guajalote
15d ago
I deliberately wrote decent burrito, meaning something roughly on par with Chipotle. That did not exist most places in the US 30 years ago.
I can't imagine the Midwest being so very different as not to have its own terrible burrito factory at the time?
My mom grew up in a very rural part of the midwest. She saw an avocado for the first time as a teenager when another kid who had been on vacation somewhere brought one to the school as a curiosity to show people.
guajalote
16d ago
Tell me if I'm getting the argument here:
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You feel your life is worse than your father's.
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When people argue your beliefs are factually incorrect, you say its about "the messaging strategy, not the object debate."
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Based on your feelings (which need not be true at the object level), you believe you are entitled to submit a list of "specific asks" to someone (?) who is for some reason obligated to implement them.
Can you flesh out the last part?
guajalote
16d ago
So first of all... yes.
That is certainly not the experience of most people 30+ years ago. My mother who grew up in the Midwest never laid eyes on a burrito until she was at least in her 20s. My father grew up in the SF bay area, so he likely ate them from a young age, but he's in a small minority. And even he didn't have access to sushi or other such "exotic" food we take for granted today.
But my point is that I think you are probably doing better than your parents and you are simply failing to recognize it (or if not you personally, then at least the average member of your cohort). Your kids are 4 to a bedroom, but you admit that is because you are simply prioritizing your spending differently. You are spending more on things like food and healthcare and in exchange receiving much higher quality food and healthcare than your father's generation did. My burrito question is emblematic of this fact. And you can't just handwave away modern cars and phones and TVs and the internet and everything else your father didn't have. You are objectively choosing to spend money to get more and better stuff in other areas of your life for yourself and your children, and in exchange you are settling for slightly worse housing. You and your family are objectively better off overall.
I completely agree we need to address affordability, because it's good to do that regardless of whether people are doing better than their parents or not. There are a bunch of simple things we can do to accomplish that, but they largely lack political support: deregulate housing and make it much easier to build, get rid of tariffs, lower taxes and government spending.
Adjusted for inflation, do you make significantly less than your father did at the same age? If so, that would explain your experience. But it is very much not the typical US experience. Real wages have risen consistently, and this is true across all income deciles.
Of course, there is a distribution of outcomes, and some people will inevitably see their incomes decrease even as most incomes increase. You may be one of those people, for whatever reason. This is not a new phenomenon, and it doesn't warrant new policies to address it. It's just a fact of statistics that some people will (based on genetics, luck, whatever) diverge from the typical outcome and end up making less than their parents did, even while most people are making more.
If that's not the case, then it means you are choosing to allocate your resources differently than your father did. You are choosing to live in a high cost of living area (the fact that it's the same zip code is irrelevant; the relative desirability of zip codes shifts over time). You are choosing to spend more on other things besides housing square footage.
How did you take that away from what I said? I said you were choosing to spend your money differently. That's not accusing you of being wasteful (although if you are being wasteful, that would certainly be a relevant fact). I'm saying you are prioritizing other goods more highly than you prioritize housing square footage. That may be a perfectly legitimate thing to do.
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