▪️This meme makes it seem like 60% of Americans are destitute, but that’s not what lies beneath the headline. This comes from an analysis from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), which is an activist group for low and middle income families. Their reason for existence is to be a perennial Debbie Downer on the plight of the middle class, so keep that in mind, although they do make some fair points.
▪️LISEP has a metric they call Minimal Quality of Life Index (MQL) which imo is misleading. I’d call it the decent quality of life index. It’s the income they consider necessary to afford a reasonable standard of living in America, beyond just essentials.
▪️For a couple with 2 kids, the MQL is $120,302, which doesn’t appear to include taxes, so would equate to a salary of ~$130-150K. Now, that’s probably what it takes for a family to have a decent QOL today, but it’s certainly not a poverty line or minimum standard.
▪️For example, this allots $27,875 ($2,322 per month) for transportation. One could certainly eclipse this with a few family airline trips, but this budget should easily provide for 2 decent cars with gas, insurance and maintenance. The MQL also budgets for college savings. This is comfortable middle class territory.
▪️LISEP likes to highlight that the MQL has declined since 2001, but it’s also risen considerably from the lows in 2011-13. So one could spin this to say things are considerably better than a decade ago.
▪️Basically, the MQL got steadily better from 2013 until peaking around 2018-19. Then there was a downturn in 2022-23, where the data ends. This was during the high inflation in the early-to mid part of the Biden years so not surprising. However, inflation moderated in the last Biden year and through Trump’s first months so it’s likely the MQL has leveled or reversed trend since.
▪️This headline should read, “A majority of Americans unable to afford a comfortable middle class lifestyle.” Which has always been the case here, and everywhere else in the world.
Link to the MQL, graphs in comments:
https://www.lisep.org/mql
It’s funny to see the left use the same conspiratorial rhetoric as the right did a year ago regarding the jobs numbers being downwardly revised. So many on the right, who knew nothing of how the jobs numbers are calculated or why they revise them, were convinced the downward revisions were a conspiracy to help Biden win.
If people want to have a debate about the birth death model or the survey methods, ok, but that’s not what’s happening here. Most people are under the delusion that the BLS report is the govt reporting every job created and lost, and are thus easily swayed it’s rigged when it suits their political ends.
This is almost laughingly misleading, as it leaves out everything before the letter.
▪️After being repeatedly lampooned by the Smothers Brothers over Vietnam, Johnson finally had enough. One night at 3 am he called the head of CBS William Paley, demanding that he “get those bastards off my back.”
▪️Paley then asked the heads of CBS entertainment to get them to back off of LBJ. However, instead of backing off the Smothers Brothers doubled down, booking a folk musician performing “Waist Deep,” an anti-war song about a soldier being stuck in the mud while “the big fool says to push on,” clearly a dig at LBJ.
▪️At the last minute, CBS cut the song from the pre-taped show to the outrage of the Smothers. They continued to push the boundaries off and on for the rest of his presidency, with CBS sometimes cutting segments that they thought went too far. Basically, it was a soft form of censorship.
▪️It wasn’t until Johnson made his surprise announcement not to run in 1968 ...
