2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: The US middle class is in the top 1% .... [View all]raging moderate
(4,292 posts)You are right, TM99. People in the US are NOT ALLOWED to live the inexpensive ways many SE Asia people do. Just try that, and you get your kids taken away and put in some institution or in under-supervised "foster" homes. A guy in San Francisco was just FORCED out of the inexpensive box he had cleverly rigged up. PLUS, there is the necessity in most of the northern half of the US to spend hundreds of dollars each year on warm clothing and hundreds of dollars each month on heating bills, because the outdoors temperatures fall to below freezing, at least at night for many months and even at noon during the winter. People DIE from that kind of cold! There are laws against the simple fire-building our ancestors used to survive these winters, and back then lots of people DIDN'T survive but died from the cold. As I once emailed the Congress when they wanted to yank unemployment benefits from a lot of people in December, WHAT PART OF 20 DEGREES BELOW ZERO FAHRENHEIT DO YOU FAIL TO UNDERSTAND?