Sick around the world

[j_b]

what a moron

[KaskadskyjKozak]

what a moron

 

yes, you are - and a fucking ass clown to boot.

 

 

[j_b]

Especially don't let reality intrude upon your nauseating ideology. From that well know anti-capitalist rag, the HArvard Gazette:

 

Middle-class income doesn't buy middle-class lifestyle

HLS professor sounds an alarm to families: One in seven will go bankrupt

By Beth Potier

Harvard News Office

 

Elizabeth Warren, a portrait in soft-spoken calm as she sips tea in her gracious office at Harvard Law School, is sounding an alarm.

 

"The American middle class is in real trouble," she says, her Southern-tinged sotto voce belying the power of her statement. "American families are smack up against the wall, financially speaking." A middle-class lifestyle, she says, is increasingly out of reach for middle-class families, many of whom are going broke trying to attain it.

 

This startling news shouldn't have stunned Warren, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law. After all, she's been studying families, debt, and bankruptcy for nearly three decades. Yet her recent research, based in part on a survey of more than 2,000 families who had filed for bankruptcy, told a different tale from familiar bankruptcy sagas of the elderly, the young, or the profligate.

 

"We discovered that having a child is the single best predictor that a person will go bankrupt," she says. By the end of this decade, one of every seven families with children will file for bankruptcy.

 

Even more surprising to Warren were the causes of this financial breakdown, which she assumed would implicate the battered culprit of overconsumption of luxury goods. "I thought I would write a story about too many trips to the mall, too many $200 sneakers, too many Gameboys," says Warren.

 

But stacks of government data on consumer spending, which she combed through as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow in 2002, proved her hunch wrong. Compared with a generation ago, she found, today's middle-class families earn about 75 percent more (all figures are adjusted for inflation), thanks in large part to Mom's entrance into the work force. But after shelling out for four fixed expenses - mortgage, health insurance, child care or education, and car payments - today's median-income family has less left over, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the single-income family of the 1970s.

 

"Families are not going broke over lattes," Warren quips. "Families are going broke over mortgages."

'Families are not going broke over lattes. Families are going broke over mortgages.'

 

- Elizabeth Warren, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law

 

Read more about Warren's research

 

There goes the safety net...

 

Warren has reported her findings, as well as a few proposed solutions, in the book "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke" (Basic Books, 2003), which she co-authored with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi.

 

The book's title highlights a central paradox of middle-class families today versus a generation ago: While middle-class families generally need two incomes to make ends meet, it's reliance on that second income (usually Mom's) that's putting them in financial peril. By counting on two incomes to fund the basics of a middle-class lifestyle - including modest homes in safe neighborhoods with good schools and high-quality child care, preschool, after-school care, or college - families have forfeited their safety nets.

 

"When a family builds its budget around two workers ... they're much more exposed to any economic disruption," says Warren. A generation ago, if the sole breadwinner lost his (or her) job or became disabled, the family had a backup earner who could step into the workforce. Further, reliance on two incomes makes families twice as vulnerable to layoffs.

 

"The two-income family is like a speeding race car," says Warren. "It goes faster than its one-income counterpart, but if it hits a rock, it careens out of control and crashes."

 

Making those crashes all the more devastating, Warren adds, is a deregulated consumer credit industry that she calls "a monster that feeds on families in trouble." With both incomes committed to fixed costs, families who hit a financial rock in the road turn to credit cards, mortgage refinancing, and payday lenders - often at ballooning interest costs that drag families into a spiral of debt. More and more often, bankruptcy is the only way out. This year, more children will live through their parents' bankruptcy than their parents' divorce.

 

Blame it on good schools, safe neighborhoods

 

How did being middle class get so expensive? The answers run contrary to popular wisdom as well as to Warren's own assumptions. Today's family is spending 21 percent less on clothing, 22 percent less on food - including eating out - and 44 percent less on appliances than they did a generation ago. Warren notes that a combination of lowered production costs and changing lifestyles are at work. Discount stores, meals that include less red meat and are more likely to have been purchased in bulk from wholesalers like Costco, and casual dressing at all ages have spelled savings for families.

 

Nor are warehouse-sized McMansions to blame; this type of housing is generally not going to middle-class families. Although housing costs have skyrocketed nationwide in the past generation, the size of average homes has grown far more modestly, by less than one room between 1975 and the late 1990s, Warren found.

 

Instead, Warren points the finger at two concepts dear to the hearts of almost all Americans: safety and education. Both are perceived to be more elusive now than a generation ago, when families bought a house they could afford and sent their children to the school down the street without a second thought. Now, she says, middle-class families are stretching themselves to the breaking point to afford homes in safe neighborhoods and "better" school districts.

 

Warren insists she's not discussing a phenomenon exclusive to Cambridge academics or the wealthy go-getters of Boston's tony suburbs who measure the subtle distinctions between two towns' outstanding public schools. "I'm talking about families that are weighing the differences between Plymouth and Weymouth," she says, describing two middle-class communities south of Boston.

 

more here: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/10.30/19-bankruptcy.html

 

 

[prole]

 

We can at least be glad he's not like some poor American stuck in his country's healthcare crisis, you know, dying gutter and draining his family's bank account.

 

Americans don't have bank accounts.

 

Huge, endlessly running credit card debt, OTOH... but heh, we should be able to buy 5 plasma TVs, a new car every 3 years, and not have to buy health insurance - that's too much money!

 

Amazing recycling of the discredited "Welfare Queen" mythology updated for the post-social safety net era of 21st century America. Man, they're not kidding when they say conservatives are completely out of ideas. Weak, Kojak.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Middle-class income doesn't buy middle-class lifestyle

 

 

the middle-class lifestyle is part of the problem you fucktard

[j_b]

education, housing, health care and food on the table (and other fixed expenses) are part of the problem? if these are problems you better come up with more effective propaganda because I don't know too many people willing to slave away for sub-standard living conditions.

Edited November 11, 2009 by j_b

[KaskadskyjKozak]

education, housing, health care and food on the table (and other fixed expenses) are part of the problem? if these are problems you better come up with more effective propaganda because I don't know too many people willing to slave away for sub-standard living conditions.

 

i challenge the methodology of the moron who wrote that article.

 

and Americans hardly have "sub standard living conditions". 90% of the world's population would cut off an arm to live here.

[j_b]

you have challenged nothing. You have only made gratuitous statements.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

you have challenged nothing. You have only made gratuitous statements.

 

funny, coming from a guy for whom gratuitous statements are bread and butter

 

 

[j_b]

I just gave you an article about studies that support my affirmations and contradict yours, jackass.

Edited November 11, 2009 by j_b

[prole]

education, housing, health care and food on the table (and other fixed expenses) are part of the problem? if these are problems you better come up with more effective propaganda because I don't know too many people willing to slave away for sub-standard living conditions.

 

What part of "lick sack", "FOAD", etc. did you not understand?

 

[KaskadskyjKozak]

I just gave you an article about studies that supports my affirmations and contradicts yours, jackass.

 

not in the least

 

the average consumer buys a lot of shit he does not need, including the average middle class consumer. and although middle class Americans don't all buy "McMansions" they do buy houses they can not afford, do remodels they can not afford, take vacations they can not afford, buy boats, RVs, ATVs, continually replace appliances, spend money on restuarants, entertainment etc. The average middle class American has no control over spending. The article you cited is bullshit, like anything you spew on this site.

 

And life for the average American is a whole fuck lot better than it is for most of the world.

[j_b]

I gave you reports about studies that show exactly the opposite of what you say. No anecdotal information from you is going to change that.

 

People consume a lot compared to a non-consumerist model but then, you have to make your mind because nothing of what you have ever said promotes a non-consumerist model.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

I gave you reports about studies that show exactly the opposite of what you say.

 

no they don't. they brush away real questions on comsumer spending with glib comments about "lattes" and "mcmansions" not being to blame. it's the whole consumer bundle, not lattes and mcmansions.

 

[j_b]

I am not going to waste my time further since you can't manage to understand what is being discussed but the article clearly states that middle class income is spent on fixed expenses (housing, health, transportation, education, ...) and less on restaurants, appliances, etc ... than 30 years ago. As I said, these studies contradict your fact-free assertion that most people get in debt over unnecessary stuff.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

I am not going to waste my time further since you can't manage to understand what is being discussed but the article clearly states that middle class income is spent on fixed expenses (housing, health, transportation, education, ...) and less on restaurants, appliances, etc ... than 30 years ago. As I said, these studies contradict your fact-free assertion that most people get in debt over unnecessary stuff.

 

what was his sample and how did he select it? how did he get access to the detailed budgets of each family he "studied"? how did he determine (or did he even try) if the homes purchased were unnecessarily large or expensive (or if renting for said family is a better choice). Just because somebody wrote an article doesn't mean it is sound nor should be believed (hook line and sinker) by any dumbass who reads it (that would be you).

 

[j_b]

well, if you are truly interested in the details of the studies you'll have to read the publications beyond the press article that mentions Warren's 30 year academic career on this very topic.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

well, if you are truly interested in the details of the studies you'll have to read the publications beyond the press article that mentions Warren's 30 year academic career on this very topic.

 

Academics are always so in touch with the average man

[j_b]

Conservatives are such anti-intellectual demagogues.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Conservatives are such anti-intellectual demagogues.

 

you are one clueless fuck

[j_b]

I feel Attila soon reverting to monosyllabic argumentation.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

I feel Attila soon reverting to monosyllabic argumentation.

 

Tell us your own personal testimonial of your battle with the man and lack of respect and deserved compensation for your superior intellect in our skewed society. I would pay to read that!

[prole]

what was his sample and how did he select it? how did he get access to the detailed budgets of each family he "studied"? how did he determine (or did he even try) if the homes purchased were unnecessarily large or expensive (or if renting for said family is a better choice). Just because somebody wrote an article doesn't mean it is sound nor should be believed (hook line and sinker) by any dumbass who reads it (that would be you).

 

If you'd bothered to read the article, you'd know that the study was done by a woman. Since you didn't even get that far, it doesn't give one much hope that you'd go any further by delving into the research methodology you claim to find important.

[prole]

well, if you are truly interested in the details of the studies you'll have to read the publications beyond the press article that mentions Warren's 30 year academic career on this very topic.

 

Academics are always so in touch with the average man

 

Who needs academics when we have the likes of Joe the Plumber, eh?

[Hugh Conway]

Don't forget more family members working more hours too!

 

well, yeah, you got to have enough cash to pay off the finance charges every month!

 

and pay taxes to bail out the credit card company's

 

only rich people pay taxes, so that's ok

 

so they invest to expand their empires

 

nice deal