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Yes, yes I know it’s not actually dumb but canny clickbait to pump the rageclicks etc., but there’s a genuine phenomenon here. This really is how many of the wealthy feel, which is why Dick Costello is shorting his fellow elites and auditioning for pitchfork twirler.
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A $1.6M home on a $400K household income, w/young kids, is how you end up house poor. The conventional wisdom that your mortgage should be up to 25% of your gross income is ridiculous. More like your total housing costs. That house is about 20% more than they can afford. (1/n)
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The rest is actually all pretty reasonable for a middle class family of four. (Actually, a $350 car payment sounds pretty good. And even that assumes only one car payment at a time.) (3/n)
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But just a slightly less expensive home and more reasonable childcare choices would shave $1,500-$2,000 off that budget. At which point they're hardly "barely scraping by". (4/n)
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Of course, none of that takes into account what happens when you get laid off, can't find suitable work for 12+ months, coronavirus hits, COBRA coverage runs out, you have unexpected major medical expenses, etc. It sounds wealthy, until suddently it isn't. (5/5)
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The point is, there's people making an order of magnitude less and still staying alive and complaining less, who could use more humane taxpayer-funded support. It's a no-brainer that it's better to save one family from starvation than another from bank repo of a too-big house
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The people in this notional family have made choices as you point out -- too much home, too-high-end childcare etc etc. They've been enabled to make these bad (for them and society) choices by bad incentives. They're not helpless. They can make new choices under new incentives.
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I honestly find the presumption in the original that this notional 400k lifestyle should somehow have a privileged level of security and immune to the precarities that affect the rest of us almost offensive. Yeah shit happens. Jobs are lost. Incomes are lost. Welcome to life.
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True. But the counter-argument is that at that level, neither are they worthy of any special obligation or penalty. I can honestly make the case for either side of this argument.
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Under normal circumstances I’d be inclined to bothsides this too, and give some of the benefit of doubt to the wealthy but we happen to be at a historically high level of social stress (cf Turchin theories) that correlate to serious breakdown.
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Ie I think it’s time to load ALL the benefit of doubt in one direction. For 30 years it’s been loaded the other way, cf welfare-queen type narratives. The socially safety net has been systematically dismantled.
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