I can tell you that every family that I know in my department, unless they're independently wealthy, is seriously hurting compared to any time in the past decade. That includes faculty and students.
Metrics don't include many things. For example, the fact that your ability to buy a house has fallen dramatically. Or the fact that rents in my city have gone up 25%+ in the past 3 years and now graduate students have to share 1 bedroom homes (they use curtains to separate out the living room). Or that the cost of childcare has skyrocketed to the point where it's far higher than a mortgage.
https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-r...
Somewhere over half of Americans live in cities. Not just grad students and media
The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression
* I'm pretty sure that the bulk of those that became homeless are still homeless and that more ederly are still becoming homeless at high rates.
* How many of those do you think are getting the kind of Social Security that is sufficient to meet needs?
* You'd rather a social security pension with an 8.7% increase over a median engineering salary of US $169,000?
if the gvt report say unemployment is down. but you're having a hard time finding a job who are you to believe ?
if the gvt says grocery prices are down. but then you go into the shop with $20 and only buy two things who are you to believe.
Was in Europe this summer. Even if inflation is comparable or worse everything was still far cheaper than the US.
This is a lot easier said than done. Sure you could move to Canada (for example) but better do it before you get over a certain age and you have to demonstrate that you have a certain net worth. If a lot of Americans decide to start leaving that's only going to make it harder to emigrate to other places.
FEIE as an example is a deduction that currently goes for around the first ~$120k you earn, you also have your standard deduction. This only applies if you have spent at least 11 months in another country. Then there's housing, foreign tax credit, and so on.
In reality, most expats who earn any sort of income pay $0 to US. The only requirement is that you file every year, like all citizens to the US. Double dipping, like you're alluding to pretty much does not happen much.
Relinquishing citizenship has a fee of $2350 minimum attached to it, which is hefty, but if you're giving up your citizenship, chances are that the bill is paltry compared to your supposed other benefits.
Getting in’s not easy, not sure how all the obviously-first-gen immigrants working as e.g. taxi drivers in Canada got in. All refugees, maybe? Spouse had a points-granting technical degree and landed a Canadian job in that field before immigrating? They’re secretly famous artists or brain surgeons (special immigration categories) and just moonlighting for fun? Unclear.
I am struggling to parse that sentence. Isn't people voting for whom they want the definition of democracy. Separate from how you feel about the choice that's made.
It’s very common for the person who ends a democracy to be elected to the position that lets them do it, and to be in-fact very popular when they do it.
It's really hard to swallow being told that everything is great, when your lived experience is that it is obviously not great; seriously declining really.
People will eventually vote for anyone who is willing to bring chaos.
If we can't be like, "hey the current state of affairs can be traced back to X, Y, Z" without the implication that whoever did X, Y, Z is literally Satan then it's no wonder we never get anywhere.
Saying that Trump (the original author, doing his best) thought that looser fiscal policy was a good idea and that Biden (the current maintainer) has to be the one to course correct due to unforeseen consequences isn't blame unless you take it as such.
No. Hillary conceded the 2016 election the following day. There's no need to make things up.
relative to where they were 3 or 4 years ago they've gone up a lot. But historically, the average mortage rate has always been around 7 to 7.5% - right around where we are now. Mortgage rates seem to be reverting to mean - they'll probably overshoot a bit before they start moving back down.
> owning a house is beyond hope for many young people now.
Yes, prices are still way too high. This is largely due to the dearth of home building during the 2008-2014 period (great recession and aftermath). We need a lot more units built and quickly. Neither party is addressing the supply problem. Also, it's not an exclusively US problem - it's a problem in most of the developed economies of the world.
People keep saying this. (I'm sorry, my negative reaction is definitely not your fault, I've just heard this a lot) It's getting really annoying :)
If I could buy a house for what it cost in 2005 in my city I would gladly buy one at 7%. But housing is now 2.5x the cost. A 500k house at its peak in 2005 is now around 1.5M.
> Yes, prices are still way too high. This is largely due to the dearth of home building during the 2008-2014 period (great recession and aftermath). We need a lot more units built and quickly. Neither party is addressing the supply problem. Also, it's not an exclusively US problem - it's a problem in most of the developed economies of the world.
I don't agree that this is the cause. We haven't been building enough housing for a long time.
The problem is that the US has a crazy system. Mortgages are not assumable. Nor are they portable. And they're locked in for 30 years. I don't know of any other country that has this combination of factors. That just leaves people feeling trapped and unable to move whenever rates go up.
This is a policy decision that Congress and the President actively make to not free up mortgages and make them all assumable and portable. That would relax the housing market. If we're going to wait for building to catch up to fix the situation, well, it won't.
It's true that people with a 3% mortgage do not want to move now if they don't absolutely have to and this is impacting supply. however...
> This is a policy decision that Congress and the President actively make to not free up mortgages and make them all assumable and portable.
I don't think they have the power to do this (and I'm not sure I want them to have that kind of power). You want the President and/or congress to tear up all existing mortgage agreements? That's a massive amount of power you want to hand over to the government.Maybe they could mandate that mortgages going forward be assumable with some legislation, but it would take a while for that to have an effect.
> I don't know of any other country that has this combination of factors.
As I understand it, in a lot of other countries (like the UK) mortgages are essentially ARMs - the rates adjust with prevailing interest rates.
If it was true that the stats were fake, you could get rich in the bond market with TIPS arbitrage, so why not try it?
Some strong cognitive dissonance going on in your comment, friend.
The other thing unfair to Biden is that Trump got credit for the unsustainable surge in stock prices after the giant republican tax cut, so it looks bad for everyone's savings as the stock settles back to a normal level.
Salaries are falling. My academic salary has not kept up with inflation at all; we're all way behind. Childcare is obscenely expensive. Mortgage rates are through the roof and owning a house is beyond hope for many young people now.
Things are rough out there. I fear that people will give up democracy by voting for Trump just because the economy is so bad for many people.