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if you are not succeeding than no you haven't found a way . you may be trying or hoping but nope, if that is your status you still have not found a way then ,.
We have brought in a huge army of skilled technical people. They will come from India and other countries and are willing to work cheap. Because the process is so easy, Americans find it undesirable to enter many of these fields. It is a well known story. Americans need to work cheap or face being bumped out of jobs. The jobs are taken over by aliens working cheap or even more often the jobs go overseas.
After Sputnik, Congress looked at the sad state of technical and scientific education in the US and started to make changes. Those initiatives have long since been forgotten. It takes a great many years to be at the forefront of scientific and technical knowledge. In the sciences that can mean 4 years of college, 4-5 of graduate school, and another couple of years working as a post doc. All of those years are life in poverty. At that point only the luckiest and the best make it to a secure or even semi-secure job.
Yep. But this kind of contradicts your prior statement that only the bottom half will struggle.
I know IT people who were making 125k in the Bay Area in 1995 in senior level individual contributor positions. 23 years later, even just adjusted for inflation, that salary should be close to 200k. That hasn’t happened due to outsourcing and h1bs.
There are fewer and fewer opportunities for college educated people to get ahead, and more and more college educated people to compete with.
It amazes me how successful people won’t admit there was some element of luck to their success. Hell, being born to college educated parents is the biggest lucky break you get get.
Nope. Wages are down for the bottom 99%, not just the bottom 50%. This obviously includes Americans of various skill levels including the highly skilled.
And its self reinforcing. If those in the 75th percentile have no disposable income, that means every industry that services Americans with disposable income will suffer.
The highly skilled are getting killed almost as bad as the unskilled in this economy.
Fewer and fewer people have the opportunity to succeed.
I’m 55 and have had more success than I ever could ever have dreamed of. It wasn’t all luck - I was valedictorian of my high school class, graduated from an elite school, found a good career.
But there’s no way in hell the path I took in the 80’s would be available to me today. There’s more luck needed today than in the past. Things change so quickly, people can’t just sit in a job for 30 years and collect a pension at 55. Many more good decisions are needed to survive. I’m not sure why my generation has such a hard time admitting this.
then you don't have medicare and a supplement because there are no supplements that cover it . that sounds like an advantage plan .which plan ? because even advantage plans usually have it on drug coverage
I have a medicare supplement and have no deductibles and no co-pays for medicare covered services and no prescription drug 'gap'.
these special gov't plans are not the same as standard lettered medigap supplement plans offered to the public .there are no standard public medigap supplements that cover the doughnut hole . even the highest level fully comprehensive F-PLAN does not cover it
This type of comment really bothers me. You see these types of general statements all over this forum.
Many of us are 'succeeding' but we are still doing horribly. What is 'succeeding'? IMO even those in the 70th or 80th percentile of income will be broke in this economy. This is a systemic problem that affects everyone and everything.
There are many people doing extremely well. The gap between the poor (even the middle class) and those at the top is getting wider and wider.
these special gov't plans are not the same as standard lettered medigap supplement plans offered to the public .there are no standard public medigap supplements that cover the doughnut hole . even the highest level fully comprehensive F-PLAN does not cover it
I understand that, I was just trying to demonstrate that they do exist, in California 1.4 million seniors are covered by a PERS medicare supplement or medicare advantage plan.
Not really. There are well over 60 million Americans living in households with 6 figure or greater incomes. That number is increasing at a pretty good rate and is likely to take a big jump with the predicted upcoming inflation in wages.
About 20 years ago I worked for a global investments company in Boston. We had already planned for this bifurcation of the former American Middle Class.
The upper part of it was renamed the Mass Affluent -- those earning 100k household income in the 1990s(probably more now), and with one or more professional jobs in the household. These people would account for about 40% of the citizen households by population and represented the new "Middle Class." This group constituted our primary target market.
The only other group we would ever discuss was the "Top Tier," comprising High Net Worth and Ultra High Net Worth households. About 10% of the population.
I remember asking about the other 50% of America -- were we going to market our goods and services to them? No one ever answered. Crickets.
This problem has been well known to the leadership class in the US for decades. Half of the population would be living a Just-Scraping-By lifestyle. IMHO this represents a fundamental change from the America I knew in the 1970s and 1980s. In those decades and back to WW2, what I would have called the Working Class and the Poor totaled closer to 20%, perhaps 30% at worst.
I understand that, I was just trying to demonstrate that they do exist, in California 1.4 million seniors are covered by a PERS medicare supplement or medicare advantage plan.
...which is why California is on the brink of government collapse from all the unfunded pension liability. In a race to default with Illinois. Not a race I'd be in any hurry to win. When the tech stock windfall tax revenue gravy train ends, it's going to get ugly.
About 20 years ago I worked for a global investments company in Boston. We had already planned for this bifurcation of the former American Middle Class.
The upper part of it was renamed the Mass Affluent -- those earning 100k household income in the 1990s(probably more now), and with one or more professional jobs in the household. These people would account for about 40% of the citizen households by population and represented the new "Middle Class." This group constituted our primary target market.
The only other group we would ever discuss was the "Top Tier," comprising High Net Worth and Ultra High Net Worth households. About 10% of the population.
I remember asking about the other 50% of America -- were we going to market our goods and services to them? No one ever answered. Crickets.
This problem has been well known to the leadership class in the US for decades. Half of the population would be living a Just-Scraping-By lifestyle. IMHO this represents a fundamental change from the America I knew in the 1970s and 1980s. In those decades and back to WW2, what I would have called the Working Class and the Poor totaled closer to 20%, perhaps 30% at worst.
Unfortunately, I think 50% is the new normal.
Except it's not even 50%. It might be 50% in the high COL regions where you have the high concentration of educated people who create intellectual property. In Massachusetts, 50% of adult households have a college education. West Virginia is 19.2%. Look at the state rankings by education level. In easily half the country, you have little pockets of affluence around the college towns and the rest with pretty much no shot.
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