economics

American Dream

From wirecutter, we see yet another article lamenting the loss of the American dream and how it isn’t possible for a family to live in a home with only one breadwinner. I call bullshit.

I hear this all of the time, and I have to say that I disagree with it. Americans don’t want to have the lifestyle of their grandparents, they want to live a life of unbelievably expensive leisure and luxury.

Degradation of the Family

The idea of a basic family: The Father, Mother, and 2.4 children is no longer the case in America. The share of one-parent families with children under the age of 18 has grown from 7.4% of all families in 1950 to 34.3% of all families today. It’s harder for a family to make it when there is only one adult taking care of what used to be taken care of by two adults.

My mother made most of our clothes, and what store bought clothing we did have wasn’t expensive designer stuff. For jeans, we wore Sears Toughskins because my mother claimed that they lasted longer than the stuff she made at home. I was lucky, being the oldest. My younger brother wound up wearing all of the stuff that I handed down after it no longer fit. My brother and I owned two pairs of shoes at a time- tennis shoes for general wear, and dress shoes for church and other “nice clothes” events.

Mom cooked all of the meals. We almost never ate out. When there were dinners out, it was Mom and Dad going out and we got a babysitter.

Owning a home

The average home built in 2023 is 2657 square feet. Just 50 years ago in 1973, the average new home in the US was 1660 square feet. Seventy five years ago, in 1948, the average size of a new single family home was 983 square feet. In 1938, new homes were slightly larger at 1173 square feet, but it was also more common to have multigenerational households then, with grandparents, parents, and children all living under the same roof.
Children shared a bedroom. I remember when I finally got my own room- I was a teenager and thought we had become rich. My parents bought a new house, and my brother and we finally got our own rooms. Looking back, I remember thinking how large that house is. Built in the late 70’s, it’s a four bedroom house that is only 1854 square feet, small by today’s standards.

Materialism

Technology has played a role as well. Everyone in the family now has a smart phone with a data plan that permits them to be online 24/7. Multiple televisions in a house, something virtually unheard of in 1973, are the norm.

The stay at home mom didn’t sit around all day and watch TV 50 years ago. No, the woman of the house cooked, cleaned, took care of the kids, made her own and the children’s clothes, and all of the other household chores.

Back then, Dad had the only car, and the upper middle class families had a second, family car. If one of the kids wanted their own car, they paid for it themselves by getting a job.

School

In 1970, only half of Americans graduated from high school, less than 10 percent went to college. When you were 15 or 16, you went out and got a job. You didn’t spend your whole life in school majoring in smoking weed and getting laid while studying gender roles of non-binary sexual predators. No, you became a mechanic, a farmer, or a factory worker. You did something productive with your life and didn’t waste it making TikTok videos about sex toys.

If you want to live like Americans did in the 50s through the 70s, it is still attainable.

By Divemedic, ago

Part Time

This post over at GFZ reminded me of a story that happened to me 15 or 20 years ago, while I was still a street medic. I was partnered with another medic, a female who like to seem like she was jaded, but really wanted to believe the best in everyone.

There was a prostitute who had diabetes that we would run on every month or so. The call would usually follow the same path. Her “customers” would call 911 every time she would pass out at “work” and we would check her blood sugar to find that it was low. We would start an IV, give her some glucose, then she would wake up and refuse to go to the hospital. We did this for several years.

Then we didn’t see her for awhile. After not seeing her for 6 months or so, we got a call to a local convenience store and there she was. My partner says to her: “Hey Dianne! We haven’t seen you in a while. How have you been?”

Dianne replied: “Things are great. I got me a man, now. We have a good job, and moved to Orlando.”

Partner: “Good for you! So what brings you here to town today?”

Dianne: “Well, my husband says that now that we are married, we have plenty of money, so I only have to work part time.”

By Divemedic, ago

Spin

Read this:

This is tipping, but by calling it a “service charge,” it is no longer optional. Then comes the virtue signaling about benefits.

I don’t have an issue with this. I would like to see tipping become a relic of the past.

By Divemedic, ago

Stock Tip

The DOJ has officially opened up a lawsuit against Apple to break up its Smart Phone Monopoly. $AAPL is one of Pelosi’s largest positions. So for you Apple bulls, you have Pelosi on your side for this one.

Follow this Twitter feed for more stock tips. Just buy what Congress buys. Those crooked sonsabitches are all insider trading.

By Divemedic, ago

Real Communism Hasn’t Been Tried

Seattle, which already as a $19.97 per hour minimum wage, passed a law mandating delivery driver minimum wage. Using a complicated formula, the law dictated that delivery drivers receive a living wage. The law caused delivery companies to pass the added costs on to the consumer in the form of extra delivery fees. The next thing you know, people in the Seattle area had to contend with $26 coffees and $32 sandwiches, with taxes and the neew delivery fees comprising nearly 30 percent of the total bill.

The free market responded, as it always does. They don’t call it the LAW of supply and demand for nothing.

Seattle residents started deleting their delivery apps from their phones in response to the spiking exorbitant delivery prices. Uber Eats experienced a 30-percent decline in order volume in the city, while DoorDash reported 30,000 fewer orders within just the first two weeks of the ordinance taking effect.

As a result, the income for drivers actually went down. A driver who made $931 in a week this time last year saw his earnings drop by half to $464.81. Small restaurants are hurting, delivery drivers are hurting, and people who depend on food deliveries are not able to get food because drivers are quitting in droves. So do the socialists in charge admit that they were wrong, and change the law? Of course not.

A spokesman for the mayor noted that “should the data show there have been unintended impacts for workers and small businesses, we are always open to making improvements”—a criterion which has clearly been met already—but nonetheless clarified that the mayor still “stands strongly in support” of the minimum wage ordinance.

Meanwhile, the president of the City Council claims she is “very worried” about the ordinance’s impacts so far—and even argues that “it’s not the role of policymakers to regulate the profit margins of companies”—before going on to say “I’m not going to redo the whole legislation.”

The law required that the city hire more bureaucrats to administer the law, and that is the point of most socialist laws- to increase the size and power of government and its officials. Just remember, the reason why communism and socialism fails is because the right people haven’t been in charge, and true communism hasn’t been tried yet.

By Divemedic, ago

Usury

I spend a lot of time talking about how the left doesn’t understand economics. Today I am going to criticize those on the right who don’t understand money or economics. Let’s use a Christian who quotes the Bible when he claims that usury (the charging of interest) is a sin, and thus shouldn’t be permitted.

The outlawing of interest would stop all lending. Why would I loan you money and assume the risk of the borrower not paying it back. What is the upside? According to him, you would loan out this money because you are a nice person.

This is simply idiocy. He claims that the bank is making a profit on money that isn’t theirs, and besides money doesn’t actually exist.

There are reasons why it’s a bad idea to lend to people:

  • Default: A percentage of people won’t repay the loan. Charging interest makes up for that. If there is a 1% chance that a person will default, you need to charge more than 1% interest to compensate for that.
  • Loss of opportunity: Instead of loaning you that money, perhaps I could use it myself to repair my home, buy some clothes, or some other reason. If I am not charging interest, I would rather use my money for my purposes, not yours. Imagine the look you would get from the wife if you loaned $100,000 to a family so they could buy a house, then your kid needs braces. Then you explain to the wife that your kid can’t get braces because you loaned out the money that you had been saving.
  • Inflation: The $100 I lend you today will only be worth $80 or $90 tomorrow. I need to charge interest to compensate for that loss to inflation.

For the three reasons above, let’s say that you loan $1,000 out to 100 people. Your $100,000 is out there, and 1% of them never pay you back. The others take 5 years to pay you back. Now you have only $99,000, but that money is now only worth $48,000, thanks to inflation. You just lost the use of your money for 5 years, and half of it’s value.

But at least you can claim to be a “good Christian.”

The other part of his argument is that banks are lending money that belongs to their depositors, and because it isn’t theirs, they have no right to profit from that. This is a nonsensical argument. A retail store is selling goods that they purchase from others. A grocery store sells tomatoes that it buys from a farmer, beef from a rancher, etc. so that the consumer doesn’t have to go to ten different farmers to get their groceries, charging a fee for the convenience.

A bank operates the same way. They take small amounts of money from depositors, paying them interest for the use of their money, then loans out larger amounts, charging interest for the convenience of being able to buy a house or a car now, instead of having to wait years while saving to do it in cash. A bank is a retail store that sells money for a fee.

The claim that Christian societies functioned for thousands of years without banks is bullshit. First, people were largely living a subsistence lifestyle for a good part of that. Banks and money allow for society to have a division of labor: instead of having to build your own house, grow your own food, make your own clothes, etc., money allows a person to specialize in building houses, or farming, or fixing people’s teeth. You can sell that product or service and use some of it to pay people to do the other things, or make the products that you don’t. Part of that is money and money lending.

This is where Jewish people have gotten the hate and scorn from. Christian societies needed money lending, but couldn’t make it work because they were losing money in not charging interest. Along came the Jews, who weren’t prohibited from charging interest, and they made a pile of money providing bank lending services. It is people who had the “interest should be illegal” opinion that started all of the hate and discontent.

Saying that people who provide this service should do so for free is no different than claiming landlords shouldn’t charge rent, or that medical care should be free. It’s a nonsensical, childish argument. This argument is how you tell me that you don’t understand people, opportunity cost, or economics.

By Divemedic, ago

Why not $250 an hour?

Then we would all be rich.

Our politicians are morons.

However, I fully support this. As a nurse, I can currently get a 10 week travel contract to California paying $3k a week plus per diem for expenses. Under this plan, nursing contracts would go up to $10k a week or more. I could take one contract a year and be retired for the other 42 weeks a year.

By Divemedic, ago