In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
I actually think cost of living can be quite low in the US. I just did a bit of a budget-experiment for my area for living as a single person with a car. I found CoL in a suburb (I live in Louisville, this is in the city directly over the Ohio) to be $425/ month in an apartment in New Albany. Water and trash bills are included; electric is not. Assuming you keep your temperature at around 60 degrees F during the winter for heating, I don't think the electric bill will ever pass $275 per month. Food bought at a supermarket will run about $100-150 per month if you cook things yourself and mostly buy raw ingredients. I just found an old car on craigslist for $1.8k. I got an insurance quote from Progressive on it for about $37 per month. The car gets 16 mpg in the city and 24 on the highway. Assuming a daily commute of about 30 miles we'll say it takes 1.6 gallons per day= 48 gallons per month, currently gas is $3.50 in New Albany, so about $168 in gas per month. Ouch. Still, with a bit of rounding
Per month 425 -Rent 275- Electricity, but will usually be less. This is only for 3-5 months of the year. 130- Food 40- Insurance 170- Gas
We get a total of $1040 per month. You will still need to buy things like cleaning supplies, cleaning for clothes, get a bed+ mattress in the beginning and maybe work out financing for the car, but you still will not go over 1.25k per month, which is $15k per year. In fact, a typical work year consists of 50 40 hour work weeks= 2000 hours of work. Get just an 8.25$ per hour wage and you're making $16.5k. Federal tax + state tax is $1.2k. So you really only need a job barely above minimum wage to survive on your own and own a car. Living is even easier if you share space with people or work more/ get paid marginally more. Also, the place I chose is actually more expensive than other places I could have chosen. Other suburbs near Louisville, like Radcliffe, are even cheaper. I don't know if $16.5k per year qualifies for any welfare, but section 8, public housing, and EBT could seriously reduce costs as well.
That was for new albany, IN in a 2001 Chrysler 300m in Progressive. Maybe I misread the quote but that was the lowest I could turn the coverage for Indiana and still operate in the law (I think).
Yeah, I got a $202 plan for 6 months for the lowest possible coverage. The payment plan is $61.5 upfront and then $37 per month for the following four months. I could be reading the quote wrong though, since it seems kind of weird that you would then have two months of coverage without paying anything.
Okay, one last edit, I had to include some more coverage so the payment changed to $66.30 up front and $39.68 per month for four months. The plan is
On June 18 2013 11:07 JonnyBNoHo wrote: A topic we can all agree on - the rich: Defending the One Percent.
This is a pretty good representation of my own take on inequality. Though I have to stress that I don't see fighting inequality as a bad, or inefficient thing. In my view the remedy needs to focus on the root causes (supply and demand imbalances, rent seeking, social ills and the like) rather than tax and transfer schemes (though they can still be used - I'm not speaking in absolutes here).
A blog rebuttal from The Economist with good comments below.
Here's a new article that actually highlights some of what I postulated earlier (but with better wording and data to back it up) PDF
It gets quite technical and it's mostly about models and assumptions based on US and international findings. Here is the gist from Wonkblog:
The theory comes from a paper by economists Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty and surprise guest star Stefanie Stantcheva. They hypothesized that lowering marginal tax rates increases the incentive for high earners to bargain up their wages — and pocket more of their raise. Moreover, because the higher earners are bargaining for greater pay without actually becoming more productive, the additional money they’re taking in is coming form other workers, generally those lower down the income scale.
Sure enough, Saez, Piketty, and Stantcheva found that there’s a strong correlation between the size of countries’ tax cuts on the rich and increases in the income shares of the rich, even before taking taxes into account. That is, the rich are getting richer even before you take into account that they’re paying less in taxes:
What’s more, increases in the rich’s income share didn’t coincide with increases in the rate of GDP growth. That fits the Saez/Piketty/Stantcheva theory that the rich aren’t getting more productive; they’re just getting better at bargaining because lower tax rates give them the motivation to get better at bargaining.
The point being, while the assumption of high taxes is that of a literal transfer of wealth/income socially and based on need, the reality is to encourage a fair distribution of income inside the market of marginal productivity and wages. The revenue generated can then be used to do whatever the people want to spend it on, which may very well be counterproductive to the cause of better income equality, but at least it is under some control of comprehensive policy and not a "whim of the market." This is why I hate anything sounding like "tax and transfer scheme" regardless if people are advocating for or against top income tax rates, since it misses what taxes are in a modern governing structure and monetary system.
While I believe it's important for the government to provide a level of social insurance for things not feasibly insurable in the private sector, I don't think doing so gives people a better chance to climb the social ladder. It simply provides a floor at which people can't fall below. Some public services/expenditures are different, like education and scientific funding, but those benefit the society equally (for the most part) and, thus, don't narrow the gap of inequality.
With regards to the paper, I still don't see why there would be any noticeable correlation with top marginal tax rates and GDP growth or income share - it's just such a small factor (particularly over that long period of time). It's really an over-emphasized data point.
On June 18 2013 13:39 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: $40 bucks per month for insurance, where do you live as I need to move there.
Good god not even in my dreams could I hope for that.
If anything, your example is just a hypothetical person surviving, saying that they are living would be an overstatement. In your example, this person would just about go insane due to lack of any kind of entertainment (movies, bar, hell anything). And you appear to be ignoring fluctuating prices and increasing food costs. And you best forget about any kind of health insurance or savings. It is just not realistic to make the amount you put forward and say its a "living" wage when it barely meets the surviving requirements.
But perhaps what is most unbelievable is the 40 hour work week. At the wage that you listed chances are very good they are working in a position that has varied amounts of inconstant shifts (such as at a restaurant) where you would be lucky to get 30 hours, let alone 40.
On June 18 2013 13:28 Chocolate wrote: I actually think cost of living can be quite low in the US. I just did a bit of a budget-experiment for my area for living as a single person with a car. I found CoL in a suburb (I live in Louisville, this is in the city directly over the Ohio) to be $425/ month in an apartment in New Albany. Water and trash bills are included; electric is not. Assuming you keep your temperature at around 60 degrees F during the winter for heating, I don't think the electric bill will ever pass $275 per month. Food bought at a supermarket will run about $100-150 per month if you cook things yourself and mostly buy raw ingredients. I just found an old car on craigslist for $1.8k. I got an insurance quote from Progressive on it for about $37 per month. The car gets 16 mpg in the city and 24 on the highway. Assuming a daily commute of about 30 miles we'll say it takes 1.6 gallons per day= 48 gallons per month, currently gas is $3.50 in New Albany, so about $168 in gas per month. Ouch. Still, with a bit of rounding
Per month 425 -Rent 275- Electricity, but will usually be less. This is only for 3-5 months of the year. 130- Food 40- Insurance 170- Gas
We get a total of $1040 per month. You will still need to buy things like cleaning supplies, cleaning for clothes, get a bed+ mattress in the beginning and maybe work out financing for the car, but you still will not go over 1.25k per month, which is $15k per year. In fact, a typical work year consists of 50 40 hour work weeks= 2000 hours of work. Get just an 8.25$ per hour wage and you're making $16.5k. Federal tax + state tax is $1.2k. So you really only need a job barely above minimum wage to survive on your own and own a car. Living is even easier if you share space with people or work more/ get paid marginally more. Also, the place I chose is actually more expensive than other places I could have chosen. Other suburbs near Louisville, like Radcliffe, are even cheaper. I don't know if $16.5k per year qualifies for any welfare, but section 8, public housing, and EBT could seriously reduce costs as well.
Things you missed: health insurance (about $60-100/month for catastrophic coverage only), renters insurance, internet and/or cable tv, personal/entertainment expenditures, furnishings, phone. You probably overestimated electricity costs for an efficiency, but it would probably even out with the cable/internet + phone. You underestimated food costs, especially if we consider a full-time hourly job, which will probably come out as $5-8 a day, unless you can point me out to a large portion of the population that enjoys eating unseasoned beans, rice, and bread daily and can find the time and energy to cook full meals daily.
Even if we assume poor people don't deserve entertainment, they still need accessible forms of communication available to them on demand. With the corrections, it adds another ~$1.2k in mandatory expenses a year to your calculations, which still leaves out any luxury items and entertainment, as well as the ability to accrue savings and account for unexpected expenses (like additional health care, car maintenance, and lost work because of either). This leaves 0 room for bad luck and 0 room for joy in your life.
Of course, that's why we have our social safety nets, to give room for those unfortunate circumstances that happen to EVERYBODY, but most of the time those safety nets will only afford people a choice between risk aversion and entertainment, and that's only if they don't have kids. This is not a good situation to be in.
On June 18 2013 11:07 JonnyBNoHo wrote: A topic we can all agree on - the rich: Defending the One Percent.
This is a pretty good representation of my own take on inequality. Though I have to stress that I don't see fighting inequality as a bad, or inefficient thing. In my view the remedy needs to focus on the root causes (supply and demand imbalances, rent seeking, social ills and the like) rather than tax and transfer schemes (though they can still be used - I'm not speaking in absolutes here).
A blog rebuttal from The Economist with good comments below.
Here's a new article that actually highlights some of what I postulated earlier (but with better wording and data to back it up) PDF
It gets quite technical and it's mostly about models and assumptions based on US and international findings. Here is the gist from Wonkblog:
The theory comes from a paper by economists Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty and surprise guest star Stefanie Stantcheva. They hypothesized that lowering marginal tax rates increases the incentive for high earners to bargain up their wages — and pocket more of their raise. Moreover, because the higher earners are bargaining for greater pay without actually becoming more productive, the additional money they’re taking in is coming form other workers, generally those lower down the income scale.
Sure enough, Saez, Piketty, and Stantcheva found that there’s a strong correlation between the size of countries’ tax cuts on the rich and increases in the income shares of the rich, even before taking taxes into account. That is, the rich are getting richer even before you take into account that they’re paying less in taxes:
What’s more, increases in the rich’s income share didn’t coincide with increases in the rate of GDP growth. That fits the Saez/Piketty/Stantcheva theory that the rich aren’t getting more productive; they’re just getting better at bargaining because lower tax rates give them the motivation to get better at bargaining.
The point being, while the assumption of high taxes is that of a literal transfer of wealth/income socially and based on need, the reality is to encourage a fair distribution of income inside the market of marginal productivity and wages. The revenue generated can then be used to do whatever the people want to spend it on, which may very well be counterproductive to the cause of better income equality, but at least it is under some control of comprehensive policy and not a "whim of the market." This is why I hate anything sounding like "tax and transfer scheme" regardless if people are advocating for or against top income tax rates, since it misses what taxes are in a modern governing structure and monetary system.
While I believe it's important for the government to provide a level of social insurance for things not feasibly insurable in the private sector, I don't think doing so gives people a better chance to climb the social ladder. It simply provides a floor at which people can't fall below. Some public services/expenditures are different, like education and scientific funding, but those benefit the society equally (for the most part) and, thus, don't narrow the gap of inequality.
With regards to the paper, I still don't see why there would be any noticeable correlation with top marginal tax rates and GDP growth or income share - it's just such a small factor (particularly over that long period of time). It's really an over-emphasized data point.
Well, there's no correlation with GDP growth and top marginal rates that we can pinpoint, or I am unaware of credible studies that say so. However, we HAVE seen relations to those top marginal rates and income inequality, like seen with that graph linked. The disconnect comes in when factoring in the difference of the projected revenue if marginal tax rates stayed at that high rate of the 50s-70s. Those projections show that income inequality would still be at ridiculous levels, not erasing the gap entirely. So there's something multiplicative about marginal tax rates, that doesn't show up directly in the economic data we collect.
Their paper models this out using corrections for: 1) supply-side responses, 2) tax avoidance responses, and 3) compensation bargaining responses. Using this model, they can apply it to empirical data that we have and show that their model fits reality (to some extent I imagine).
Not necessary. Cable/Internet is a luxury and pay as you go cell phones are very cheap.
renters insurance
$10-20 per month
furnishings
bed+ mattress, a refrigerator, a chair, a table, a desk, and a couch doesn't cost much.
I've never paid electric bills so I probably did overestimate them, but keep in mind that it is including heat. Food costs really don't need to be $5-8 per day, and I don't know why it matters if it's a full-time job since you can just bring food for lunch. Also, you can still have variety and healthy food for cheap. Bananas and apples are pretty cheap, and a lot of soup is cheap too. Milk+ oatmeal with a banana is a good breakfast, a good lunch could be a salad with some chicken and some cheap dressing, and for dinner you have lots of options with cheap food like beans, potatoes, bread, rice, corn, soups, noodles, chicken, etc. Multivitamins are like 200 for $10 at Walmart too. I also forgot health insurance, good catch. Still, there was leeway in the budget with over $200 per month unaccounted for, so if you really want to splurge on entertainment (I would do internet+ computer) you could still have money left over. You could also save if you wanted to, but personally if I were a non-university educated, HS degree holding person in the hypothetical situation I would be going to community college in preparation for a transfer to a 4-year university to get a STEM degree. That would take a lot of time and you might not have much time for entertainment.
To be honest this isn't a great living, but it's not a big income either and all the essentials are covered. It could be a fine temporary budget you use while you prepare for a more well-paying job. I guess the real difficulty for a lot of poor people is even finding a full-time job, but I think if you know how to market yourself you could probably get a job as a waiter/retailer pretty easily, and with working knowledge of computers perhaps an IT job.
On June 18 2013 11:07 JonnyBNoHo wrote: A topic we can all agree on - the rich: Defending the One Percent.
This is a pretty good representation of my own take on inequality. Though I have to stress that I don't see fighting inequality as a bad, or inefficient thing. In my view the remedy needs to focus on the root causes (supply and demand imbalances, rent seeking, social ills and the like) rather than tax and transfer schemes (though they can still be used - I'm not speaking in absolutes here).
A blog rebuttal from The Economist with good comments below.
Here's a new article that actually highlights some of what I postulated earlier (but with better wording and data to back it up) PDF
It gets quite technical and it's mostly about models and assumptions based on US and international findings. Here is the gist from Wonkblog:
The theory comes from a paper by economists Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty and surprise guest star Stefanie Stantcheva. They hypothesized that lowering marginal tax rates increases the incentive for high earners to bargain up their wages — and pocket more of their raise. Moreover, because the higher earners are bargaining for greater pay without actually becoming more productive, the additional money they’re taking in is coming form other workers, generally those lower down the income scale.
Sure enough, Saez, Piketty, and Stantcheva found that there’s a strong correlation between the size of countries’ tax cuts on the rich and increases in the income shares of the rich, even before taking taxes into account. That is, the rich are getting richer even before you take into account that they’re paying less in taxes:
What’s more, increases in the rich’s income share didn’t coincide with increases in the rate of GDP growth. That fits the Saez/Piketty/Stantcheva theory that the rich aren’t getting more productive; they’re just getting better at bargaining because lower tax rates give them the motivation to get better at bargaining.
The point being, while the assumption of high taxes is that of a literal transfer of wealth/income socially and based on need, the reality is to encourage a fair distribution of income inside the market of marginal productivity and wages. The revenue generated can then be used to do whatever the people want to spend it on, which may very well be counterproductive to the cause of better income equality, but at least it is under some control of comprehensive policy and not a "whim of the market." This is why I hate anything sounding like "tax and transfer scheme" regardless if people are advocating for or against top income tax rates, since it misses what taxes are in a modern governing structure and monetary system.
While I believe it's important for the government to provide a level of social insurance for things not feasibly insurable in the private sector, I don't think doing so gives people a better chance to climb the social ladder. It simply provides a floor at which people can't fall below. Some public services/expenditures are different, like education and scientific funding, but those benefit the society equally (for the most part) and, thus, don't narrow the gap of inequality.
With regards to the paper, I still don't see why there would be any noticeable correlation with top marginal tax rates and GDP growth or income share - it's just such a small factor (particularly over that long period of time). It's really an over-emphasized data point.
Well, there's no correlation with GDP growth and top marginal rates that we can pinpoint, or I am unaware of credible studies that say so. However, we HAVE seen relations to those top marginal rates and income inequality, like seen with that graph linked. The disconnect comes in when factoring in the difference of the projected revenue if marginal tax rates stayed at that high rate of the 50s-70s. Those projections show that income inequality would still be at ridiculous levels, not erasing the gap entirely. So there's something multiplicative about marginal tax rates, that doesn't show up directly in the economic data we collect.
Their paper models this out using corrections for: 1) supply-side responses, 2) tax avoidance responses, and 3) compensation bargaining responses. Using this model, they can apply it to empirical data that we have and show that their model fits reality (to some extent I imagine).
They drew a correlation between GDP growth and top marginal rates in the paper, so I brought it up.
Do you know if it adjusts for other tax factors (ex. deduct-ability of interest, tax brackets, etc.)? Where a lot of the top marginal tax rate arguments lose me is where the 1% faced a higher marginal rate but paid a lower tax rate because of other factors. I'm not sure how that dynamic is supposed to play out.
bed+ mattress, a refrigerator, a chair, a table, a desk, and a couch doesn't cost much.
I've never paid electric bills so I probably did overestimate them, but keep in mind that it is including heat. Food costs really don't need to be $5-8 per day, and I don't know why it matters if it's a full-time job since you can just bring food for lunch. Also, you can still have variety and healthy food for cheap. Bananas and apples are pretty cheap, and a lot of soup is cheap too. Milk+ oatmeal with a banana is a good breakfast, a good lunch could be a salad with some chicken and some cheap dressing, and for dinner you have lots of options with cheap food like beans, potatoes, bread, rice, corn, soups, noodles, chicken, etc. Multivitamins are like 200 for $10 at Walmart too. I also forgot health insurance, good catch. Still, there was leeway in the budget with over $200 per month unaccounted for, so if you really want to splurge on entertainment (I would do internet+ computer) you could still have money left over. You could also save if you wanted to, but personally if I were a non-university educated, HS degree holding person in the hypothetical situation I would be going to community college in preparation for a transfer to a 4-year university to get a STEM degree. That would take a lot of time and you might not have much time for entertainment.
Indeed pay-as-you-go phones are cheap. Probably about ~$30 a month. The food situation comes from personal experience. Last summer I had a factory job working from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm every weekday. I would wake up at 6:45, get ready for work, get home around 5:00, shower/clean up until 5:30. Entertainment and dinner until ~9:00 pm, and then bed. That gives me 3.5 hours for relaxation and errands daily. Cooking a meal normally takes anywhere from 30-90 minutes, and prepping a meal that isn't leftovers for lunch takes another 10-15 minutes. If you're cooking, this reduces your free/errand/chore time down to 2-2.5 hours a day (on weekdays), which isn't much. Meanwhile, eating out shrinks that time requirement down to ~15 minutes, and eliminates the "next-day-lunch" prep altogether. Consuming the ~2200-2500 calories for an active job will cost you at least $6 a day if you eat fast food 2-3 times a week. This is where the disconnect on food comes in, as foods that look cheap (like fruit and vegetables) are actually really light on calories as well. Their cost/calorie ratio (which I know isn't the END ALL measurement, but can be a metric) isn't that great or different from a fast food meal. I currently budget myself to <$7 a day on average, and I have plenty of time to cook my own meals.
Power for me in my current ~600 sq ft. efficiency is close to $95 a month, water and trash is about $25. I admittedly overpay for rent, but that's because I can afford to do so for now, but I do know of some really shady places you can get for ~$425-450, and any apartment I have found that includes water/gas/trash and/or electricity in the bill are not places you want to be even temporarily. Furniture and home cleaning supplies get expensive really, really fast and easily. It's not uncommon for me to spend $50 on 2 weeks of groceries, and another $50 on a month worth of home supplies. While living alone, I have also noticed a tendency for me to have some sort of unexpected expense of ~$200 a month relating to either car trouble, medical expenses, or replacing/fixing something broken at home.
On June 18 2013 11:07 JonnyBNoHo wrote: A topic we can all agree on - the rich: Defending the One Percent.
This is a pretty good representation of my own take on inequality. Though I have to stress that I don't see fighting inequality as a bad, or inefficient thing. In my view the remedy needs to focus on the root causes (supply and demand imbalances, rent seeking, social ills and the like) rather than tax and transfer schemes (though they can still be used - I'm not speaking in absolutes here).
A blog rebuttal from The Economist with good comments below.
Here's a new article that actually highlights some of what I postulated earlier (but with better wording and data to back it up) PDF
It gets quite technical and it's mostly about models and assumptions based on US and international findings. Here is the gist from Wonkblog:
The theory comes from a paper by economists Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty and surprise guest star Stefanie Stantcheva. They hypothesized that lowering marginal tax rates increases the incentive for high earners to bargain up their wages — and pocket more of their raise. Moreover, because the higher earners are bargaining for greater pay without actually becoming more productive, the additional money they’re taking in is coming form other workers, generally those lower down the income scale.
Sure enough, Saez, Piketty, and Stantcheva found that there’s a strong correlation between the size of countries’ tax cuts on the rich and increases in the income shares of the rich, even before taking taxes into account. That is, the rich are getting richer even before you take into account that they’re paying less in taxes:
What’s more, increases in the rich’s income share didn’t coincide with increases in the rate of GDP growth. That fits the Saez/Piketty/Stantcheva theory that the rich aren’t getting more productive; they’re just getting better at bargaining because lower tax rates give them the motivation to get better at bargaining.
The point being, while the assumption of high taxes is that of a literal transfer of wealth/income socially and based on need, the reality is to encourage a fair distribution of income inside the market of marginal productivity and wages. The revenue generated can then be used to do whatever the people want to spend it on, which may very well be counterproductive to the cause of better income equality, but at least it is under some control of comprehensive policy and not a "whim of the market." This is why I hate anything sounding like "tax and transfer scheme" regardless if people are advocating for or against top income tax rates, since it misses what taxes are in a modern governing structure and monetary system.
While I believe it's important for the government to provide a level of social insurance for things not feasibly insurable in the private sector, I don't think doing so gives people a better chance to climb the social ladder. It simply provides a floor at which people can't fall below. Some public services/expenditures are different, like education and scientific funding, but those benefit the society equally (for the most part) and, thus, don't narrow the gap of inequality.
With regards to the paper, I still don't see why there would be any noticeable correlation with top marginal tax rates and GDP growth or income share - it's just such a small factor (particularly over that long period of time). It's really an over-emphasized data point.
Well, there's no correlation with GDP growth and top marginal rates that we can pinpoint, or I am unaware of credible studies that say so. However, we HAVE seen relations to those top marginal rates and income inequality, like seen with that graph linked. The disconnect comes in when factoring in the difference of the projected revenue if marginal tax rates stayed at that high rate of the 50s-70s. Those projections show that income inequality would still be at ridiculous levels, not erasing the gap entirely. So there's something multiplicative about marginal tax rates, that doesn't show up directly in the economic data we collect.
Their paper models this out using corrections for: 1) supply-side responses, 2) tax avoidance responses, and 3) compensation bargaining responses. Using this model, they can apply it to empirical data that we have and show that their model fits reality (to some extent I imagine).
They drew a correlation between GDP growth and top marginal rates in the paper, so I brought it up.
Do you know if it adjusts for other tax factors (ex. deduct-ability of interest, tax brackets, etc.)? Where a lot of the top marginal tax rate arguments lose me is where the 1% faced a higher marginal rate but paid a lower tax rate because of other factors. I'm not sure how that dynamic is supposed to play out.
This is the main talk about GDP I see:
Third, we find no evidence of a correlation between growth in real GDP per capita and the drop in the top marginal tax rate in the period 1960 to the present. This evidence is consistent with the bargaining model whereby gains at the top come at the expense of lower income earners. This suggests that the first elasticity (top marginal rates) is modest in size and that the overall effect comes mostly from the third elasticity (bargaining aka rent seeking).
(parentheticals added for clarification)
Section 2.1 talks about effects of tax avoidance and their methods for accounting for them. I'll be honest and say that I haven't read the paper in detail or tried to understand their approach (even if it's within my ability to understand). I'll do so tomorrow during one of my classes though and see if I can't decipher the details of their model. For now, it's time for some BF3 before sleeping.
Not necessary. Cable/Internet is a luxury and pay as you go cell phones are very cheap.
renters insurance
$10-20 per month
furnishings
bed+ mattress, a refrigerator, a chair, a table, a desk, and a couch doesn't cost much.
I've never paid electric bills so I probably did overestimate them, but keep in mind that it is including heat. Food costs really don't need to be $5-8 per day, and I don't know why it matters if it's a full-time job since you can just bring food for lunch. Also, you can still have variety and healthy food for cheap. Bananas and apples are pretty cheap, and a lot of soup is cheap too. Milk+ oatmeal with a banana is a good breakfast, a good lunch could be a salad with some chicken and some cheap dressing, and for dinner you have lots of options with cheap food like beans, potatoes, bread, rice, corn, soups, noodles, chicken, etc. Multivitamins are like 200 for $10 at Walmart too. I also forgot health insurance, good catch. Still, there was leeway in the budget with over $200 per month unaccounted for, so if you really want to splurge on entertainment (I would do internet+ computer) you could still have money left over. You could also save if you wanted to, but personally if I were a non-university educated, HS degree holding person in the hypothetical situation I would be going to community college in preparation for a transfer to a 4-year university to get a STEM degree. That would take a lot of time and you might not have much time for entertainment.
Indeed pay-as-you-go phones are cheap. Probably about ~$30 a month. The food situation comes from personal experience. Last summer I had a factory job working from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm every weekday. I would wake up at 6:45, get ready for work, get home around 5:00, shower/clean up until 5:30. Entertainment and dinner until ~9:00 pm, and then bed. That gives me 3.5 hours for relaxation and errands daily. Cooking a meal normally takes anywhere from 30-90 minutes, and prepping a meal that isn't leftovers for lunch takes another 10-15 minutes. If you're cooking, this reduces your free/errand/chore time down to 2-2.5 hours a day (on weekdays), which isn't much. Meanwhile, eating out shrinks that time requirement down to ~15 minutes, and eliminates the "next-day-lunch" prep altogether. Consuming the ~2200-2500 calories for an active job will cost you at least $6 a day if you eat fast food 2-3 times a week. This is where the disconnect on food comes in, as foods that look cheap (like fruit and vegetables) are actually really light on calories as well. Their cost/calorie ratio (which I know isn't the END ALL measurement, but can be a metric) isn't that great or different from a fast food meal. I currently budget myself to <$7 a day on average, and I have plenty of time to cook my own meals.
Power for me in my current ~600 sq ft. efficiency is close to $95 a month, water and trash is about $25. I admittedly overpay for rent, but that's because I can afford to do so for now, but I do know of some really shady places you can get for ~$425-450, and any apartment I have found that includes water/gas/trash and/or electricity in the bill are not places you want to be even temporarily. Furniture and home cleaning supplies get expensive really, really fast and easily. It's not uncommon for me to spend $50 on 2 weeks of groceries, and another $50 on a month worth of home supplies. While living alone, I have also noticed a tendency for me to have some sort of unexpected expense of ~$200 a month relating to either car trouble, medical expenses, or replacing/fixing something broken at home.
"Factory job"? You mean you had a job in a building that used to be an old mill? Otherwise this Massachusetts boy just can't relate :p
Not necessary. Cable/Internet is a luxury and pay as you go cell phones are very cheap.
renters insurance
$10-20 per month
furnishings
bed+ mattress, a refrigerator, a chair, a table, a desk, and a couch doesn't cost much.
I've never paid electric bills so I probably did overestimate them, but keep in mind that it is including heat. Food costs really don't need to be $5-8 per day, and I don't know why it matters if it's a full-time job since you can just bring food for lunch. Also, you can still have variety and healthy food for cheap. Bananas and apples are pretty cheap, and a lot of soup is cheap too. Milk+ oatmeal with a banana is a good breakfast, a good lunch could be a salad with some chicken and some cheap dressing, and for dinner you have lots of options with cheap food like beans, potatoes, bread, rice, corn, soups, noodles, chicken, etc. Multivitamins are like 200 for $10 at Walmart too. I also forgot health insurance, good catch. Still, there was leeway in the budget with over $200 per month unaccounted for, so if you really want to splurge on entertainment (I would do internet+ computer) you could still have money left over. You could also save if you wanted to, but personally if I were a non-university educated, HS degree holding person in the hypothetical situation I would be going to community college in preparation for a transfer to a 4-year university to get a STEM degree. That would take a lot of time and you might not have much time for entertainment.
Indeed pay-as-you-go phones are cheap. Probably about ~$30 a month. The food situation comes from personal experience. Last summer I had a factory job working from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm every weekday. I would wake up at 6:45, get ready for work, get home around 5:00, shower/clean up until 5:30. Entertainment and dinner until ~9:00 pm, and then bed. That gives me 3.5 hours for relaxation and errands daily. Cooking a meal normally takes anywhere from 30-90 minutes, and prepping a meal that isn't leftovers for lunch takes another 10-15 minutes. If you're cooking, this reduces your free/errand/chore time down to 2-2.5 hours a day (on weekdays), which isn't much. Meanwhile, eating out shrinks that time requirement down to ~15 minutes, and eliminates the "next-day-lunch" prep altogether. Consuming the ~2200-2500 calories for an active job will cost you at least $6 a day if you eat fast food 2-3 times a week. This is where the disconnect on food comes in, as foods that look cheap (like fruit and vegetables) are actually really light on calories as well. Their cost/calorie ratio (which I know isn't the END ALL measurement, but can be a metric) isn't that great or different from a fast food meal. I currently budget myself to <$7 a day on average, and I have plenty of time to cook my own meals.
Power for me in my current ~600 sq ft. efficiency is close to $95 a month, water and trash is about $25. I admittedly overpay for rent, but that's because I can afford to do so for now, but I do know of some really shady places you can get for ~$425-450, and any apartment I have found that includes water/gas/trash and/or electricity in the bill are not places you want to be even temporarily. Furniture and home cleaning supplies get expensive really, really fast and easily. It's not uncommon for me to spend $50 on 2 weeks of groceries, and another $50 on a month worth of home supplies. While living alone, I have also noticed a tendency for me to have some sort of unexpected expense of ~$200 a month relating to either car trouble, medical expenses, or replacing/fixing something broken at home.
Well, I guess pay as you go really depends on your usage. If you're like me you would just get the shittiest phone possible that can call and text and then maybe average 3 texts and 3 minutes per day. Also, from my experience fast food is almost never worth it, even for the convenience. 30-90 minutes of cooking a meal can be interspersed with Internet/phone/games and you can also cook something for the next three days or so if it's not a bad food to microwave. You can get plenty of calories from potatoes, rice, and chicken if you make them the mainstay of your diet, too.
You are right about emergency expenses but 200/month seems a bit much. Personally I don't get sick much, but I don't see how replacing something non-car related could be 200. Nor do I see how cleaning could cost 50 per month. Anyway, this is less about personal budget preferences and more about my point that what we might consider poor can definitely afford living expenses. There are also plenty of ways for people to improve their position by education, learning a trade, or self-employment. For these reasons I don't think income inequality is as bad as many make it out to be.
Not necessary. Cable/Internet is a luxury and pay as you go cell phones are very cheap.
renters insurance
$10-20 per month
furnishings
bed+ mattress, a refrigerator, a chair, a table, a desk, and a couch doesn't cost much.
I've never paid electric bills so I probably did overestimate them, but keep in mind that it is including heat. Food costs really don't need to be $5-8 per day, and I don't know why it matters if it's a full-time job since you can just bring food for lunch. Also, you can still have variety and healthy food for cheap. Bananas and apples are pretty cheap, and a lot of soup is cheap too. Milk+ oatmeal with a banana is a good breakfast, a good lunch could be a salad with some chicken and some cheap dressing, and for dinner you have lots of options with cheap food like beans, potatoes, bread, rice, corn, soups, noodles, chicken, etc. Multivitamins are like 200 for $10 at Walmart too. I also forgot health insurance, good catch. Still, there was leeway in the budget with over $200 per month unaccounted for, so if you really want to splurge on entertainment (I would do internet+ computer) you could still have money left over. You could also save if you wanted to, but personally if I were a non-university educated, HS degree holding person in the hypothetical situation I would be going to community college in preparation for a transfer to a 4-year university to get a STEM degree. That would take a lot of time and you might not have much time for entertainment.
Indeed pay-as-you-go phones are cheap. Probably about ~$30 a month. The food situation comes from personal experience. Last summer I had a factory job working from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm every weekday. I would wake up at 6:45, get ready for work, get home around 5:00, shower/clean up until 5:30. Entertainment and dinner until ~9:00 pm, and then bed. That gives me 3.5 hours for relaxation and errands daily. Cooking a meal normally takes anywhere from 30-90 minutes, and prepping a meal that isn't leftovers for lunch takes another 10-15 minutes. If you're cooking, this reduces your free/errand/chore time down to 2-2.5 hours a day (on weekdays), which isn't much. Meanwhile, eating out shrinks that time requirement down to ~15 minutes, and eliminates the "next-day-lunch" prep altogether. Consuming the ~2200-2500 calories for an active job will cost you at least $6 a day if you eat fast food 2-3 times a week. This is where the disconnect on food comes in, as foods that look cheap (like fruit and vegetables) are actually really light on calories as well. Their cost/calorie ratio (which I know isn't the END ALL measurement, but can be a metric) isn't that great or different from a fast food meal. I currently budget myself to <$7 a day on average, and I have plenty of time to cook my own meals.
Power for me in my current ~600 sq ft. efficiency is close to $95 a month, water and trash is about $25. I admittedly overpay for rent, but that's because I can afford to do so for now, but I do know of some really shady places you can get for ~$425-450, and any apartment I have found that includes water/gas/trash and/or electricity in the bill are not places you want to be even temporarily. Furniture and home cleaning supplies get expensive really, really fast and easily. It's not uncommon for me to spend $50 on 2 weeks of groceries, and another $50 on a month worth of home supplies. While living alone, I have also noticed a tendency for me to have some sort of unexpected expense of ~$200 a month relating to either car trouble, medical expenses, or replacing/fixing something broken at home.
"Factory job"? You mean you had a job in a building that used to be an old mill? Otherwise this Massachusetts boy just can't relate :p
I did low level work fabricating parts for aircraft. Not my normal line of work, but it was an experience.
Not necessary. Cable/Internet is a luxury and pay as you go cell phones are very cheap.
renters insurance
$10-20 per month
furnishings
bed+ mattress, a refrigerator, a chair, a table, a desk, and a couch doesn't cost much.
I've never paid electric bills so I probably did overestimate them, but keep in mind that it is including heat. Food costs really don't need to be $5-8 per day, and I don't know why it matters if it's a full-time job since you can just bring food for lunch. Also, you can still have variety and healthy food for cheap. Bananas and apples are pretty cheap, and a lot of soup is cheap too. Milk+ oatmeal with a banana is a good breakfast, a good lunch could be a salad with some chicken and some cheap dressing, and for dinner you have lots of options with cheap food like beans, potatoes, bread, rice, corn, soups, noodles, chicken, etc. Multivitamins are like 200 for $10 at Walmart too. I also forgot health insurance, good catch. Still, there was leeway in the budget with over $200 per month unaccounted for, so if you really want to splurge on entertainment (I would do internet+ computer) you could still have money left over. You could also save if you wanted to, but personally if I were a non-university educated, HS degree holding person in the hypothetical situation I would be going to community college in preparation for a transfer to a 4-year university to get a STEM degree. That would take a lot of time and you might not have much time for entertainment.
Indeed pay-as-you-go phones are cheap. Probably about ~$30 a month. The food situation comes from personal experience. Last summer I had a factory job working from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm every weekday. I would wake up at 6:45, get ready for work, get home around 5:00, shower/clean up until 5:30. Entertainment and dinner until ~9:00 pm, and then bed. That gives me 3.5 hours for relaxation and errands daily. Cooking a meal normally takes anywhere from 30-90 minutes, and prepping a meal that isn't leftovers for lunch takes another 10-15 minutes. If you're cooking, this reduces your free/errand/chore time down to 2-2.5 hours a day (on weekdays), which isn't much. Meanwhile, eating out shrinks that time requirement down to ~15 minutes, and eliminates the "next-day-lunch" prep altogether. Consuming the ~2200-2500 calories for an active job will cost you at least $6 a day if you eat fast food 2-3 times a week. This is where the disconnect on food comes in, as foods that look cheap (like fruit and vegetables) are actually really light on calories as well. Their cost/calorie ratio (which I know isn't the END ALL measurement, but can be a metric) isn't that great or different from a fast food meal. I currently budget myself to <$7 a day on average, and I have plenty of time to cook my own meals.
Power for me in my current ~600 sq ft. efficiency is close to $95 a month, water and trash is about $25. I admittedly overpay for rent, but that's because I can afford to do so for now, but I do know of some really shady places you can get for ~$425-450, and any apartment I have found that includes water/gas/trash and/or electricity in the bill are not places you want to be even temporarily. Furniture and home cleaning supplies get expensive really, really fast and easily. It's not uncommon for me to spend $50 on 2 weeks of groceries, and another $50 on a month worth of home supplies. While living alone, I have also noticed a tendency for me to have some sort of unexpected expense of ~$200 a month relating to either car trouble, medical expenses, or replacing/fixing something broken at home.
Well, I guess pay as you go really depends on your usage. If you're like me you would just get the shittiest phone possible that can call and text and then maybe average 3 texts and 3 minutes per day. Also, from my experience fast food is almost never worth it, even for the convenience. 30-90 minutes of cooking a meal can be interspersed with Internet/phone/games and you can also cook something for the next three days or so if it's not a bad food to microwave. You can get plenty of calories from potatoes, rice, and chicken if you make them the mainstay of your diet, too.
You are right about emergency expenses but 200/month seems a bit much. Personally I don't get sick much, but I don't see how replacing something non-car related could be 200. Nor do I see how cleaning could cost 50 per month. Anyway, this is less about personal budget preferences and more about my point that what we might consider poor can definitely afford living expenses. There are also plenty of ways for people to improve their position by education, learning a trade, or self-employment. For these reasons I don't think income inequality is as bad as many make it out to be.
The main point out of this is that armchair budgeting like this is fruitless. You simply CANNOT penny-pinch and budget like this. Things almost inevitably cost noticeably more than we expect them to, and unexpected problems (car, health, or otherwise related) always happen. To say that someone can survive, let alone live any kind of meaningful life on roughly $15k a year is being very, very optimistic, especially since $8.75/hr is generous here in the U.S., as are some of the price points you're talking about (rent under $500? Insurance that cheap?).
Again, it's great that you have a life where you have little to no obligations to other people and can live a comfortable, debt-free and obligation-free life on a low amount of money, but that simply isn't the reality and trying to make it out to be the reality for even a significant amount of this country's poor is simply ignorant (and, in some cases, downright insulting). You are very lucky to live in a decent enough neighborhood on low rent while also having a car and a decent paying, stable job. None of these are even close to a given in this country. Furthermore, people have families and loved ones to take care of, health problems, car problems, debt problems, serious inability to even find a job (let alone get full-time hours), and access to education or other ways to improve your desirability as an employee are very difficult for the working poor to have access to for a number of reasons, the biggest of which are both money and time.
Insurance (auto) that cheap isn't really that uncommon as long as it's not full coverage on a newer model and you have no tickets/accidents. Then again I sold insurance in Indiana but I don't think it's that much cheaper (it does vary from region to region of course). Side note: sometimes you can save money on auto with renters insurance and actually get a net discount by getting additional insurance.
Russell Brand. I am under the proverbial rock till today. I'd never really seen any of his material,even though I was aware of his name. This clip of him taking over the Morning Joe show and discussing current events(Snowden and Manning) and mocking the anchors and their jobs is pretty damn funny. All I can say is "lose the ring Mika, it don't mean nothing to ya Shaftgrasper!". Sharp critic, and funny to boot. New fan.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/DxLeawT.png)
