An annoying thing well-meaning Australians tend to do is to internalise economic/social axioms that are true in the USA and false here. In particular: the median Australian has a comfortable, fairly secure middle-class lifestyle, in a way that the median USA-an really doesn't.

Australia is quite an equal society from (approximately) the 20th to the 95th percentiles. Poor people in Australia are really, multigenerationally fucked (in ways that tie in with the oppression of Indigenous people but are not solely limited to them).

So that's a huge difference: when a USA-an with a white collar job complains about doing it tough, they're talking about being fired at will, being bankrupted if they get sick, and struggling to afford essentials. In Australia, it's about the foreign holiday or third car.

Another, semi-related point is that we have vastly different cost structures. In the USA, fuel, electricity and processed food (retail and foodservice) are incredibly cheap, whereas fresh food is quite expensive. In Australia, those costs run pretty much the opposite way.

In other words, any analysis of how economics, lifestyles and poverty intersect that's informed largely by a US understanding of lifestyles is going to be risibly stupid in an Australian context.

The opposite is also true: Australians don't really get the amount at stake in US politics even for middle income people - because for the median Australian, voting is a binary choice between "getting to feel vaguely nice about helping the poor" and "getting a small tax bribe"

Michael's final point here is also an important one to reflect on, when you're weighing up how much the tax bribe will be worth to you https://twitter.com/MichaelH_PhD/status/1312606295401197570?s=19