Americans grapple with affordability crisis: "Hard for me just to survive"
Americans grapple with affordability crisis: "Hard for me just to survive"
www.cbsnews.com
Americans grapple with affordability crisis: "Hard for me just to survive"
10 comments
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This is exactly what the minimum wage is supposed to prevent. The people that have taken that from us have made themselves rich at our expense.
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Quick history lesson. In 1960 US minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the cost of the average US home was $11,000.00 A couple of high school kids could get married on graduation day and be homeowners in a few years.
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$10.86 and $119.463 in today's dollars. Currently the federal minimum wage is $7.25 or $0.67 an hour in 1960s dollars.
Assuming 2 weeks off a year this would be an annual income of $43,440 or 36% of the home's value, less than 3 years wages. In 2025, the median home value is $416,900 and a couple earning the federal minimum wage would earn $29,000 per year, which is 7% of the home's value or 14 years worth of wages.
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People were buying houses that were smaller despite having larger household sizes then.
More housing is where most of our increases in wealth have gone for the past century.
EDIT:
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-a-home-the-year-you-were-born/
This has size increase by decade.
In 1920, the average size of a new house in the US was 1,048 square feet, 248 square feet per person.
By 2015, the average size was 2,657 square feet. 1,046 square feet per person.
In the US, we have some of the largest houses in the world.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/house-size-by-country
The Europeans manage to get by with considerably smaller houses. You could fit nearly three average British homes --- the British tend to be on the small side on housing --- inside one average American home.
EDIT2: Elon Musk got on the whole "small house" fad thing a few years back. He lives in a $50k, 400 square foot box, and he's the richest guy in the world. So we definitely could get by with considerably smaller houses.
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Absolutely no way that nazi fuck lives in that tiny house. And people don't get to choose what size houses are getting built, developers build homes by parameters outlined to maximize their profits. Then they slap the word 'Luxury'' in front of home and apartments to add a couple more thousand to the price. then some 'passive-income' touting fuck buys the house and uses some poor renters meager salary to pay off the mortgage.
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This is going to get drastically worse with no end in sight. There's very little reason our representatives should actually have to listen to these complaints. They have a blank US government check and they're going to use it to get richer.
Midterms? I really do hope we will be allowed to vote by then. The billionaire class has pretty much won. I'm wary of having hope with yesterday's protest. I want to hope. We'll see.
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Guess what Trump's Tarriffs and trade war against literally every other country are only just getting started.
The stagflation is quite possibly upon us in a matter of weeks
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Wasn't Trump supposed to fix that? Somebody call him.
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He'll get right on it, after infrastructure week.
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Do you consider changing the way you vote? Else you deserve that.
10 comments