12-16-2021, 01:36 PM
(12-16-2021, 09:22 AM)Anthony Wrote: It's better to live in a home that you yourself own in Manchester Township, New Jersey, roughly halfway between NYC and Philadelphia, where public transportation is essentially non-existent, and believe it or not has the lowest per-capita income in the entire state - even Newark and Camden have higher per-capita incomes - than live in a dilapidated SRO in San Francisco (I've done that too).
The ratio of income to rent is one of the more reliable measures of the ease of life in America. Of course, really-cheap places might be cheap for unwelcome reasons -- such that the public services are cr@ppy (law enforcement is ineffective and the schools are the sorts that prepare kids mostly for farm labor, fast food or roadside services work, or prison -- which is possible in some high-cost places, too, in California), the economy has been nuked (Rochester, New York; Flint, Michigan), or there is nothing to do so that if a kid leaves town for college he is likely to never return upon graduating except for an occasional visit to show the in-laws why the low rent isn't such a good thing.
Part of the appeal of a demagogue like Trump is his allusions to an America in life was not so much better as easier. Paying seventy percent of your 'disposable' income to a landlord is a good reason to leave California because relatively little of California is really livable. Central Valley? You might as well be in the part of Texas between El Paso and the I-35 corridor, a part of America that I do not recommend. The US population has doubled over sixty years, and there is no cheap land on which to build tract houses for the middle class near places that are neither overpopulated nor economically-nuked. Housing is incredibly cheap in Youngstown, Ohio, but the city is becoming a town. (Besides, to find anything really fun or enlightening to do you would need to schlepp over to Cleveland or Pittsburgh). Demagogues never have viable solutions.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.