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How poor is the average American? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Kushia@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I've been watching a few American TV shows and it blows my mind that they put up with such atrocious working terms and conditions.

One show was about a removal company where any damage at all, even not the workers fault, is taken out of their tips. There's no insurance from the multimillion dollar business. As they're not paid a living wage the guy on the show had examples of when he and his family went weeks with barely any income and this was considered normal?!

Another example was a cooking show where the prize was tickets to an NFL game. The lady who won explained that she'd be waiting in the car so her sons could experience their first live game, because she couldn't otherwise afford a ticket to go. They give tickets for football games away for free to people where I live for no reason at all..

Yet another example was where the workers got a $5k tip from their company and the reactions were as if this amount of money was even remotely life changing. It saddens me to think the average Americans life could be made so much better with such a relatively small amount of money and they don't unionize and demand far better. The company in question was on track to make a billion bloody dollars while their workers are on the poverty line and don't even have all their teeth?

It's not actually this bad and the average American lives a pretty good life like we're led to believe, right?

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[–] RBWells@lemmy.world 33 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The main problem we have here is the difference between mean and median income. The average (mean) is fine but not many actually make that. There's a majority who are sort of poor or very poor, a smaller slice who are average and that's reasonably well off (not in immediate danger of something dire happening) and a minority who are so fucking rich it skews the average.

All of this is exacerbated by the lack of social safety net here, we simply don't do as much redistribution in the correct direction as most rich countries. So it's harder to be poor here because they are preyed on rather than supported. In those shows you watched, you are correct, the stickiness of capital in the upper classes is the problem, not an overall lack of money.

It's just not spread out right. Yes more should unionize and also we need more small to medium size businesses, more growth at the bottom to pull that money back and spread it out better.

[–] Kushia@lemmy.ml 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This is an interesting take and I think you are right. Apart from unionizing and demanding better there are definitely structural problems in how capital moves though the classes because there's clearly enough wealth to make a lot of people's lives better. I mean, that wealth is right there on display in these shows but it's just not shared with these workers at all except when the wealthy want to big note themselves a little bit.