Co$tly living in the United $tate$

I recently learned from this forum that the life of the American citizen was a bit more expensive than in the 1990s, 1980s and 1970s. I do not know if this has a relationship with the ruling Democratic Party for so long. But I saw that Donald Trump wanted to change this critical situation and facilitate the life of the American middle class.

Do you who live in America could confirm this? Has life in the United States become more tense in the last ten years, or is it myth?

Hopefully things will go back to the 1980s. A young middle-class at the age of 16 can buy his muscle car(Mustang or Camaro). Even if it is the starting version(V6). But at least a zero kilometers model and not a used model of any store! Less taxes and more America! Please!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urHCYBOdNGg

The middle class is being wiped away thanks to income inequality.

The cost of living has gone up pretty much everywhere not just the US.

The cost of living has gone up but so has the income, so compared to other places in the western world America is pretty cheap to live in.

So not sure what you are on about.

Blame companies like google for destroying the housing market in San Fran.

Taxes in the US are rough. My wife and I paid roughly 18k in taxes each last year and we still owed 2 grand during tax time.

While wages have not.

I pay 17k in taxes just myself alone in Sweden, I think you guys are fine.

@plageus900: I thought you guys each made roughly 85 grand a year, plus some really nice benefits like fully paid healthcare.

@mattbbpl: That's correct. Our income barely pushes us into a higher tax bracket. It would almost be more beneficial to make slightly less (gross income).

@plageus900: "It would almost be more beneficial to make slightly less (gross income)."

Nah, that's not how marginal tax brackets work. If the tax brackets are 10 percent and 20 percent broken at the 100 k mark and you make $100,001, then $100,000 is taxed at 10 percent and $1 is taxed at 20 percent. Your taxed amount would be $10,000 if you made 100,000 and $10,000.20 if you made that $100,001 pushing you into the higher bracket.

You guys are probably looking at a compensation package of something like 180k or 190k using a conservative estimate. Based on the figures above, that's something like 12 percent, right?

@mattbbpl: Yes roughly 185k for total compensation. Last year we received a small refund and this year we ended up owing money; and that's after itemizing things like mortgage, childcare, student loans, etc. It's possible we did our taxes incorrectly.

To be fair who in the right mind would ever want to live in San Francisco or even in Calfornia? unless you are a liberal or want to get work in the entertainment industry, it´s pretty much hell on earth.

A 16-yr old buy a brand new pony car back in the 80's? Yeah, right. I'm thinking more of say, a 55 hp Nissan Pulsar NX might be more like it.

Add insurance which would be astronomical for a 16-yr old. Also, during the 80's, memories of the 70's energy crisis was still fresh in people's minds. Most cars were 4-bangers or 4-banger turbos in a bid to save gas. Some were V6 turbos like the GNX. But, I doubt a 16-year old would have one. There were some V8s like the Monte Carlo. But, the vast majority of V8s were used holdouts from the 70's. They weren't cool then, again because of the preceding decade's energy crisis.

The late 80's is where I first saw the V8 pony cars bouncing back. I thought about buying a V8. But, I liked the then new high-tech Diamond Star turbos which defined my car ownership during the 90's.

Anyway, kids back in the 80's were more likely to be driving a Ford Escort, Ford Tempo, a Dodge K-car, and other wallflowers.

Anyway, my car for most of the mid-late 80's was a Nissan Pulsar NX. ;)

Easy car to maintain. I did my own engine maintenance, brake pads, ball-bearing replacement, etc.

The only bad part is freeway driving. On a steep climb, it's embarrassing when 18-wheelers can actually keep up with me.

Cost of living goes up everywhere every year.

Ummmm...yeah, nope:

Oh yeah, what a hellhole. You conservatives could literally be living in heaven and you'd say it's hell so long as a liberal lived next door. Talk about snowflakes.

Anyway, to the original question, it depends a lot on the area you live in but in general, yes, it is super expensive to live in America. Taxes really don't play much of a role in that at all, seeing as how the top rates were at 70+ percent from the fifties through the seventies and half that during the nineties and aughts. If your hypothesis is that taxes and cost of living are linked and cost of living has gone up since the seventies then lower taxes are to blame, not higher ones. This isn't to even get into the fact that the top bracket impacts a small fraction of the U.S. population, it's really the lower to middle brackets that affect the majority of Americans and they have remained pretty stable over the years.

There are two things that really drive the cost of living in America up: unaffordable housing, and lack of wage growth. Part of this is due to bad policymaking, housing policies more often restrict the supply of housing rather than expand it. Part of it is due to downright greed. The last time there was a supply glut rent prices went up anyway, so much for supply and demand. Landlords simply don't have much incentive to lower rent prices even when market logic says they should. The wage part, I think that's pretty much self-explanatory at this point. I could point to graphs that show an inverse relationship between productivity gains and worker pay, I could point to graphs that show executive pay increasing exponentially while worker pay barely increases at all, I could point to cases like Toys R Us paying out 16 million dollars in bonuses to executives who oversaw its downfall. At this point, if you think there isn't a wage issue in this country you've got your head in the sand. Combine that with sky-high rents and you have people spending well over 60% of their paychecks on rent, take out utilities, transportation costs, and necessities like food and their take-home is minuscule. Those people most likely don't even make it into a bracket where they're paying taxes, but they're still struggling to get by.