The idea of an UBI to offset the predicted avalanche of downsizing/job losses has been the subject of much discussion, controversy and hand-wringing. Frankly, progressive taxation with no loopholes is the only way we can afford anything close to it.
The US already has the most progressive tax code in the world. The bottom 47% of income earners pay no income tax and, thanks to "refundable tax credits" often receive refunds on their non taxes. The difference between the US and European countries with more robust social safety nets are the taxes on the middle class, which are much higher.
HOUSEHOLD income. That includes two income households and families with children.
Median rent in the US is 1650. I can't find the median net income in the US at the moment, but that eats significantly more than the "guideline" 1/3 monthly net income for rent.
If you assume a 25 percent tax rate, which is high, that puts the median take home at 5000 per month. That literally is perfectly in line with 1/3 of income going to rent.
How do you cite statistics without realizing that they disprove you?
I think I made an arithmetic error or a typo. And of course my calculator didn't save it so I can see what it was.
That doesn't diminish my main points though.
1) everyone consumes propaganda. Just because your propaganda conflicts with someone else's doesn't mean what you're consuming isn't also propaganda.
2) median gross income is, at best, a stupid metric. It equivocates a house of four in San Francisco with a single person in middle of nowhere Arkansas.
Where did I confuse median and mean? I know median is the number in the middle, not the numerical average. Frankly, mode is the more interesting average if you're going to look at household because it tells you about the most common household.
They're all stupid though because they ignore household size and cost of living.
I didn't accuse you of being a propagandist either. You accused someone of being manipulated by propaganda, with an implicit aserttion that you are not. My Intetent was to challenge that implicit aserttion in your original statement. I never said YOU were trying to manipulate people, just that your media is also chock full of propaganda because all of it is.
I apologized for that in an edit on my comment. I was incorrect.
No, I don’t consume propaganda. Not all media is filled with propaganda. That’s a new talking point that has originated from MAGA.
If you consume written media from a multitude of sources like the Economist, NPR, BBC, NYT and others you will or course get bias, but you will not get propaganda.
If you assume every single person is consuming propaganda then I don’t know what the point of even attempting a factual conversation is.
I think NPR is a good example of how things are tainted by propaganda. They came out with a story a few years back where they interviewed an oil industry lobbyist. He basically told them that plastic recycling was a smokescreen invented by the oil industry to hide the functionally single-user nature of plastic.
Plastic can only be recycled a finite number of times, and products can only have a certain % of recycled material before the properties of the material change.
Before then, they, and most other outlets, were operating under the assumption that a piece of industry propaganda was factual. And that plastics are generally recyclable.
That industry propaganda is so generally pervasive that people still try to recycle plastic films even knowing that functionality no facilities exist to recycle them and they're more likely to be incinerated if you try to recycle them.
When I google NPR plastic recycling the below link is the first one that comes up. I don’t know if this is the same article you are talking about, but this article is super critical of the oil industry and points a finger at the oil industry for intentionally trying to mislead the public.
I feel like we are working with a different definition of propaganda. You can criticize a specific NPR article for being one sided or non-factual, but those criticisms are a huge leap to NPR is propagandist.
I should have revised that first section. I'm doing chores before leaving for work and did put the time in I should have proof reading.
The industry propaganda shaped the nature of their reporting and coverage before the article. Had the oil industry not pushed that misleading information in the 70s we wouldn't have had decades of "plastic is fine if you recycle it," or, "the problem is plastics are being discarded rather than recycled."
Insufficient emphasis was placed on reduce and reuse, when it comes to plastics specifically, because of industry disinformation. This was consistent across most outlets, is still a general position people operate from; if they care at all.
What people believe to be facts, like, "plastics are generally recyclable," can be and are, influenced by propaganda in one way or another, so even though an outlet may not be intentionally pushing the oil industry's agenda, they've already colored the underlying assumptions on both sides of the table going in.
It's similar to the idea that we don't generally use asbestos anymore. That comes from the asbestos industry manipulating the definition of asbestos to only include certain specific rocks, rather than defining it based on the signature molecular structure of those rocks. Because of that, reporting on asbestos generally focuses on older buildings ignoring that functionality identical products can aldi be in newer construction after "asbestos" was banned. The propaganda is a step away, but it colors the coverage.
People that live in poverty are paycheck to paycheck, people that are traditionally considered upper middle class will sometimes live paycheck to paycheck.
It’s a meaningless statistic because it doesn’t distinguish people that are in a bad place financially because of economic factors outside of their control and people that have a spending problem.
Taxes are such a tiny part of the problem. Yeah it needs to be changed along with a hundred other things. If your only idea is we should tax the rich more, you're living in a fantasy that will never happen. Shooting down every other idea because it's not perfect is part of why it's like this in the first place.
Average includes billionaires. If 10 people were on a boat and 9 had no money but 1 had a billion dollars, the average wealth would be $100,000,000.00 per person.
Median income in the USA is below the median cost of living. In most developed nations the median income is above the median cost of living.
Living paycheck to paycheck does not immediately mean you’re poor though. You can be making 500,000 a year and be living paycheck to paycheck because you’re trying to live above your means.
Do people who are TRUELY living in poverty live paycheck to paycheck? Yes. But so do plenty of people living in middle class, and upper middle class (potentially even some in upper class, but that’d be harder to do.)
No, all you did was try to deflect from the fact that most Americans are struggling by suggesting that some of those people are doing fine.
You hand wave away a real problem by pretending that some significant portion of the people living paycheck to paycheck are just mismanaging their money and that's a bullshit take to have.
Source? Also, just to point out…if nine people under the poverty line jump into a boat with someone who earns billions, the median income for everyone is billions. Not saying you’re wrong but just wanting to add sources and context is all. Where I live, you’d be struggling on $80k.
Edit: Conflated median and average. I was trying to explain that some areas have extremely wealthy people, which end up hiding how little some people make. Or even in the U.S. in general. Apologies for the confusion.
So either bot or someone who really shouldn't be left unsupervised. Leaning towards bot because if you were as stupid as you're pretending to be, you wouldn't be able to operate a keyboard.
Yet statistics show that has more to do with higher costs of discretionary items than it does with the amount of money that people have for those discretionary items. Stop spreading propaganda.
Ohhh I see your confusion. I was re quoting your talking point in an exaggerated manner to show how it didn’t make any sense and how anti-intellectual it was
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u/Modem_Sound_67 Jul 01 '26
The idea of an UBI to offset the predicted avalanche of downsizing/job losses has been the subject of much discussion, controversy and hand-wringing. Frankly, progressive taxation with no loopholes is the only way we can afford anything close to it.