The Economy

The thing that a lot of people don't take into account/get is "net worth" is not the same how much someone has in their checking account at the end of the month.
Of course a lot of those folks' net worth/savings is what they have at the end of the month.

 

How one defines "the middle class" numerically is tricky (and, I'd also argue, fraught conceptually), but I've seen it defined income-wise as ranging from 2/3rds to twice the median. So if you use those markers, middle class household net worth would range from around $128K to around $384K.

And yes, median is a far better indicator of central tendency with respect to net worth. Median household net worth is $192K ... average net worth is $1.06M (which is ballpark-ish the 82nd percentile).

 

An $80 Billion Industry Looks for Child Workers. It Keeps Missing Them.

One morning in 2019, an auditor arrived at a meatpacking plant in rural Minnesota. He was there on behalf of the national drugstore chain Walgreens to ensure that the factory, which made the company’s house brand of beef jerky, was safe and free of labor abuses.

He ran through a checklist of hundreds of possible problems, like locked emergency exits, sexual harassment and child labor. By the afternoon, he had concluded that the factory had no major violations. It could keep making jerky, and Walgreens customers could shop with a clear conscience.

When night fell, another 150 workers showed up at the plant. Among them were migrant children who had come to the United States by themselves looking for work. Children as young as 15 were operating heavy machinery capable of amputating fingers and crushing bones.

Migrant children would work at the Monogram Meat Snacks plant in Chandler, Minn., for almost four more years, until the Department of Labor visited this spring and found such severe child labor violations that it temporarily banned the shipment of any more jerky.

 

I find this practice abhorrent and would pay more for jerky in order to see it end.

 

I don't know. Beef jerky is pretty expensive these days.

 

Anecdotal evidence of the economy - my farmer brother-in-law has become a bourbon guy in the past year. He buys three or four high-end bottles, flips most and keeps one to drink with his buddies. They’ve even formed a collective and split expenses. On Christmas night, we tried seven bourbons. The cheapest bottle was $1,200. He had about $40,000 worth of bourbon in his house.

So, yay, farm subsidies. And, holy crap, how inflated is that bourbon bubble!?!

 

If I understood this correctly -- total non-drinker here -- he must be doing really well as a bourbon seller! Or else, he's keeping a lot more than he's flipping. Wow, I cannot imagine having that much bourbon around.

 

I don't drink bourbon, but I know a single bottle of Pappy Van Winkle sells for thousands.
Just give me a case of Miller Lite, and I'm good to go.

 

Once upon a time I was hanging out with my then-roommate, her friend and a guy who was trying to impress her. (I suppose I was trying to impress her friend.)

Dude said he had some $700 bottle of tequila. He said he opened the bottle. He could've been serving from a flask for all I knew, I wasn't paying attention. I drank it. I couldn't tell you whether it was $17 tequila or $700 tequila.

I've never understood the fascination with high-end booze. It pretty much all tastes the same and the end result is the same.

 

Both!

His spare bedroom is now a warehouse for flipping. His home bar has a couple dozen bottles for drinking.