Posted on 10/27/2015 4:38:54 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
Fifty-one percent of working Americans make less than $30,000 a year, new data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) shows.
That’s $2,500 a month before taxes and just over the federal poverty level for a family of five. The new numbers come from the National Wage Index, which SSA updates each year based on the National Wage Index, which SSA updates each year based on reported wages subject to the federal income tax.
In 2014, half of working Americans reported an income at or below $28,851 (the median wage), and 51 percent reported an income of less than $30,000. Forty percent are making less than $20,000.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
and none of that 51% works for the gubbermint....where I bet the median is 50 thou. We are being destroyed by government, and we are paying government to do it to us.
In this day and age I don’t doubt this. Wages have been driven down while prices have risen too. Obama’s revenge against the white man.
I googled “average payment for : SNAP, EITC, TANF, Sect 8, etc. “ and was able to very conservatively come up with at least $20,000 yearly payments tax free. This didn’t include SSI for the kiddies (for single mothers who’ve applied for SSI for their kids), or other programs. Also, there are some states where TANF is much higher than some of the Southern states.
Interesting and with charts.
If you are only making $30,000, I would advise against having three kids.
On its face, I think it sounds a bit worse than it may be.
I know a number of couples where one works part-time to supplement their income and therefore that person’s income is below $25,000
God would. Doesn’t He promise clothing and food, or more than He provides the sparrow?
What about all the paid-in-cash jobs that never get reported? Especially to illegal immigrants! How many “poverty level” families are actually doing quite well by not reporting income?
It’s very difficult in the current economy to make more than $15/hr punching a time clock with a H.S. diploma or useless bachelor’s degree.
If those are your credentials, you’re far better off devising a way to work for yourself. That requires drive and ambition though, and while not having a functional college degree isn’t necessarily a sign of lack of drive/ambition, by the same token, ONLY have a high school diploma isn’t exactly a testament to ambition/motivation.
I’ve tried to push my adult children towards functional college degrees.
The problem is that the jobs that used to pay well for high school graduates (construction, etc.) are now being done by illegals. That pushes the labor pool sideways so that high school graduates that want to work must compete with college graduates for entry level jobs in areas such as basic management (fast food or hotel shift manager). That in turn drags down the salaries for those jobs and the college grads are not just competing with high school grads for those jobs, but at those salaries.
The illegals are indeed working jobs no American will do (for $10/hr). Knock them off those jobs and pay Americans reasonable pay to do those jobs, and viola, many of the employment problems would be solved.
It’s drives me nuts that the same leftists demanding a minimum wage are the very same people advocating a wholesale debasing of entry level work in this country by allowing illegal aliens to destroy the wage base for what used to be called “an honest day’s work”.
I’m sure they are all aware how to maximize that. I knew a husband and wife loser tag-team that were experts at it.
Took their daughter to enough doctors to get her a disability claim, collected TANF/AFDC multiple times working in between when they absolutely had to, on SNAP, Section 8 and got EITC....they ended up out of state to somewhere the things like SNAP and TANF were supposed to be higher. Two complete losers who spent most of their days video gambling.
Sometimes I miss the days of less responsibility, no meetings, no commute, and less taxes.
“In 2014, half of working Americans reported an income at or below $28,851 (the median wage)”
Imagine that, fifty percent are at or below the median.
So while bammy's cohorts in crime can fudge the employment numbers any way they want, even use all this part time employment as justification for pulling down the unemployment percentage, jack around with the labor force participation rate, etc. etc. Nothing changes the fact that people are struggling.
Not good. Not good at all.
This is shaping up to be a perfect storm for Bernie Sanders/Liz Warren style redistributive Socialism.
I suspect government math at work. For example a single income (by choice) family where one spouse makes 60k and the other chooses to stay home with the kids (0 income) would score a 30k average income. But that would not support the picture the headline attempts to paint.
Considering the aggregate regulations driving up the cost of living, little surprise it’s a problem. Housing CoO requirements, vehicle mileage & emissions, a thousand other little “make life better” requirements. Sure, every little regulation made things better ... but added up and coupled with high taxation, one practically needs a Master’s degree or some such to earn enough to achieve “above poverty” (which continues to lack an objective definition). If you don’t comply with these regulations, you risk fines & incarceration. And to make it worse, the “poverty line” is defined high enough that it’s easy for those lower on the ladder to just let go and fall into the relatively luxurious “safety net”.
Though depending on the unspecified definition of “working”, it may include one full-time spouse and one working part-time (say, $50k and $10k respectively), creating an average at/under $30,000 when the latter not working at all would skew the statistics much higher.
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