▪️This incredible leap of logic is only possible if you ignore all context. The median income is only relevant if you have a job! In the Great Depression, unemployment reached nearly 25%, so a good portion of the country had no job to buy a house with. Kind of an important detail.
▪️Because of this, home prices plummeted. One estimate has home prices falling 67% from 1929-32, and hovering there for most of the GD. So if you were lucky enough to have a good job, housing was affordable, but obviously this wasn’t ideal. Housing was “affordable” because…so many couldn’t afford them.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=41283#:~:text=Abstract,most%20of%20the%20Great%20Depression.
▪️In 1932, 273K people lost their homes. The next year, 1,000 homes were being foreclosed on every day. By 1934, nearly half of all mortgages were delinquent. But hey, median pay to home cost was great!
https://www.atlantafed.org/blogs/real-estate-research/2010/11/15/mortgage-relief-in-the-great-depression
https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-and-education-magazines/housing-1929-1941
▪️Also, homes have changed substantially. In the 1930s, homes averaged around 1,000 sq ft. Today, they avg over 2,200 sq ft and come with many more amenities (air conditioning, refrigerator, washer/dryer, etc.) We live in bigger homes with fewer people, a substantial increase in standard of living.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/04/05/the-size-of-a-home-the-year-you-were-born-5/
▪️Today, median personal income is ~$42/yr. So that would equate to a $131K house using the meme’s 32% Great Depression standard. But more relevant, median household income is ~$80k/yr, equating to a $250K home. Guaranteed you’d rather find a home at that price today than the avg house in the 1930s.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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