The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Re:The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy by the_gastropod on Monday May 28, 2018 @02:58PM (#17174112)

Homes today are roughly twice the size they were in the 1970s [1]. Despite that, home ownership rates are higher than they were in the '70s [2]. More people today have college educations in the U.S. than any time in U.S. history [3]. I'm not fond of the rhetoric about the poor middle class. There are issues we need to solve w/r/t poor economic mobility. We should be focusing our attention more on solving those problems, and less on complaining about things that aren't true.

[1] http://www.aei.org/publication/todays-new-homes-are-1000-squ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...

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Re:The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy by dnomad on Monday May 28, 2018 @04:04PM (#17174521)

The economy is a "forward-oriented enterprise." What matters is not so much where we are but where we are going. To that end it's important to understand that homeownership rates are falling fast [1], birth rate is falling [2] and "80s babies" (ie the Millenials) are much, much poorer than their parents were in their 20s and 30s.

If you're an investor (and everybody's an investor whether they like it or not) the question you should be asking is what things will be like in ten years.

That said the article (like pretty much all economics that comes out of The Atlantic) is pretty silly. The dire condition of the American middle class is completely the fault of the US government. In the last 30 years (while China has achieved world historic growth) the US has dumped trillions into wholly unnecessary wars and giveaways to international investors. The $20 trillion dollars the US government has wasted is the greatest malinvestment in the history of the world. All the money that should've been spent on vital innovations and critical investments and infrastructure was used to blow up brown people and inflate asset prices. 2008 was just the beginning; the consequences of this extraordinary malinvestment will take decades to ripple through the global economy. The 9.9% or any other arbitrary percent of Americans are only to blame to the extent that they haven't overthrown their government and executed a few politicians. Over and over electorate have failed to correct the system and so politicians like John McCain -- who helped push America into the greatest crime of the 21st century -- are widely lauded instead of arrested.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/51771766-7c7c-11e7-9108-edda0bcbc...

[2] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/22/17376536/fe...

[3] https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Files/PDFs/HFS/essays/HFS...

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