
Household income surged in April despite record unemployment - joeyespo
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/29/21274416/household-income-surge-april-cares-act-coronavirus-stimulus
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bearjaws
It's pretty sad that $600-$900 a week is a massive improvement for most
people.

With state benefits and $1200 its nearly $45k a year, which is quite a bit
more than $15 an hour. Its no wonder people have more money given around 30
million Americans make <$10 an hour. [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2014/11/05/making-more...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2014/11/05/making-more-than-minimum-wage-but-less-than-10-10-an-hour/)
(older source, but I am sure its in the ball park)

I am curious how long until US congress starts blaming anyone who is
unemployed for "being lazy", and stop providing financial assistance, or only
provides the bare minimum $7.25 an hour.

~~~
ac29
For those of us who live in high cost of living areas, its easy to forget just
how cheap most of the US is: the median mortgage payment in the US is
$1100.month (2017 data) [0]. That's 151 minimum wage hours, or about a month
of ~40 hour weeks (before taxes, which are very low at that income level). So,
a household with two minimum wage earners probably would struggle to afford
the median mortgage, but remember half of mortgages are _less_ than that.

This is not me attempting to justify the current minimum wage - I think it
should come up. I just think many on this site live in areas where renting a
small 1 bedroom apartment is more expensive than $1100/month, or even
significantly more than that, much less owning a home.

[0] [https://www.census.gov/programs-
surveys/ahs/data/interactive...](https://www.census.gov/programs-
surveys/ahs/data/interactive/ahstablecreator.html?s_areas=00000&s_year=2017&s_tablename=TABLE14B&s_bygroup1=19&s_bygroup2=1&s_filtergroup1=2&s_filtergroup2=1&s_show=S)

~~~
ethanbond
The price of real estate in an area is set pretty exactly to the level of
productivity (i.e. what kinds of jobs you can hold) in that area.

So yeah, it all “works out” in that it doesn’t matter if the median person is
producing $10 or $15 or $2000 worth of value per hour. The median person will
always be “barely making it” given what they must spend to have access to jobs
in which they can produce that much value. Look at Palo Alto’s consideration
of housing welfare for people earning $150k - $250k/yr.

Inequality grows as more people max out their individual productive potential,
but real estate prices keep rising because the few hyper-productive peoples’
ceilings have not been hit yet.

~~~
ac29
> Palo Alto’s consideration of housing welfare for people earning $150k -
> $250k/yr.

This sounds like an exaggeration, this 2020 article puts "low income" housing
at a household income of less than ~$70k:
[https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/01/17/palo-alto-
boo...](https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/01/17/palo-alto-boosts-
affordable-housing-project-with-105-million-loan)

My experience in looking into this in the past is that there are maybe tens of
units of this sort in development at any given time, orders of magnitude less
than the number of people who would qualify. With wait lists easily exceeding
10 years, for all practical purposes these units dont exist.

~~~
ethanbond
I only remember this from when I was living in Palo Alto:
[https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/22/250k-per-
year-s...](https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/22/250k-per-year-salary-
could-qualify-for-subsidized-housing-under-new-palo-alto-plan/)

Wasn’t able to quickly find what the actual current number is (or if it just
varies by development). But yes, obviously qualifying on even $70k would sound
insane in most of the country. The point is that higher productivity = higher
rent = real lifestyle gains that are nowhere near proportional to real
productivity gains.

~~~
goliatone
In San Francisco, San Mateo, and in Marin households making $117,000 would
actually qualify to live in low-income housing projects

[https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/06/26/hud-117000-low-...](https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/06/26/hud-117000-low-
income-san-mateo-san-francisco-marin/)

------
puranjay
Anecdotally, I run a website for a specific hobby that's monetized by Amazon
affiliate program. I saw holiday season-like traffic and revenues in April
(before Amazon cut the commission rate).

Was thr strangest thing because I had already assumed that my revenue from
Amazon this year would be drastically lower. But so far, I'm up nearly 100%
YoY

~~~
munificent
My father runs a Woodcraft franchise, and the past few months have been
significantly better than average for him. Since people aren't spending much
time and money on activities and dining out, they are investing some of that
in hobbies they can do at home instead.

~~~
Tiksi
To add another data point, I got into hydroponics and indoor gardening since I
was sitting at home all day, and I guess a lot of other people did too.
Everything is sold out everywhere. Seeds, nutrients, even just potting soil is
harder to come by. I tried to order some seed potatoes last week to try a
hydroponic grow of them and almost every supplier is completely sold out. I
found one seller that had 2/100 of their products in stock, but won't ship
until mid-August.

~~~
munificent
Yeah. Another point: my wife fosters kittens for the local animal shelter and
almost all of the shelters are just straight up out of adoptable animals.
Everyone is getting pets now.

------
strict9
> _That’s because of government stimulus benefits, both the $1,200 checks that
> went out to most people and, even more importantly, the $600-a-week increase
> in unemployment insurance benefits_ ... _But the message of this data is
> that, on the whole, it worked._

It sort of worked, but unfortunately the dialog has centered on the talking
point that "people are making more not working than they could by working."

It's temporarily true for a lot of people suddenly out of work that weren't
making a whole lot to begin with.

Now that it's ending soon things are about to get much worse for everyone.

------
thephyber
Note this was reported on May 29, 2020 for data in the April calendar month.

It's likely that a good proportion of households got their one-time $1200
federal check in the April timeframe. I'm more interested to see how much of a
cliff happened after April.

