this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
1171 points (96.5% liked)

US Authoritarianism

868 readers
279 users here now

Hello, I am researching American crimes against humanity. . This space so far has been most strongly for memes, and that's fine.

There's other groups and you are welcome to add to them. USAuthoritarianism Linktree

See Also, my website. USAuthoritarianism.com be advised at time of writing it is basically just a donate link

Cool People: [email protected]

founded 9 months ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] friend_of_satan 40 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (31 children)

Edit: there is a huge caveat in my post which is I missed that these are household numbers, not individual numbers.

That would be amazing if it were true, but it's not. In 2022 the median income in USA was over $74k

Source: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html / https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/279/tableA1.xlsx

Reminder that median means "half of the samples are above this point and half of the samples are below, which means exactly what was stated in the OP "half of America"

I fully support the ideas from OP that corporations need to pay people better and wages need to at least attempt to track economic gains, but we can send that message while telling the truth and citing our sources to prove that the message is legit.

[–] Skasi 55 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (21 children)

That's "Household income". Household income is the most useless and skewed statistic I can think of when it comes to equality and actual income per person.

In my mind rich people can afford to live in different homes. Poor people can not afford to do so. That means if 8 poor people who each make eg 10k a year share a household then their household earns 80k. Now if 8 less-poor people who each make eg 40k a year are split over four households then their households also make 80k each.

So now there's 4 households of 2 people each that make as much as 1 household of 8 people. Here statistically 100% of households make exactly 40k. Regardless 50% of those 16 people still make less than 35k a year.

In reality people inside one household have different incomes, which means even among the 4 slightly richer households in the example above some inhabitants would probably make less than 35k.

One question I have is how do household-statistics count people who have multiple houses? If a rich person owns 10 houses, then does it count as 10 households who earn >35k?

[–] Anticorp 14 points 8 months ago (9 children)

Household income doesn't mean you and all your roommates. If you're single and you have 3 roommates, your household is still just you for the purpose of calculating household income. If two families share a house, then each respective family has their own household income.

[–] tomalley8342 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

If you're single and you have 3 roommates, your household is still just you for the purpose of calculating household income.

Where did you hear this brother?

https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/technical-documentation/subject-definitions.html#household

A household includes the related family members and all the unrelated people, if any, such as lodgers, foster children, wards, or employees who share the housing unit. A person living alone in a housing unit, or a group of unrelated people sharing a housing unit such as partners or roomers, is also counted as a household.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

For the census, perhaps. Not for tax purposes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's adding to the confusion and seems like a weird gotcha, we're talking about the census as the person posted above as a source. The people who are confused and wrong seem to be stuck on tax filing status for some reason, I'm hoping obfuscation isn't the goal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Where did anyone get the idea that the statistic cited in the OP comes from the census?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

...I'm going to lean on the side of this being trolling unless you're just lost or not following the full conversation. We are in a comment chain discussing what [email protected] replied to OP with. No one is implying the OP image is census data, people are using the census data to dispute the OP image's claims. I feel breaking it down further is redundant since you can just scroll back up and read all the replies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

For some reason I’ve been accused of being a troll and being deluded because I said it makes more sense to define household the way the IRS does, and I was told no, it’s about the census. At this point my interpretation is no of here really has a clue what they’re taking about at all. Thanks for the sideways insults though.

[–] Skasi 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks for that, it really helps clearing things up!

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (17 replies)
load more comments (26 replies)