[onlooker]

http://www.alternet.org/books/america-r ... ost-people
Two roads diverged

In one of these countries live members of what Temin calls the “FTE sector” (named for finance, technology and electronics, the industries that largely support its growth). These are the 20 percent of Americans who enjoy college educations, have good jobs and sleep soundly knowing that they have not only enough money to meet life’s challenges, but also social networks to bolster their success. They grow up with parents who read books to them, tutors to help with homework and plenty of stimulating things to do and places to go. They travel in planes and drive new cars. The citizens of this country see economic growth all around them and exciting possibilities for the future. They make plans, influence policies and count themselves lucky to be Americans.

The FTE citizens rarely visit the country where the other 80 percent of Americans live: the low-wage sector. Here, the world of possibility is shrinking, often dramatically. People are burdened with debt and anxious about their insecure jobs if they have a job at all. Many of them are getting sicker and dying younger than they used to. They get around by crumbling public transport and cars they have trouble paying for. Family life is uncertain here; people often don’t partner for the long-term even when they have children. If they go to college, they finance it by going heavily into debt. They are not thinking about the future; they are focused on surviving the present. The world in which they reside is very different from the one they were taught to believe in. While members of the first country act, these people are acted upon.

The two sectors, notes Temin, have entirely distinct financial systems, residential situations and educational opportunities. Quite different things happen when they get sick or when they interact with the law. They move independently of each other. Only one path exists by which the citizens of the low-wage country can enter the affluent one, and that path is fraught with obstacles. Most have no way out.

[Cog]

80% of Americans don't live in poverty. So there is no point of reading the rest of the article. More doomerish nonsense.

[onlooker]

So Cog how do define Poverty, like starving to death

[Cog]

So Cog how do define Poverty, like starving to death

Yes I do and here is why. If you look at poverty in the third world, we are actually talking about people starving to death or have no idea where their next meal is coming from. A lot of people in the world live that exact way. But to compare USA poverty to that is just plain silly.

If you have a government supplied house, food, electricity, internet, health care, and phone, you can not classify that as poverty from a world point of view. Look at the number of obese people who are poor. Not saying they are healthy at all because they are not. But they aren't truly living in poverty either.

Even the homeless in the USA can find a shelter when they want one, a handout when they need it, and scrounge for chow in a dumpster when they have to.

[onlooker]

Well, we are not looking at comparisons between US and the third world. We are comparing within the US. Will you deny the premise of the two Americas? If so can you provide documentation to back your claim

[Cog]

If you insist. Now what does that actually mean? These people vote, have cars, internet, have a roof over their head etc. That is 15% of the population we are talking about. So do they represent the 80% of all Americans? Not even close. Most Americans are what I consider comfortable. They can't necessarily ski in Aspen or water-ski behind a yacht but they live, by any measure, a comfortable life.

If this 80% of Americans are having a hard go of it, then they did it to themselves with over-leveraging debt. Sucks to be them. Go try being poor in the third world and do the comparison for yourself.

http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-cur ... ted-states

The official poverty rate is 13.5 percent, based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 estimates. That year, an estimated 43.1 million Americans lived in poverty according to the official measure. According to supplemental poverty measure, the poverty rate was 14.3 percent.

[Outcast_Searcher]

So Cog how do define Poverty, like starving to death

How many people in the US are starving to death (due to lack of money to obtain food, including from programs like food stamps)?

Not very many, except for perhaps some badly demented street people who won't accept help.

So aside from doomer nonsense, what is your point?

[sparky]

.
poverty best indicator is how much of your daily activity go to feed yourself
if more than 50% of your endeavors are going on daily food , you are poor

[onlooker]

My point was and is the greater and greater disparity in wealth and privilege between two different segments of society. This is happening in all the rich countries as the majority of the former middle classes are becoming poor. The starker contrast is seen in the super rich becoming ever more wealthy in comparison to everyone else even while many are being left behind economically. The article I linked cites a growing economic disparity between the 20% top tier Americans and the other 80% of Americans

[onlooker]

And then we have in the last number of years dramatic increases in those on disability and receiving food stamps. These trends supporting the notion that impoverishment is steadily growing among Americans
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
https://mises.org/blog/thanks-bush-and- ... tamps-2015

[jedrider]

Calm down folks. We have TWO AMERICAS on multiple fronts.

1. Economic as the author points out.
2. Politically as is evident every single day and hour practically.
3. Now, Trump is adding Immigrants to how we are divided.

Of course, when times gets tough, this can be an explosive mixture.

These divisions intersect, of course, which is what is making this so interesting and, probably, difficult to resolve to anyone's satisfaction.

[Tanada]

Basically what the author is doing IMO is projecting. He looks around his urban environment and sees two classes of people, the wealthy over educated like himself, and the urban poor who make up the bulk of urban population. He then presumes that all across America this 80/20 split must exist because looking around inside his urban bubble that is all he sees.

Meanwhile in rural Red America people live at every economic level with every educational level and because most people do physical tasks of some sort higher education is of limited advantage. How much good is a degree in gender studies if your job is waiting tables in a fancy restaurant or driving a delivery truck distributing Amazon parcels from the warehouse to the end consumer?

The vast bulk of jobs always have been physical in nature, even if that meant knapping stones to make spear points. The biggest disparity in the USA today comes from the fact that we forgot all the lovely iPhone games won't grow the crops or get them to the table where people consume them, and they sure won't keep the plumbing working so that feces gets dealt with after the fact.

[onlooker]

Tanada, I do not think any of what your saying is not true but none of that negates the growing disparity between the affluent and non affluent. The problem is twofold. One, people have lost the ability to be truly self sufficient. Your signature is an idealized version of a human, most people nowadays are specialists and even our Higher Education system carves out specialties for people, so a multi-disciplinarian outlook is rare.
Second, related to the first point is that the Economy is totally monetized and yet many jobs are relatively low paying. So, you have areas depressed like the Rust belt and Midwest that are in stagnation and decline from the lack of a thriving local economy and scarcity of money in people's pockets. Here we can glean then what jobs and skills truly matter. The difference between wants and needs. But as long as the conditions I described above exist, money will continue to be a necessity and the lack of it will continue to potentially affect adversely a person's well being

[onlooker]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-0 ... card-debts
45% Of Americans Spend Up To Half Their Income Repaying Credit Card Debts
Part of the 80% referenced in the OP link

[Outcast_Searcher]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-01/45-americans-spend-half-income-repaying-excessivefrivolous-credit-card-debts
45% Of Americans Spend Up To Half Their Income Repaying Credit Card Debts
Part of the 80% referenced in the OP link

And things like this are why I argue that a LOT of what we call first world "poverty" in the US isn't poverty at all. It's outspending one's income, as though actions had no consequences. And then blaming everyone else of course.

Think of it. 45% of Americans, many spending a huge amount of income on credit card debt. Even as credit cards charge huge interest rates (I noticed a recent mailer saying my rates increased again to 25+%) -- I'm sure glad I NEVER pay a cent in credit card interest. (Oh, and I should have pretty good credit.What the he** kind of credit card interest rates do people have with BAD credit? So is usary completely a thing of the past in the US?). My highest paying "high yield savings account" pays 1% interest. About 0.98% better than most money market funds these days. So to me, credit card interest rates seem like a deal from the Ninth Circle of Hell.

So they're throwing away a HUGE proportion of their income by failing to wait to buy a lot of consumer junk they likely don't need, a little sooner.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. K-12 public education truly needs to have some basic home finances added as a requirement. Maybe if people had some clue how much money they threw away with such decisions, they'd dig their financial holes more slowly.

And I'll add to that teaching some self discipline. My parents used a combination of telling, showing by example, yelling, punishing, and hitting depending on the circumstances and how badly I screwed up. Oh, and assigning and expecting lots of hard work. I realize nearly all that is frowned on or impossible in public schools today, so I'm not sure the schools really can teach self discipline effectively, but I still say it's badly needed.

[evilgenius]

This seems more like a what is truth argument than a strict examination of numbers. People like to say that you can make statistics say anything. In this context that's possible. That's why if you ask Cog to explain himself he does it with a philosophical argument rather than a host of facts. There's a range to what constitutes poverty. It varies according to people's perceptions.

I'd much rather see this discussion go in the direction of political involvement. I think that's where Americans are falling down, no matter which side of the political spectrum they come from. As much as this last election, putting Trump into office, was supposed to be the result of some kind of groundswell it did not come as the result of a consensus around definitions of various things we can argue over, but as the result of so many people's desire to say, no. It wasn't a populist uprising in the truest sense. It wasn't for anything. Ideology is in the mix, but isn't part of the direction things are going in. It doesn't have a real direction it can go in, except where history will take it. There may be a lot of contention coming surrounding abortion as an issue, but there you go, another sidestep away from addressing the philosophical arguments that talking about poverty requires us to pick up. And poverty is just a subset of greater issues concerning control and distribution of power, which are directly related to people's involvement in the political process.

[onlooker]

And poverty is just a subset of greater issues concerning control and distribution of power, which are directly related to people's involvement in the political process.-- Yes, because after you peel away all the onion layers, you get to the nexus of money and power. The financial elite have a disproportionate amount of power because they have a disproportionate amount of money. So, what to do. Well for starters about no money contributions allowed in politics period. It would be just Govt independently audited money to pay for elections of national candidates.

[evilgenius]

But it's also about how people just do not want to become involved. That can be because they work too hard. That's probably the truth for a lot of lower income people, but it's a thin excuse. What do you call it when a thing like unions, which set the standard of protection for working people, get decimated due to an inclination toward apathy and the right amount of propaganda to reinforce that apathy? I'm only using unions as an example. Please don't harp on how unions are corrupt or evil or whatever. In this case, they are a metaphor for something else.

I think what happens in civilization is that it becomes easy through specialization to occupy a niche in pretty much everything to do with life. You see the same things every day and soon you aren't sympathetic toward those you aren't used to. Oh, you know in the back of your head they are necessary, but do they really require your concern for their struggles? Soon enough, you can justify a range of injustices toward them, seeing as how your life might change if you had to either step in or become more informed. They will do for you what is necessary even if they aren't being treated fairly most of the time. Especially economically, I think it becomes very easy to see the world as a zero sum game that you will come out on the wrong end of if you stand up for a fair game. People don't want to confront their own attitudes. They don't really want to correct injustices. What they want to do is win.

It's funny, I've talked to many people about how I try to keep my word if I've given it. I try to keep it no matter what circumstances have changed. If I can I will move heaven and earth to keep my word rather than let it go unfulfilled. Most people aren't like that. As soon as the game changes they figure their word can change too. And keeping my word here is another metaphor. It's an aspect of being a certain way toward others that stays the same no matter how annoyed you are with them. It has to begin with you. It shouldn't matter what other people say or what kind of reward is in it for you.