| > 40% don't have the money to cover a $400 emergency expense This is an often cited statistic that's been essentially debunked for being flawed and misleading[1][2]. > And yet 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck Again, not a particularly useful statistic because 1. real consumption per capita has been increasing[3], and 2. the US has the 2nd highest household consumption[4] in the world. "Living paycheck to paycheck" includes people that are destitute, but also people that just consume more than they should, and also people that are unable to save money due to increasing housing costs (not due to inequality, but due to zoning regulations). Of those who claim to be living "paycheck to paycheck", you don't know which are destitute. > For our riches, we have the highest population of people without health insurance in the first world, and the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical expenses. Sure, this has nothing to do with inequality. If you gave everyone health insurance in America today, inequality would hardly change. And inequality is NOT the root cause of America's healthcare system, the root cause is a series of policies passed in the 20th century that resulted in 1) healthcare being tied to employment, 2) a lack of any form of price transparency, 3) supply constraints on medical professionals that have resulted in the highest PPP adjusted salaries for medical practitioners in the developed world. > Inequality drives cost of living up. Normal people in the US are competing with the richest people domestically and internationally for housing. While normal people need housing to shelter themselves, the rich, especially the rich outside of the US, see housing as a means to store value. We’ve always had mega-rich families. The new phenomenon we’re seeing now is not that "normal people" are competing with the super-rich, it's that they are competing with the upper-middle class. Where I live (Brooklyn), The rents aren’t driven up because I’m in a bidding war with Jeff Bezos; they’re driven up because I’m in a bidding war with other high earning millennial white collar workers. The “middle class” worker doesn’t stand a chance in our neighborhood. Also the cost of living isn't up uniformly across the US, it's only up in most big cities where the root cause is attributable almost entirely to poor zoning regulations, not "inequality". You can see the salary one must earn to purchase the median house in every city[5] and outside SF/NY/Seattle, it's around the median household income. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40... [2] https://www.cato.org/blog/it-true-40-americans-cant-handle-4... [3] https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=A794RX0Q048SBEA [4] https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-... [5] https://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home-buying-25-c... |