> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Dan Minette
[snip]
> By that analogy, the folks in the bottom 20% should be losing
> ground. But,
> in the nation as a whole, they have gained a very good amount of ground in
> the last 6 years. It won't happen, but if things kept on
> improving the way
> they had over the span 93-00 until, say, 2014, then we would virtually
> eliminate poverty in the US. From the numbers you gave, the
> local inflation
> rate in your area was much higher, so the inflation adjusted increase for
> the
> bottom 20% was only 1%, not 15%. That's not good, but its not going
> backwards.
> It won't happen, but if things kept on
> improving the way
> they had over the span 93-00 until, say, 2014, then we would virtually
> eliminate poverty in the US. From the numbers you gave, the
> local inflation
> rate in your area was much higher, so the inflation adjusted increase for
> the
> bottom 20% was only 1%, not 15%. That's not good, but its not going
> backwards.
Where is this coming from? It is a fact that people in the lowest income
ranges in SAnta Clara County are significantly worse off now than they were
in 1995. And I don't understand why anyone would try to prove that wrong
with the kind of arguments you are making.
The numbers I cited indicate the income available to a representative
four-person household over time. Over the same time period, the cost of
living rose 20 percent. The math is simple -- when income stays the same
and the cost of living goes up, the standard of living falls.
In Silicon Valley, this means, for example, that many, many school teachers
who used to be able to afford to live on their salaries no longer can. I
know this from both the statistics and what we've seen happen at my wife's
school.
For reasons that are not the least bit clear to me, you seem to believe that
the numbers I cited prove that the poor here are no worse off, which
demonstrates, in my mind, an insensitivity to the poor, at the least. And
some kind of refusal to believe that in the midst of a technology boom here,
a lot of people became worse off.
> But, why can't they make a decision to get out of such a stupid location?
> In Texas, teachers can afford to live in the neighborhoods they teach in.
> We have friends who are teachers who live in our neighborhood, which has a
> premium on housing prices because of private zoning. There are
> 2200 sq. ft.
> houses available with mortgage payments of around $600/month.
They cannot afford housing here or anywhere near here. They used to be able
to. But the cost of living rose faster than their incomes. You and Gautam
can explain to them that the cost of living *is* inflation, but that won't
change the fact that they can't afford what they used to be able to afford.
> I guess the point is that people don't have to live in the Bay area. Its
> certainly pretty, a _lot_ prettier than Houston. Indeed, I think
> this area
> is ugly. But, as fate had it, when I first looked for work, it was during
> the recession of 81-82, and it was an oil service firm that offered me a
> job.
If I'm hearing you right, you're saying that it is okay for the top 20
percent income-makers to gain all the benefit of the wealth created in this
area, even as much of the rest of the community is seeing their standard of
living decrease? I see something terribly wrong when teachers are compelled
to leave the area because they can't afford to live here on their salary, or
have to commute four to six hours a day from affordable housing.
Yes, people don't have to live here. But for many, their families are here,
their roots are here and anyone who is at the 20th percentile here has a job
here, too. How cruel and elitist it seems to suggest that they should just
leave.
> But, isn't the problem solved by companies moving their operations to west
> of Madison Wisconsin, Austin Texas, Houston Texas, Minneapolis MN, etc.?
> where the cost of living is a whole lot more reasonable.
Shall we move the schools? The dry cleaners? The fast-food restaurants?
The police and fire departments? The hospitals? The libraries? Most of
the employees in each of those have seen their standard of living decline.
Silicon Valley isn't all technology companies, but somehow we have managed
to create an economy where the increase in wealth has been channeled almost
entirely to people who make more than $250,000 a year. What kind of place
would this be if the low-paying businesses and institutions left?
> Actually, it kinda would. If illegal immigrants came to the
> country, worked
> at bottom level jobs, and then be became legal...and moved up the
> ladder to
> higher paying jobs, to be replaced by new dirt poor immigrants...then that
> would be a success story. The problem is that the measures of
> mobility that
> I've seen indicate that its not that high.
Trickle-down economics lives... How do these people move *up* the economic
ladder when their income is failing to keep up with a rising cost of living?
They're moving down, not up. Not only is none of the wealth being created
here reaching them, they are becoming less wealthy. If you're not
college-educated, but you have children, you're pretty much trapped by fact
that child care, in particular, costs more than you could possibly earn. If
you're poor enough and lucky enough to get through the waiting list, the
state will pay for child care if you're in school. But you still have to
pay rent, which is an even longer waiting list. Around here, if you don't
have a college degree and you do have children, it is nearly impossible to
escape poverty or near-poverty. And you may not even be able to afford to
move away. Joint Venture Silicon Valley exists in part to try to do
something about that kind of trap. Let me give you a very personal example.
The standard of living for low-income households in Silicon Valley has been
dropping since 1993. Nothing I've read here begins to convince me that
isn't true. And I'll be very hard to convince, since I've seen it happen,
first-hand. The only thing I didn't know until the other day was just how
deep the problem is. You guys can continue to argue about statistics if you
like.
Nick
