How can you tell if Americans are "poor"?

I can place residents of NY by social class according to their accents, because I lived there for five years. And, to a degree, southerners. But I can't place Californians at all by accent. California is now the US equivalent of received pronunciation, and unplaceable.

I never thought she had a NY accent tbh. She is a decade older than the rest. She met Carrie in the mid 80s when she was a barmaid.

"There is no working class in the US, per se. Nobody uses that phraseology in daily life. There really isn’t a class system like that, or at least not one that is ever discussed. "

I've heard it used on American TV. I know they don't use it as often, but it must be used sometimes or I wouldn't have heard it, and they use middle class to mean ordinary people and upper class often just means rich rather than posh.

OK, but they didn't have any perceptible regional accents from those places either, at least not to my uneducated ear.
If Samantha moved to NY in the 70s that would have been in her teens presumably so she might have picked up the accent...

"In my experience the writers of shows don't always worry about whether that family could really afford that house, they just want it to look lovely on screen unless they are going for the gritty side of us life."

That was always the complaint about Friends, that the apartments were better than people in those jobs could afford, but it was explained with 'belongs to grandmother and NY rent control'. People make the same complaint about Eastenders.

" I think here it can be too easy for people who should work but choose not to, and that upsets me"

Come to where I live if you want to be resentful of people with no job. No need to prove you're looking for work, benefits in line with previous income, not required to take a job below the level of your previous jobs.

To be clear I meant 2 bathrooms is typical in the US, not the UK. California is fairly generous with Medicaid, so he should definitely check into it.

10 years/40 quarters is the minimum to qualify for SSDI or retirement, but as a PP says it will be taken based on a longer view. You get a reduced pension if you take it at 62. However if he was a high earner his reduced amount might still be reasonable especially compared to the basic state pension.

Medicare Part B is $150 a month. If you choose Medigap and Part D (Pharma) that is more. You can also get Medicare Advantage (Part C) which bundles everything and is cheaper than traditional Medigap (politically it's another story but that's not relevant here). If your income is low, then you are dual eligible and Medicaid pays your Medicare premiums plus the cost share and additional services.

As an ex-pat that’s lived in the US for the last 2+ decades, I can tell you that you should largely ignore what you see on TV. Houses don’t tell an accurate picture for the most part. Poor people don’t all live in the projects or trailer parks or ramshackle rundown houses. It’s totally possible to earn a median salary and own or rent a decent sized house in excellent condition. I have a friend who scrapes by using the money her husband left her when he died. Her house is valued at $1.2MM. My ex-wife lives in a 5,000 square foot home and is only just able to make it work with her salary. I live with a bunch of guys and rent a room. I retired at 52 and I have a nice nest egg tucked away. Until the 2000s, it was totally possible for someone earning a median wage to get a reasonable mortgage and own a home and several cars.

There is no working class in the US, per se. Nobody uses that phraseology in daily life. There really isn’t a class system like that, or at least not one that is ever discussed. Middle class is how most people will describe themselves; a weird situation, but there you have it.

You can’t even be totally sure that “homeless” people are what they appear to be. Once you consider that they may simply be panhandlers with some sort of home, or travelers, or even “Trustafarians” (teenagers with rich parents that choose to rough it for extended periods), it becomes hard to know which are truly homeless. Of course, the majority you come across actually are, but you see my point?

Television and movie production, for the most part, love to use interesting homes for their settings. They’re usually always too perfect. You can tell something’s up for other reasons. Parents sometimes seem to go for long periods without their kids, people don’t ever seem to work, and much of a normal daily life is absent. People really do lock their cars (sometimes obsessively) and you can’t order a “beer” in a bar without giving a hint as to what you actually want.

Having said that, some stereotypes are actually accurate. The very first thing I saw in the US was two police officers drinking coffee and eating donuts outside of a coffee shop in their vehicle.

They weren’t all from NYC.

Carrie and Charlotte were from Connecticut.

Samantha unknown but moved to NYC in the late 1970s and was from a working-class background.

Miranda was from Philadelphia, which I can only guess is Pennsylvania.

Please encourage him to look into Medicaid! He doesn’t need to needlessly suffer. I’m sure losing his job and the breakdown of his marriage impacted his mental health, and there are resources he is entitled to. Good luck to him!

I absolutely agree. He's made some terrible choices over many years, long before he went to the US. I'm not criticising the US systems, but realise his situation would be different here.

I think anyone who can work and needs money should work, even if it's not at their chosen profession, but not everyone agrees. TBH, I think here it can be too easy for people who should work but choose not to, and that upsets me too, but that's a whole different thread.

In my experience the writers of shows don't always worry about whether that family could really afford that house, they just want it to look lovely on screen unless they are going for the gritty side of us life. In reality Ive known people living in trailers held together with duct tape, no hot running water, people raising grandchildren because of drug addiction living hand to mouth, cars held together by aforementioned all purpose duct tape (no mot's there), and 2 hour commute ma because due to Amazon they got kicked out of their decent low rise housing in Seattle for "redevelopment" when i visited a whole neighbourhood of homes and small businesses like car repairs had gone.

“The saving grace is that he will be able to draw his state pension now, at 62, and it's around double what he'd get here, which really surprised me. (Apparently you only need to contribute for 10 years to get this, unlike the 40 years in the UK.) Once he has his pension he will be entitled to use some kind of Medicaid.”

No, that’s not the case. Social security adds up and averages the 35 years of your highest income. If you worked fewer than 35 years, then a 0 is averaged on for every year you did not work. So if you worked. For 10 years, you’d get those earnings plus 25 zeros all divided by 35. So your average is reduced by not working.

Then if you take your social security before your full retirement age which is 65-68 depending on year of birth rn, (62 is early). Your pension is reduced by a certain % for each year below full retirement age you are.

He may be surprised at how little he will get.

Once on social security, you are then eligible to pay for Medicare health insurance which is several hundred dollars a month. Medicaid is for low income (below poverty level) working age Americans.

Here in the U.K., similarly you can claim some state pension with only 10yrs of NI contributions, however you get a prorated amount instead of the full state pension if you have less than the 35 years of NI to get full state pension. The calculation is they take full state pension weekly £ amount divide it by 35 and then times that by the # the yrs of NI you have between 10 and 34 and that gives you your smaller state pension amount.

It does mean poor in some parts of the US.

I lived in a gated community there and hanging out washing was banned. You weren’t even allowed to have a wet swimsuit and towel hanging by your private inground pool. It was a $500 fine if a neighbour snitched on you.

This was same community where you weren’t allowed to do any gardening yourself as that was for our grounds crew. We were only allowed to have a few decorative potted plants. It was a very posh place.

Yes, the fortunes of the Conner family mirrored a downturn in the sort of industries that had provided secure jobs at union rates for millions up to the era the show was set in. The precariousness of their later non-union employment was a reflection of a changing economy/ globalization.

Union subs for tradesmen and construction workers and others skilled or even manual laborers provided group health insurance and also retirement / pension schemes, plus some unemployment protection.

There is a dark side to unions too. They had a role to play in the exclusion of African Americans from blue collar prosperity - in most cities it was nigh impossible for a black man to get a union card for many decades, while city aldermen or their relatives could give a white teenage son of a friend/ cousin/ reliable precinct worker/ someone who knew a guy who could lay his hands on Cuban cigars, etc, the introduction to the union that would result in a union card, the golden ticket to a summer job, for example, schlepping bricks at union rates.

It sounds like your brother has a history of bad choices, sadly, and possibly also is misinformed or was given bad advice. If he’s completely unemployed he qualifies for Medicaid which will cover his medical and dental costs now. It’s Medicare that he needs to be retirement age for.

He also should probably have been less picky when it came to finding work—he could have acquired a job at Starbucks or one of the many other big companies that pays over minimum wage and offer benefits. It’s not luxurious but it sure beats living in a camper!

There's lots of car crash style youtube footage of this kind of situation. You could spend weeks down a rabbit hole of that kind of material and never see the same footage twice

And I don't know if it's still running on some channel somewhere, but the (reality?) show Cops from many years back featured skid row types and their problems with The Law. The issue of stereotyping of all kinds was rightly pointed out in the heyday of that show.

The late Maury Povich had a show featuring the same sort of demographic and paternity testing, etc, again raising questions about exploitation, stereotyping, and the like.

It's their cultural references.

I imagine you're not from New England

Blue collar is a term in the UK too. However, as for being unionised, Roseanne ended up working more in services later on didn't she? It didn't seem particularly secure. They all quit the factory and in the end she was working in a cafe in a mall or something. I seem to remember a hairdresser or something in the middle too.

Dan had his own business that was very up and down so not very secure either.

Roseanne and her family were what is called "blue collar" in the US. This term mainly encompasses union members - self-employed or company-employed tradesmen, construction workers, and others who do manual work for a living, such as bus drivers, automotive / factory workers, truckers, people working for utility companies, and more. Blue collar doesn't include large groups of workers in sectors like retail, who tend to have precarious PT employment, and tend to be young or female.

Union membership is a distinguishing element of the blue collar class, and an extremely important element of blue collar success in the US. The ongoing assault on unions by the capitalist class since the days of Reagan is a major factor in current politics. President Biden made a point of supporting striking automotive workers a few years ago.

The term "working class" as it is understood in Britain doesn't really translate into the American socio-economic concept.

"It was interesting that the other passengers were either students or elderly people, or obviously poor. I was the only person of working age who was not obviously poor."

This is exactly the same in the semi-rural part of Wales I come from. The public transport is not reliable enough or frequent enough for people to use to go to and from work.

You see that in the UK too. Or just that on the poorer streets there is no space to grow trees.

With farmers it totally depends. Gentleman farmers in some areas, maybe? Tenant farmers, small farmers in other areas definitely not.

" (a bungalow is a sign of affluence in these parts!)"

Where do you live? Bungalows are for old people where I come from. Not posh at all.