> A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough

They are highly productive but the market doesn't value them. It values the backup forward on a basketball team - an almost completely non-productive job - more than a doctor. It values the owner of a company at $1 trillion, which is obviously absurd.

> Someone could interpret that as a lack of capitalism rather than the opposite.

In Capitalism surplus economic value goes to the Capital class, so it seems like it is working as designed.

> There's an extreme selection bias there.

Maybe. Unfortunately, what digitaltrees wrote here is ambiguous. It could also be read as this:

Our caregivers serve low income families. Those caregivers, who are our employees, earn $12-18/hr which is above minimum wage. Our employees absolutely struggle. Our employees are the ones using food banks and housing assistance because many are one car repair away from homelessness.

digitaltrees: which interpretation is correct?

If you read the rest of the comment you’ll find it’s about their employees rather than their clientele.

That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising can be explained by things like more dual earner households (more women working since the 70s), more hours worked, etc. The household income can rise while the wages can theoretically remain flat or even fall.

The more relevant statistic is that median real wages have only grown by about 29% across 40+ years (~0.6% per year)

Since 2000, medical care costs have risen by 121.3%, hospital services by 275%, college tuition and fees by 196%, compared to consumer goods by 86.1%. Things like TVs and electronics went way down in costs while the essentials have absolutely skyrocketed. The cheap stuff drags the average down.

You need a lot more than a single graph to argue against the quality of life going down for Americans.

> So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright?

I think this isn't as unreasonable as it seems to everyone living it. It's like water to the fish.

We are conditioned that everything should be fueled by more and more debt, and your dollars should constantly be devalued so you can't stop grinding.

The little people can never be allowed to just work enough to accumulate what they need and then take it easy.

Medicare is a different thing, the government should be providing medical care for everyone to begin with, regardless of what they make.

My definition is if you need to borrow money to put a roof over your head, at the minimum renting, you're in poverty. There are huge chunks of the US population borrowing money to pay for rent.

If your locality doesn't provide adequate public transit, then a car is a necessity, and the onus is now on the locality's economy to make sure everyone can access that; if your locality doesn't pay high enough to afford that car without borrowing money, then yes, you're in poverty. Alternatively, the locality can choose to provide adequate, safe public transit, and the bar of poverty would change.

Most of the US doesn't think this way because they're delusional and have been conditioned to feed the financial system and pay for things with money they don't have.

>Here in Sweden I can walk to work.

That's you. but nobody In Sweden drives to work?

I see walking to work as an relative to each individual and their job lcoatiopna dn circumstance of where they live, not a country related thing.

For example, ,ost of my jobs in EU that me and my gF had required a car to get to work because companies put their offices out in the boonies to save money so walking was not an option, and neither was public transport.

> But this is actually better than if Swedish GDP were higher and I was traveling by car.

GDP growth "experts" would disagree. It's the reason we don't have mandatory WFH for white collar jobs after Covid proved it's possible and salves the environment

Totally understand that; but it counters the assertion of “abject poverty”. Perhaps relative poverty is a better descriptor but abject poverty is someone living in cardboard tents by the riverbank. Regular poor is living in section eight housing or subsidized housing. I don’t think we have 50% of Mississippians living in abject poverty.

The GP claimed that 50% of the US lives in abject poverty. Mississippi our poorest state compares with Germany in terms of median income and Mississippi itself does not suffer from 50% rate of abject poverty. So by extension the US as a whole doesn’t suffer from a 50% rate of abject poverty (begging, trinket selling, selling off relatives, shitting in public, etc.) rates of abject poverty. That’s stuff you’d see in the Great Depression or Weimar Germany level stuff.