I was talking about income there, as apparently the mean personal income (which I approximately make) falls at around the 75th percentile of personal incomes, i.e. 75% of people make less than that.

So.... around 50k? Have you paid off the mobile home? So monthly take home after tax is maybe...$4k? $3500? I'd be interested to see a budget breakdown.

Looks like the Putin bogeyman is back in play, wants Sanders to win Dem primary.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/bernie-sanders-briefed-by-us-officials-that-russia-is-trying-to-help-his-presidential-campaign/2020/02/21/5ad396a6-54bd-11ea-929a-64efa7482a77_story.html


First rule of Russian interference: it’s always someone the DNC wants to destroy: sanders, Trump, Stein, Gabbard.

Thereabouts yeah. The MH was paid off in cash with my entire life savings up to that point (and even then only affordable because it was in a weird financially distressed condition similar to a foreclosure). I don't want to give out too much personal detail, but about a quarter of that take-home goes to my current super-under-market-for-an-ordinary-apartment lot rent, and about a third of it is being saved in an IRA toward an eventual down payment on a real house, or possibly to buy a larger MH in cash on the way to that (because I might be able to get a MH big enough for two for about half of what I'd need to put down on a real house in order for the mortgage interest to not crush me). Maybe a sixth or so is bills, the vast majority of that the minimal mandatory health insurance.

Thanks for the indepth response! I’ll check out the article that was linked.

About Elizabeth Warren... as great a candidate as she may indeed be... when would it become advantageous to the “progressive movement” (for lack of a better term) for her to clear the way for Sanders, and to unite forces?
— 0 thru 9
March 3rd is my guess: the day after Super Tuesday (unless, of course, she emerges with the most delegates, then Bernie should "clear the way" for her ...) — 180 Proof

Ahh, a guess with an exact date! Nice. (You win the donkey stuffed animal, signed by Jimmy Carter :grin: ). I might be inclined to agree with that thinking. I wonder if perhaps they have an agreement to do just that. We shall see soon enough. (I’m assuming that they even like each other? Seems like it. Hope so.)

Super Tuesday less than 2 weeks away, approaching like a tornado.

Saving 1/3 of your income is really good. Bravo. I don't know how much houses cost in your area, but if it's prohibitively expensive you might want to either look into a condo or just trying to find a different job in a different part of the country. I live on the east coast and the difference in the cost of housing between say, Boston and Baltimore (where I live now) is just absurd. If you were to move down south it gets even cheaper around $150k is possible and with the FHA loan you'd only be paying 10% down so $15k. You could be doing everything right but if you live in San Francisco forget about it.

Dope! :smirk: (I live just down the street from his presidential library.)

Saving 1/3 of your income is really good. Bravo. — BitconnectCarlos

Thanks.

I don't know how much houses cost in your area — BitconnectCarlos

The median cost for the entire state of California is over half a million dollars, and I can't find anything less than that within hundreds of miles of the general area where my girlfriend and I have grown up and lived our entire lives with our families and friends and everything here. (Ventura county).

If it was just a matter of "moving out of the city" (I don't live in a city at all) or moving to the next county or something, there'd be no problem. And yes, I know that I personally could let myself be forced out of my homeland by wealthy invaders "investors" and find a place that's cheaper in a far-away place that I would probably hate living, but when it's not my personal fault that I can't afford to stay here, and the vast majority of my compatriots, the hundreds of thousands of people who can afford to live here even less than me, aren't getting out first, I'm not just going to accept defeat.

Someone's gotta fucking do something about this and if that means killing some rich motherfucker so the people who live in his second or third "investment" house can stop paying him for the privilege, so be it. Or maybe, you know, we could try a less drastic solution before it comes to that.

I was talking about income there, as apparently the mean personal income (which I approximately make) falls at around the 75th percentile of personal incomes, i.e. 75% of people make less than that. — Pfhorrest

Well good for you. :)

What's so essential about a house and a car? You don't need either to find someone to love, or to raise a family.
— Xtrix

You need a home big enough for two people to live in if they're going to be a family, even if they're not planning on having kids (which we're not). — Pfhorrest

A home in the sense of some kind of dwelling place, yes. Not necessarily a house.

We're scraping by because she lives with family on super-discounted rent and I own a tiny one-room mobile home in a shitty trailer park that's also rent-controlled; when either of us visits the other, we can at most bring a backpack full of stuff to the other's place, and even that just sits on the floor in the way and constantly needs to be moved to get about, so there's no way we could actually live together on a long-term basis unless one of us was just living out of a backpack indefinitely. — Pfhorrest

I'm sure your situation is shared by many Americans. How old are you, if you don't mind my asking?

An apartment big enough for two would leave us scraping by paycheck-to-paycheck, not saving anything for the future, and so when we're too old to have paychecks to pay toward that rent anymore, would leave us out on the street. The interest alone on a mortgage on the cheapest available house in the area would be just as bad, never mind paying down the principle. — Pfhorrest

My wife and I still rent and have been postponing buying a house. Mortgaging a house is in many ways the better alternative because you are at least paying down the mortgage and building equity as opposed to simply giving away money every month and owning nothing.

So I hear you on all of this, but my point was that none of this in itself should be an end in itself -- weather owning a home or saving money or having a retirement plan or making sure you're secured when you're old, etc. I think all of that is fine, but that the emphasis, the stress, that has been placed on these objectives is and has been out of whack for a long time.

It's simply taken for granted that having a billionaire dollars makes you "successful," for example. I hear this all the time in reference to Bloomberg. But I ask: why? Maybe in the domain of business, where the game is "won" by accumulating more and more profit, does this metric make sense, and even there this is arguable. But applied to a person's life generally is absurd. Moreover, what's frustrating is that my fellow countrymen will take this for granted while at the same time professing agreement with the proverbial "money can't buy me love" and "money is the root of all evil"-type stuff.

Anyway, I wasn't meaning originally to contradict your point, but to emphasize that things were even worse than you're already making them out to be, to double down on your original point. — Pfhorrest

I understand. So you're right, of course. The "American Dream' has indeed become more and more elusive, especially since about the 1970s. But even if we were in the 1950s again, my point would be the same: that our highest aspirations as Americans, in the form of the American Dream of a steady, well-paid job, a house and car, and a wife and family, is itself a mistake. Not that it's morally or financially wrong to want a family or a house, but that the ideal itself is a mistake and is given too high a priority.

I'm sure your situation is shared by many Americans. How old are you, if you don't mind my asking? — Xtrix

That most Americans are even worse off was kinda my point.

We’re both 37, so Elder Millennials, Class of 2000.

Mortgaging a house is in many ways the better alternative because you are at least paying down the mortgage and building equity as opposed to simply giving away money every month and owning nothing. — Xtrix

So long as the interest portion of the mortgage is less than the rent you would otherwise be paying, yes. Paying 6/12 your income in interest and 1/12 toward equity is worse than paying 3/12 in rent and saving 4/12 toward other investments, even though of course it’s definitely better than paying 7/12 in rent.

And yeah, sure you get more house right now for that 7/12 spent entirely on housing right now, but if you’re barely going to ever be safe from homelessness with just 4/12 set aside to buy your way out of that, reducing that to 1/12 or 0/12 so you can have a big enough place right now is just short sighted.

How so? — 180 Proof

Beyond her ostentatious mishandling of Bernie's purported "A Women Can't Win" comment, she's increasingly engaged in spurious attacks centered on internet Bernie Bro meanies and misleading attacks from the Culinary Union's leadership. Despite nominally being the "unity" candidate and a progressive ally of Sanders, she's recently participated in hackenyed (and frankly anti-semitic) statements around Bernie's...yelling...despite prominent surrogates for Sanders defending her performance at Wednesday's debate against critics. But perhaps most egregious was her answer for one of the last questions at the most recent debate in which she answered no to the question "should the person with the most delegates at the end of this primary season be the nominee, even if they are short of a majority?", which, as it currently stands will most likely work against Sander's chances at the nomination in favor of a moderate who rejects the progressive policies proposed by Sanders/Warren.

There's already so much inane noise and table pounding directed against Sanders, (who may well become the first Socialist president of the USA or at least the most progressive president since FDR), from conservatives to pearl-clutching Democrats, Warren's comments and actions have become a major turnoff.

(I live just down the street from his presidential library — 180 Proof

Did you move, I thought you lived in Arizona?

but when it's not my personal fault that I can't afford to stay here, and the vast majority of my compatriots, the hundreds of thousands of people who can afford to live here even less than me, aren't getting out first, I'm not just going to accept defeat.

If I were you I would swallow my pride and do what is best for you and your partner. If you want to suffer on this cross and complain about it you can, just don't act like you're "forced" to. In some areas of the country, not only would you be a homeowner but you'd be able to go out to eat whenever you wanted and genuinely enjoy a nice financial cushion. But I guess that would mean admitting defeat. It's really just a pride thing for you.

She doesn’t want to leave her home either. She’s even more attached to the land than me; I’m happy living anywhere in the general area where I can still occasionally visit the people and things I love, she wants to stay in her particular town.

It’s not a matter of pride, it’s a matter of not just giving in and letting us be forced out of our home so that some rich asshole can move in here instead (or, more accurately, so some super-rich asshole can buy all the housing stock and rent it out for profit). The hundreds of thousands of people poorer than us who aren’t all fleeing to cheaper shitholes aren’t sticking around for pride either. People shouldn’t be forced out of their homes, and financial pressure is a kind of force. In telling me that I should move, you’re saying that almost everybody in the entire state of California, the most populous state in the country and one of the largest, also shouldn’t live in the state that they do: that almost everybody in a place bigger than most European countries should go to what is consequently equivalent to another country. Should the vast majority of Brits move to Russia too? It’s a comparable population, distance, climate difference, cost of living difference, etc. Or should Britain get its shit together so Brits can stay in Britain?

Sorry, I keep saying “hundreds of thousands” of people would have to move by your logic, but my quick mental estimate was off. It’s actually tens of millions.

A home in the sense of some kind of dwelling place, yes. Not necessarily a house. — Xtrix

The only kind of home that you can truly own is a house, because if you live in a part of a building with other people, even if you nominally “own” your part, you have to keep paying fees or you can still be kicked out.

So for people to be secure from homelessness, they need to own houses. And security from homelessness is like... the most elementary kind of thing to aspire to.

Did you move, I thought you lived in Arizona? — Maw

I moved (back) to Atlanta in 2015. However, looking forward to relocating to Portland, Oregon this fall. Left coast "blue state" for the duration - putting down roots finally.

Once you get to the second round and the superdelegates take over, Bernie is certain to be screwed.
— fishfry

Explain why you think this is true. I don't see it. — Xtrix

It was reported today that Bloomie's already conspiring with the superdelegates.

There's a fight to the death between the centrist neoliberals -- the Hillary wing of the party -- and the radical leftists. I'm sure you know this.

If Bernie shows up in Milwaukee with a plurality but not a majority of the votes, then the superdelegates will have their way. The superdelegates are party insiders, status quo types. They remember 1972. They are not letting Bernie win the nomination. Blooomie, flawed as he is, is the only status quo candidate who can beat Trump. Biden's not even in the race anymore, nobody bothered to attack him at the debate the other night. It was sad to watch. Today he got confused and said his late son Beau was the Attorney General under Obama.

When I went looking for a link to that last bit the only one I found was on Breitbart.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/02/21/joe-biden-falsely-claims-son-beau-was-us-attorney-general/

So people who don't read Breitbart and who get their news from MSNBC or the New York Times, have no idea that Joe Biden isn't even on this planet anymore, let alone in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. I hope you see how news reporting works these days.

The story about Bloomie plotting with the superdelegates was reported yesterday by Politico, a center-left outlet.

Bloomberg quietly plotting brokered convention strategy

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/bloomberg-brokered-convention-strategy-116407

What happened in 1972?

What happened in 1972? — Pfhorrest

Dems violently split between their centrists and leftists, just like today. In 1968 the centrists won and the Dems nominated centrist Hubert Humphrey, who had even refused to come out against the Vietnam war. The leftists were marching against the war every day.

Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon in what was at that time the closest election history.

By 1972 the leftists took back the party and nominated George McGovern. Nixon got reelected in a historic landslide, winning 49 out of the 50 states.

Hillary is Humphrey, the centrist beating back the challenge from Bernie in 2016; and Bernie, if he wins, would be McGovern. The pattern is that after the centrists beat back the leftists but then lose the general election, they're discredited and the leftists take over. Hence AOC and the sharp leftward lurch of the Democrats.

The Democratic party powers that be are damned if they are going to let 1972 happen all over again with Bernie. No other candidate can win. That leaves Bloomie as the great centrist hope. That's why his disastrous debate performance was such a shock. But Bloomie's still plotting and I would not count him out. He had the same stiff, wooden, cold demeanor when he won three elections as Mayor of NYC. He's rich and has powerful friends in high places.

I moved (back) to Atlanta in 2015. However, looking forward to relocating to Portland, Oregon this fall. Left coast "blue state" for the duration - putting down roots finally. — 180 Proof

Nice, hope you enjoy Portland, been a while since I've been there but certainly a great place to live.

By 1972 the leftists took back the party and nominated George McGovern. Nixon got reelected in a historic landslide, winning 49 out of the 50 states. — fishfry

This was nearly 50 years ago, under vastly different conditions and with a set of voters who are now mostly dead. Not at all analogous.

This was nearly 50 years ago, under vastly different conditions and with a set of voters who are now mostly dead. Not at all analogous. — Maw

Tell it to the DNC insiders plotting to stab Bernie in the back. 1972 is very much in the minds of the Dem insiders. I'm not making this stuff up. It's in the news. I can assure you that the professionals who run the campaigns are acutely aware of history. And today's politics comes directly out of that era.

Here's the Atlantic.

Bernie Sanders Is George McGovern
The similarities between 2020 and 1972 are too astonishing to ignore. But there’s one big difference.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/bernie-sanders-george-mcgovern/606883/

Tell it to the DNC insiders plotting to stab Bernie in the back. 1972 is very much in the minds of the Dem insiders. I'm not making this stuff up. It's in the news. I can assure you that the professionals who run the campaigns are acutely aware of historical precedents. — fishfry

I don't care if it's "in the news", it's a vapid analogy attempting to be prophetic in service to democratic moderates

In 1968 the centrists won and the Dems nominated centrist Hubert Humphrey, who had even refused to come out against the Vietnam war. The leftists were marching against the war every day.

Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon in what was at that time the closest election history.

By 1972 the leftists took back the party and nominated George McGovern. Nixon got reelected in a historic landslide, winning 49 out of the 50 states.

Hillary is Humphrey, the centrist beating back the challenge from Bernie in 2016; and Bernie, if he wins, would be McGovern. The Democratic party powers that be are damned if they are going to let that happen. No other candidate can win. That leaves Bloomie as the great centrist hope. — fishfry

Apt analysis, which reminds me of a couple of maxims: "History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes" & "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce"; and the status quo "insiders" attempting to ham-fistedly avoid the rhyming farce will inadvertantly double-down on national tragedy. :shade:


2 weeks ago I also recognized there's no waking from this nightmare ... so "the game's afoot."

it's a vapid analogy — Maw

Take it up with the Atlantic. Or the LA Times, George McGovern is a cautionary tale for Sanders supporters.

Or if you prefer the other side of the proposition, 2020 is NOT 1972, and Bernie Sanders is NOT George McGovern.

Take your pick.

The LA Times link you provided is just a 10 sentence Letter to the Editor...

The Atlantic article, which I did happen to read early today, despite offering a simplistic overview, unequivocally concludes that the analogy is not valid (despite the clickbait headline). Did you actually read the article?

The Atlantic article, which I did happen to read early today, despite offering a simplistic overview, unequivocally concludes that the analogy is not valid (despite the clickbait headline). Did you actually read the article? — Maw

Let's agree to disagree here. Nobody knows if Bernie is McGovern. We'll find out in Milwaukee.

Did you actually read the article? — Maw

Let's agree to disagree here. — fishfry

You can just say "no" next time :wink:

I don’t understand those who decry “big business” and lobbying. The only reason people buy out politicians and bureaucrats is because politicians and bureaucrats can be bought. We should decry the politicians and bureaucrats for setting the conditions. If they didn’t accept bribes and certain lobbying that sort of business would become untenable within a few years. — NOS4A2

It's legal, and Trump has benefitted from both sides of such monetary corruption. He actually publicly bragged about it on a national debate stage in 2016. The irony.

the candidate with the most votes should receive the nominatio — Maw

Depends on if you define majority or plurality as "most votes". The Bernie fans take one position, the swamp the other.

Whatever happens, one thing is sure: American election circus is always interesting. I have stock up on popcorn.