Why any Democrat doesn't just repeat something along the lines of "If you make less than $25 an hour this guy over here (the R candidate) will screw you over" is way beyond me.
Ummm....we paid off our house in spring, 2012. Purchase price in 1994 had been $60,000, when we were making less than $30K a year, with three jobs between us. Interest rate was over 11% to start, and two re-fis later, it was down to about 5.5% (in Cleveland, where both wages and cost of living are low).
So....does that mean we're wealthy now? Not a chance. With skyrocketing utilities and grocery bills, and me involuntarily retired, we're barely scraping by. In the first eight years, we rehabbed the house from top to bottom, doing more than 90% of the work ourselves (including replacing staircases and ceilings and putting in a family room, workshop, bath, and laundry room in the basement). And now, because our neighborhood has never been gentrified, the amount we could get from selling the house might just barely cover the original cost plus the money we've put into it.
We've earned our house, and we're better off in terms of that security than millennials are, but by no stretch can homeowners like us be considered wealthy.
It’s been said more eloquently than I can but the squatter in the White House is a reeking melange of every single one of the absolute worst character traits a human can possess while still barely qualifying as human. He is hateful, lazy, entitled, cruel, vindictive to the point of caricature, destructive, both willfully ignorant and bog-standard stupid, racist, sexist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, thoughtless, impulsive, ludicrous, absurd in appearance and thought, base, callous, materialistic, insecure, jealous, deceitful, myopic, thin-skinned, depraved, shameless, weak, shambolic, short-sighted, narcissistic, egotistical, vapid, tacky, vain, craven, stubborn, hypocritical, classless, greedy, shiftless, seedy, incurious, and vile. Fiction could never craft such a creature. He could only ever be shit out by a world, real, grim, and broken by the worst vices of (mostly) men given free rein to entertain their every impulse unchecked by a system designed to cater to their every desire. He crimes openly and brazenly and is enabled by a murderer’s row of callow, opportunistic shitbags who will happily destroy the country and the world to advance their own agendas and retain access to power, noxious and malformed as it may be. May comeuppance be soon, swift, and brutal. But I have my doubts.
"Fiction could never craft such a creature." Why I gave up on escapist fiction and started paying attention to the real world oh so long ago; fiction has to make sense.
More than a third -- 37 percent -- of Usians can't afford an unexpected $400 emergency expense with the cash they have on hand.
So I'm guessing an $80,000 down payment on a house is a bit out of their reach.
This country has been a shithole for awhile except for those in the top 10 percent and those in the upper middle class, but PAB is just really making that shitholiness evident and he's actually making it worse.
I think we're all pretty much tired of all this winning. Unless we're sitting on our yacht with beverages with little umbrellas in them.
They really are sooo delicate. Perhaps we need an Economy Doll so they can tell us where they were hurt. Damaged. Whatever. Slightly OT, apparently some have forgotten how the interest rate was over 10% in the early 80s, making it very hard to buy a house. Ex-hubs had the GI Bill and my mother did daycare for our son, so we were able to buy a small house in a sketchy neighborhood. And we loved it. They used to call it a starter home.
Wtf is wrong with male journalists in the tech space, though? Calling women and girls “females of one age or another” is fucking gross. Calling women and girls “females” is gross. I implore all dudes to STOP DOING THIS as it is dehumanizing. The article is interesting in identifying Elon’s concealment of his actual involvement with Epstein since he wasn’t actually able to set up a visit, though. All gross, gross all along, but for the love of Pete can men “of one age or another” please stop using the phrasing of sexist douchebags?
I am calling my two US Senators out on their inaction. Republicans hold the key to Impeaching Tump and they must be hiding something besides being cowardly. So here is my recent message to Tillis and Budd - currently known in my household as Tweedledweeb and Tweedledumb:
Senator: I am going to be direct: If Trump and his people were employees in a business you owned, you would have fired them long ago. Unless you are comfortable with the lies, mismanagement, outrageous and illegal behavior by an armed militia that answers to a vengeful Department of Justice, I ask you. WHAT IS IN THIS MESS FOR YOU?
No CEO in any company I have heard of would stand for employees running the company into the ground.
What is holding you back from getting rid of Trump and his blatant disregard for any and all norms of behavior and regard for the rule of law? So again: ARE YOU BENEFITTING FINANCIALLY FROM THIS CHAOS? You must be getting something from Trump for your inaction and cowardly failure to defend this country and our people.
WHAT IS IT? Are you in the Epstein Files? Have Russian Pee Tapes Putin his holding over your head? It must be something, because you are presiding over a national meltdown with millions of loyal Americans demanding you do something. It must be something. Since you are not acting, I can only believe - despite your protestations that you believe in the US Constitution - that you are just simply a coward in the face of this crisis, or you are making money on this, or expect some kind of pay off from a future Trump Ministry of something or other.
Get with it, senator. Your country needs you. Do something or resign so someone else can take the reins and end this TACO crazy rollercoaster nightmare. And I mean now before Trump tears down another Federal Building or builds a triumphal Arch to himself on the National Mall.
He is not an Eastern Potentate; he is a felon and an emotionally addled five-year-old sick old man, and he and his gang of thieves and incompetents need to go before he bombs another country and kills off the rest of anyone else who will deal with us. Or are you just ok with killing off the United States of America on your watch? Hmmm? Senator? Are you there? Hello?? Wake up, Senator. Your nation needs you.
I can barely stomach listening to some friends that are sitting in their million dollar homes they pride themselves over, saying young adults need to prioritize buying a home as if it is the same market they benefited from. Young adults today do not have the same good fortune of buying low and seeing equity grow as we did for home purchases prior to 2007.
When I went to college at Georgia's largest university in the 1980s, tuition was $400 per quarter plus another $100 or so for books (buying used as much as possible). Costs at public universities were pretty much the same across the various state universities.
That was for mostly books in English lit and foreign language, so people who were in other majors likely saw higher book/lab costs, but nothing excessive like today.
I didn't have to amass massive debt to cover those costs that left me paying college costs for decades like young people have to do today.
Sometimes people don’t follow market changes. My father was big into me being into job consistency. Not so much for income and resume building, but because I’d be putting in to social security.
I told him what if social security fails? He would laugh and say that would never happen.
If you were born after 1964 you experienced major recessions during the years that were your largest earning years and that really impacted earnings. I get that baby boomers did accomplish a lot more than their ancestors however it was because of the extreme growth and lower costs. Between 1965 and 2025, inflation in the U.S. resulted in a total price increase of approximately 919.2%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data This means that $100.00 in 1965 had the same purchasing power as roughly $1,019.21 in 2025. Prices increased by a factor of 10.19 over these 60 years, with an average inflation rate of 3.95% per year. Yes wages increased but then something odd happened,( likely planned)—that wages did not keep up with inflation and that difference makes all the difference.
Just so you know, it sucked for the last of the Boomers, too. I was born in 57 and got out of college in 1979, with no jobs anywhere. Unemployment hit 14% in Cleveland, where I fetched up. Hubs-to-be's factory moved to Texas. I lied about my college degree to get a job cutting fish at Red Lobster. We got government cheese.
I know this is true for many. I can imagine this was hard for you. I happen to have boomer friends who by and large have openly expressed that they actually perceive that people are not working hard enough, saving enough or had made bad choices that led to people not owning homes and having more wealth compared to them. For many it is a pride thing, of the ego and Trump is feeding into this mentality. Though I am friendly with them I just can't relate personally or when looking at the hard data.
I have a fRight-wing friend who on one occasion, speaking about how black people have had the same opportunities as he had because schools had been integrated and everybody had the same education, say that he had no more opportunities than anyone else.
He began working at his dad's business when he was a teen. He inherited his dad's business when the dad died.
Because everyone inherits a business if they are allowed to attend school with the white kids.
Just for info, this is a map from Realtor.com showing the income you need to buy a median home in the US.
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/map-earn-income-home-purchase-every-state/
Note: the upper 10% of households in the US starts around $100K.
Why any Democrat doesn't just repeat something along the lines of "If you make less than $25 an hour this guy over here (the R candidate) will screw you over" is way beyond me.
Because the line is waaay higher than $25 an hour.
I for one am happy that with the renovations being done on our home, it might be actually worth what the tax assessors are valuing it at.
Did anyone expect anything else from someone in the real estate investment biz?
Affordable housing goes against everything he has ever done.
Ummm....we paid off our house in spring, 2012. Purchase price in 1994 had been $60,000, when we were making less than $30K a year, with three jobs between us. Interest rate was over 11% to start, and two re-fis later, it was down to about 5.5% (in Cleveland, where both wages and cost of living are low).
So....does that mean we're wealthy now? Not a chance. With skyrocketing utilities and grocery bills, and me involuntarily retired, we're barely scraping by. In the first eight years, we rehabbed the house from top to bottom, doing more than 90% of the work ourselves (including replacing staircases and ceilings and putting in a family room, workshop, bath, and laundry room in the basement). And now, because our neighborhood has never been gentrified, the amount we could get from selling the house might just barely cover the original cost plus the money we've put into it.
We've earned our house, and we're better off in terms of that security than millennials are, but by no stretch can homeowners like us be considered wealthy.
My new air fryer arrived and I am so excited!
The good news for Millennial home ownership is that your parents ate a fair amount of red meat during their lives.
Isn't red meat healthy now, as it's at the top of the new food pyramid?
It’s been said more eloquently than I can but the squatter in the White House is a reeking melange of every single one of the absolute worst character traits a human can possess while still barely qualifying as human. He is hateful, lazy, entitled, cruel, vindictive to the point of caricature, destructive, both willfully ignorant and bog-standard stupid, racist, sexist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, thoughtless, impulsive, ludicrous, absurd in appearance and thought, base, callous, materialistic, insecure, jealous, deceitful, myopic, thin-skinned, depraved, shameless, weak, shambolic, short-sighted, narcissistic, egotistical, vapid, tacky, vain, craven, stubborn, hypocritical, classless, greedy, shiftless, seedy, incurious, and vile. Fiction could never craft such a creature. He could only ever be shit out by a world, real, grim, and broken by the worst vices of (mostly) men given free rein to entertain their every impulse unchecked by a system designed to cater to their every desire. He crimes openly and brazenly and is enabled by a murderer’s row of callow, opportunistic shitbags who will happily destroy the country and the world to advance their own agendas and retain access to power, noxious and malformed as it may be. May comeuppance be soon, swift, and brutal. But I have my doubts.
"Fiction could never craft such a creature." Why I gave up on escapist fiction and started paying attention to the real world oh so long ago; fiction has to make sense.
Bravo! But you left out short fingered vulgarian.
Ha! Thanks. Why mess with greatness on that one? 😆
Thank Graydon Carter: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/03/how-donald-trump-became-the-short-fingered-vulgarian?srsltid=AfmBOorHrjZ8lXHiVN3XbAhFxdIWP6WUBOCtOQQ8zT-afpU3Xk9fYQWE
This is such a fucking hoot, he never denied being a vulgarian :)
Liam’s home: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/liam-conejo-ramos-and-father-return-to-minnesota_n_697f801ce4b03611978cbfad
More than a third -- 37 percent -- of Usians can't afford an unexpected $400 emergency expense with the cash they have on hand.
So I'm guessing an $80,000 down payment on a house is a bit out of their reach.
This country has been a shithole for awhile except for those in the top 10 percent and those in the upper middle class, but PAB is just really making that shitholiness evident and he's actually making it worse.
I think we're all pretty much tired of all this winning. Unless we're sitting on our yacht with beverages with little umbrellas in them.
Nailed it again, Robyn.
They really are sooo delicate. Perhaps we need an Economy Doll so they can tell us where they were hurt. Damaged. Whatever. Slightly OT, apparently some have forgotten how the interest rate was over 10% in the early 80s, making it very hard to buy a house. Ex-hubs had the GI Bill and my mother did daycare for our son, so we were able to buy a small house in a sketchy neighborhood. And we loved it. They used to call it a starter home.
https://gizmodo.com/dont-you-dare-misinterpret-elon-musks-epstein-emails-just-the-facts-are-bad-enough-2000715313
Oh, Elno, Elno, Elno.
Wtf is wrong with male journalists in the tech space, though? Calling women and girls “females of one age or another” is fucking gross. Calling women and girls “females” is gross. I implore all dudes to STOP DOING THIS as it is dehumanizing. The article is interesting in identifying Elon’s concealment of his actual involvement with Epstein since he wasn’t actually able to set up a visit, though. All gross, gross all along, but for the love of Pete can men “of one age or another” please stop using the phrasing of sexist douchebags?
What's the used market for Slovenian whores these days?
We’re slut shaming again?
I am calling my two US Senators out on their inaction. Republicans hold the key to Impeaching Tump and they must be hiding something besides being cowardly. So here is my recent message to Tillis and Budd - currently known in my household as Tweedledweeb and Tweedledumb:
Senator: I am going to be direct: If Trump and his people were employees in a business you owned, you would have fired them long ago. Unless you are comfortable with the lies, mismanagement, outrageous and illegal behavior by an armed militia that answers to a vengeful Department of Justice, I ask you. WHAT IS IN THIS MESS FOR YOU?
No CEO in any company I have heard of would stand for employees running the company into the ground.
What is holding you back from getting rid of Trump and his blatant disregard for any and all norms of behavior and regard for the rule of law? So again: ARE YOU BENEFITTING FINANCIALLY FROM THIS CHAOS? You must be getting something from Trump for your inaction and cowardly failure to defend this country and our people.
WHAT IS IT? Are you in the Epstein Files? Have Russian Pee Tapes Putin his holding over your head? It must be something, because you are presiding over a national meltdown with millions of loyal Americans demanding you do something. It must be something. Since you are not acting, I can only believe - despite your protestations that you believe in the US Constitution - that you are just simply a coward in the face of this crisis, or you are making money on this, or expect some kind of pay off from a future Trump Ministry of something or other.
Get with it, senator. Your country needs you. Do something or resign so someone else can take the reins and end this TACO crazy rollercoaster nightmare. And I mean now before Trump tears down another Federal Building or builds a triumphal Arch to himself on the National Mall.
He is not an Eastern Potentate; he is a felon and an emotionally addled five-year-old sick old man, and he and his gang of thieves and incompetents need to go before he bombs another country and kills off the rest of anyone else who will deal with us. Or are you just ok with killing off the United States of America on your watch? Hmmm? Senator? Are you there? Hello?? Wake up, Senator. Your nation needs you.
I can barely stomach listening to some friends that are sitting in their million dollar homes they pride themselves over, saying young adults need to prioritize buying a home as if it is the same market they benefited from. Young adults today do not have the same good fortune of buying low and seeing equity grow as we did for home purchases prior to 2007.
When I went to college at Georgia's largest university in the 1980s, tuition was $400 per quarter plus another $100 or so for books (buying used as much as possible). Costs at public universities were pretty much the same across the various state universities.
That was for mostly books in English lit and foreign language, so people who were in other majors likely saw higher book/lab costs, but nothing excessive like today.
I didn't have to amass massive debt to cover those costs that left me paying college costs for decades like young people have to do today.
Sometimes people don’t follow market changes. My father was big into me being into job consistency. Not so much for income and resume building, but because I’d be putting in to social security.
I told him what if social security fails? He would laugh and say that would never happen.
His degree was economics.
If you were born after 1964 you experienced major recessions during the years that were your largest earning years and that really impacted earnings. I get that baby boomers did accomplish a lot more than their ancestors however it was because of the extreme growth and lower costs. Between 1965 and 2025, inflation in the U.S. resulted in a total price increase of approximately 919.2%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data This means that $100.00 in 1965 had the same purchasing power as roughly $1,019.21 in 2025. Prices increased by a factor of 10.19 over these 60 years, with an average inflation rate of 3.95% per year. Yes wages increased but then something odd happened,( likely planned)—that wages did not keep up with inflation and that difference makes all the difference.
Just so you know, it sucked for the last of the Boomers, too. I was born in 57 and got out of college in 1979, with no jobs anywhere. Unemployment hit 14% in Cleveland, where I fetched up. Hubs-to-be's factory moved to Texas. I lied about my college degree to get a job cutting fish at Red Lobster. We got government cheese.
I know this is true for many. I can imagine this was hard for you. I happen to have boomer friends who by and large have openly expressed that they actually perceive that people are not working hard enough, saving enough or had made bad choices that led to people not owning homes and having more wealth compared to them. For many it is a pride thing, of the ego and Trump is feeding into this mentality. Though I am friendly with them I just can't relate personally or when looking at the hard data.
I have a fRight-wing friend who on one occasion, speaking about how black people have had the same opportunities as he had because schools had been integrated and everybody had the same education, say that he had no more opportunities than anyone else.
He began working at his dad's business when he was a teen. He inherited his dad's business when the dad died.
Because everyone inherits a business if they are allowed to attend school with the white kids.
Yes. We make relatively less for sure. Then they took social security and broke the office. Not necessarily in that order.