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As a left-wing social democrat, I'm going to say the "living paycheck to paycheck" poll numbers are basically BS.
Yes, a lot of people live 'paycheck to paycheck', but that living paycheck to paycheck includes putting money in retirement accounts, saving forr your kid's college, and so on, and so forth and that's why you have $0. The actual amount of money with zero wiggle room is actually fairly low.
If the standard American family w/ two jobs making $65k a year lost one of those jobs, I'm not saying it'd be tough. But the idea they'd be in desperate straits immediately simply isn't true. First of all, depending on their state, they'd be getting 1/2 to 2/3 of their former wages in unemployment for up to six months, and even after that, the big spending (mortgage, etc.) have a relatively light touch if you're not obviously just walking away and paying nothing.
There are people who would be screwed quickly without a job, but many of those people are getting financial assistance in addition to their current job at the moment anyway. Now, as a left-wing social democrat, of course, I want a bigger and stronger safety net for everybody, but at the moment, the couple making $100k who claim they're living paycheck to paycheck may have no money in their bank account on the 14th of the month, but they're not actually without a cushion.
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Yes, coal mining was a very attractive job in this period. Men travelled across the country with the hope of somehow getting a job in a coal mine. Miners' houses compared very favourably with the rural hovels that had been the lot of ordinary people for all of UK history.
More generally, the late 19th/early 20th century was both the peak of the British Empire and the period when the British working classes finally experienced real wage growth from industrialization. It was also a period of rapidly improving sanitation and infrastructure in the cities. It was the beginning of modern retail, with rapidly falling prices and the beginnings of an unprecedented era where ertswhile luxuries like imported meat, oranges, and dairy could be afforded by an increasing proportion of working class Britons.
Not that the Empire caused the prosperity, as Leninists might claim. The Empire was arguably yet another luxury that the Industrial Revolution enabled Britain to afford - it has been described as "outdoor relief" (make-work) for the upper classes. The US is similarly in a position where even many poor people have smart phones and yet it can easily fund even Ukraine's military to the point of stalling Russia's.
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This era pulled most of the British population out of the rural subsistence poverty that the rest of the world was mired in, so yes.
What typically didn't happen in Rome is their population being killed and enslaved on a massive scale by a stronger neighbor, because there was none. Although later on I'm sure there were complacent Romans talking about how they should just ignore the rest of the world while Attila the Hun was ravaging their borderlands again because there wasn't enough gold in the treasury to bribe him away for the seventh time.
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