1701

I, like many persons experiencing unemployment over the last 4 years, cannot afford to move right now. I have checked and weighed the costs and benefits of doing so versus staying where I am. Additionally, the unemployment rate where I live is about 6%, and 5% for persons in my career field. Unemployment in the midwest or south is higher, and is 8-10% for persons in my career field (Yes, Jason, I checked.)

Fuck your assumptions, Jason, and fuck you.

1702

…and what? It’s also the US consensus that the business cycle is best handled by throwing people out of work periodically, with little or not assistance provided. Again, sorry to hear that and you have my sympathies, but being rightly upset about your shit situation does not change the definition of middle class.

There’s certain jobs that seem oddly immune to supply and demand (why do we keep producing so many professors without jobs for them?) and you obviously can’t work in North Dakota with certain skills, but in general for the vast bulk of jobs a given set of skills gives you a given set of areas to live in and work. They have a different set of unemployment rates, pay scales, and costs of living. No one forces software developers to live in Seattle or San Francisco; it’s one point on the continuum of options.

1703

Pretty much (though, if memory serves, we’re in the same industry, so that makes sense on some level).

So the tradeoff is that I move somewhere miserable like Federal Way or Everett, and take on a 45+ minute/day commute (and associated fuel costs, even though I drive a mini and a motorcycle), merely because i want to live in the place I grew up and work (the three restaurants I manage are all around Lake Union).

So, Jason, am I middle-class for Seattle?

1704

You don’t seem to grasp how the whole supply and demand thing works with relation to population. More people live in areas like NYC suburban Chicago or Philly, so the demand for housing is higher and the cost of living is higher. Conversely, the number of jobs available, and the wages paid for those jobs is higher. I make much more for doing what I do here than I would elsewhere in the country.

That is why you adjust for cost of living versus raw wages, and why simply listing raw wages to define an economic strata is useless data unless one factors in those contributing factors.

1705

For the Seattle metro, yes, but that includes least pleasant places like Federal Way. Due to the endless torrent of software money, the ever-increasing demand to live here, and the seemingly insurmountable opposition to putting higher density housing in the city the trendy areas of Seattle are turning into San Francisco, another playground for dissonant yuppie fucks like me. I’m amazed you can live in Ballard at all as a restaurant manager at all; I’m impressed.

The days of Ballard as middle or working class haunt for Swedish fisherman are sadly long gone.

Price is supply vs. demand, not just demand, with an extra scaling factor for how much extra it costs to support people as population density goes up. The scaling factor (harder to build sewer lines, have to hire more cops per capita, etc. boring stuff) is a notable contributor, but it’s not the big difference. The overwhelming difference you see in the US in cost of living is land prices, and the overwhelming difference there is the income people have to buy the land vs. how much is available.

From there, income is determined by what it takes to hire someone, and the big variance regional variance on that is again, land prices. So you end up with the difference in income for, say, software developers between Michigan and Missouri being disturbingly close to a proxy for land prices, with the remainder as a “desireable place to live” bidding war.

If you want to define middle class sure, you have to work in cost of living there a bit; the middle class in North Dakota probably makes half what they do in manhattan. There’s real limits though; you don’t get a $100k dual-earner household in Seattle as the starting point of middle class, it’s heading towards the upper end just based on the sheer large number of people who earn less. The top 20% of households starts at $125k, and the top 20% cannot possibly be middle class unless you completely redefine the term.

$100k doesn’t feel rich around here, because your house is really not going to be anything special due to the ridiculous amount of money trickling down from the software boom and the tight land restrictions. You can buy nice stuff in every other goods category though, and you’re probably not going to have a debt problem.

If you’re unemployed and stuck in a high-cost area I’m sure this is all grating and I’m coming off as an asshole for telling you you’re better off than you think, but I’m not trying to do that, my apologies. If you’re talking about the US income distribution, though, it’s all pretty relevant.

1706

Not to mention, if you’re a restaurant manager and live in an area that can be subject to things like inclement weather, you have to be the one to brave the elements, and living close-by is a good thing. When there’s a foot of snow on the ground, it’s good to be able to spend two hours walking to work if need be.

Not only that, but living 45 minutes away? What happens when the alarm company calls in the middle of the night to tell you that you’ve got one going off?

1707

Interesting (at least to me) aside…

Is there a difference between the ‘middle’ and the ‘working’ class? I’ll admit to a certain bias, here. I work. My job is hard, both physically and mentally. I’m left exhausted at the end of every day. I’d say week, but I seldom get actual weekends, so the days just blur all together, and I work for what I categorize as a great employer.

The software engineer or middle manager across the street? They have no idea.

1708

How to define class is confusing as hell. I kind of lean towards the “have a boss bothering you all day” line as separating them off.

It’s one of those odd things where you can immediatelly rattle off what you think about every possible job but it’s hard to describe why. Guy who changes oil at Jiffy Lube? Working class. Waiter? Working class. Restaurant manager? Middle class, unless we’re talking fast food. Software? Middle class or rich depending on employment status and business, but I’d say the Microsoft contractor army is highly-paid working class just based on how short-term and high turnover the jobs are.

1709

Fair enough. Thanks for indulging, Jason.

1710

Class is a strange concept in America. It’s largely perceived as a question of wealth where certain jobs fit into certain strata - but that’s not entirely complete. Money is very important in the Middle Class but among the Upper Class it hardly has any value. Class is also a set of exclusive social values that you set you apart from other segments of society. Certain mores and norms that you value above others. In that respect it’s a question of who you were born to and how you identify yourself.

1711

Money is like any other good, it has declining marginal utility- once you have enough of it, it matters little.

Give a hobo $1,000 and he’ll value it more than say, a millionaire.

He’s also more likely to spend it and increase the economic value of said $1,000, which is the core of my economic philosophy, though it is also a recipe for inflation.

1712

Yesterday’s Washington Post with an excellent story that makes a good point I haven’t seen made elsewhere.

For the click-averse, the story points out that the Obama and Romney campaigns enjoy an advertising edge that their associated SuperPacs do not: Obama and Romney get a federally-mandated low, low rate on their advertising buys in the media markets they run spots in. SuperPacs, on the other hand, but pay the full ad rate. As an illustration:

In one Ohio ad buy slated to run just before the election, for example, Obama is paying $125 for a spot that is costing a conservative super PAC $900.
(I assume that is a rate that is multiplied by market, ratings, and times aired.)

In today’s New York Magazine blog, Chait picks up that WashPo point and runs with it, asking if the supposed buying of the election by SuperPacs wasn’t much ado about nothing.

In Chait’s story, he includes this fascinating chart:

That chart is meant to illustrate the negligible impact of SuperPac spending, I guess. Thing is, I’m not sure that graph shows how Pacs and ad rates are not affecting the race nearly as much as it makes me wonder what in the name of Nelson Rockefeller the Romney campaign is doing, letting itself get outspent like that in a key state like Ohio. That chart may not illustrate the negligible effects of SuperPacs on the race so much as it illustrates a glaring strategic competency gap on the part of Team Romney.

1713

While talking about money, I heard on the news this morning on the way to work that the campaigns (plural, including congress) are on track to spend about $5.8 billion dollars. A few moments ago, I read an article about the Higgs Boson stating that CERN cost $10 billion to build.

Given the two sources of expenditure, I can’t help but be utterly depressed at the vast amounts of money being shuffled away to convince a small percentage of American voters to pick one largely similar rich guy over another based on organized disinformation and smear campaigns, when we could instead be doing things like advancing our understanding of the cause of heinous diseases, the nature of life, or even just fucking feeding people who don’t get enough to eat.

It seems like such a huge fucking waste. :(

1714

CERN!? Pfffft. If Americans don’t elect the right President, it will be the end of the country! We’ll all become socialists! Freedom will end! Shortly thereafter the world will fall into chaos!

1715

I view it as the only conceivable way of making the Koch brothers chip in for an economic stimulus.

1716

Waste? The folks who run hotels, motels, restaurants, etc. in swing states don’t think so. Neither do thousands of folks charged with various campaign-related jobs, those who cut, direct, and do tech work on ad spots, folks who do on-payroll canvassing and polling, etc.

If possible criminals like Sheldon Adelson want to spend tens of millions of their personal fortunes on this election cycle…well, at least those expenditures are acting like a mini-jobs program for certain areas of the country.

1717

It’s only waste if you assume all of the folks that triggercut mentions wouldn’t be doing other more productive things if they weren’t working on the campaigns. That’s certainly possible, but it’s also a hell of a counterfactual to prove.

1718

Those storefronts would all be open, regardless. Thanks to Los Bros. Koch and millions of small-dollar Obama donors, those storefronts are busy.

1719

Do those businesses in swing states account for that money as part of a seasonal business? Like tourist season, but once every 4 years. It must be weird to manage their books.

1720

Or they may be doing what they should be doing – pouring more money into states that Romney will get a better ROI from, electorially.

Obama leads in Ohio by some 4 to 6 points and winning it would net Romney 18 electors. But Romney is much more competitive in Florida (with 29! electors) or North Carolina (15), so it would make sense for him to invest in those states over Ohio.

Now of course that begs the question of whether Obama is over-investing in Ohio or not… but he is in a position to do so. Obama could theoretically simply choose not to contest Florida as much and concentrate on Virginia and North Carolina while doubling down on the “leaning Dem” states like Ohio to “sandbag” his victory. Romney doesn’t have that option – he MUST run the table on all the battleground states like VA, NC, FL, and CO, so he doesn’t have as much leeway to invest in winning over states like Ohio where his disadvantage is statistically significant.