many of the players from that time were "boomers" and their seniors, so living memory of those circumstances are now fading. There are many, many non-fiction books about these topics.

The middle class (especially upper middle) saw their share of income drop, but the bottom 50% increased.

https://equitablegrowth.org/u-s-income-data-for-2024-shows-t...

Silicon Valley Is Obsessed with 'Trust Stacking,' and the IRS Doesn't Like It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48727963 - June 2026

Instead they said "abject poverty" as an emotional emphasizer, and people rightly called them out.

The median (not average) household income in the US is 80K USD. p25 is 40K. p10 is 20K. They're struggling, sure.

But I wouldn't call that abject poverty.

It dramatically lowered the cost to consumers. Further, conflating overall healthcare spend with the portion of spend tied to a significantly lower-cost population is apples and oranges at best and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of healthcare cost in general. It's ok to not have opinions about things you know you don't understand.

Are you living in the same country as the rest of us? There is plentiful evidence of the enormous fraud and waste. It’s not even a point of debate anymore.

But we're not going to eliminate misery from the healthcare system. Demand is effectively infinite, mainly from patients with complex conditions, and supply is finite. Developed countries with more socialized healthcare systems typically do a pretty good job of delivering basic primary care but things often fall apart when more complex or specialized care is needed. Those systems also ration and deny care but it tends to be through forcing patients to wait in long queues, or simply not offering expensive treatments at all. Like under the UK NHS, some prescription cancer drugs just aren't available. So that's a different form of misery.

It's true that no matter how you look at it, the USA spends a lot more per capita on healthcare relative to outcomes. But you have to be careful what outcome metric you look at. Like we're not doing great on life expectancy, but much of that is due to factors largely outside the healthcare system like violence, vehicle crashes, and lifestyle choices. And in other areas like 5-year cancer survival rates or new drug development we're at or near the top. Part of the problem in the USA is that we seem to be culturally incapable of admitting that rationing is needed, and that it simply isn't feasible to deliver excellent care to everyone, so political reform debates devolve into sound bites about "death panels".

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) set a minimum health plan medical loss ratio of 80%, or actually 85% for larger plans. And in practice most come in higher than that due to competitive pressures.

https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/med...

There's a huge amount of administrative overhead in dealing with health plans for things like claims and prior authorization. Much of that is imposed not so much by insurers themselves but by employers who want to hold down costs. Like a commercial insurer would be happy to sell a plan that would pay every claim immediately at 100% with no questions asked. It would be less work for them. But no one would buy it because costs would explode. Medicare and Medicaid plans also have prior authorization and peer review processes. Something like a quarter of all healthcare services are "low value care" which doesn't align with evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and may even harm the patient, so when health plans apply review processes the right way then ideally it's better for patients and holds down costs for everyone.

To be clear, I'm not here to defend commercial health insurance companies. They are part of the problem and some reforms in that area are sorely needed. But let's have an honest debate about it and stop pretending that eliminating them would solve the deeper systemic problems.

i wasnt sure if it simply takes a different form or gets eliminated completly.

But even this feels like it is overstating things. You say folks are one car repair away from being homeless. And there is a lot of polling that shows people would struggle to pay for repairs. But full on homelessness? I can only assume that you are describing towns/cities that offer no transport assistance at all, that lands people into being so dependent on a car. I believe it, but I struggle to think this is literally half the nation.

So, the people you are mentioning making 12-18/hr, are literally below 1 in 4, to less than 1 in 10. These are not “average middle class Americans” except maybe in that higher end. These are low wage earners and are far below “average”.

I mean absolutely nothing normative by this statement, nothing about whether this is good or bad or what we should do policy, socially, whatever. But saying someone making below the 10th percentile is average is like saying someone making $75/hr is average.

That is, Henry Ford changed the world because he deployed capital to make workers so productive that they could afford to buy the cars they make.

A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough to put their own children in child care. So child care fails to revolutionize the world the way the car did.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

There's an extreme selection bias there. If you run an agency that works with low income families you're not going to see a representative sample of the overall population.

???

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

Note this is already inflation adjusted, so "housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing" is already accounted for.

If you put Germans whose lives function in a US-style, even just getting to work will be a huge drag.

Misery depends on the structure of society. Here in Sweden I can walk to work. This means that I'm spending zero money on travel to work, and that my travel to work contributes $0 to Swedish GDP. But this is actually better than if Swedish GDP were higher and I was traveling by car.

This is one way in which GDP can be extremely misleading.

* Median household income in Mississippi: $44,717

* Median wage in Germany: €5,370 per month, equals $73,565.

So even the individual median wage in Germany is more than 50% higher than the median household income in Mississippi.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

But in addition to the raw numbers, you have to keep in mind that they don't account for cost of living and that different countries account for various services differently, especially health care.

So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright?

> and medical expenses in retirement

You're saying I'm in poverty because I understand and intend to use Medicare?

These are trivially poor definitions.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-amer...

Maybe it feels good to say "actually everyone is a victim of capitalism", but it muddies real necessary work when it comes to determining whether to prioritize how resources need to be allocated between a disabled person living on the streets vs a graduate student who is currently just a little underwater on their credit card payments.

https://research.senedd.wales/research-articles/poverty-and-...

Does being poor cause mental health issues, or are mental heath issues a cause of poverty... The answer here clearly better access (read free) to mental heath care, and it wont have the impact one would think (see the UK data).

> Look at other stats like rising infant mortality

You mean the attributions tied directly to maternal complications: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr033.pdf

The thing is we changed how we collect this data, to something that would be considered bad: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/13/maternal-mo... - There are tons of criticism on how we collect this data, they are valid, if you dont like this source, find another its a mess of our own creation.

> dropping IQ etc.

The largest root cause is that people spend too much time on their cell phone dumbing themselves down. Think about that one... no one feels the need to elevate themselves, they are happy to spend time on what amounts to leisure. Would you have sympathy for the person who gets fired cause they chose to play 18 holes of golf 5 days a week rather than do their job?

Why is it impossible for Americans to live with 300 sq ft per person like baby boomers did as kids, but now we must live with 600+ sq ft per person?

This is a functionaly unmovable number. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

> you can't afford rent

Because we as a society have drastically changed how we use housing: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... -- Multi generational housing was a thing. Having roommates was a thing... the premise of "golden girls" would be lost to a modern audience, because cohabitation is dead. The premise of "bosom buddies" would get canceled for its insensitivity, but no one would understand because boarding houses are all but gone.

Building every one in the world an American style house, would cripple the globe. Concrete, Sand, Copper, Wood are going to become massive problems long before we get close to getting the job done.

> Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket.

You think that vacation homes are causing the housing crisis? Are eroding wages elsewhere? The industry of these locations is TOURISM, and a fair bit of it is international. (Not Nantucket).

It's not like whaling is going to make a comeback to make Nantucket a viable place to live again.

> Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"

Plenty of Americans look at musk and say "lets eat the rich" ... the problem is that the rest of the world has those same hungry eyes for us.

While we must be mindful of greed and abuse, we need to include all underlying costs before just assuming people are cranking up rents. I'm not a landlord but I own property and the costs are gotten vicious lately. Labor is expensive, materials are insane, energy costs, and now insurance are suffocating. And in states with high property taxes, watch out.

This sets a price cap, makes these high density spaces affordable for people who want to live their whole lives there and not just their single 20's, brings diversity into communities and drops the floor out of the prices on these single occupancy closets going for $2000 per month.

We should all just stop speaking. The origin of too many words is problematic. Just think of how many were coined by racists and misogynists!

"The Census Bureau measure overstates current income inequality between the highest and lowest 20% of earners by more than 300% and claims that income inequality has risen by 21% since 1967, when in fact it has fallen by 3% ... In 2017, among working-age households, the bottom 20% earned only $6,941 on average, and only 36% were employed. But after transfer payments and taxes, those households had an average income of $48,806. The average working-age household in the second quintile earned $31,811 and 85% of them were employed. But after transfers and taxes, they had income of $50,492, a mere 3.5% more than the bottom quintile."

[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/income-equality-not-inequality-i...

As such, when comparing income tax and capital gains, you should add the impact of corporate taxes. Incidentally, corporate taxes are why many small business owners pay themselves wage income, rather than doing stock buybacks or dividends.

These gains might be realized at any point if they're willing to pay taxes for them.

Having lots of money but choosing not to spend it doesn't make you any less wealthy.

https://www.starbucksbenefits.com/en-us/home/stock-savings/s...

But you could. There is no law of the universe that is going to stop you. Words are something randomly made up by humans.

> it's just plain wrong.

Again, words are completely made up, so it can't really be wrong in the traditional mathematical sense. It could be misinterpreted, perhaps. Of course that is dependent on how you've chosen to randomly make up "wrong".

Also not saying you're wrong about many healthcare services being unnecessary or even harmful, and someone has to be the one to say no to patients asking for low value care which is definitely a real hard position to be in and a real problem. At the same time insurance companies aren't making a great case for themselves as the solution imo bring on the government death panels.

Maybe. Unfortunately, what digitaltrees wrote here is ambiguous. It could also be read as this:

Our caregivers serve low income families. Those caregivers, who are our employees, earn $12-18/hr which is above minimum wage. Our employees absolutely struggle. Our employees are the ones using food banks and housing assistance because many are one car repair away from homelessness.

digitaltrees: which interpretation is correct?

They are highly productive but the market doesn't value them. It values the backup forward on a basketball team - an almost completely non-productive job - more than a doctor. It values the owner of a company at $1 trillion, which is obviously absurd.

In Capitalism surplus economic value goes to the Capital class, so it seems like it is working as designed.

That's you. but nobody In Sweden drives to work?

I see walking to work as an relative to each individual and their job lcoatiopna dn circumstance of where they live, not a country related thing.

For example, ,ost of my jobs in EU that me and my gF had required a car to get to work because companies put their offices out in the boonies to save money so walking was not an option, and neither was public transport.

> But this is actually better than if Swedish GDP were higher and I was traveling by car.

GDP growth "experts" would disagree. It's the reason we don't have mandatory WFH for white collar jobs after Covid proved it's possible and salves the environment

The more relevant statistic is that median real wages have only grown by about 29% across 40+ years (~0.6% per year)

Since 2000, medical care costs have risen by 121.3%, hospital services by 275%, college tuition and fees by 196%, compared to consumer goods by 86.1%. Things like TVs and electronics went way down in costs while the essentials have absolutely skyrocketed. The cheap stuff drags the average down.

You need a lot more than a single graph to argue against the quality of life going down for Americans.

I think this isn't as unreasonable as it seems to everyone living it. It's like water to the fish.

We are conditioned that everything should be fueled by more and more debt, and your dollars should constantly be devalued so you can't stop grinding.

The little people can never be allowed to just work enough to accumulate what they need and then take it easy.

My definition is if you need to borrow money to put a roof over your head, at the minimum renting, you're in poverty. There are huge chunks of the US population borrowing money to pay for rent.

If your locality doesn't provide adequate public transit, then a car is a necessity, and the onus is now on the locality's economy to make sure everyone can access that; if your locality doesn't pay high enough to afford that car without borrowing money, then yes, you're in poverty. Alternatively, the locality can choose to provide adequate, safe public transit, and the bar of poverty would change.

Most of the US doesn't think this way because they're delusional and have been conditioned to feed the financial system and pay for things with money they don't have.

I'm asking you the question because a statement like 50% of [population] is making a claim to some notion of what they expect society to look like

you introduced the benchmark "not being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage", though I would expect a modern day society that makes any claim to be wealthy to be able to have above 50% of it's population to be able to support something like that as that would indicate they can support a small family

You're saying that's not a good benchmark, so I'm trying to understand:

1) Do you have a different benchmark?

2) Is your key complaint that being unable to own a 2 bedroom house doesn't mean that individual or family is in "abject poverty"? In which case fair, though I would ask what does mean abject poverty for you?

It seems like you're saying 2, but I want to be sure

But my thesis really is that these things are not underlying the rents. But rents are actually underlying these costs. And well in general the rent seeking economic process build on ever growing valuations of everything.

You've been sold some BS. Usually this is because you're required to take a "reasonable" wage for your role in a company. Otherwise I guarantee you every independent contractor out there (among others) would be operating in a way that made 100% of their income business profit, rather than wages, as it has enormous tax advantages. Approximately everybody tries to find out the least they can take as wage income without pissing off the IRS, and sets their "wage" to whatever that is.

Sure, the stock price should somehow be tied to the actual value of the company, but for a while now it's been mostly indistinguishable from a Ponzi scheme other than a few companies that do sometimes decide to buy back some stock, which makes it slightly less sketchy but if the value is from the company buying it back, it's a lot closer to debt or a bond, which is not at all how anyone treats it.

"Spending for the public benefit" has a lot of latitude.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/06/englands-nhs...

I'm not trying to be snarky here, the point is that there is no easy solution and optimizing based on what politicians subjectively consider "humane" isn't going to get us anywhere. If we want to actually fix the problem then we need to focus on what's economically feasible rather than low-effort hot takes and sound bites. Free markets, with reasonable limits, can be part of that solution by revealing consumer preferences and allowing for efficient allocation of limited resources.

This is absolute nonsense. We use common language to refer to common things in understandable ways in order to communicate with each other. You don't get to just handwave baldly incorrect statements as "well maybe he just has a different personal definition" without basically rendering literally all conversation moot and pointless.

"Yeah, I know he said 2+2 is 5, but you don't know he defines 5" is just as patently silly.

A $1T founder is rewarded for building a massive system that employs hundreds of thousands of people, moved technological progress forward dramatically, and has positively affected the lives millions.

A doctor provides life-saving care, but they are physically limited to helping one person at a time. A backup NBA forward might not save lives, but their work is broadcast and monetized across millions of screens at once.

Arguing that entertainment is "non-productive" ignores human nature. People gladly pay to be entertained. If sports have no value, do you feel the same way about books, art, and movies?

A smaller fraction than in the US. I think most people I know drive.

>I see walking to work as an relative to each individual and their job lcoatiopna dn circumstance of where they live, not a country related thing.

Well, it isn't. It's about how walkable environments are.

>GDP growth "experts" would disagree. It's the reason we don't have mandatory WFH for white collar jobs after Covid proved it's possible and salves the environment

Well, they may disagree, but the whole point is the goal of society isn't GDP, since GDP is easy to game with things like creating situation where people are effectively forced to waste energy, drive to work-- that sort of thing.

Look at the good deal that the UAW has gotten for auto workers in the system, both US car makers and the union are pretty happy right to keep this system in place and shrink in the face of technological change like electrification not to mention abandoning small cars for large cars that are profitable for now.

(Funny how I often I see "good old boys" driving Asian compacts because they can afford Asian compacts, and I see office workers driving big-ass trucks)

I would assume this doesn't account for Germans having different healthcare costs which will aboslutely wreck the average American household with how fucked our system has become.

The exact number is heavily contested[1], so I know better than to provide my own. That said, the official poverty lines are a pretty good place to start, and it's pretty safe to say is that whatever the line for "abject poverty" actually is, "2 bedroom apartment on 1 person income" is pretty far away from that. That claim doesn't require me to provide a specific poverty line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#M...

People want healthcare, they want cheaper housing, they want high quality jobs, they want lower crime. Material outcomes absolutely matter and there is zero evidence to suggest that "high incomes" in the US translate to anything except more blood for corporations to extract.

On the contrary, most politicians seem very adamantly against what I'm proposing. I don't know why you think I'm suggesting that we delegate how we determine what's humane to politicans.

I think painting the inhumanity of that as a consequence of the structure of the healthcare system is disengenuous at best, especially as the implicit solution you're proposing is to artificially lower utilization rate and access. Deflecting patient deaths into "technically not our fault, they didn't try to get help" by exploiting economics is in no small terms extremely inhumane.

The answer to that is that near universally in the world, our labor pool of medical personnel is too small, and almost all of it has to deal with an arbitrary restriction of labor supply. Stupidly, I have felt this many times in America, so trivially it's a problem no matter the structure of the healthcare system. Optimizing towards maximizing the number of nurses, doctors, pharmacists, the whole spread, in a society is underdiscussed but obviously beneficial (for everybody but those who profit off of the labor scarcity)

Common doesn't mean ever-present. In practice, it is impossible for everyone to converge on a shared understanding for all terms. There are provably many people in the world who have never even heard the term "abject poverty" before. They cannot possibly understand what the term means to you. Fundamentally, "abject poverty" can only mean in that comment what the author believes it means. That may overlap with your understanding, but it also may not. We can also prove that he is not a mind reader and thus cannot tune it to your understanding. He is limited to his understanding and his understanding alone.

A good faith actor who believes there may be a discrepancy in understanding will seek clarification. That is what a discussion forum is all about. If one does not want to participate in discussion, why be here?

Probably the highest paid athletes in the world are european soccer players and the thing there is that these salaries can be justified in terms of the value top players bring in a game where being relegated can bring the money train for a team to a halt. You don't see working-class soccer fans complaining about this (they feel the value!) but the owners and many representatives of capital get fuming mad about it.

(Funny, growing up in youth soccer in the US taught me to think of the game as an exercise in Brownian motion where there are too many people on the field who aren't held accountable. It wasn't until I had an argument with a recommender system that couldn't accept that I hated soccer that changed my mind and turned me into one of those sports fans who rolls out of bed Saturday mornings to watch the Premier League that I realized how high the stakes are in the European game.)