Americans are big on appearances. Gotta seem religious. Gotta seem rich. Gotta seem happy. Gotta seem free.
Seem
Propaganda of American exceptionalism.
crazy how people in brazil used to look up to American living standards, but it turns out americans have more inequality, violence, worse education, health system, worse food, and the list goes on
I swear the biggest lie is that America is somehow a better country because it has houses that are expensive and fast food so that it can import what essentially accounts to slave labor when they finally come over excited to work for lower wages and live in cramped housing without their social networks other than the other slave laborers.
Its probably how we make it how people not climbing financially can still feel superior. No one has to pay the debt if you can keep getting new people on a lower rung.
Americans rarely have access to real bread
The US is big on wealth inequality, like most third-world countries. Yeah, lots of people are broke, but lots of people are also making 200k/year. Overall we’re definitely struggling, but that doesn’t mean everyone is struggling.
Lemmy also leans both older and into the tech demographic, which tend to be higher paid.
Cries in near minimum wage UK tech work. The only upside is minimum wage is actually pretty good
Yeah, close to 6% of the population is making unfathomable amounts of money and the crazy thing is that just 6% of the population is still 20 Million people. You could replace the entire population of Tokyo with American millionaires and still have more to spare to claim New York too.
Tokyo metro area is more than 36 million people.
True but I think the rich are about 10% so I think that’s number should be closer to like 30-35m
Either way, US has a mega city or canada sized country of pure high income and or asset owner.
These people are true benefecies of the empire. They essentially enforce regime orthodoxy on political level while providing their professional services to the owner class. For this they are permitted to thrive, while the rest of working class is being driven into more poverty with each generation.
Yeah but the tokyo metro area is an insanely large sprawl only rivaled by the tristate area of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut.
I kinda meant just the dense city lines of both which is still an insane amount.
That entire tristate area is also 20 million people so its more people than that that are wealthy enough to think the empire as a truly good thing.
The US is big on wealth inequality
You misspelled “built”.
Because being poor means you’re weak, and weakness makes you’re a piability to your friends, useless, and prey.
Ego
Bad education
Toxic capitalism, instagram
Who’s pretending?
We’re all broke. Unless you’re a boomer trying to sell a $0.50 house you bought in the 50s you paid for on a gas station cashier salary. They’re ok for the moment. But even a lot of them are going broke now too. Highest demographic of newly homeless last I heard.
Because those boomers who are broke were attempting to keep up with those who actually had money. I know a few examples…
America is a third world occupied country but everybody is in denial, obese and wearing nice clothes 😌
Broke, poor, and in debt are three different things.
Broke just means no cash on hand. You can have tons of cash flow and assets but at the moment you are lacking liquidity to pay cash for things. You may or may not have debt. You might have just blown all your cash on a big purchase.
Poor means you have little and earn little and can do little. Debt is often a factor here but you can be poor and not in debt.
People in debt owe money. They might not be struggling at all. Sometimes rich people borrow money because it costs them less than the interest they receive on the cash they have. Or it could be the opposite, it could be crippling every aspect of their lives.
Americans carry a lot of debt on average. My only debit is my mortgage plus the last two weeks of credit card spending. I pay off my card in full every month. I only use the credit card because it offers purchase protection and I get rewards. Not all debt is bad debt, but a lot of it is.
I used to be comfortably poor with no debt. My income, expenses and living standards were low.
Now earning a little over minimum wage and fucking hell life is easy, but largely because I was poor and just got used to not having things. I continue that now.
Once you learn how to live on very little money out of necessity, living comfortably within your means as your wages increase doesn’t feel like such a bad thing.
And anyone who has been without a safety net understands that keeping a buffer in their bank account feels way better than splurging on impulsive luxuries.
My buffer started at treat £2k as zero. As my wages went up I quickly started going over £5k and then £10k, didn’t even know how to spend it. So I didn’t spend it.
Within a few years of saving like £5-10k a year I had enough for a pretty good deposit on a house, like 15% or so. The house we got wasn’t even at the higher end of what we could borrow. I don’t want to min/max wealth, I want to live comfortably, and there are allotments across the road from us.
I’m guessing not admitting your finances are shit is pretty universal, no need to pick on 'Murica.
There is some truth to what you’re saying but the USA are special about it. It’s like, they try to (badly) act as if they had more than enough money but it’s obvious they’re struggling badly. Like a functional addict thinking he’s hiding it well but in fact everyone knows and there’s a shared social discomfort in the charade
It’s part of our culture. It dates back to when America was new. Plantation owners wanted to pretend we had a rich and powerful economy and history and culture. They made everything pristine and gaudy and exp wove looking but there was no substance. Look at the architectural decisions made in plantation houses and how the elements are still used in homes today.
We pretend we are better than we really are.
Do we count mortgages as debt here?
They often are, yes. I’m not sure exactly what “in debt” means to OP. But, when I use it like this I generally mean “negative net worth” not “carrying a line of credit”.
I currently have a balance on a CC, but I don’t consider myself in debt, because it’s smaller than my checking account balance, and that’s smaller than my investment account balance, and that’s smaller than my retirement account balance.
I don’t own a home, but I also didn’t really consider myself “in debt” when I purchased my current car.
Oddly enough I would say I am “in debt to” my CC company, because I do owe money to them and they do not owe money to me. The “to X” part of the phrase restricts my consideration to just two-party financial relationship, in my mind. When you leave off the “to X”, I consider all the financial relationship I have and (roughly) sum over them.
Same here, funny carry a balance, but at least for a couple of weeks I owe my credit card company.
Simply because if I use my debit card, i get nothing. Use my credit card and I get 2 to 3 percent off…
Yeah, I pay it off about twice a month, but usually between the day I schedule a payment and the day it arrives I’ve used the card again, so it’s rare for me to have a zero (or negative!) balance.
I do like the CC rewards, but they get that my “shorting” / charging the merchant. So, if the merchant is part of your community, try to avoid involving a CC processor by paying in cash. (I think cash is a pain to deal with, so my in-built preference is for some sort of card / phone payment system.)
We have a very materialistic and consumeristic culture and we shame the poor.
Or more specifically, we are ashamed when we can’t afford things we need. We are saturated by right-wing propaganda that says if you don’t succeed, it’s your fault. So, like abuse victims, we internalize the shame of what is done to us.
It’s a message tailored so we don’t question the rich, and as an added benefit to them, trains the poor to not seek government systemic solutions to the inequality that creates their poverty.
Homeless people are more financially rich than most of this country.
Do you see the problem yet
It’s actually curious to read this comment while several others state how they could manage to pay their debt, but they choose to be in debt because it’s somehow convenient for them. I believe them, it’s just curious because anyone could say the same.
Part of that has to do with how our economy is built around credit cards and debt itself. They don’t want you to fully pay off your credit card debt, and will reduce the amount you can borrow if you do. And if you try to opt out of the debt system entirely, it hurts you as well because you have no credit score from the credit card companies and no history of paying off you debt on time, which hurts your chances to get things like loans and mortgages. I hate debt, and ran into this issue the first time I went to buy a car because I had always used debit cards to buy stuff. Despite the cards being Visa cards that just got paid off immediately by charging my bank account instead of being paid off over time, I didn’t have any debt history as a result and had to have somebody cosign my car loan to vouch for me that I’d actually pay the loan.
and will reduce the amount you can borrow if you do.
This is not true.
are you talking about the comment mentioning it makes financial sense to not pay off their mortgage?
Because we want to spend our end of days in comfort
