Good for you. I bet you have to drive everywhere and you don't even realize that the cost of the infrastructure to make your life convient is bankrupting your closest city.
A society where having kids is an unsustainable financial decision is a society that can't continue to exist, and a society where caregiving for someone with a disability or having one yourself makes life impossible is also a society that can't continue to exist.
There are also a ton of other factors that can easily push someone over the edge. "We have lots of wiggle room" is great for you but lots of people don't... And even if someone did make a mistake, why should some small mistake put someone in inescapable debt?
I just think the idea that $150k is fine and everyone who can't make it is an idiot isn't taking in to account the obvious data that shows the opposite.
Yeah, if you're a single man who doesn't have anyone to take care of and has no physical or mental health problems $150k is great. If you're part of a house with two incomes you're probably OK. If you're on a single incoming supporting parents with disabilities, kids, partners with disabilities, or any combination of similar things, you can maybe get by on $150k as long as you never fuck up and everything goes perfectly in your life and you don't care about or try to help anyone else.
Edit: and I say man, because men are less likely to take on caregiver roles that cost large amounts of money.
A lot of, if not most, folks in that income bracket vote democrat and hate republicans. These are tech folks who voted for Bernie. It isn't until you add another couple of zeros that you find the people funding the Republican party. 150k isn't elite, it's literally just barely middle class in any major city.
The whole EV thing is the same scam as Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars were under Bush. It's not real. It never was real. It's just an opportunity to dump a bunch of taxpayer money on Detroit and give the petroleum industry another decade of profits while the US government pretends to solve oil dependency with one more fake solution.
They don't work. It's simply not possible. Cars can't continue to exist like they do today because every person carrying around several tons of metal everywhere just doesn't make any kind of sense.
...that goes through brakes and tires faster because it's significantly heavier.
... that's still limited in where it can go by lack of charging infrastructure.
...that might explode if you charge it while it's cold.
Yeah, EVs are the hydrogen fuel cell scam all over again. It was all just a big bail out to Detroit and 10 more years of not doing anything real to get away from petroleum.
And when they only read Lenin, you get the USSR...
Maybe it's time for folks to read Abdullah Öclean or Murray Boomchin and realize that bending the knee and violent revolution aren't the only two options.
SUVs have lower cargo capacity than more fuel efficient vans, and often even less than cars like old Foresters. They 100% serve no purpose, but people have been tricked in to believing this lie about cargo capacity.
Even trucks today have lower cargo capacity than vans, while also having worse fuel efficiency.
But lets for s second assume this lie is true. Why not require a commercial license for any vehicle built on a truck frame? Prove you need it and you could get an exception.
We sold our car and committed around Tacoma for about 6 months before we moved to the Netherlands. It was awful in a ton of ways, but for a lot of trips it was way better. The majority of trips are under a mile, so dropping the kids off at preschool and stuff was way better on a bike. It's actually quite a bit faster since kids love to get on the bike instead of the long fight against the car seat.
We also did a few shopping trips. You can't really do much more than 3 bags on a long tail bike with two kids in the back, but it worked well enough for shopping trips. People look at you like you're crazy in the US when you've got things strapped all over your bike, but here it's just completely normal. We probably would ride year round there if it wasn't for how dangerous cars are when it rains. I have no problem biking in the wind and the rain here because I know I'm not going to be randomly murdered by some idiot in a multiton metal box.
I'm not familiar with Boise, but I'd bet that an eBike would still be better for a lot of trips.
Do you know what those tea taxes were about? The colonists kept starting wars with local tribes and the king got sick of paying for it, so he imposed taxes on the colonies to pay for their own genocidal wars.
The US was founded to guarantee the right to carry out genocide without paying for it all, with a constitution that explicitly kept slavery legal and only allows rich white men to vote. A slave holder who's dentures were made out of human teeth from slaves murdered a bunch of his own soldiers who he'd promised to pay and feed them didn't.
Yeah, there's the nation's soul right there. It's been on the same trajectory since the beginning.
It was always that bad, it was just better at hiding it in the past. Anyone who grows up poor has always known what's up. There's a reason the crooked rural sheriff meme exists... If it wasn't for massive amounts of racism folks would probably recognize the same patterns in the cities.
It's not new, it's just that the dysfunction got so big that it started impacting the lives of white Liberals. Fuck, go read about native history in the US. They knew what was up from the beginning.
Good for you. I bet you have to drive everywhere and you don't even realize that the cost of the infrastructure to make your life convient is bankrupting your closest city.