Some humor and math for perspective: What it takes to survive in modern america.

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I was over reading zerohedge as I sometimes do, and came across a comment talking about the trades, and how you could make $40-50k in one.

Lets go over some math.

Assuming your average distance to work is 20 miles one way, and you get on average 20 miles to the gallon. Suppose gas is an average of $4.19 a gallon. Thats about $8.40 to get to work and back, per day doesn't include waiting in traffic, or going anywhere else. So lets round it to an even $9 a day. Thats assuming you don't use a truck, or diesel, for work.

Lets say people drive 6 days a week. 312.84 days a year of driving, * 9 =

So thats $2,815.56 in fuel. Call it an even $2815.

$1200 in insurance per year.

80 in food, per person, per week. 4 person household = $320 in groceries. 16,640 for 52 weeks.

Lets say you scrimp a ton, and only have three household members, keeping your food costs at a minimum using gardening (factoring in not everyone lives in rural areas, some live in suburbs with little land, or ordinances that interfere). Lets say your food costs per week are $200, or about $66 a person per week. Thats $10,400 a year in food, thats a third of your income before taxes.

probably 10% in taxes, another 6-8% in local, state, benefits that dont meaningfully cover any expenses without a huge co-pay, pensions and social security that will never pay out. Taxes on purchases. Taxes on fuel. Taxes on property.

But lets say, to be generous though, you pay 15% out of your check total, for all of these taxes and fees.

40 hours a week, 37 working weeks in a year, equals 1,480 hours.

Lets say you do a little overtime every month, and round it out to 1500 hours.

Gross, you make $33,000 a year.

33000-15% = 28,050

28,050 - 1200 - 10400 - 2815 = 13,635

Now thats NOT including

emergencies like car breakdown or your roof collapsing
home insurance
vehicle maintenance
home maintenance
better (and more expensive) diet
maintenance health checkups (dental, vision, cancer screening, etc).
rent or property taxes.
education for you or your family
prior debts
savings (which are considered 'responsible' despite negative real yields)
investments (which are also considered 'responsible' despite negative real yields)

Rent and property taxes are the big ones here. And typically two months rent pay property taxes for an entire year on a typical home.

If rent is $600 a month (fat fucking chance), thats one six-month tax payment on a typical owner-occupied home.

Instead, with the majority of people being renters, and home ownership out of reach because of fedbucks wallstreet pigs feeding at the corporate-welfare central-banker trough we get rents that are $800 minimum on average, for a shoe box, or more like $1500 in a middle-income state like virginia, with enough space to even consider raising a family. But going with a nice average of $1200, even for an 'efficiency' apartment, you're looking at $14,400 a year.

But thats ok, because you have two incomes.

You do have two incomes don't you?

But of course you do. Naturally, your wife makes 'good' money like you do, say 33-35k pre-tax. But she has an education because women dont make it in the trades, and consequently, has a huge student debt payment of $300 (which was 'only' $200-$299 in 2019, but now because 2022-2023 is essentially not just a new decade, but an entirely new 'financial century', is more like $300 minimum), pays 3,600 a year, which is actually more like $4500 a year because her debt is compound interest and undischargable by bankruptcy. But to be fair, lets just say she pays $4000 a year.

Combine you have lets say roughly twice the original remaining amount of 13,635 = 27,270.

Minus her $4000 = 23,270

Now lets figure rather than owning your own home, you have a mortgage OR rent. If you own your own home, lets assume you're one of them 'tiny-homes-are-totally-not-trailers' types 'living off the land', in a tornado-hazard that doesn't have a storm cellar on a shitty splinter of a 2-5 acre lot. So we'll disregard that sliver of the population for now.

$23,270, how far does it take you.

Well lets figure that out.

The median mortgage payment in 2019 was $1200, while the average rental payment now is $1900. Best data I had available with a 2 minute google search.

Lets split the difference at $1500, and call any extra 'inflation', lumping in the cost of mowing grass and the occasional plumber call. This is wildly underestimating some things, but I digress.

$18,000 a year in mortgage or rent and property maintenance/insurance/taxes/etc.

That leaves our hypothetical couple with 0-1 kids, with just $5,270 to manage/save/invest/put away for an emergency, for an entire year.

Think on that.

Again we're talking low-averages and ballpark here--that is what 'works' for a big broad swath of america, not joe-buttfucks-nyc-2-minutes-of-thrift-analysts-expert-opinion about how hipsters need to stop buying $5 lattes once or twice a week to 'cope with inflation and employment losses due to "automation" ' while inflation rages at 10+% month-over-month and all our jobs are outsourced to mexico, india, and china. Or worse 'downsourced': Thats where the ceo gets a golden parachute or bonus, while firing people or cutting hours "Creating more (part time) jobs!" while allocating more work at the same, or lower pay, with less time to complete it--to everyone who still remains employed.

And as a consequence, to perform, managers become grouchier, or more whip-enthusiastic, pushing more productivity out of employees, like an downward-sloped economy, only where the confetti money is replaced with units of stress and verbal abuse, to under-enthused employees already tapped out on economic pressure. That is why we call it downsourcing: Because shit rolls DOWN HILL, and the people on the bottom are expected to swallow it and make up for it.

So you end up with assholes, screamed at by their bosses, or gaslit about how "well jodie in unit 3 can do all this extra hours/work, I dont see why you can't." Well Karen, its because jodie is sitting in an air conditioned office, typing word documents all day, delivering coffee, and giving blowjobs to a bunch of midlevel executives who just voted themselves $10k, 20k, 50k, bonuses. While i'm out here shoveling shit against the coalface of madness in 90 degree weather for a pension that the "family" at smilingfacesRUs inc promised but have no intention of delivering, on a 401k that will be stolen by wallstreet bail-ins or massive tax increases in the future, while pulling 10-20 hours overtime.

Or disinterested stockboys who have managers that go for smoke breaks literally every 15 minutes, but put the stockers and cashiers on the spot for not 'carrying their weight' while those same managers only complete their own jobs because they ignore that managers are supposed to serve as second cashier/stocker/whatever.

And all these short-shift, shafted workers, stressed out, drive in traffic, honking their horns at redlights that are 5-10 seconds too long today, even though they didn't seem that long in 2012, 2016, or even 2018. And they don't know why they're angry at the light, not knowing some developer that built the nearby circle K gas station, paid the city fat cash to increase the light length time by 10%, increasing gas sales. All the drivers know is they're angry. And its pure graft, and so one asshole goes to the next, passing the buck, passing the stress, cutting corners to make up for a shrinking economy, everyone, everywhere, cutting, cutting, cutting corners, and shortening the stick, till some greasy fuck experiences a blow up in line at fucking burger king, some poor sod schlepping it under a hot stove to pay for his $900 one bedroom flop apartment, gets the short end of someones temper. Maybe the soda machine was out. Maybe the whopper they got was cold. Maybe the line was exactly 1.25 people too long because some coked-up numbers-ghoul in corporate misplaced a digit while calculating thorough-put for idealized procedure times calculated from industrial test kitchens, because no one gives a shit about how the numbers being churned out of corporate dark pool algols connect to reality anymore, as long as it lets executives smooth the bumps out on their way to thailand to fuck more 16yo strippers or getting DUI levels of drunk while vehicularly-murdering orphans because they can always pay off a judge in the new, modern, two-tiered justice system of america.

This is the stress economy, where everything has been atomized, butchered, analyzed to pieces, overbaked, prototyped, released before completion, so the steel in your kids heart-stent, made in china, can fail at the same time the steel in highrise towers fails, and that way the insurance adjusters can claim "act of god" instead of medical malpractice, and shave zero point three fucking percentage points of a basis point, off their over-all costs. And if anyone gets pissed off and pulls a michael douglass and falls down, hey its just one more number that we've calculated and weighed in our risk-calculations of the stress economy. The engine of progress, and modern society, is powered by people exploding, as long, like gasoline in an actual engine, the explosions are limited, controlled, and one at a time. An entire society burning up, like oil-slicked ducklings killed by exxon, thrown, one at a time, onto a pyre to moloch, to please some malevolent aztec-like economic spirit. And as long as too many people don't explode all at once, the engine keeps on running.

The shrinking world, like a collar too tight, has strangled off the sanity and blood to the brains of a billion plus people. And like people being strangled, as it gets tighter, their faces turn redder, their desperation and anger grows more palpable. Until it seems all the world is a swelter-house of people sitting in traffic, both physically, and mentally, angry at the world for being awful. And this toxic stew of decadent fucks sitting on the top telling the poor to blame the middle class, and the middle class quietly realizing it is being blamed for something it had no hand in, is slowly morphing into a situation where everyone, both rich wallstreet analysts "suffering just like the rest of you! Why I might have to give up my summer home!" and even the poor-and-already-put-out meth-addled tattoo'd service workers, to start to wonder at the growing volume of the surrounding silence, till the silence deafens them with a conclusion they are afraid even to think:

Somethings going to give.

And when the dam breaks, when the tower of shit that is the modern financial system collapses, like babel, the one we've built to the moon--when it collapses, the debris of that hyperinflationary collapse will slam into the earth like a giant meteor, causing tidal waves of murderous riots, the fires from which, will be measured not in days, but in seasons and casualties. The stress economy, the ever shrinking world, will have become a pyre.

The scale will make 'The purge' look like comedy by comparison. Only a world war, or DC or wallstreet being mercifully nuked into ashes, could wake people up from the hothouse stupor that has descended over the nation. And in the grim dark specter of the post-nuclear apocalypse, we'll wake to a new dawn, and reports that some tech company came out with the next hot ithink or app, and the NASDAQ ROCKETED HIGHER BY 7.44%!

When people lose everything, they lose it.

These days, with the public the way it is, you could almost hear a pin drop, its so quiet.

The silence speaks volumes.

I was over reading zerohedge as I sometimes do, and came across a comment talking about the trades, and how you could make $40-50k in one. Lets go over some math. Assuming your average distance to work is 20 miles one way, and you get on average 20 miles to the gallon. Suppose gas is an average of $4.19 a gallon. Thats about $8.40 to get to work and back, per day doesn't include waiting in traffic, or going anywhere else. So lets round it to an even $9 a day. Thats assuming you don't use a truck, or diesel, for work. Lets say people drive 6 days a week. 312.84 days a year of driving, * 9 = So thats $2,815.56 in fuel. Call it an even $2815. $1200 in insurance per year. 80 in food, per person, per week. 4 person household = $320 in groceries. 16,640 for 52 weeks. Lets say you scrimp a ton, and only have three household members, keeping your food costs at a minimum using gardening (factoring in not everyone lives in rural areas, some live in suburbs with little land, or ordinances that interfere). Lets say your food costs per week are $200, or about $66 a person per week. Thats $10,400 a year in food, thats a third of your income before taxes. probably 10% in taxes, another 6-8% in local, state, benefits that dont meaningfully cover any expenses without a huge co-pay, pensions and social security that will never pay out. Taxes on purchases. Taxes on fuel. Taxes on property. But lets say, to be generous though, you pay 15% out of your check total, for all of these taxes and fees. 40 hours a week, 37 working weeks in a year, equals 1,480 hours. Lets say you do a little overtime every month, and round it out to 1500 hours. Gross, you make $33,000 a year. 33000-15% = 28,050 28,050 - 1200 - 10400 - 2815 = 13,635 Now thats NOT including 1. emergencies like car breakdown or your roof collapsing 2. home insurance 3. vehicle maintenance 4. home maintenance 5. better (and more expensive) diet 6. maintenance health checkups (dental, vision, cancer screening, etc). 7. rent or property taxes. 8. education for you or your family 9. prior debts 10. savings (which are considered 'responsible' despite negative real yields) 11. investments (which are also considered 'responsible' despite negative real yields) Rent and property taxes are the big ones here. And typically two months rent pay property taxes for an entire year on a typical home. If rent is $600 a month (fat fucking chance), thats one six-month tax payment on a typical owner-occupied home. Instead, with the majority of people being renters, and home ownership out of reach because of fedbucks wallstreet pigs feeding at the corporate-welfare central-banker trough we get rents that are $800 minimum on average, for a shoe box, or more like $1500 in a middle-income state like virginia, with enough space to even consider raising a family. But going with a nice average of $1200, even for an 'efficiency' apartment, you're looking at $14,400 a year. But thats ok, because you have two incomes. You do have two incomes don't you? But of course you do. Naturally, your wife makes 'good' money like you do, say 33-35k pre-tax. But she has an education because *women dont make it in the trades*, and consequently, has a huge student debt payment of $300 (which was 'only' $200-$299 in 2019, but now because 2022-2023 is essentially not just a new decade, but an entirely new 'financial century', is more like $300 minimum), pays 3,600 a year, which is actually more like $4500 a year because her debt is compound interest and undischargable by bankruptcy. But to be fair, lets just say she pays $4000 a year. Combine you have lets say roughly twice the original remaining amount of 13,635 = 27,270. Minus her $4000 = 23,270 Now lets figure rather than owning your own home, you have a mortgage OR rent. If you own your own home, lets assume you're one of them 'tiny-homes-are-totally-not-trailers' types 'living off the land', in a tornado-hazard that doesn't have a storm cellar on a shitty splinter of a 2-5 acre lot. So we'll disregard that sliver of the population for now. $23,270, how far does it take you. Well lets figure that out. The median mortgage payment *in 2019* was $1200, while the average rental payment *now* is $1900. Best data I had available with a 2 minute google search. Lets split the difference at $1500, and call any extra 'inflation', lumping in the cost of mowing grass and the occasional plumber call. This is wildly underestimating some things, but I digress. $18,000 a year in mortgage or rent and property maintenance/insurance/taxes/etc. That leaves our hypothetical couple with 0-1 kids, with just $5,270 to manage/save/invest/put away for an emergency, for an entire year. Think on that. Again we're talking low-averages and ballpark here--that is what 'works' for a big broad swath of america, not joe-buttfucks-nyc-2-minutes-of-thrift-analysts-expert-opinion about how hipsters need to stop buying $5 lattes once or twice a week to 'cope with inflation and employment losses due to "automation" ' while inflation rages at 10+% month-over-month and all our jobs are outsourced to mexico, india, and china. Or worse 'downsourced': Thats where the ceo gets a golden parachute or bonus, while firing people or cutting hours "Creating more (part time) jobs!" while allocating *more work* at the same, or lower pay, with less time to complete it--to everyone who still remains employed. And as a consequence, to perform, managers become grouchier, or more whip-enthusiastic, pushing more productivity out of employees, like an downward-sloped economy, only where the confetti money is replaced with units of stress and verbal abuse, to under-enthused employees already tapped out on economic pressure. That is why we call it downsourcing: Because shit rolls DOWN HILL, and the people on the bottom are expected to swallow it and make up for it. So you end up with assholes, screamed at by their bosses, or gaslit about how "well jodie in unit 3 can do all this extra hours/work, I dont see why you can't." Well Karen, its because jodie is sitting in an air conditioned office, typing word documents all day, delivering coffee, and giving blowjobs to a bunch of midlevel executives who just voted themselves $10k, 20k, 50k, bonuses. While i'm out here shoveling shit against the coalface of madness in 90 degree weather for a pension that the "family" at smilingfacesRUs inc promised but have no intention of delivering, on a 401k that will be stolen by wallstreet bail-ins or massive tax increases in the future, while pulling 10-20 hours overtime. Or disinterested stockboys who have managers that go for smoke breaks literally every 15 minutes, but put the stockers and cashiers on the spot for not 'carrying their weight' while those same managers only complete their own jobs because they ignore that managers are supposed to serve as second cashier/stocker/whatever. And all these short-shift, shafted workers, stressed out, drive in traffic, honking their horns at redlights that are 5-10 seconds too long today, even though they didn't seem that long in 2012, 2016, or even 2018. And they don't know why they're angry at the light, not knowing some developer that built the nearby circle K gas station, paid the city fat cash to increase the light length time by 10%, increasing gas sales. All the drivers know is they're angry. And its pure graft, and so one asshole goes to the next, passing the buck, passing the stress, cutting corners to make up for a shrinking economy, everyone, everywhere, cutting, cutting, cutting corners, and shortening the stick, till some greasy fuck experiences a blow up in line at fucking burger king, some poor sod schlepping it under a hot stove to pay for his $900 one bedroom flop apartment, gets the short end of someones temper. Maybe the soda machine was out. Maybe the whopper they got was cold. Maybe the line was exactly 1.25 people too long because some coked-up numbers-ghoul in corporate misplaced a digit while calculating thorough-put for *idealized* procedure times calculated from *industrial test kitchens*, because no one gives a shit about how the numbers being churned out of corporate dark pool algols connect to reality anymore, as long as it lets executives smooth the bumps out on their way to thailand to fuck more 16yo strippers or getting DUI levels of drunk while vehicularly-murdering orphans because they can always pay off a judge in the new, modern, two-tiered justice system of america. This is the stress economy, where everything has been atomized, butchered, analyzed to pieces, overbaked, prototyped, released before completion, so the steel in your kids heart-stent, made in china, can fail at the same time the steel in highrise towers fails, and that way the insurance adjusters can claim "act of god" instead of medical malpractice, and shave zero point three fucking percentage points *of* a basis point, off their over-all costs. And if anyone gets pissed off and pulls a michael douglass and falls down, hey its just one more number that we've calculated and weighed in our risk-calculations of the stress economy. The engine of progress, and modern society, is powered by people exploding, as long, like gasoline in an actual engine, the explosions are *limited*, controlled, and one at a time. An entire society burning up, like oil-slicked ducklings killed by exxon, thrown, one at a time, onto a pyre to moloch, to please some malevolent aztec-like economic spirit. And as long as too many people don't explode all at once, the engine keeps on running. The shrinking world, like a collar too tight, has strangled off the sanity and blood to the brains of a billion plus people. And like people being strangled, as it gets tighter, their faces turn redder, their desperation and anger grows more palpable. Until it seems all the world is a swelter-house of people sitting in traffic, both physically, and mentally, angry at the world for being awful. And this toxic stew of decadent fucks sitting on the top telling the poor to blame the middle class, and the middle class quietly realizing it is being blamed for something it had no hand in, is slowly morphing into a situation where everyone, both rich wallstreet analysts "suffering just like the rest of you! Why I might have to give up my summer home!" and even the poor-and-already-put-out meth-addled tattoo'd service workers, to start to wonder at the growing volume of the surrounding silence, till the silence deafens them with a conclusion they are afraid even to *think*: Somethings going to give. And when the dam breaks, when the tower of shit that is the modern financial system collapses, like babel, the one we've built to the moon--when it collapses, the debris of that hyperinflationary collapse will slam into the earth like a *giant meteor*, causing tidal waves of murderous riots, the fires from which, will be measured not in days, but in seasons and casualties. The stress economy, the ever shrinking world, will have become a pyre. The scale will make 'The purge' look like comedy by comparison. Only a world war, or DC or wallstreet being mercifully nuked into ashes, could wake people up from the hothouse stupor that has descended over the nation. And in the grim dark specter of the post-nuclear apocalypse, we'll wake to a new dawn, and reports that some tech company came out with the next hot ithink or app, and the NASDAQ ROCKETED HIGHER BY 7.44%! When people lose everything, they lose it. These days, with the public the way it is, you could almost hear a pin drop, its so quiet. The silence speaks volumes.

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