Yes, I have. And it learned me good.
I don’t know why I’m so pissed off by the insinuation of your question or the rest of your post, but I am. I am not judging anyone for wearing namebrand sneakers, poor or not. But it is indisputable that there are plenty of people who do judge. My comment was directed at those people.
by which I mean I hadn’t considered that point of view, and you may have changed my mind a bit on this.
OK; I may have misunderstood you, and I apologize for that.
In addition to the post I quoted, I was thinking of this bit:
which does read to me very much as if you were saying that wearing those sneakers was a bad choice. But in the rest of the context, I can see how you might have meant something else entirely.
I was going off your point where you said some schools only graduate 25%.
You are right though that many tech jobs can wear you out after 40 and one better be thinking down the line of another job say in management rather than doing the actual work.
But some trade schools do, too. And there are other colleges that do much better–the problem is that we are throwing very young adults into systems they don’t understand, charging them a ton, and then not helping their employment prospects. Overall, I am not sure technical schools have a better track record than 4-years. The difference is only that not completing technical school is your best bet.
In this case, “thinking down the line” literally means getting a college degree–because today, a manager needs to know a lot of things you aren’t going to learn on the floor of a shop.
Just another observation of mine…
I walk by the WIC office on my way to work every morning. It is not uncommon for me to see women carrying babies/toddlers into/out of the office who are dressed in namebrands. And I’m talking about both mother and child.
Now, I will admit to having some judgment. I hope it doesn’t show on my face, but it’s there inside of me. I try to constrain it by reminding myself that one can easily find namebrands at thrift stores and in charity donation boxes. And I also try to remind myself that families are great about buying luxury items for special occasions. So the designer jeans a mom is wearing might have been a Christmas present from her mother from two years ago. The baby may be wearing Nikes because perhaps a cousin works at a shoe store and thus got them real cheap.
All that said, I suspect a great percentage of those mothers simply don’t know a damn thing about saving money and are into high-end consumer goods because they make them feel good.
Sometimes progressives bend over backwards coming up with innocent, pragmatic explanations for all questionable behavior. Why can’t we just admit that some percentage of folks wearing $200 Air Jordans while they work the register at McDonald’s are doing so because they have a need for a status symbol? Doing so doesn’t imply they are awful human beings who should be ashamed of themselves and who deserve to be poor. It just means that poor people are no different from anyone else.
I think we libbies understand pretty well that some poor people are poor as the result of bad decision making. But I think we’re way better at understanding the underlying reasons behind that poor decision making and, more importantly, don’t believe that poor people are undeserving, incapable and immoral. A concept which appears to drive much of modern conservative dogma.
I think all people are, to varying degrees, flat-out incapable of making prudent choices in the face of the cultural and social pressures to the contrary.
And an increasing wealth gap exacerbates the issue, making upward growth feel less attainable through incremental saving, as well as raising the price on “everyday” items and expenses.
And yes, to a large degree our economy is dependent on wealth flowing away from families to pay for items that are essential only in a social/cultural sense.
While I can’t comment on the economic repercussions of drastically reducing consumer spending tomorrow by making everyone spend “sensibly”, I do thinkthis article I recently read has an interesting take on some of the mental reasons why “bad spending” happens. The short of it is that if you’re young and dealing with the current housing crisis, everything looks too bleak to be worth struggling with. There’s no point saving for a house or for retirement because you’ll never be able to afford it. So why save at all? Fuck it. Buy the frappucino and get takeout tonight, it doesn’t matter. Giving that stuff up wouldn’t help anyway.
Mrs. FtG at her old job had an employee that pestered her a lot to get a raise.
This employee was a single parent with two kids. And took the kids out for meals all the time. Even for breakfast at Hardee’s.
Look, if you are stretched for cash you eat in. With as much homemade food as possible (vs. packaged meals and such). That will significantly change one segment of your monthly expenses.
And of course that’s not all that was presumably going to waste.
One key thing to keep in mind: Income level doesn’t really change things. You can be middle or upper class and wallowing in debt from stupid choices.
During the housing crisis we had 3 long term neighbors who were in well underwater on their mortgages. One eventually lost their home. Another was only saved by the Federal mortgage aid stuff. We paid off our mortgage. No big difference in income. Just better money (and life) management.
So, yeah. A lot of fiscally stupid people out there. A lot. And they vote. And they vote for the idjit that promises new, costly programs and tax cuts. (E.g., increase the size of the military while giving the rich and companies a big break while saying that Magic Stuff will happen to grow the economy, bring in more money and it will all work out. Right.)
I don’t know how it works in South Korea.
Nonetheless -
If you say “I can”, you may or may not be right.
If you say “I can’t”, you are definitely right.
The US economy doesn’t run off bad choices; it runs off choices, and it doesn’t care if those choices are good or bad.
Or the other idjit.
That’s why Warren and Sanders’ idea of free college as a response to student loan debt is somewhere between counter-productive, and stupid. If you incur $80K in debt and it doesn’t raise your earning potential enough to pay for itself, having the taxpayer pay the $80K is a net loss, because you aren’t going to pay $80K in increased taxes over your lifetime either.
The idea of affordable housing for first-time home buyers is in direct competition with the idea of maintaining home values so existing home owners can sell at a high price. You can’t have both. Changing the zoning laws in San Francisco so they can build high-rises, and that will reduce the demand for existing housing. Reduced demand means reduced prices - Econ 101. OK, building the high-rise will reduce the charming ambiance of your neighborhood. Yes, it will, and it will thereby reduce the demand for houses with charming ambiance neighborhoods, and increase the supply of cheaper houses that are cheaper in part because their neighborhoods don’t have charming ambiance.
Regards,
Shodan
The survey was done by a group trying to sell financial planning. I take its findings with a grain of salt since it defines struggling as failing on at least one aspect of financial stability. The study also says that only 13% of men and 20% of women are stressed by money. That is probably closer to the actual amount of people struggling financially.
The reason that people are saving less today is that credit is so easy to come by. Our parents and grandparents needed rainy day funds in case an unexpected expense occurred. Now we can just put it on our credit cards and pay it off over time. Thus we can pay for things after they occur instead of before. This allows people to have better idea how much they need to save.
The economy is so good and jobs so plentiful that people just don’t feel the need for a huge nest egg to fall back on if something bad would happen.
Probably true.
Unfortunately, “if” is the wrong word. “When” is the right one.
Regards,
Shodan
Your right, in the old days if say you went into Sears and wanted credit to buy a new tv or some furniture you had to sit down with a credit counselor and they went over all your expenses and THEN you got credit. Even 25 years ago I worked as a JC Penney credit card counselor and we asked people all kinds of questions about their incomes and expenses before issuing a credit card.
Nowadays they send those things to anyone even an 18 year old college kid first time away from home.
Thats actually similar to Dave Ramsey’s ideas where he talks about eliminating debt by drastic cutting expenses (ex. living off rice and beans and you wont see the inside of a restaurant PLUS take a side job like delivering pizzas for extra money) but he admits most people can only keep that up for maybe 2 years and then they go back to their old spending habits.
Not being sentient, the economy has no feelings.
OTOH, the economy runs better or worse based on good or bad choices. There’s a gamut: large numbers of people making small poor choices (people getting subprime mortgages) or small numbers making large poor choices (covering up your bank’s involvement in making all those bad loans).
I think that’s debatable. A college-educated adult may not pay eighty thousand dollars in additional taxes. But they may be making an equivalent contribution in other ways.
Let’s use teachers as an example. Teachers don’t make a lot of money. But good teachers contribute a lot to society as a whole by doing a better job in educating our nation’s children. So if we could encourage better people to enter the teaching profession by lowering the entrance costs (ie college tuition) society would benefit, even if the benefit doesn’t come in tax revenues.
I wonder how South Korea came into it. I saw it only once before mentioned in the thread as a country with a positive current account balance (though the number given was wrong or out of date, ROK’s current surplus is around 5% of GDP lately). But it has a highly indebted household sector, substantially more than the US household sector on a relative basis, in fact so much that it offsets the lower public debt of the ROK to make total public, corporate and household debt in the ROK higher than the US as % of each country’s respective GDP. Not to pick on the ROK, just to reinforce the point that stuff like social spending or current account doesn’t directly track with household debt, which is what we’re talking about in terms of aggregated individual decisions, good or bad. Public debt is a collective decision, and corporate sector debt yet further removed from average people’s individual economic decisions.
Anyway as I also mentioned, the idea that making higher education ‘free’ (in marginal cost for a given student, somebody has to pay for it obviously) would solve the issue of people taking on non-productive student loan debt is a strange one. You’d take on debt the education actually won’t help you pay off if you’re paying for it yourself, but would be more careful not to do that if somebody else was paying for it. Doesn’t sound like human nature. 
Which isn’t to rule out a massive increase in public subsidy for higher education (though I freely admit I oppose such proposals) if you can justify it on a subjective ‘fairness’ basis, or just the basis of people getting the non-economic mind expanding benefits of education. But offering that as a way to get people to make better decisions about committing resources to their education…seems pretty obviously the wrong way around.
Likewise for home prices. Some people are presumably well aware there would be losers as well as winners to policies specifically aimed at reducing home/property values. But nobody can be too surprised there’s opposition to it from the people who’d lose out. Although unlike ‘solving’ the misallocation of education resources by removing any financial responsibility for them by the consumers of education, proposing property value reducing policies is at least not completely bass ackwards. It’s easier to see how society as a whole could come out ahead if places like NY and SF found ways to grow faster by reducing barriers to creating more housing supply. But of course it’s false advertising to say that would have no cost to anyone, in terms of either the prop values or loads more people crowding a given neighborhood when it’s easier to build ‘up’.
Here’s one good reason: politically it’s a lot easier to sell “we’re going to make you pay taxes to give the money to underprivileged people who are victims of circumstances beyond their control” than to sell “we’re going to make you taxes to give the money to people who made the bad decision to buy $200 Air Jordans while you yourself made do with less”.
The government safety net encourages irresponsible spending.
There’s a school of thought which says that all safety measures (protective gear, traffic rules etc.) just enable irresponsibility and are therefore much less productive than might be otherwise assumed. The extent to which this is true would vary by instance, obviously. But the government safety net would be an example of this phenomenon.
But can’t an argument be made that people making “bad” financial choices all the time is good for the economy?