Sorry, but that aint gonna change much after Mustangman postet that graph.
It’s about how many is capable of buying enough cars, trucks and what have you to sustain and support the national economy and we all should know that the well off’s aren’t enough to do that. Which means : there have to be more people up there.
It is a quintile. Each line represents 20% so the combined bottom 3 represent 60% of the population. This is corrected for inflation so there are gains. Those in the bottom 20% generally don’t stay there, they bump to the next, and then the next. My first ever job, as a junior in high school put me in the bottom 20%. Once I finished college, I jumped to the next 20% and so on. I have read that 80 prrcent of the top 20% were not born there, they got there over the course of their life.
This will get political here in a minute. Y’all hide and watch.
If we look long enough and hard enough from from every possible angle there’s bound to be some way that most of us can rationalize the problem of poverty into oblivion as being the result of laziness and irresponsibility. and move on. It seems useless to throw away $billions in efforts cut short of showing some success in order to keep ‘those undeserving’ from ever benefiting a single cent.
Working and living near the desperately poor off and on most of my life and seeing the frustration of struggling with no opportunity to rise above a hand to mouth existence puts a face on a few anecdotes. The CEO from Blackrock somehow recognized how critical the problem was becoming. I wish I had saved the interview.
Thank You for clarifying.
Understood, but what about the sixth line? 5 lines equal 100%
I’m trying to understand You correct, but You being a junior or in college, wouldn’t that be a part time job?. And are You counting that as a yearly income in that graph?
My comments has been based on a full time yearly income.
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Also keep in mind a few more things. Access to assistance programs like food and rent assistance is much stronger in the bottom 20% to lift them towards the next quintile. That isn’t shown in the income data. Nor is the earned income tax credit that comes their way.
The 6th line is the top 5%, split off individually.
Okay, understood.
My high school job was full time in the summer plus overtime. I worked 32 hours a week while school was in session. Almost full time, if you were French!
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Rod, I have to ask, why did they have “no opportunity to rise above a hand to mouth existence”?
I work at a scrap yard. Obviously, I see some low income folks. I can’t tell you how many have asked me for a job and then never bothered to show up for work the following day. So there are some that do not have because they do not want to put forth the effort. I have little sympathy for them. Their wives and children, I do have sympathy for.
Now, realistically, these people are probably never going to afford a brand new, top of the line vehicle, even if they do take the job and come to work every day. But, then again, you and I probably won’t drive one either.
Over here, we prefer that those going to high school or college spend their time on - studying, so they get support to live on their own on a spartan budget, but most of them also gets a part time job (5 - 15 hours a week) so they can buy a car, party, visit the bar and so on.
Go ahead and flag I guess but my first job at the greenhouse was 50 cents an hour. Then 75 at the restaurant and $1.65 in the factory. The thing is though that the minimum wage was never intended to be a living wage. It was the bottom level of what a high schooler or day laborer needed to get paid. People think you should be able to live on it but that’s wasn’t what the idea was. Just yesterday there was a report on the manufacturing outlook in Minnesota. Looks good but again the fear of manufacturers continues to be finding qualified people-not low end people but people with basic or vo tec educations who can think. My BIL said last week that 30 years ago the pathologists that they hired were paid $160,000. Now they are paid $750,000. Big jump sure but consider the training needed. CNC operators, plumbers, electricians, even carpenters are doing fairly well but has nothing to do with the minimum wage which is meaningless except for something politicians can rant about. Then think about wage compression. You raise the minimum and all those folks making more are going to want more money to keep the same distance which just results in higher prices. So forget the minimum wage and concentrate on how to become worth more.
I agree. People who plan to own a car for only a short time (a few years or less) often skip recommended maintenance, because the cost of not doing the maintenance will not show up during the time they plan to own the car.
Most people will change the oil, even on a car that they plan to own short-term because it’s inexpensive, and they know when it’s time to turn it in, trade it in, or resell it, someone can easily look inside the oil fill cap and see if the engine is full of sludge. However, when it comes to equally important, but expensive maintenance, such as timing belt replacement, changing the coolant, transmission fluid, etc, most people do NOT do this stuff on a car that they’re planning to keep short-term.
I have bought many cars which had a lot of owners, and invariably none saw the need to do anything more complicated than change the oil, tires, and battery. In fact, I recently purchased a used car which is 17 years old with about 80,000 miles on it. I decided to have a professional mechanic change the timing belt on it, because I had no idea if it was ever done, and did not want it to fail and ruin the engine. The mechanic saved all the used parts to show me that the timing belt, tensioner, idler, water pump, etc. were all original, with a 2001 date code clearly marked, even though the required replacement is every 10 years or 60,000 miles.
And of course, as you alluded to, some people who plan to own a car for only a few years or less will drive it very hard–lots of rapid acceleration, excessive braking, and running over speed bumps without slowing down. These do NOT make good used cars for the next owner!
Apparently that seems to be the norm in the US these days.
Back in my day, it was very common for high schoolers to work. Most of my friends did.
When I entered college, I stopped working but I took 3 semesters straight with no summer break so I could qualify for the work-study program. At that point I would work a semester, attend school a semester and on until graduation. Finished school with little debt, work experience and a job offer in hand from my work experience company, GM (car reference!)
Bing, I could not agree more with this entire post! I can add that most people are aware that as this ludicrous push for a National minimum wage of say, 15 bucks an hour, businesses that employ minimum wage employees are laying-off workers and rapidly working on robotic systems that will replace many of these workers and machines will not demand higher, unjustified wages.
Minimum wage jobs are for high school and college kids and entry level, never worked before, people just entering the work force. It is temporary work, a stepping stone, not a career!
Also, a National minimum is nutty. I’m pretty sure that some areas of the country that have much higher costs of living are already paying near $15/hour minimum and other areas where the cost of living is much lower would find businesses unable to continue operating. I’m from the government and I’m here to help with one size fits all wage minimum, does not work. It fits very few, actually.
Want to buy a car on minimum wage? Try having more than one job or more bread winners in the family. That’s how it’s always been done and still is done. When my wife and I made a major job change and relocated several hundred miles distant when we were first married, we had 7 low paying jobs between the two of us until we re-climbed the ladder to higher wages.
Immigrants come to the U.S. and are thrilled with the availability of low paying jobs and grab a couple of them. I read a story about a recent immigrant who delivered ice during the day and then drove a cab at night. He saved every dime (no time to spend, ha) and eventually opened his own successful business.
If Bing gets flagged, flag me too… just saying…
CSA
But that’s NOT reality. There are millions of people who have been working at (or very close to) minimum wage in this country for decades. There are not enough jobs above minimum wage to accommodate all the workers. I have friends who have kids in their 30’s and 40’s who are married with kids and both parents work multiple minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. Most retail jobs are minimum wage…Wallmart has upped their wages, but that’s just one store. And most people in retail are part-time workers. They work several part time jobs totaling 70+ hours a week just to get by.
That situation would make me think:
Do I work to live or do I live to work.
I got my first job in the summer of 1957 between my sophomore and junior year in high school. The country was in a recession and jobs, particularly summer jobs, were hard to find. I lived in s college town and thought maybe I was smart enough to reshelve books in the college library. When I went to the library to inquire about a job, I was told non too politely that college students were available in the afternoon to reshelve books. I walked away really feeling low and then I saw a sign that said ‘Audio Visual Department" with an arrow pointing down a staircase. It dawned on me that if college students were available in the afternoon, that meant the students were in classes in the morning. That meant someone would be needed to show films. I went down and was hired by a supervisor who said he was willing to take a chance on me. My pay was 60¢ an hour with a raise to 65¢ an hour after I had accumulated 500 hours.
It was a great job. As well as showing films, I operated the opaque projector for an English professor. I projected the student themes on a white board and the professor critiqued each student’s composition in front of the class. I recorded graduate students’ recitals for the music department. I worked every summer for the AV department until I graduated from college in 1962.
To keep this car related, I went to work as a teenager to get the money to buy a car. My first summer I test drove home in a 1940 LaSalle that the Oldsmobile/Cadillac agency had on its lot. The price was $75. My dad made me take the LaSalle back–hr said I was to save the money for college. After I graduated and needed a car to travel 350 miles for my graduate studies. I used the $75 to buy a 1947 Pontiac.
In 1965, I was awarded a teaching position back in my home town that began in the fall. I didn’t have s job for the summer. I just happened to see my old boss who had taken a chance on me 8 years earlier. Even though the pay had gone up to $1.25 an hour, the recession was over and my old boss couldn’t find enough people to work in the AV department. I felt I owed him so I went back to work for him for the summer before my teaching duties began.
As far as new cars vs. used cars, one of my best purchases in recent years was a 2006 Chevrolet Uplander that I bought in 2006 that was a “program car”. It had 15,000 miles on the odometer and the balance of the warranty. I think I paid 17,000 for it. I sold it to my son and replaced the Uplander with a 2011 Sienna that cost $27000. The Uplander now has gone over 200,000 miles with no major repairs. For me, the seats in the Uplander are more comfortable than those in the Sienna.
Then perhaps those folks in retail need to find a job in some other field