This Week in Income Inequality: Dec. 27, 2024
When we waste housing
My elderly tripod beagle can’t walk for long distances, but just within her comfort zone we pass by an enormous difference in housing values.
I bought an 1897 Victorian house in an old neighborhood about a block from the street that contains the real showplaces, which I think helps prop up my home values a bit. So we walk by some amazingly beautiful places, but a few minutes later we see other houses that are sadly neglected.
For many years, I’ve walked by a boarded-up old bungalow that reminds me very much of my first house. I always hoped somebody would buy and restore it. If it’s as much like my first house was on the inside, it’s full of the most charming old woodwork and built-ins you can imagine. But recently we walked by and saw it was doomed.
It’s too late for that house, but many smaller towns have lots of fixer-uppers available. This won’t fix the housing crisis for everyone, but it might be the answer for you. It was for me. Buying a little bungalow in 1989 (for $37,500!) made a huge difference in my financial survival.
If you have some hot income inequality-related news you don’t see shared here, please add it in the comments or shoot me a message! I intend this round-up to be a one-stop shop for everyone who cares about this topic.
Start by calling Trump’s next scam a ‘billionaire bailout’
LOLGOP, The Cause
Every problem we face now—from the climate catastrophe to drilled holes in our safety net to the targeted scapegoating of immigrants and trans kids—is the result of massive concentrations of wealth.
Joe Biden took on these “economic royalists” more directly than any president since FDR and for his efforts and got almost no credit and a coup in his party that was made possible by him hiding the effects of aging but was fed by billionaire donors who wanted another Democrat in office but wanted Lina Khan and her wildly effective pro-worker stances, for instance, out of the Federal Trade Commission.
Trump’s Women
Jess Piper, The View from Rural Missouri
Yes. I have talked to many of these women. So many of my own family members voted for Trump. I have asked them about the reasons over and over again. Some of them have voted for him three times now.
I should tell you that I don’t come from any sort of money — no one in my family is wealthy. I was raised in a series of single-wide trailers and rental houses. We skimped on necessities to pay for other necessities. The bills walked in from the mailbox and went straight into a drawer because what’s the use of looking at a bill you can’t pay?
I understand poverty. I understand folks living in poverty.
Why would someone, especially a woman who has so much to lose, especially one who lives in poverty, vote for Trump?
Why would any woman vote for Trump?
I have a theory after being in contact with Trump-voting White women for nine years.
How Today’s Scrooges Are Taking Away Your Safety Net
Salaam Bhatti, A Paycheck Away
For a long time, Scrooge was the only wealthy, hoarding miser we would ever experience. I remember reading and watching versions of A Christmas Carol as a child and thinking, “I’m glad there’s nobody like that in real life.” But with today’s news feeds, the modern-day Scrooges are everywhere: plutocrats and oligarchs with astronomical fortunes. The wealthiest dozen people combined are worth $2 trillion - and so many of them constantly show up in our lives.
The Truth About Musk, From His Biographer
Seth Abramson, Proof
It’s worth mentioning here that the Musks were indeed obscenely wealthy when Elon was a boy. Obscenely wealthy. Luxury cars, private jets, one of the nicest homes in all of South Africa. Elon made it his goal to get to America because the obscene wealth the Musks already had wasn’t enough for him—he wanted a level of wealth that would make him both famous and powerful as well, an ambition that had eluded his politics-dabbling father (a man embittered by his perception that the end of apartheid had robbed him of power he already had, and new powers and profits he urgently sought).
Elon, in other words, wanted to be filthy rich.
About Michelle Teheux
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. My new book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules.
Twenty-nine years old and single I decided the best way for me to save money was to buy a house and in 1990 found a small "carpenter's special" for $31,600. Mortgage payment was one-third of the rent I'd been paying, $455, something I could pay if I lost my full-time job (with the economy here in Pittsburgh at the time something that had happened four times already since college graduation) and was only waiting tables (which I was already doing part time). Note--initial interest rate was 10.5%! County bond money and first-time buyer money each took 1% off that interest rate, but I would have bought the house anyway. I could and did do all the small repairs. This would be my starter home so I could move to the old farmhouse on land that I'd always wanted as I did whatever self-employed work I'd be doing. I've been self-employed as a commercial and fine artist for a few days shy of 25 years, but I'm still in the little house, and that's okay. Those were the days. Not possible anymore.
My first house, 900 sq ft bungalow, 1974, 36,000.