It’s not a problem until you become Greece. The demographics are horrible to sustain our programs. Japan is a few decades ahead of us, and how have they been since the 80’s? How about Western Europe who implemented the same policies before us?
The birth rate for incomes under $10k is about 80% higher than households over $75k. Our population has increased almost 100M since 1980. We only have 4M more tax payers. We went from 20% not paying income taxes to 42%. Increasing the population by 25 times the tax base increase isn’t going to fix the budget.
I don’t think we are in any bubble yet. People are still very cautious. People cutting my hair don’t give me stock tips yet. We are too close to the last one. It’s not even 10 years ago when the RE bubble popped. Need some time to wipe away people’s memories.
That’s why the current bull market has a looooong runway to go. You need another 10 years to make people complacent again.
Or maybe trouble is brewing in another country altogether. How’s China’s RE market doing?
We’re not Greece or Japan…With our huge resources and the ability too allow massive immigration we can work economic miracles, if we have political will and sound leadership. …
Huge resources? We’ve all but killed the coal industry. We seem against building new pipelines to transport oil efficiently. We have tons of natural gas, but there’s little political will to build liquification plants to export it. Who knows how long we will keep fracking for oil and natural gas. We have major cities that struggle to have enough water. We have to bribe people to reduce energy usage, because our power plants can’t produce enough.
Labor unions have led to automation and offshoring eliminating manufacturing jobs.
One party wants poor, refugee immigrants. The other party doesn’t want any immigrants. Neither party seems interested in allowing and attracting highly educated immigrants. We let them attend our universities then kick them out after.
Our K-12 schools are average compared to developed countries. So we have average people that expect to be paid on the top 1% of the world. That’s not even close to viable. Globalization is killing the mediocre people. The top 20% of this country will have to carry more and more of the tax burden with each generation. They’re already carrying 87% of it.
We are repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot. This isn’t post WW2 when the rest of the developed world was destroyed, and we got a free ride to economic prosperity. Our real gains were in the 1800’s as we rose to #1 around 1900. We didn’t even have income taxes, and the government was tiny. Ever since the Great Depression the government has been convincing us we need more taxes and more govenement to save us from disasters they created or allowed by being asleep at the wheel. We willingly keep voting for it, since they’ve sold the narrative that the rich and corporations are the problem.
In China the top 10% have to carry the whole country…The US is huge…so what if the 70 million achievers have to do the heavy lifting…The rest still live better than 90% of the world…Inequality is exaggerated in boom times…that is actually a good thing…It means many are doing extraordinarily well and most are just plodding along…but all people in the US are living much higher quality standards than 50 years ago or as compared to most other countries
Phds are pretty common here. You could earn that number if you have a specialization that’s hot - current one would be AI/Machine Learning, VR, etc. Right out of school it’s very very hard to get to 1M unless you are a hotshot whiz kid whom Zuckerberg desperately wants.
