["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP. If you don't like one, just wait a while. It's a blog. It'll change. —Ed.]
Wonder why this picture?
In the 2016 election, a lot of people "felt the Bern." Bernie Sanders' cause célèbre was wealth inequality, which in reality is far worse than almost anybody realizes it is.
There are all kinds of ways to slice and dice where you might fall on the spectrum. The biggest and simplest dividing line, of course, is which half of the population you fall into. According to the Federal Reserve, the median net worth of all Americans in 2019 was $121,760. That was pre-pandemic, so it might be a little different now. But it's a simple signpost. What it means is that if your net worth is above that number, you're in the top 50%. If it's below that, you're in the bottom 50%. Or at least you were in 2019.
What's net worth? ramseysolutions.com puts it succinctly: "Your net worth is what you own minus what you owe. It’s the total value of all your assets—including your house, cars, investments and cash—minus your liabilities (things like credit card debt, student loans, and what you still owe on your mortgage)."
They go on to point out that it's not a matter of what your income is or how much stuff you have. You could be surrounded by a million dollars' worth of stuff, but if your debts exceed a million dollars, then "you're broke." (Ramsey doesn't mince words.) This leads to a curiosity: many people who look very wealthy actually aren't. And the converse: some people who look poor, aren't.
My net worth took a big boost recently because the housing supply around here is incredibly tight and competition for the few available properties is ferocious (still). And that reveals a problem: while a house is among many people's biggest assets, it's a bit theoretical to consider its cash value, for two reasons. First, because its value is an estimate until it's actually realized in a sale, and second because a body's gotta live somewhere. But you own it (that is, you own the equity, its current value minus your outstanding mortgage), so it's an asset.
Have nots
Another group you've probably heard about is "the one percent." That's the top one percent of the population in terms of net worth. "One percent" seems like a small number, but it isn't: US population in the 2020 census was 329.5 million, so "the one percent" is approximately three point three million (3.3m) people. That's a lot of people.
And what does it take to belong to that group? The dividing line is a net worth of $11.1 million. If you have that or better, you're in the 1%. Worse, and you're in amongst the trifling, skinny-wallet-having losers, the 99%.
Of course, that's only the very poorest people in the 1%, the least wealthy of those 3.3m people. At the high end is where it gets extremely ridiculous: for example, the six primary Wal-Mart heirs own as much wealth as the bottom 30% of US society (the poorest 99 million people). No rational thinker would ever in a million years call for this sort of absurdity if they were designing a utopian society from scratch. It's funny, isn't it, that "centralization" was considered such a great evil of communism, when capitalism is doing nothing but getting more centralized all the time? We just centralize wealth and control in private hands, is all, both corporate and individual. And what is the difference, really, between the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France and the "hereditary one percenters"? Note the word heirs in the sentence about those six societally useless Waltons.
Looking in the other direction, if you're in the bottom half, your situation is likely pretty bad and getting worse. Only the very richest in the bottom half have a net worth as high as $122,ooo. Go down further and the situation quickly gets grim. Get down into the bottom 20%, and most people don't even think in terms of net "worth": their "own vs. owe" number is zero or negative.
Everything is stacked in favor of the top 1%, and very much against the bottom 40% or so. For the latter, life is actually more expensive: they pay more for basic services and basic needs and they take more risks with everything from health to cash reserves; they have fewer protections against depredations and exploitation; they have fewer rights because they can't afford to assert or defend them; they have fewer options in terms of life arrangements as well as job, employment, and relocation flexibility. They can't optimize their circumstances because they can't afford to. Consider the recent abortion bans. Who's that going to hurt? Poor people, mainly. The ones who can't travel to another State, the ones who were already limited in their options before the radical judicial activism of the current Court (limiting our ability to fight climate change sure is the smart move for the historical moment, isn't it?). And, of course, the poorest 40% are hurt proportionally more by progressive expenses of all sorts, from sales tax to parking tickets.
Bounty
...Which brings us to the picture up top. You know what that is? That's fifty dollars in the trunk of my car. Seriously—for one bundle of paper toweling and two of toilet paper. Fifty bucks.
I swear, that threatens me—or, at least, it alarms me a little, gets me in my gut, makes me feel the fear—and I'm financially relatively sound for my area. Not only has the gas pump gotten shockingly more efficient at sucking money out of my wallet, but, cripes, fifty bucks for paper products? You gotta be kidding me. What is this, Hawaii? Did they have to fly it in from the mainland?
Fifty bucks, to put it in the context of people poorer than I am, is 3.3 hours at New York City's minimum wage. Leaving 36.7 hours of a full-time minimum-wage job for phone, electricity, heat, kids, car, health care, home or renter's insurance, the mortgage or rent, clothing, other household goods, home maintenance, gas, on and on. Oh, I forgot food (body's gotta eat, too). Inflation might hurt everybody, but, as usual, the people in the bottom 40% will suffer the most.
I just wonder how poor people do it. I feel my wallet's under assault, and I'm not even in the bottom 60%. They say your concept of the value of money calcifies when you're fifty, and that it's old people, not young people, who don't know the value of a dollar (it's worth less than we seniors think it is). Maybe that's my problem.
I stopped at the local lumber yard to get some rock salt for the water softener the other day (cost: 2.7 minimum wage hours), and the guy who waited on me was a weatherbeaten old dude with a gray pony tail down to his waist. (Probably one of those strange amalgams, the hippie Trumper.) As he loaded the salt into the trunk, I spouted off about the cost of the paper goods. He shared with me his own untutored philosophy, which boiled down to, "that's what they want. To make it so people suffer as much as possible."
Okay, not a subtle or holistic read on the complexity of the sociopolitical situation. But you know what? He ain't all that wrong.
Mike
Book o' the Week:
The Mindful Photographer by Sophie Howarth. I only know of Sophie Howarth from her time as a curator at the Tate Modern in London, but my impression then was positive. Her brand new book (it only came out a few days ago) is about slowing down as a means of enjoying photographing more. It's said to contain a curated collection of photographs along with anecdotes and explanation.
The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.
Our link to B&H Photo
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Frank: "Only New York City and Westchester are at $15/hr. minimum wage. Rest of the state is at $13.20. Tip occupations are even lower—$8/hr. plus tips. Federal is still $7.25/hr. unless superseded by state minimum wage."
Mike replies: $7.25/hr. for a full week (40 hours) is $290 a week, gross pay. I was getting nearly that in the very early 1980s as a handyman at a garden center. Seemed a little scant at the time. Average new car in the same era cost $9,400. Average new home price was $63,000.
$7.25/hr. for a full year is $14,500 gross. I don't see how it's possible to live on that, unless you made some pretty radical accommodations to it. And to support a family? Too bad we can't sentence people convicted of financial crimes to live for a year on $14,500. :-)
Ken: "You're throwing away your money, and your usage is environmentally harmful. A simple bidet or washlet costs about a hundred bucks and is easy to install, even for someone who is not handy. It won't eliminate but will significantly reduce your need for TP. A couple of dozen kitchen towels can be had for less than the cost of a roll of paper towels and can replace paper towel use for, conservatively, 50% or more of your needs."
John Krill: "I had planned to go to a grand-nephew's high school graduation. He lives in San Luis Obispo, California. He has two older brothers and I had been to their graduations. He lives about 300 miles away from me so the gasoline for my car, at $6 a gallon, wasn't going to be cheap, but I figured, OK, I can do it. But then I checked room rates for some of the motels in town. Would you believe $500. So I sent this young fellow a check for $500 and told him to spend it unwisely. His mother loved that. I still came out ahead because I saved all that gas money."
Speed: "Missing is what happens to all the net worth accumulated by those at the top. Not even the wealthy live forever. In 2020, the [Walton] foundation awarded $749.5 million in grants to further our mission. We [Gates Foundation] are a nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Across eight decades, the Ford Foundation has invested in innovative ideas, visionary individuals, and frontline institutions advancing human dignity around the world. 'And that's the way it is.' —Walter Cronkite."
Kodachromeguy: "Your friend with the ponytail was right. 'That's what they want. To make it so people suffer as much as possible.' I live in Mississippi. The governing class here spends its entire life effort on denigrating the poor, finding ways to remove social safety nets from them, defunding their education, and claiming that it is entirely their fault and responsibility. And the white poor keep voting for them."
Albert Smith: "Re 'could be surrounded by a million dollars' worth of stuff, but if your debts exceed a million dollars, then "you're broke."' Conversely, you could have a modest house, few frivolous possessions, moderate income, and no debt other than recurring monthly bills and be much better off than those working to 'put on the show' of having success in life. When I was gearing up for retirement in 2000, I read up on a new trend that took off in the early days of blogs on the budding web called voluntary simplicity. I didn't accept every aspect of it, but enough of it rang true to me that I set up my life in a way that I would not be a slave to trying to impress anyone at the expense of being debt free and having no problem sleeping for fear of not meeting my obligations. I read that a majority of the US population couldn't come up with $400 dollars for an unexpected emergency. I'd bet many of those people drive fancier cars, wear trendier clothes and go to nicer restaurants than me. Four hundred dollars...I have that in my change jars."
Kenneth Tanaka: "I’ve long found it interesting, albeit predictable, to read reports of what people buy with sudden windfalls of wealth. Cars, houses, clothes, whatever they’ve felt deprived of in their previous life. Looks like crates of toilet paper might soon appear on those windfall shopping lists!"
Mike replies: I've long been interested in houses—not systematically, and I don't study it, just interested, since boyhood—and I've heard that when people get to build a house, they will not just cure but overdo whatever they felt deprived of in their previous one. So if you didn't like your low ceilings (my late brother's complaint), you'll make the new ceilings too high; if you felt cramped for space, every room in the new house will be a third again too big (I have a cousin who did this); if your old house was dark, the new one will have too many skylights all over the place, etc. This has been borne out when I've witnessed it happen.
For years, mainly in the last century, whenever I looked at a house, the first thing I wanted to see was the basement. Realtors were mystified. But I always dreamed of having a nice darkroom. Curiously, I started doing darkroom work in a bathroom under the basement stairs at approximately age 23, and at 65 I haven't yet had a nice darkroom of my own. If I were able to build a house now, I'm sure I would plan for a comfortable, well-equipped darkroom, although I don't know how much I would use it.
I'd get someone else to develop the film, though, that's for sure. I've had enough of that for one lifetime.
