
America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People - rbanffy
http://evonomics.com/america-regressing-developing-nation-people/
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forapurpose
The solutions to this problem, to a significant degree, were embodied in the
'Land of Opportunity' and the 'American Dream', very popular identities for
the country. The idea was that 'only in America' did poor immigrants and
natives have the opportunity to accomplish great things, and was a poor person
seen as just as important and deserving as a wealthy one (an outgrowth of the
rejection of aristocracy and the foundation of universal human rights - 'all
men are created equal', 'liberty and justice for all').

Now it's popular (though not universal) to say immigrants are unwelcome; to
cut education, health care, and other programs necessary for opportunity; and
more and more power is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. Rather than
encouraged and supported in the ambition of the 'American Dream', you now hear
non-wealthy people encouraged to stay within their class - don't go to
college; don't dream big; learn to be a plumber.

When is the last time you heard the 'Land of Opportunity' or 'American Dream'
mentioned?

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lamarpye
I think "American Dream" is a micro-aggression now

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8bitsrule
In my view, at the present time, housing costs are the greatest burden for
that 80%. The problem here is predation. The solution is small, sturdy, low-
cost homes (common after WW2, don't mean trailers) with no-interest payments
limited to 25-30% of net income. For a $20K income that's $5000 a year. For a
$30,000 home, six years.

$30B would buy a million of these. Build a few less jets.

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StillBored
The problem is that "investors" would swoop in and buy said houses for the
30k, and rent it out for $700 a month. The first round wouldn't be so bad, but
every-time anything came up for sale it would get bid up until the rent is
astronomical in relation to the base materials cost.

In order for this to work you have to build enough oversupply that anyone at
any time who wanted a 30k house could get one (and wouldn't have to drive two
hours out of town). To do this you probably need to build huge condo blocks
like you find in Hong Kong, or similar cities and those buildings aren't
inexpensive. Possible, but I don't see it being something that happens without
strong government involvement. Which itself tends to be a problem unless you
happen to luck out with the proverbial benevolent dictator.

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bgorman
The reason we don't have mass high rise construction everywhere in high cost
of living cities is due to goverment regulations. In Seattle you cannot build
above four stories for much of the city. San Francisco has similarly
restrictive measures. The problem is usually incumbent property owners want to
preserve the "character" of their neighborhood and protect their investment.

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himom
Barking up the wrong tree. Nothing to do with regulations except as a side
proxy tool of powerful NIMFOBY homeowners’ interests whom want their scenic
views and low inventory to keep their property values high.

Regulations aren’t automatically good or bad, consider each as a possible
multi-edged sword. Banning leaded gas in cars was mostly good.

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lambdasquirrel
You know, I wonder why we can't solve this problem more creatively. And by
creatively, I mean with some common sense.

We have no shortage of problems here. Some of these problems include crumbling
infrastructure and a lack of affordable housing.

It's often suggested in Hacker News that 1. college education is too expensive
and 2. college education isn't worth it. But we also forget that college
education isn't just for the individual, but for society's benefit.

-Bill Clinton- JFK introduced the peace corps. Why don't we have a round two of that? In exchange for working in the corp, you can get a government-funded college education, in a state school if you do okay on some tests, and with an additional stipend to get into whatever you get into if you do better. We could let college admissions do some part of that lifting.

I don't know. Is this too obvious? Instead of people fighting pointless wars
overseas, we can instead have them (re-)build their own country, literally. In
California alone we supposedly have 130bn in infrastructure updates.

edit: thanks dragonwriter for the correction.

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dragonwriter
> Bill Clinton introduced the peace corps.

No, that was JFK. Bill Clinton introduced AmeriCorps, which is a completely
different thing.

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lamarpye
We should solve this problem by importing more people from developing nations.
They can help teach the natives how to thrive in this kind of environment.

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nealdt
I would certainly say that we are seeing similar trends in the UK regarding
the description of the two worlds. It's almost going back to feudalism.

The drawbridge is being drawn up and those not already within the castle over
the next few years might never enter again. Very concerning.

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kristianp
The book this article describes: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vanishing-
middle-class](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vanishing-middle-class)

