[ramesh31]

>Maybe we will go back to that kind of situation where the median will be considered squarely in 'the masses' class and nowhere near 'rich'.

We're already there. American society has stratified into three groups over the last 20 years. There's the 99th percentile elite who have hoarded over half of all overall wealth, the 90th percentile bourgeois (tech workers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) that are able to maintain a modicum of security and prosperity through real wage growth, and then the masses below who are desperately working themselves to death for near starvation wages to service the above two classes, with zero chance of economic mobility.

[candiodari]

... And yet if you replaced everyone's wages with the average (which is of course the best redistribution can achieve), $97,962, call it $100k whilst that would be an increase of just shy of $30k per year, minus tax on that ($30k), average rent ($30k), transport ($11k), food ($5k), entertainment ($4k) ... which would leave you with $20k.

Note that taxes are progressive, so from a $70k wage you get about $10k "free cash" to spend, whilst a $100k wage gives you the above number of about $20k.

So it takes A little over 2.5 years' worth of average full-time wages to buy a car in the US.

Therefore I disagree, the problem is the average cost of a new car, expressed in labor (2.5 years average full-time labor), much more than the stratification of US society.

I would argue 6 months full-time labor would be quite expensive for a car, and for the value of a car to be that, you'd need to make $170k per year, you'd have to be in the top 10%. Only at a 5% income do the cars this article talks about become reasonably priced. And I do mean reasonably priced. Not cheap.

Second problem is if you look at where the problem is, profit ("capitalism") ... is not the problem. GM makes $2,150 per car, the average car manufacturer half that, according to Google. Whilst this amount would move the needle a bit, it would certainly not solve the problem. That would make cars affordable for the top 11% of the population (and that's taking the GM figures), which would be just the tiniest of improvement.

According to this article:

https://carfromjapan.com/article/industry-knowledge/how-much...

Only raw material cost, labor and (barely) tax would make a decent dent (at least 10%) in the cost of a car.

Note: numbers all just Googled and taken at face value, maybe converting to per year (from per month) but no more processing. Obviously big mistakes could have happened, although I think not. I could do better but back of the envelope this should be about correct.