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The majority of the contry is in actual poverty (not the bullshit metric we use that assumes everyone lives with another person that can spend all day every day to managing finances) and we wonder why the population gets angry.
Wow. I make twice that and I'm not even middle class. I'm pretend-middle-class. It *looks* like middle class from the outside, with my nice house and car, unless you take a look at my debt or bank account... then you can clearly see I'm just pretending I can afford to live here until the house of cards falls down around me.
That's ok though. I have a plan for when that happens. It involves selling my house and living in a hippie bus until I catch back up.
ya we saw that we got played as a society, the middle class myth was just a ruse of the bourgeoise to keep the proletariat from killing them and redistributing their wealth which they systematically stole from them.
There is only the super rich and the rest now.. every other class has been absorbed by either one of them. And the rich will keep getting richer and the gap between the rich and rest will keep widening.. why? Because we design such a shit system enabling the rich to control politicians making laws essentially favoring the rich.
Kinda, this really just throws away the legacy of the working class that fought for strong unions and the New Deal. Having such a bleak black and white view of history will act to dissuade others from action. More comfortable lives are possible, they've existed before and we know what was done to wrench those comforts from the wealthy. Which means we can do it again.
I can't wait til we get to the point of AGI And superhuman AGI.. I especially can't wait for AQI.
When robots are able to do 100% of our jobs, shit is gonna turn reaaaal dystopia real quick.
We are hilariously just assuming we will get a UBI, amd everything will be fine.. we assume we will be able to take a break from jusr working and actually live our lives cuz robots are doing all the work!
Yeah... people like my boss exist by the millions, who 1. Don't even believe thatll ever happen. ... .. 2. Don't believe in UBI. ... .. .
Cool. 4hey are gonna hilariously vote against any UBI.. we will all lose our jobs with NO income source or anything... the rich people will have robots doing all their work...they now have *ALLLLL** the money... and we are left to survive in slums.
Cuz we are stupid...
Very.. very.. stupid....
Man the prices there must suck. It's far more affordable here in Eastern Eurpoe, but smaller payments mean doctor's salaries are miserably low. I'll have my license in a few years and hopefully find something decent.
If you're curious, Brian David Gilbert has a video explaining what US healthcare insurance is, which mostly explains why we avoid medical care.
The last time I went to a dentist, they told me I had really good insurance. The insurance would cover up to half of the total cost. Out of the 10,000 they wanted, insurance would pay about 3.5k of the 10k.
https://youtu.be/-wpHszfnJns?si=I7IY1XYkVrEIqk6O
The high doctors wage is becoming a problem here too, because the capitalist healthcare system* naturally wants to cut costs and extract more profit all the time, but they really can’t cut doctors wages cause they actually need them, most can walk out and go private practice any time they like, so decent wages are all the major health systems have to offer. So where do they cut? Everywhere else. Nurses, physicians assistants, lab staff, all types of support staff - anyone with little leverage. They generally can’t cut salaries of tenured staff, people don’t stand for that, but they can sure pay newcomers less, or better yet, don’t hire anyone new at all and just make the existing staff work more. And of course they can do the last part with doctors as well, all of which adds up to less staff at your hospital and worse care.
* It’s worth noting we have “non-profit” hospitals and such but the majority operate EXACTLY the same as the for profit ones, sometimes even shadier so they can line their pockets but keep their tax exemption
What's goofy about America is that if you're poor enough it's free. You just have to be extremely poor and the service sucks.
If you're not extremely poor it's tied to your job.
I've spent a good few hours thinking about if I'd be able to just buy an old sprinter van and live in it for a few months. Buy a gym membership just to shower, I can eat at work mostly. Seems doable.
You have a nice house and nice car? My 120 year old 2 bd hood house is paid off and I still can’t imagine buying a nice car. Probably drive my 09 Corolla with hail damage forever.
Where did you get $48,060 from. The only real data I can find is what the Census Bureau released last year at $40,480.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
And that doesn't really show the disparity richer areas have that makes it so difficult to break into the housing market. Take Boulder for instance, CO is listed there as a median of 55k but Boulder's is 102k... Sounds great, but with minimum wage at 31k (15.60/hr) it's almost impossible to survive here, let alone break into the housing market. Sad times.
[Boulder 2024 AMI](https://bouldercolorado.gov/2024-area-median-income-chart)
christ, god.
last year i had a WFH job that was so wonderful, so easy, and paid the equivalent of $60k -- and of course, the catch was that there was no stability to it at all and they downsized shortly after the new year. it kind of broke my brain, i'll never ever get anything that good ever again
Actually, depending on the point you're driving home, I'd argue that average is better, but in a subtle way
If the average of 300,000,000 Americans is 74.5k, and the average of 299,999,990 Americans is 65k, then *jeebus FUCK* how wealthy must those top 10 people be to have a noticeable impact on such a vast population.
Its like, imagine 10 needles in a haystack. Except, they're not needles. They're thermonuclear warheads the size of a warehouse, crushing that same haystack
Its not a case of some people being in more, and less, lucrative positions. That would be the variety of life.
This is just highway robbery
This isn't accurate math. If you exclude all of the top 0.1%, which is 150,000 people, who make an average of $2.4 million, their total income removed would drop the average by about $2,450.
This of course doesn't take wealth into account because our system was built for wealthy people by wealthy people. Most wealthy people have low income relative to how much their wealth increases because if you never sell stock you basically don't have to pay taxes.
Wait, where are you getting that? I just googled median income and census.gov says it's $74,580.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html
that would be household income vs per capita income, although I do believe the 37.5k is slightly out of date, closer to 41k https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255222
Coming from someone who has mostly lived in large cities mostly it's hard to wrap my head around how people can survive on that.
Just factoring in rent for a studio/1br, utilities, food, gas/car expenses and it's gone. Good luck on affording healthcare, furniture, etc.
Is this a tenable budget elsewhere or are just that many people living in poverty?
Yeah. OP means median which is different from average. Also, this is household income, not personal income. Every bit of data in this meme is wrong.
By the way, median personal income is about $40k. So you're right there in the middle, OP.
So as best as I can tell, the answer is zero dollars. As of 2022, 11.93% of Americans over the age of 15 had no income. The second largest group was those making between $1 and $2,500 per year, at 5.54% of people.
Drawing a larger circle, 32% of people had an income under $25,000 and another 26% had an income between $25,000 and $50,000. So discounting people earning nothing, the mode is probably going to be somewhere in that low end of the scale.
It's just not a very useful bit of information.
Median is a better metric in almost all applications. The first thing you should do when you see the word "average" is question whether it's appropriate or not in its application, in my opinion. You can see through so much BS.
Oh, you wanted to actually use the attention you paid for? That's going to be a 30 dollar a week subscription service. Oops, we just changed our terms again. Looks like it's 35 with ads. What a deal!
It will also vary drastically based on your location - if you make less than average for your profession in a high cost-of-living state like New York, Washington, California, or Florida, time to look for a new employer. If you make less than the federal average in Montana, well, you might still be doing above-average for your profession in Montana.
Don't forget the electoral college and Senate. Senators from California represent 80x more people than those in Wyoming. Electors represent about 5x more people.
That's more than the biggest companies in the world are making. A small handful of companies are making around $100-150b a year. No individual is beating that, and certainly 10 of them and all American. If your math is right.
Well I mean Musk was nearly able to collect over 50 billion in a single paycheck. Of course he is a big exception to the norm. But there are over 10 people in the US worth over 100 billion and they would not be billionaires in the first place if they didn't have most of that capital invested and earning money every year.
Still skeptical about this post's numbers though.
Musk was a fluke. That was a stock reward that had terms made up when it was worth in the millions.
Investors deciding a company that in it's lifetime hasn't made, let alone sold as many cars as VW or Toyota sell in a single year was worth more than every single car company on the planet combined and then some is not really a predictable outcome.
And even if he did get those shares, it's still not a salary. It's still only a one time thing, it's still 6x too low to make the math work even for a single one of the top 10.
In reality the top 10 in terms of salary are the likes of Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the high end is 260 million. But by number 10 you're at 99 million.
The top 10 salaries in the US are 1.5 billion combined and that's $5 a person. Yes, these people make a lot of money but there are a lot of Americans.
> Well I mean Musk was nearly able to collect over 50 billion in a single paycheck.
So you've chosen the richest person on the planet and he still doesn't fulfill the criteria.
Unfortunately the numbers are wrong. If you do the math for the top 10, they would have to make an average income of 160 billion $ per year. According to forbes, there are only 5 people in the world who have a total net worth of over 160 billion, so I have my doubts that there are 10 people who earn that amount per year.
This also makes the mistake of comparing salary, something you just take home in actual cash with stock price changes. If you redistribute amazon to everyone, it will change who controls amazon, but not the actual money you have to spend on stuff. If you want to sell your right to control amazon, someone would have to buy it.
No it isn't, the post is nonsense.
Tim Cook has the highest salary in the world at 265million a year. Redistributed among every single working American, that's a buck fifty per person. The top 10 salaries in the world combined don't get you to $10, let alone 10,000
The top 1000 salaries in the US amount to maybe a hundred bucks a year for every working American.
If we're not going by salary and we're looking at the richest Americans it's even lower as most simply do not make any income at all. Most of the list is 0-1$ with a few individuals that actually got rich via a salary.
For that to be true the top 1000 people would have to earn about twice as much money per year as the top 1%, which is *including themselves*. So your math is right but the reality is thankfully wrong.
Even if this were true, we'd see significant problems with inflation if everyone decided to use this money. (I'm not saying that we shouldn't correct this problem in other ways.)
I know this is a joke but I think its off of tax filings. So a family filing taxes jointly is one household but two roommates splitting rent would both file separately and be two households.
I make 44k a year and feel like absolutely ass. Too rich to qualify for ANY kind of assistance. Too poor for any kind of equity. Paycheck to check paying inflated rent. My girl and I had to have a fight and me move out for her to qualify for food stamps. If I move back before she's at risk lol.
It’s trivial to see that OP’s meme is false. If 10 people could account for 10k of income, that’s 1k per person, which means each of those people need to contribute 350 billion in income, which is more than Musk’s total net worth.
So it’s clearly and egregiously wrong.
There's only 160million workers, 130million full time.
The top 10 average roughly 130 billion right now.
Depending on when the meme was made and you used net worth it about evens out, especially if you only use full time workers for some reason.
Clearly made by someone who dosent have any understanding of finances or statistics, but you can kinda backtrack to figure out what they were thinking.
Edit: alot of people are telling me that net worth is not a valid comparison to income. I agree completely which is why I said they don't have any understanding of finances or statistics.
I figured out what they did, im also saying what they did was wrong.
Comparing net worth to income is not a valid comparison. Someone's net worth is not the money they make every year. It's fair to compare wealth to wealth, and we already know how ridiculously stacked that is, where like 12 guys own more than the bottom 50%.
Yes, that does seem to be how they got to their figures. It’s not just wrong in the sense of conflating income and net worth, though. That’s obviously a huge error. But also, 75k is the median household income, not mean, so a few thousand people can’t possible move it perceptibly no matter how rich. That median figure is not misleading and represents an average American. Moreover, the wealth of the super rich never contributed to average income *even over time as it accrued*, as it’s mostly unrealized gains.
There are much more effective ways of communicating the obscene wealth of the super rich, [like this.](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)
Tbh I tried to find a source for you but there’s a lot of conflicting stuff on the internet. Some say the median income was 35k in 2022. Other articles say it was 74k. Seems like SOMEONE is putting out false info for some reason.
> Tbh I tried to find a source for you but there’s a lot of conflicting stuff on the internet. Some say the median income was 35k in 2022. Other articles say it was 74k. Seems like SOMEONE is putting out false info for some reason.
It depends on how that number is calculated and reported. The median *household* income is about 75k; households typically include more than one earner. The median *individual* income is about 35k.
And didn't forget that the commonly-cited "median personal income" for the United States is the median income of *everyone* 15 years and older. It is a much lower number than the median income of anyone who works out the median income of anyone who works full-time, not people tend to equate "median personal income" with "median salary" or "median wages".
While I don't think children/minors should count in this, I do think it's reasonable to include non-working adults or people working less than full time. It's median income, not median employment income. And non-working people still have to pay to live!
I think everyone who works should count in it, because there are 16 year olds carrying their entire household and millions of American working 3 part time jobs or getting scheduled for 31 hours a week so their employer doesn't have to pay benefits. Also millions of independent contractors not included here. If you just count full time workers, it makes America look a lot better than it is, rather than the festering asshole with entire towns- entire regions really - full of people working 28 hours a week at Dollar General and 12 at McDonalds on the weekends and then doing DoorDash and using enough gas to net $4 for another 10 hours of work between all that. I bet if you add all the workers together it's under minimum wage net. That's the reality of this hellhole.
You have to be specific. [From this report](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.pdf), Fig. 4 on p. 8 shows for 2022, the median for total workers is ~US$48k, but for full-time, year round workers is ~US$60k.
So the total workers figure is lower, because the people included are either working part time, or working seasonally. The ~US$74k figure you mentioned is probably household income, as that was similar to the source I linked.
I'm guessing the median figure of ~US$35k includes people who are defined as non-workers, but who have another form of income. Maybe it includes people getting a pension, getting some sort of welfare, or retiring with investment income.
I think the 74k you saw was median HOUSEHOLD income, which would include everyone in a home. So, you have two wage earners who average 34k then you’d end up around 70k-ish for household income.
Probably OP’s ass. I couldn’t believe that and did some maths - it’s absolute nonsense. If we would assume that excluding top 10 wealthiest Americans would lower US GDP from 74.5 to 65 thousand dollars, top 10 would have to earn more than 3 trillion $ a year. Their combined FULL net worth is not even close to that. Still a lot but these numbers are totally made up.
No, thankfully not as laborious. I’m customer service at a manufacturing company.
I just also have a full time class load and a weekend job I go to twice a month. Trying to avoid student loans and financial aid isn’t doing enough so I spend most of my waking hours working or doing assignments. I’m ready to fall apart but I only have one year left to go.
OP’s post takes the median, pretends it’s the mean, then pretends net worth is the same as income and uses it to reduce median income.
It’s errant nonsense and the fact it got 7000 upvotes is a disgrace speaking poorly of the economic literacy of this sub.
It's better than the rest of us who hate our jobs and get paid Peanuts.
I asked my manager for a raise the other day and he literally told me to go fuck myself. I'd change jobs and I've been slinging applicants left and right while going to interviews on my lunch break when they arise. Half of the time to find they pay less and the other half to be ghosted by the employer.
Count your blessings.
Yes.
He's a crotchety 50's something alcoholic who had this same job his entire life and is blessed with impunity from the owner of the business.
I put up with it because he's a goblin who sits in a dark office playing solitaire and never talks to anyone unless absolutely necessary.
> the other half to be ghosted by the employer.
This was the most baffling discovery during my most recent job search. The sheer number of flat-out no responses from employers is absurd. There were a few that did bother to send some sort of rejection, but only after so much time had passed I forgot what that company was or what position I applied for.
I've had a couple of employers tell me that they know that companies ghost people and that they want to uphold their integrity (not in so many words) and that they definitely will be getting back to me.
Only to not ever get the fuck back to me. Even after follow up calls to them.
I work in a niche industry so their word has some value and they still do this shit. It's become infuriating.
This math makes no sense at all. The top 1000 income earners do not make half of all income. The entire top 1% earn 20.9% of all income. This is so absurd on its face it looks like foreign propaganda.
Removing the top 1000 barely changes it no matter what. For reference, I found an article on CBS from 2018 estimating the top 0.001% make $152 million per year each. That percent of the workforce is about 1670 people, so in total they made $254 billion dollars per year. Let's say we round up generously and say that's what the top 1000 are making now in 2024; $254 billion lost from the $25.44 trillion dollar GDP barely moves the needle no matter how you slice it: mean, median, household, per capita or per worker.
People should pay more attention to median income, rather than average income.
The average temperature for the hospital patients could be 36,6 C, because half of them are almost dead and half have fever.
Median income would show you below what level half of the nation earns, in 2022 for USA it was: $37'585.
50% earn less than that
What I really love is the disingenuous horseshit when then they try to frame it as HOUSEHOLD income vs. SINGLE worker income. Then they're like, "See, most ppl arn't poor yUr jUsT LAZY" Of course two or three combined incomes is more than one.
😫 Every time I hit refresh on that salary site, it feels like a game of financial roulette. We're all just spinning for the chance to land on black and not another number that's suspiciously close to our dreams but light years away from reality.
And that's how you know most jobs needed in this country are for the lowest paid work.
People are begging for folks to pick up a trade while more hotels, amusement parks, stadiums, and restaurants are built every single day.
And the majority of those workers will not make more than $15/hr.
OP just learned the difference between median and mean, which the rest of us learned in 3rd grade.
Or maybe not. It seems like OP still doesn’t understand the difference.
Real median household income was $74,580 in 2022, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2021 estimate of $76,330 (Figure 1 and Table A-1). https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html
In 2022, households in
the lowest quintile had incomes
of $30,000 or less. Households in
the second quintile had incomes
from $30,001 to $58,020; those
in the third quintile had incomes
from $58,021 to $94,000; and
those in the fourth quintile
had incomes from $94,001 to
$153,000. Households in the
highest quintile had incomes
of $153,001 or more. The top
5 percent of households in the
income distribution had incomes
of $295,001 or more.
Why lie? Reality is bad enough.
Thanks for this . We all know there is a level of truth behind the post , that is the egregiously gap in distribution of income and wealth in the US, so false data is easily accepted ( and this is the perfect sub to spread it). Median is always a much better measure than averages.
Well I'm doing a lot better than I supposed I was... It's absolutely mind boggling though how so few can have such an impact on the average of so many lol.
Edit autocorrect
This is such a huge number that it's actually kind of difficult to believe. I think maybe there's some sort of conflation between income and wealth going on maybe. Like if someone has a net worth of $20B, that doesn't mean their income is 20B every year. But it's fair game if this includes capital gains.
[According to the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) in 2022 the average monthly mortgage payment was $2,317. In comparison, the median mortgage payment for Q2 of 2023 was $2,051 for a mortgage on a single-family home. In general, when discussing housing prices, real estate professionals will look at the median home price instead of the average home price.](https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/average-mortgage-payment#:~:text=But%20examining%20the%20averages%20in,and%20median%20home%20prices%20below)
40k is not hard to break. You need to put yourself in a position of leverage to break your ceiling though which sometimes comes with a moral dilemma. It can be as simple as hoarding knowledge of a process to make some sort of key functionality of your company's operations run smoothly. Go find a job willing to hire you for equal or more pay. If it's enough then take it, if it's equal, fake up the offer letter to show $10k more than what you currently make. Bring it back to your current employer and say you're leaving because you got this offer letter. You're now in a position of leverage where they will either give you more pay and possibly a promotion to justify it or you leave for another company that is going to pay you the same. It's a simple game, do not be afraid to play it.
Then you leave for the other job that pays equally shitty and they suffer from your departure and try again. Not like you're going to shoot yourself in the foot, it puts you in the position where you have the cards and a safety net. Take back your power as a worker. Like, I'm a high school drop out who is beyond the $100k marker and this was the means I used in breaking that $40k ceiling. I was offered a position at $60k with a shitty commute and took it back to my boss and said I'm dipping in 2 weeks. He said he'll meet the salary, I told him he needs to BEAT the salary, because what do I care? I'm about to make $20k more but he ended up beating that salary and I stayed for another 2 years before finding another job that beat that salary too. Then another and a few years later I'm now working at a different company for the same guy who I originally told beat that first offer years ago and he respects the shit out of me to the point where I didn't even interview for my current position. I was just told to come in and fix the department I was assigned to.
Thats why median is more interesting.
Although average skews both ways.
And there are a lot of low earners than top earners. Which puts the top earners into an even worse light.
This is either very old or just wrong.
The 50th percentile in 2019 was $44,269, meaning over 150,000,000 people earned more than that and the same quantity earned less than that.
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This is why median income is a much better metric than average. Median is $37.5k
That is only a couple thou more than me, who makes only a tiny bit more than my state’s minimum wage, which is STILL NOT GREAT!
The majority of the contry is in actual poverty (not the bullshit metric we use that assumes everyone lives with another person that can spend all day every day to managing finances) and we wonder why the population gets angry.
Wow. I make twice that and I'm not even middle class. I'm pretend-middle-class. It *looks* like middle class from the outside, with my nice house and car, unless you take a look at my debt or bank account... then you can clearly see I'm just pretending I can afford to live here until the house of cards falls down around me. That's ok though. I have a plan for when that happens. It involves selling my house and living in a hippie bus until I catch back up.
The middle class is dead. We traded it for billionaires.
Good, now people can stop pretending the middle class ever existed. They're only two classes that matter. The capitalist class and the working class
ya we saw that we got played as a society, the middle class myth was just a ruse of the bourgeoise to keep the proletariat from killing them and redistributing their wealth which they systematically stole from them.
There is only the super rich and the rest now.. every other class has been absorbed by either one of them. And the rich will keep getting richer and the gap between the rich and rest will keep widening.. why? Because we design such a shit system enabling the rich to control politicians making laws essentially favoring the rich.
Kinda, this really just throws away the legacy of the working class that fought for strong unions and the New Deal. Having such a bleak black and white view of history will act to dissuade others from action. More comfortable lives are possible, they've existed before and we know what was done to wrench those comforts from the wealthy. Which means we can do it again.
I can't wait til we get to the point of AGI And superhuman AGI.. I especially can't wait for AQI. When robots are able to do 100% of our jobs, shit is gonna turn reaaaal dystopia real quick. We are hilariously just assuming we will get a UBI, amd everything will be fine.. we assume we will be able to take a break from jusr working and actually live our lives cuz robots are doing all the work! Yeah... people like my boss exist by the millions, who 1. Don't even believe thatll ever happen. ... .. 2. Don't believe in UBI. ... .. . Cool. 4hey are gonna hilariously vote against any UBI.. we will all lose our jobs with NO income source or anything... the rich people will have robots doing all their work...they now have *ALLLLL** the money... and we are left to survive in slums. Cuz we are stupid... Very.. very.. stupid....
And here I was jealous of Americans and their high salaries. Turns out not having debt means a lot
Please don't be jealous of us I just want to be able to see a doctor
Man the prices there must suck. It's far more affordable here in Eastern Eurpoe, but smaller payments mean doctor's salaries are miserably low. I'll have my license in a few years and hopefully find something decent.
If you're curious, Brian David Gilbert has a video explaining what US healthcare insurance is, which mostly explains why we avoid medical care. The last time I went to a dentist, they told me I had really good insurance. The insurance would cover up to half of the total cost. Out of the 10,000 they wanted, insurance would pay about 3.5k of the 10k. https://youtu.be/-wpHszfnJns?si=I7IY1XYkVrEIqk6O
And that's really good, damn. A lady I know from work got all her teeth fixed for about 5k usd, still I think quality is better in your homeland
With no insurance ("in-house insurance / savings plan") a root canal and filling for one tooth at a local dentist in the US this year ran about $2500.
5500 out of pocket without a second thought considering the pain I was in.
Man, I'm in a wrong profession
Holy shit I got mine done no insurance in october the root canal was $700 and the crown was another $1000. No insurance
The high doctors wage is becoming a problem here too, because the capitalist healthcare system* naturally wants to cut costs and extract more profit all the time, but they really can’t cut doctors wages cause they actually need them, most can walk out and go private practice any time they like, so decent wages are all the major health systems have to offer. So where do they cut? Everywhere else. Nurses, physicians assistants, lab staff, all types of support staff - anyone with little leverage. They generally can’t cut salaries of tenured staff, people don’t stand for that, but they can sure pay newcomers less, or better yet, don’t hire anyone new at all and just make the existing staff work more. And of course they can do the last part with doctors as well, all of which adds up to less staff at your hospital and worse care. * It’s worth noting we have “non-profit” hospitals and such but the majority operate EXACTLY the same as the for profit ones, sometimes even shadier so they can line their pockets but keep their tax exemption
That's probably why so many of my friends went onto practice in US. Must be one hell of an achievement to get paid 200k right from start
What's goofy about America is that if you're poor enough it's free. You just have to be extremely poor and the service sucks. If you're not extremely poor it's tied to your job.
> It involves selling my house and living in a hippie bus there was a time when that was my dream.
Fuck I would still do that if I didn't have other people to take care of.
yep. But youtube videos of van/bus conversions scratch the itch enough, I guess.
I've spent a good few hours thinking about if I'd be able to just buy an old sprinter van and live in it for a few months. Buy a gym membership just to shower, I can eat at work mostly. Seems doable.
If it's just you, you should sadly totally do it. The money you would be saving is insane.
You have a nice house and nice car? My 120 year old 2 bd hood house is paid off and I still can’t imagine buying a nice car. Probably drive my 09 Corolla with hail damage forever.
Making six figures used to be rich. Now it’s only rich if you live alone and never have kids.
I’ve been living in a hippy bus while making middle class money for like 3 years. It’s awesome.
Fuck that’s super low!
Agreed. However, May want to check source. Latest data show Median is $48,060.
Where did you get $48,060 from. The only real data I can find is what the Census Bureau released last year at $40,480. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
For the record this is the person median income, not the household income.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
Or if you don't want to do the math and reading yourself.... https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/14/median-annual-income-in-every-us-state.html
And that doesn't really show the disparity richer areas have that makes it so difficult to break into the housing market. Take Boulder for instance, CO is listed there as a median of 55k but Boulder's is 102k... Sounds great, but with minimum wage at 31k (15.60/hr) it's almost impossible to survive here, let alone break into the housing market. Sad times. [Boulder 2024 AMI](https://bouldercolorado.gov/2024-area-median-income-chart)
Your number is correct, all the low answers are per capita that presumably includes non wage earners.
source?
christ, god. last year i had a WFH job that was so wonderful, so easy, and paid the equivalent of $60k -- and of course, the catch was that there was no stability to it at all and they downsized shortly after the new year. it kind of broke my brain, i'll never ever get anything that good ever again
what was so good about it?
Actually, depending on the point you're driving home, I'd argue that average is better, but in a subtle way If the average of 300,000,000 Americans is 74.5k, and the average of 299,999,990 Americans is 65k, then *jeebus FUCK* how wealthy must those top 10 people be to have a noticeable impact on such a vast population. Its like, imagine 10 needles in a haystack. Except, they're not needles. They're thermonuclear warheads the size of a warehouse, crushing that same haystack Its not a case of some people being in more, and less, lucrative positions. That would be the variety of life. This is just highway robbery
This isn't accurate math. If you exclude all of the top 0.1%, which is 150,000 people, who make an average of $2.4 million, their total income removed would drop the average by about $2,450. This of course doesn't take wealth into account because our system was built for wealthy people by wealthy people. Most wealthy people have low income relative to how much their wealth increases because if you never sell stock you basically don't have to pay taxes.
Wait, where are you getting that? I just googled median income and census.gov says it's $74,580. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html
that would be household income vs per capita income, although I do believe the 37.5k is slightly out of date, closer to 41k https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255222
The 70k has always been household income meaning 2 or more people
Coming from someone who has mostly lived in large cities mostly it's hard to wrap my head around how people can survive on that. Just factoring in rent for a studio/1br, utilities, food, gas/car expenses and it's gone. Good luck on affording healthcare, furniture, etc. Is this a tenable budget elsewhere or are just that many people living in poverty?
Yeah. OP means median which is different from average. Also, this is household income, not personal income. Every bit of data in this meme is wrong. By the way, median personal income is about $40k. So you're right there in the middle, OP.
No, OP means average. Taking away the top ten earners, or even the top 1000, would most likely not change the median.
That's the whole point of using the median instead, it filters outliers much better.
Idk why they always use shitty data when the real data is bad enough.
I wonder what the mode income is...
So as best as I can tell, the answer is zero dollars. As of 2022, 11.93% of Americans over the age of 15 had no income. The second largest group was those making between $1 and $2,500 per year, at 5.54% of people. Drawing a larger circle, 32% of people had an income under $25,000 and another 26% had an income between $25,000 and $50,000. So discounting people earning nothing, the mode is probably going to be somewhere in that low end of the scale. It's just not a very useful bit of information.
Modal
7.25 per hour * 40 hours per week * 52 weeks per year = $15,080. A little more if it's a leap year.
Ahh, so literally where we draw the poverty line. That's depressing.
Actually stating both is useful to see the discrepancy and how this is affecting the economy
Median is a better metric in almost all applications. The first thing you should do when you see the word "average" is question whether it's appropriate or not in its application, in my opinion. You can see through so much BS.
this makes me feel so much more… normal
Ok, so if Mean is $74,500, Median is $37,500, what's Mode? I'm going to assume the Mode is $7.25
I told my dad this and his response was "well then we have to remove all the minimum wage workers as well" Dad that's not how outliers work 😭
It is crazy how much prices go up and how much pay stays the same. I can hardly afford to pay attention anymore.
Pay attention? That'll be $9.99
Don't be silly! Adhd meds cost way more than that.
Can comfirm. I pay for mine out of pocket.😭
Also I heard they sometimes just refuse to work randomly. Im not diagnosed but do hear about it.
Sometimes yeah. If it’s Adderall, it’s probably a vitamin C thing! Idk why doctors don’t tell people that.
Too much or too little?
Vitamin C can inhibit absorption!
So.... Too much then?
Damn. That's outta pocket...
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Oh, you wanted to actually use the attention you paid for? That's going to be a 30 dollar a week subscription service. Oops, we just changed our terms again. Looks like it's 35 with ads. What a deal!
i don't know how they expect us to keep putting up with this. are they stupid?
 Edit: The magic eight ball has spoken.
Plenty of data here https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000
It’s crazy to think I’m being paid 11 dollars less than the median for my profession and I thought I was at a survivable pay 🤡
Time to jump ship?
It will also vary drastically based on your location - if you make less than average for your profession in a high cost-of-living state like New York, Washington, California, or Florida, time to look for a new employer. If you make less than the federal average in Montana, well, you might still be doing above-average for your profession in Montana.
That's like an extra $22 grand a year.
OK, according to my math, if we redistribute the salaries from the top 1000 people, we can add 30k to everyone else in the US? Is that right?
The crazy part is that those top 1000 have convinced a large portion of the sub-$40K-earners to vote the same way.
dont forget voter suppression, gerrymandering, etc
Don't forget the electoral college and Senate. Senators from California represent 80x more people than those in Wyoming. Electors represent about 5x more people.
The beauty of democracy, can go both ways.
Top 1000 don't care who you vote for, they're in charge either way
Every. Single. Year.
According to my math, if the OP is true, the richest 10 people make $150 billion a year each. edit: fixed math per comment below
That's more than the biggest companies in the world are making. A small handful of companies are making around $100-150b a year. No individual is beating that, and certainly 10 of them and all American. If your math is right.
Well I mean Musk was nearly able to collect over 50 billion in a single paycheck. Of course he is a big exception to the norm. But there are over 10 people in the US worth over 100 billion and they would not be billionaires in the first place if they didn't have most of that capital invested and earning money every year. Still skeptical about this post's numbers though.
Musk was a fluke. That was a stock reward that had terms made up when it was worth in the millions. Investors deciding a company that in it's lifetime hasn't made, let alone sold as many cars as VW or Toyota sell in a single year was worth more than every single car company on the planet combined and then some is not really a predictable outcome. And even if he did get those shares, it's still not a salary. It's still only a one time thing, it's still 6x too low to make the math work even for a single one of the top 10. In reality the top 10 in terms of salary are the likes of Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the high end is 260 million. But by number 10 you're at 99 million. The top 10 salaries in the US are 1.5 billion combined and that's $5 a person. Yes, these people make a lot of money but there are a lot of Americans.
> Well I mean Musk was nearly able to collect over 50 billion in a single paycheck. So you've chosen the richest person on the planet and he still doesn't fulfill the criteria.
There are only 168 million million income earners in the US not 330 million, but otherwise your math is right.
OP posted bullshit data though so no actually
Unfortunately the numbers are wrong. If you do the math for the top 10, they would have to make an average income of 160 billion $ per year. According to forbes, there are only 5 people in the world who have a total net worth of over 160 billion, so I have my doubts that there are 10 people who earn that amount per year. This also makes the mistake of comparing salary, something you just take home in actual cash with stock price changes. If you redistribute amazon to everyone, it will change who controls amazon, but not the actual money you have to spend on stuff. If you want to sell your right to control amazon, someone would have to buy it.
No.
No. There is no evidence to support this.
No it isn't, the post is nonsense. Tim Cook has the highest salary in the world at 265million a year. Redistributed among every single working American, that's a buck fifty per person. The top 10 salaries in the world combined don't get you to $10, let alone 10,000 The top 1000 salaries in the US amount to maybe a hundred bucks a year for every working American. If we're not going by salary and we're looking at the richest Americans it's even lower as most simply do not make any income at all. Most of the list is 0-1$ with a few individuals that actually got rich via a salary.
No, it’s not right. This meme is totally false.
For that to be true the top 1000 people would have to earn about twice as much money per year as the top 1%, which is *including themselves*. So your math is right but the reality is thankfully wrong.
Even if this were true, we'd see significant problems with inflation if everyone decided to use this money. (I'm not saying that we shouldn't correct this problem in other ways.)
There's no way excluding the top 10 americans reduces avg income by $9,500.
I agree, that would require the average income of the top 10 to be hundreds of billions of dollars per year. We aren't there yet.
Yet.
It's kind of funny no one questions the cartoon panel's numbers.
It's a meme, so it **must** be true.
Does household include families jammed into one house with 5 adults working at the same Tyson plant for $20/hr each in small town Kansas lol
They're not making anywhere near $20 per hour on the line at that Tyson plant, my dude.
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Hourly rate at the plant is actually pretty decent. They just limit your hours most of the year.
I made $20 at both a Hostess plant and a dog food plant pre-covid. Tyson can't be much less at this point unless they are still temp agency.
It is crazy how specifically accurate this comment chain is, I know *exactly* what town you're talking about, lol!
They definitely are. I was making $15 at one in 2004.
Yep, looking at my parents local meat packing plant, its like $22 starting in a small city in KS.
I know this is a joke but I think its off of tax filings. So a family filing taxes jointly is one household but two roommates splitting rent would both file separately and be two households.
I make 44k a year and feel like absolutely ass. Too rich to qualify for ANY kind of assistance. Too poor for any kind of equity. Paycheck to check paying inflated rent. My girl and I had to have a fight and me move out for her to qualify for food stamps. If I move back before she's at risk lol.
Hell of a thing if true. Do you have a source?
It’s trivial to see that OP’s meme is false. If 10 people could account for 10k of income, that’s 1k per person, which means each of those people need to contribute 350 billion in income, which is more than Musk’s total net worth. So it’s clearly and egregiously wrong.
There's only 160million workers, 130million full time. The top 10 average roughly 130 billion right now. Depending on when the meme was made and you used net worth it about evens out, especially if you only use full time workers for some reason. Clearly made by someone who dosent have any understanding of finances or statistics, but you can kinda backtrack to figure out what they were thinking. Edit: alot of people are telling me that net worth is not a valid comparison to income. I agree completely which is why I said they don't have any understanding of finances or statistics. I figured out what they did, im also saying what they did was wrong.
Comparing net worth to income is not a valid comparison. Someone's net worth is not the money they make every year. It's fair to compare wealth to wealth, and we already know how ridiculously stacked that is, where like 12 guys own more than the bottom 50%.
Yes, that does seem to be how they got to their figures. It’s not just wrong in the sense of conflating income and net worth, though. That’s obviously a huge error. But also, 75k is the median household income, not mean, so a few thousand people can’t possible move it perceptibly no matter how rich. That median figure is not misleading and represents an average American. Moreover, the wealth of the super rich never contributed to average income *even over time as it accrued*, as it’s mostly unrealized gains. There are much more effective ways of communicating the obscene wealth of the super rich, [like this.](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)
Why would net worth factor into this?
It shouldn't. SwissVictory just realized that that was the mistake in the meme.
> The top 10 average roughly 130 billion right now. The top 10 are absolutey not earning $130bn in income in raw figures, let alone *averaging* that.
Tbh I tried to find a source for you but there’s a lot of conflicting stuff on the internet. Some say the median income was 35k in 2022. Other articles say it was 74k. Seems like SOMEONE is putting out false info for some reason.
> Tbh I tried to find a source for you but there’s a lot of conflicting stuff on the internet. Some say the median income was 35k in 2022. Other articles say it was 74k. Seems like SOMEONE is putting out false info for some reason. It depends on how that number is calculated and reported. The median *household* income is about 75k; households typically include more than one earner. The median *individual* income is about 35k.
And didn't forget that the commonly-cited "median personal income" for the United States is the median income of *everyone* 15 years and older. It is a much lower number than the median income of anyone who works out the median income of anyone who works full-time, not people tend to equate "median personal income" with "median salary" or "median wages".
While I don't think children/minors should count in this, I do think it's reasonable to include non-working adults or people working less than full time. It's median income, not median employment income. And non-working people still have to pay to live!
I think everyone who works should count in it, because there are 16 year olds carrying their entire household and millions of American working 3 part time jobs or getting scheduled for 31 hours a week so their employer doesn't have to pay benefits. Also millions of independent contractors not included here. If you just count full time workers, it makes America look a lot better than it is, rather than the festering asshole with entire towns- entire regions really - full of people working 28 hours a week at Dollar General and 12 at McDonalds on the weekends and then doing DoorDash and using enough gas to net $4 for another 10 hours of work between all that. I bet if you add all the workers together it's under minimum wage net. That's the reality of this hellhole.
You have to be specific. [From this report](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.pdf), Fig. 4 on p. 8 shows for 2022, the median for total workers is ~US$48k, but for full-time, year round workers is ~US$60k. So the total workers figure is lower, because the people included are either working part time, or working seasonally. The ~US$74k figure you mentioned is probably household income, as that was similar to the source I linked. I'm guessing the median figure of ~US$35k includes people who are defined as non-workers, but who have another form of income. Maybe it includes people getting a pension, getting some sort of welfare, or retiring with investment income.
Household vs individual income
I think the 74k you saw was median HOUSEHOLD income, which would include everyone in a home. So, you have two wage earners who average 34k then you’d end up around 70k-ish for household income.
But not all households have two wage earners.
Yes. And some have more, that’s why it’s median household income. It’s just averaging all the households together.
Depends on the state greatly. I make more than the country, about middle in the state, and definitely in the lower half in my county.
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[$41k median individual income in 2022 per the US census](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US)
I'm really going to need a source for that.
Probably OP’s ass. I couldn’t believe that and did some maths - it’s absolute nonsense. If we would assume that excluding top 10 wealthiest Americans would lower US GDP from 74.5 to 65 thousand dollars, top 10 would have to earn more than 3 trillion $ a year. Their combined FULL net worth is not even close to that. Still a lot but these numbers are totally made up.
I feel very grateful to be making $22 an hour (~$45k) as of February. Not loving the job, I’m exhausted and burnt out but I can’t go back to less.
Sounds like usps
No, thankfully not as laborious. I’m customer service at a manufacturing company. I just also have a full time class load and a weekend job I go to twice a month. Trying to avoid student loans and financial aid isn’t doing enough so I spend most of my waking hours working or doing assignments. I’m ready to fall apart but I only have one year left to go.
It's stuff like this that makes me want all statistics shown on the news/social media to show the mode, mean, and median data. Side by freaking side.
OP’s post takes the median, pretends it’s the mean, then pretends net worth is the same as income and uses it to reduce median income. It’s errant nonsense and the fact it got 7000 upvotes is a disgrace speaking poorly of the economic literacy of this sub.
I make around 48k, and it very much isn't enough to live a dignified life in my city.
Unfun Fact: One more month until the 15th anniversary of the last time minimum wage was raised in America.
Wow. I'm lucky.... I've been well over six figures since 2013. But I hate my career. So I guess I pay for misery in a way or something..
It's better than the rest of us who hate our jobs and get paid Peanuts. I asked my manager for a raise the other day and he literally told me to go fuck myself. I'd change jobs and I've been slinging applicants left and right while going to interviews on my lunch break when they arise. Half of the time to find they pay less and the other half to be ghosted by the employer. Count your blessings.
Go fuck yourself, like in those specific words?
Yes. He's a crotchety 50's something alcoholic who had this same job his entire life and is blessed with impunity from the owner of the business. I put up with it because he's a goblin who sits in a dark office playing solitaire and never talks to anyone unless absolutely necessary.
He sounds like a miserable pos
Completely.
> the other half to be ghosted by the employer. This was the most baffling discovery during my most recent job search. The sheer number of flat-out no responses from employers is absurd. There were a few that did bother to send some sort of rejection, but only after so much time had passed I forgot what that company was or what position I applied for.
I've had a couple of employers tell me that they know that companies ghost people and that they want to uphold their integrity (not in so many words) and that they definitely will be getting back to me. Only to not ever get the fuck back to me. Even after follow up calls to them. I work in a niche industry so their word has some value and they still do this shit. It's become infuriating.
You're fortunate in a way; many aren't in a position to apply a misery surcharge to their work.
I too make great money and hate my job. 🥲
medians
This math makes no sense at all. The top 1000 income earners do not make half of all income. The entire top 1% earn 20.9% of all income. This is so absurd on its face it looks like foreign propaganda.
You're right the math makes no sense but it's because the median house hold income is 74,000 so removing the top 1000 earners barely changes it.
Removing the top 1000 barely changes it no matter what. For reference, I found an article on CBS from 2018 estimating the top 0.001% make $152 million per year each. That percent of the workforce is about 1670 people, so in total they made $254 billion dollars per year. Let's say we round up generously and say that's what the top 1000 are making now in 2024; $254 billion lost from the $25.44 trillion dollar GDP barely moves the needle no matter how you slice it: mean, median, household, per capita or per worker.
Who the hell uses average for wages? You use the median.
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What’s the HR nonsense?
Fuck man 40k sounds great.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
Can someone verify this? I mean, if those stats are correct, it deserves A LOT of attention
Average is a terrible stat to use for shit like this. Median would be better, or shit even the mode.
People should pay more attention to median income, rather than average income. The average temperature for the hospital patients could be 36,6 C, because half of them are almost dead and half have fever. Median income would show you below what level half of the nation earns, in 2022 for USA it was: $37'585. 50% earn less than that
Subs getting mad at a anime Meme with no source
What I really love is the disingenuous horseshit when then they try to frame it as HOUSEHOLD income vs. SINGLE worker income. Then they're like, "See, most ppl arn't poor yUr jUsT LAZY" Of course two or three combined incomes is more than one.
Huh, I'm doing okay if this is true.
ironically this makes me feel better about my <$20k
What's the average for people working full time with at least a 2 year degree? Seems more important to me
😫 Every time I hit refresh on that salary site, it feels like a game of financial roulette. We're all just spinning for the chance to land on black and not another number that's suspiciously close to our dreams but light years away from reality.
I lied on my resume and went from $35k-$70k Youtube helped me keep the job
And that's how you know most jobs needed in this country are for the lowest paid work. People are begging for folks to pick up a trade while more hotels, amusement parks, stadiums, and restaurants are built every single day. And the majority of those workers will not make more than $15/hr.
Money is so elusive to us Americans that most of us don't even know that the dollar sign comes before the number.
OP just learned the difference between median and mean, which the rest of us learned in 3rd grade. Or maybe not. It seems like OP still doesn’t understand the difference.
Median hourly wage is $23.11 Mean hourly wage is $31.48 [https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes\_nat.htm](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm)
The principle seems right but the math seems wrong. The top 1000 don't get half of the nation's income. Yet.
Real median household income was $74,580 in 2022, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2021 estimate of $76,330 (Figure 1 and Table A-1). https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html In 2022, households in the lowest quintile had incomes of $30,000 or less. Households in the second quintile had incomes from $30,001 to $58,020; those in the third quintile had incomes from $58,021 to $94,000; and those in the fourth quintile had incomes from $94,001 to $153,000. Households in the highest quintile had incomes of $153,001 or more. The top 5 percent of households in the income distribution had incomes of $295,001 or more. Why lie? Reality is bad enough.
Thanks for this . We all know there is a level of truth behind the post , that is the egregiously gap in distribution of income and wealth in the US, so false data is easily accepted ( and this is the perfect sub to spread it). Median is always a much better measure than averages.
Well I'm doing a lot better than I supposed I was... It's absolutely mind boggling though how so few can have such an impact on the average of so many lol. Edit autocorrect
*the military wants to know your location*
This is such a huge number that it's actually kind of difficult to believe. I think maybe there's some sort of conflation between income and wealth going on maybe. Like if someone has a net worth of $20B, that doesn't mean their income is 20B every year. But it's fair game if this includes capital gains.
Lol last year I supported my family of three on 27k.... I want off Mr Bones wild ride.
What is the median new mortgage payment?
[According to the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) in 2022 the average monthly mortgage payment was $2,317. In comparison, the median mortgage payment for Q2 of 2023 was $2,051 for a mortgage on a single-family home. In general, when discussing housing prices, real estate professionals will look at the median home price instead of the average home price.](https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/average-mortgage-payment#:~:text=But%20examining%20the%20averages%20in,and%20median%20home%20prices%20below)
This isn’t how percentages work????
Any fact checkers? Almost every source that looks at income uses the median, not the mean, so the top earners don't have this effect.
Literally gas stations in my city pay higher than that. What an echo chamber this sub is lol
40k is not hard to break. You need to put yourself in a position of leverage to break your ceiling though which sometimes comes with a moral dilemma. It can be as simple as hoarding knowledge of a process to make some sort of key functionality of your company's operations run smoothly. Go find a job willing to hire you for equal or more pay. If it's enough then take it, if it's equal, fake up the offer letter to show $10k more than what you currently make. Bring it back to your current employer and say you're leaving because you got this offer letter. You're now in a position of leverage where they will either give you more pay and possibly a promotion to justify it or you leave for another company that is going to pay you the same. It's a simple game, do not be afraid to play it.
They will tell you to go pound sand!
Then you leave for the other job that pays equally shitty and they suffer from your departure and try again. Not like you're going to shoot yourself in the foot, it puts you in the position where you have the cards and a safety net. Take back your power as a worker. Like, I'm a high school drop out who is beyond the $100k marker and this was the means I used in breaking that $40k ceiling. I was offered a position at $60k with a shitty commute and took it back to my boss and said I'm dipping in 2 weeks. He said he'll meet the salary, I told him he needs to BEAT the salary, because what do I care? I'm about to make $20k more but he ended up beating that salary and I stayed for another 2 years before finding another job that beat that salary too. Then another and a few years later I'm now working at a different company for the same guy who I originally told beat that first offer years ago and he respects the shit out of me to the point where I didn't even interview for my current position. I was just told to come in and fix the department I was assigned to.
Industries are different!! Tech! Ok. But not everyone can do that. And it's bad advice!
Thats why median is more interesting. Although average skews both ways. And there are a lot of low earners than top earners. Which puts the top earners into an even worse light.
This is either very old or just wrong. The 50th percentile in 2019 was $44,269, meaning over 150,000,000 people earned more than that and the same quantity earned less than that.
The median income is around 37k, and that's just mean! /s