Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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Sure, but the survey results align with BEA's likely better survey data (the income is validated against tax returns). Which finds that about half of households have a negative personal savings rate.
https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2024/pdf/ec240050.pdf
None of this seems shocking to me, I've learned a little about friend's and acquantance's finances over the years. Does everyone here only know people who are prodigious savers?
The survey also states that the "cash-poor" have a significantly lower rate of disability/chronic health issues than the general population (40% vs 75%), and is at odds with data that "the median American has $8,000 in transaction accounts (savings, checking, money market)".
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Possibly. I come from germany, which already has a different savings culture, and in particular even from one of the poorer parts, but it's very rural and almost nobody I know was actually struggling with anything. All my school friends, and I'm still in contact with many of them, are doing very well independent of earning a lot - they just make do with whatever they get.
If anything, I sometimes get the impression that some of the better earning (urban) friends struggle more, because they then spend it away so fast on holidays, vacations, insanely expensive hobbies, and other stuff. If I were cheeky, I might say that the richer you are, the more you can afford to live paycheck to paycheck.
On the BEA report, it not only also has some insane stats, like expenditure being double of the income (!,wtf) for the whole bottom 10%, they explicitly say they suspect some unreported income to finance that much consumption, which would be my guess as well. So again, press X to doubt.
To be clear about my position, I think that not only the rate of paycheck-to-paycheck is probably seriously overstated, I also think that the kind of person living like that is very likely to have a lot of unnecessary expenses they can cut if need be. But the US is a different world, so maybe I'm typical minding too much.
That's one of those metrics that gets thrown around, but is awfully defined. How does it reflect, say, automatic retirement plan contributions? If someone is putting (say) 15% of their salary into a 401k every month, but have basically nothing extra left over in their bank account at the end of each month (because they have a defined budget, and spend on luxuries and vacations everything beyond bills, needs, and retirement savings), is that "paycheck to paycheck"?
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