• zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    85·
    1 year ago

    My family’s salary was $200 a month

    I hear this shit and I think about my grocery bill today, in America. Like, what could you buy for $200/mo in Ukraine in 2004? What was rent? What was a month’s worth of electricity?

    Like, never even mind Communism v Capitalism. Americans have no clue how bad they have it, because there’s always some guy on the other side of the planet living a depressingly normal existence on 1/10th of the salary you need to get by in the States. It looks fucking hellish on paper, but when you’re living in the literal bread-basket of Europe its surprisingly easy to fill up your shopping cart when you compare it to some college kid who blows that same $200 at Whole Foods on dry pasta and laundry detergent.

    • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      yeah you also have to look at cost of living when talking about income. What kind of life does that money buy

      although if he was talking about Ukraine in the 90’s and early 2000’s it is entirely possible his family were just really poor. But that would be capitalism by then

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        There was still a ton of infrastructure that’s credited to the Soviets. And one of the big appeals of a place like Bulgaria is how you can privatize those incredibly valuable capital projects.

        Then you build a gradient that siphons wealth from one corner of the county to another, you create a Rich cohort of professionals and a Poor cohort of day laborers, and you brag about all the new Burger Kings you’ve introduced to the post-Soviet frontier.

        It’s possible that they were on the poor end of that spectrum. It’s also possible that $200/mo spent significantly farther than it does today.

        Certainly, they weren’t homeless and they weren’t starving. That means their $200 was getting vastly more mileage than what an American in 2023 receives.