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by Jach 3127 days ago
Well, if you want, you can live quite better than most immigrants at $90k+, even in the expensive coastal cities, it's just that you're setting yourself up for having to work throughout your 30s and 40s and maybe your 50s. A lot of people are fine with that. But if people took frugality more seriously, they could plan for retirement by their 40s or earlier. Working 3 years out West gives you several years to spend back home with your family without having to work during that time.

Sounds like you want to redistribute the economic gains? Good luck with that, we know where that leads. Economic inequality is fine if people are also raised out of poverty, like over a billion people have been since 1990 while inequality has raised. Inequality can be a good sign. (http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html)

At the very least, America can't have it both ways, being an economic power house and evenly redistributing the fruits internally. You might have a shot if you require Americans roll back into a farming economy where half the population farms for each other and the other half, but you'll have to kill a lot of people and take and salt a lot of land and forbid a lot of machinery to get it done. I don't think that's why Trump got elected. The voters don't tend to want handouts, they just want certain existing handouts to other parties to go away so they can effectively compete again in certain domains. Dissatisfaction with the economy in their area is a big component, sure, and Trump actually cares about making the country's economy better, and he's already done good things to help some areas out, but neither he nor anyone else will ever make e.g. all the state capitals equally economically viable with similar growth rates. Physics is against them, math is against them, human nature is against them, morality is against them. SV and other tech hubs will pass one day, too, just like the ghost towns you can visit all over the western states albeit probably not so dramatically, but that'll just be because the economic centers have moved elsewhere, not because they've been redistributed. Exploit their opportunities while they're there.