Slop.

in what fucking dimension do americans have a low cost of living, relatively.

food and fuel? sure, per unit maybe.

everything else is shit tier quality for 10x the price. housing, education, healthcare, the car you have to have to get to work/geoceries, debt servicing for all those things are bananas.

the wage comes in, the wage goes out. its completely rigged to squeeze the shit out of the working class and sucker immigrants into coming here for the "high wage" so they can turn around and cut checks to landlords, banks, and insurance companies.

Saw a post on rednote a while back where a chinese guy was making a similar argument, but he was using average wage as a metric. Billionare Georg is an outlier who should not be counted.

If this post was made in the 50s and specifically about white Americans he'd maybe have a bit of a point.

Even before inflation came along and wiped people out, most of the country was living paycheck to paycheck.

There was a time in my life when i agreed with this, I could fly to america and every single item bought in the US would have been half the price it was here in the UK or even better, especially food.

That is no longer true. The experience of that america lingers however in many people's minds that visited it at the time, and it is further unhelped by all exported american media depicting some of the richest lifestyle possible in movies and tv series. A lot of people in the UK think Friends is average American. A lot of other people in the UK think your average Julia Roberts movie is average american.

I was shocked when I found out how much my friends in the US made for similar work (it was a lot). I was similarly shocked when I found out how much they paid for health insurance (it was more than my rent).

Like, i appreciate not being bombed, but i remember when a can of beans was like 25 cents

Now they're over a buck

330+ million people all have the same problems and solutions, I got it all figured out

Maybe Americans had absurd wages 40 ffucking years ago but my pay doesn't really feel that absurd being like 20% or whatever pittance more than a McDonalds worker was making in 1970 oh but with 4x the cost of living

Spoken like an out of touch European conservative lol.

Ah yes, the center of neo liberalism actually provides social democrat benefits to its population. They're ruling failson elite are definitely 400 IQ 4d Chess masters who realize this arrangement minimizes risk and maximizes profit.

Well, it's kinda true in the sense that Americans in general do have massive natural wealth, and if American citizens collectively decided to guillotine their opressors, distribute their wealth and implement socialism, then Americans would easily not go broke. (Not really limited to Americans though, but true for every society)

Of course, it's extremely unlikely that's what that person means.

This person must never have seen the 'food' that Americans post on the internet

it's true that americans have higher wages and lower taxes compared to the cost of living, but to be honest looking from the outside the main issue for the personal finance of americans that i see is the absurd amount of debt they often take and pay out. for "boosting consumer spending" the government has incentivized a massive industry of credit and usury, and americans (already living paycheck to paycheck) rather than accepting to take a hit to their living standards during a recession, pawn or loan hoping to make the payments later.

the interest americans are paying is ridiculous, genuinely baffling to someone like me who hasn't grown up in that environment but to people who need to borrow to improve their credit score and are used to budgeting monthly as opposed to calculating the total price of something, it sorta makes sense. i think all of us are more optimistic about our future than is warranted, it's just that americans are getting uniquely taken advantage of.

personally i wasn't financially able to buy any dairy or meat products in the last two months. if i was more hopeful about my future and had the same mentality, i probably would've decided to take a loan and ride it out, living like this sucks.

I'm doing fairly well but its cause me and my wife used some rural development thing to get a house. We now have 3 other people living with us. (They needed a place).

I'm disabled and even when i can get a job it tends to make my issues worse.

This means my wife is the sole money maker. Its a horrible stress for her and I do everything I can (much to her chagrin at times because I can put way to much on me)

All my friends are always struggling. If its not with work then it's with living situation. The only people I know doing well are boomers and maybe elder millennials.

Like, idk while we are doing alright in the grand scheme, our situation still sucks and it bugs the hell out of me. What we have shouldnt be privilege.

Gonna quote myself here:

Everybody likes to say "Death to Amerikkka, but when it comes time to visualize American consumption declining to the world average, they all turn into apologist succdems talking about the poor American victims.

This is both true and false because Americans as a category contains both the "middle" class (professional/managerial, petty bourgeois/landlord, cop, etc) as well as the lower working class: wage workers and imprisoned labor.

The former has been the ideological and symbolic essence of Americanism, the focal point of US culture and commodity production, despite being a smaller subclass than the lower workers. They've gotten the lion's share of any imperial spoils that weren't taken by the large bourgeoisie. Highways and suburbs and theme parks and restaurants exist for these people. They're the image many people think of when they hear the word "American", an image that obscures the domestic wage work that props them up as well as the international expropriation of resources.

This illusion even has its effect on the wage workers. Deprived of real proletarian culture and language, they absorb the manufactured culture of the "middle class", which functions as a false consciousness. Cheap commodities and consumer debt help bolster this consciousness while also heightening their exploitation.

The "middle" subclass (whatever you want to call it) has been getting eaten away for the last few decades. More and more people have shifted from the "real" middle consumer class to the image of middle consumption that's propped up by debt and cheaper (and increasingly shittier) commodities. Many aren't consciously aware of the change, most don't understand the mechanisms that caused it.

But we still exist in the ruins of this mythical middle class, where resources are wasted building too-big houses, fast food joints, oversized cars and roads. Utilitarian commodities often aren't produced at scale so wage workers are stuck trying to live with inefficient scraps of the petty bourgeoisie. There aren't enough small cars (and few buses/trains because that's counter to the petty bourgeois image), there aren't enough apartments, there aren't enough healthy food distribution centers.

There often just aren't cheap options. And even when there are, people are subject to increasingly-complex psychological and social manipulation to overconsume.

If you haven't been thrust into the reserve army of labor or whatever shade of lumpen, and you can avoid the psychological manipulation to overconsume, and you don't have kids, you might be able to live a fairly comfortable, if tenuous, life. That opportunity certainly isn't equally accessible everywhere in the world, so it's a sort of privilege.

But it's not a stable class. The American form of commodity production is crumbling. There's nothing to take its place, domestically. Just petty bourgeois ruins.

I cant even get a job here and if I did the absolute cheapest apartment in my area is $1,600 per month (which is rare most apartments are around $1,800 or even $2,000). If I did somehow move out then I would also have to pay the absurd cost of living here.