#polistat

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For younger American families, the classic American dream — a home of your own! — has become an ongoing nightmare. Some 20 percent of young American men between 25 and 34 lived with their parents last year, 12 percent of young women. America’s multigenerational household population, the Pew Research center notes, has quadrupled since the early 1970s.

What explains these stats? The simple story: Fewer and fewer American young people can afford a home of their own. Overall, an Amherst Group analysis has found, some 85 percent of renting households cannot “qualify for a mortgage.” America’s most typical first-time homebuyers last year, adds the National Association of Realtors, had already turned 36 years old. Young people a generation ago were becoming first-time homebuyers in their 20s.

The economic reality behind all these stats: the shrinking share of America’s wealth that belongs to average Americans. Back in the mid-1990s, America’s “middle class” — the middle 60 percent of U.S. households by income — held double the wealth of the nation’s richest 1 percent. Last year, Fed Reserve researchers calculate, top 1 percenters held more wealth than our entire middle 60 percent.

And America’s richest aren’t just enjoying that turnaround. They’re exploiting it — on a wide variety of housing-related fronts.

[endymionstudies]

to do list for tonight!

do laundry

polistats paper outline

ir presentation notes

dishes 😓

gym

exam study plan

clean the room

[azspot]

By about 2 to 1, Americans want popular vote, not Electoral College, to decide who is president

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Consider these findings from a 2014 study: Asked what they view as an ideal pay ratio between CEOs and unskilled workers, Americans pointed to a ratio of 7-to-1. The real ratio at the time? 354-to-1. Meanwhile, Americans thought that the actual ratio was more like 30-to-1, about an order of magnitude off from reality.

Media That Benefit From Inequality Prefer to Talk About Other Things

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Ignoring Covid will go down as one of the single greatest, though unacknowledged mistakes a president has ever made. The silence on everything from masks and clean air to Long Covid has only emboldened the far right, ceding them a vast territory to blame the rising tide of heart attacks, strokes, and neurological problems on "the jab." Their continued insistence on vaccines instead of broader mitigations has made that problem worse, given their short windows of efficacy and relative ineffectiveness against Long Covid.

Masks Have a Higher Approval Rating than Joe Biden

[azspot]

The Christians Who Matter Most in this Election (Hint: It’s Not White Evangelicals)

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Lalo Alcaraz

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The registrations of young Black women have almost tripled compared with the same period in 2020. The registrations of young Hispanic women are up by 150%.

Heather Cox Richardson

[azspot]

Unions had a flat 2023

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UHC leads the nation in claims denials, with a denial rate of 32% (!!). If you want to understand how the US can spend 20% of its GDP and get the worst health outcomes in the world, just connect the dots between those two facts: the largest health insurer in human history charges the government a 183,300% markup on covid tests and also denies a third of its claims.

Predicting the present

[azspot]

The Seeds of Social Revolution: Extreme Wealth Inequality

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Link Rot and Digital Decay on Government, News and Other Webpages

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You know what aren't scarce in the United States? Cars. You know why cars aren't scarce? Because we build 16 million of them per year. You know how many homes we build per year? About 1.4 million. Don't tell me the United States is a country. We're a car company.

Matthew Lewis