[HN Gopher] 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Pr...
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       30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?
        
       Author : rcardo11
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2025-11-14 21:56 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (kyla.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (kyla.substack.com)
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | I like the idea of visible vs invisible here. It approaches what
       | I think is one of the biggest issues of the day which is "Why do
       | so many people think that the economy sucks when the official
       | statistics don't look _too_ bad? "
        
         | quantummagic wrote:
         | Ignoring how easy it is for statistics to be misleading, let
         | alone outright lies, the official statistics are rather mute on
         | the topic of economic distribution. It doesn't matter how well
         | an economy is doing, if the majority of wealth is accruing to a
         | small minority.
        
           | TylerE wrote:
           | The word you are looking for is _moot_. Twitch.
        
             | meatmanek wrote:
             | no, mute is the right word here, in the sense of "silent".
        
         | TylerE wrote:
         | Trump has literally shut down many of the agencies responbible
         | for making the reports.
         | 
         | We live in a banana republic.
         | 
         | https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...
         | 
         | https://www.science.org/content/article/republican-push-make...
         | 
         | https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/federal...
         | 
         | https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-administration-disbands-2-ex...
         | 
         | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-government-data-pu...
        
       | reactordev wrote:
       | Two words: "subscription fees"
       | 
       | It's the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone
       | budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to
       | the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.
        
       | jmclnx wrote:
       | To the billionairs via income inequality.
       | 
       | When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail.
       | 
       | I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice
       | house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working
       | retail. Buying a home, out of the question.
       | 
       | We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force
       | companies to pay a living wage as they did back then
        
         | delichon wrote:
         | I'm sending IP packets to you from a computer I bought from one
         | billionaire, built by another billionaire, with an operating
         | system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by
         | yet another billionaire, on a web forum written by another
         | billionaire. The market is not a zero sum game.
        
       | chasd00 wrote:
       | This US is a big place, I don't think it's accurate to start an
       | article with "traveling accross America" when you only drove
       | around the DC area, one part of Maryland, NYC, and small part of
       | South FL.
        
         | andsoitis wrote:
         | ... and then compare to two cities in different European
         | countries and think THEY are representative. There are many
         | cities in Europe I can name that feel terribly dilapidated.
         | 
         | I think the article has the nugget of some good ideas and would
         | love to hear them explored a little more rigorously and with
         | more critical thinking.
        
       | samdoesnothing wrote:
       | It's inflation. The hidden tax that's perpetually underreported
       | by governments and acts as a massive transfer of wealth to the
       | property class.
        
       | treis wrote:
       | It's hard to put thoughts into the right words but the world she
       | wants exists. They're not writing for substack or flying around
       | to conferences. They're out there living their lives without
       | being so unrelentingly negative.
       | 
       | I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see
       | Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly
       | revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening
       | but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard
       | to reconcile.
        
       | dboreham wrote:
       | To vampire squids.
        
       | SimianSci wrote:
       | "America's problem isn't that we lack wealth - we have enormous
       | wealth - it's that we've made our wealth invisible while letting
       | everything visible decay in a way. We've inverted the formula."
       | 
       | In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into
       | society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have
       | alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people
       | and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer
       | need to face the degredation. Wealth isnt visible anymore because
       | its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be
       | easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest
       | it only in the things they care about. I promise you, any time
       | spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not
       | decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.
        
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       (page generated 2025-11-14 23:00 UTC)