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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Better comparison is what gasoline prices were January 2025 when Trump took office vs last few months. By macrotrends, it's $3 vs $4, a 33% increase. Younger voters possibly didn't even exist in 2006, they don't care about that.
But that’s just not a lot of money to most workers. Like 5-10 a week. It’s copium to say the election swung on a minuscule expense. Gasoline just isn’t a big budget item like it use to be because of fuel efficiency.
Plus Americans get all that money back since we now produce our own oil. Texas elected a Dem and all the oil money significantly goes to texas.
This feels like copium blaming gas prices
The big swing in Texas was Hispanic voters. I think the takeaway is once you have immigrants you can’t keep out more of them in a Democracy. Your only choice is fascism or figuring out how to run ethnic politics.
We probably need to make a deal with Hispanics to block immigrants from any other country.
Half of American households dont have $200 in savings, which means an extra $10 a week on a must spend expense forces them to give up $10 that otherwise would have been spent on something they wanted. And given the lack of savings cutting $10 from the another want is probably a pretty sizable cut.
What benefit does the average American see from the Iran war that's worth giving up maybe 20% of their fun budget?
The modal poster here is very, very different from a sizable share of voters.
That's one I'd like to see a bit more detail on, in terms of how it's calculated. There was a while where I didn't have "$200 in savings", having only about $25 in my "savings account", but I instead had about $5k in my checking account (at a similar interest rate but more convenient, same credit union), and a bunch more in a Cash Management Account stored in a MMF. Would I have counted as "not having $200 in savings"?
The full reports dont seem to be there but this describes a bit of background:
https://solofunds.com/blog/the-2025-cash-poor-report-the-true-cost-of-living-paycheck-to-paycheck-solo-funds
Relevant to your question:
Not according to that definition.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the report is entirely survey-based, correct? Not only that, they then need to extrapolate their fee estimates from this survey claims, adding another potential level of error, though that's irrelevant for this particular discussion, I guess.
So it entirely hinges on how well-selected the set was (usually the answer is no), how trustworthy you think the people filling it out are, and however they interpreted the question.
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?
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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