re: .

I’m not taking any more condescension from someone who can’t figure out if they should buy renters insurance.

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This stimulus BS is just BS. Firstly wtf is $900 or $1200 going to do for anybody, really?

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That’s pretty smug. If you’re a waiter making $25k a year, it could pay your rent for a few months while the restaurant you work at is shut down. If you’re making $300k, probably not much. But that’s kind of the point isn’t it?

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Secondly it's going out to people in the majority who don't pay any income taxes.

The fact of my second point is in the end where will this money be drawn from? Will they scale HUD back?

Nope,not hardly.

Will any of the entitlement programs be scaled back.

Nope again.

Medicade entitlements?

Nope...

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I’m having trouble wrapping my head around what, exactly, some of you view the purpose of the stimulus to be. Because you seem to think it was designed as some sort of thank you gift for taxpayers, which is absurd.

There are legitimate arguments to be made about the country’s response to COVID. We caused unbelievable amounts of economic damage that could have, in my opinion, been avoided.

That being said, Congress didn’t dole out the stimulus in an effort to shut the national economy down. They doled it out because the national economy was already shut down. At that point, there are literally no good options.

If the 164 million people in households making less than $75k/year stop spending money because of layoffs, furloughs, or uncertainty.. there are no $300k/year households. The Fed is projecting a 50+% drop in Q2 GDP. I think some of you are severely understating just how bad this economic hit has been. Maybe that means the stimulus is working. (I hope.)

So yeah, it sucks and nobody knows how we will pay for it beyond printing more money. (PS, wait until you see what this downturn does to tax revenues this year..) But if the alternative is a “greater” depression, is the decision really that hard?

Judging by your grammar, you will most certainly receive the max amount of trump bucks.

I've read through and nothing explains how much $ that you waste a month.

You waste a lot of fricking money.

Why would you need a $300-400K house in Lake Charles? Do you need that much of a house while bitching about not receiving a $2400 check on a message board?

Our friend DD here came on here crying and looking for sympathy as someone with $200K income in Lake fricking Charles. It’s really pathetic.

It’s also astounding how some of you can honestly believe that $200K is not a lot of income. You guys sense of reality is so fricking warped.

The funniest part of this whole thread is for the supposed “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd, all the arguments are anecdotal based on much feels.

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In the US... it's easy to make the top 5%. It's not that hard.

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It's not. The flaw in that thinking is that you are equating the fact that certain actions are relatively rare with the idea that that must mean that most people do not have the capacity to perform them. That's a flawed assumption IMO.

If you were on a basketball team in which the free throw shooting percentages were awful, being in the top 5% wouldn't mean that much. And it's a good analogy in that sense b/c free throw shooting is mostly a function of shooting practice free throws. If you are committed and shoot 200 a day without fail, your FT % will be high. If you don't, it won't. It's well within the capacity of every player on the team to be at least a decent free throw shooter. It's a choice. Do you shoot the 200 practice balls a day or not?

Bottom line, being in the top 5% of a team that averages 60% from the line isn't that hard. Same with being in the top 5% of income earners in the US.

In another sense it's not a good analogy b/c as I have posted before, there is such a huge difference between the top half a percent and everyone else that the graph is extreme. It's like the basketball team has one person who shoots 100% from the line (and he shoots most of the free throws for the team) and everyone else shoots 5% and below for a team average of 60%.

When you're caught up in expressing this in terms of "the top 5%," the "top 1%," as though they are meaningful metrics it ignores how vast the income inequality is in the US because of that top half a percent and instead implies that the graph is linear.

It's not.

99.5% of the graph is.

If you were to imagine it plotted on paper it might look like a line that rose from the bottom to a height at the other end of a couple of inches. Then the last half a percent would plot pretty much straight up until it ran off the page and up the wall a few feet. That's how great the difference in the last half a percent is.

Back to the first point, there's really not a huge deal of difference between someone who makes $60,000 a year and someone who makes $200,000 except a few choices. In other words, I could take anyone with at least an average IQ and reasonable physical ability who makes $60,000 a year and if they were willing to do what I told them to do, I could get them making $200,000 a year. It wouldn't be that hard, it would just require them to probably be willing to radically alter some life choices, and be willing to spend probably some years building up to it.

The difference between those two scenarios is not the capacity to exercise abilities that only 5% of the population has, it's that it requires specific choices that only around 5% of the population make. Not because they are all that much harder choices. I guess they are somewhat harder, but nothing that is only possible for a few people to achieve.

Mostly because no one shows them the pathway. They do what everyone else does. Go to college, get a job like everyone else, etc. They could absolutely do other things and make other choices, but they don't. They could. But they don't.

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If the 164 million people in households making less than $75k/year stop spending money because of layoffs, furloughs, or uncertainty.. there are no $300k/year households.

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No argument there. I want everyone to make more money. So that some of those people will spend it with my business.

I'd rather that happened because government allowed business to thrive than I would because government shut business down, though, then tried to prop up the economy with stimulus checks.