this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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This seems like a good place to post this reminder that in the last 50 years income has lost to inflation by 137 points. That's decades of prices rising faster than wages. It's not rocket science. They walked away with all of the productivity gains, and gave the entire country a pay cut at the same time. You want a boring dystopia? How about stealing your paycheck a couple percentage points a year until suddenly we realize we can't afford to live without 3 full time incomes in one household.
Where I'm from, the median house price has risen 600% relative to the median income in the past 50 years.
That means the deposit we pay today is the equivalent of the entire 30 year mortgage of the people calling you lazy.
Yup, the 137 points is just "core" inflation. Education, Housing, Food, and Cars all come in over that. Which is fine because those aren't necessary in the US right?
And yet nearly anyone IRL you point this out to spouts some form of free market propaganda bullshit.
Without violent pushback there is no reason at all to improve things. Cant afford to live?.. fuck you, we'll find someone who can. Piss off, peasant.
All we would need is 3 days of a general strike with at least 10% participation.
But unfortunately there are several factors that prevent this, some human nature, some deliberately manufactured.
Almost no one I know can afford missing a week's worth of work: This is manufactured with stagflation and at-will work laws
The rich inflaming radical partisanship with traditional and social media to distract from who the real enemy is, reducing social cooperation
American culture has become largely an 'observer culture', where the world is treated as a thing to passively watch while feeling disconnected, this is probably the worst contributor.
So many of the labor movement gains our forefathers bled and died for have been trampled by an owner class hell bent on recapitulating european nobility on American soil and they have been WILDLY successful the last 30 years.
Either we organize a general strike, or there will be food riots within a decade.
Shawn Fain (United Auto Workers president) has been calling for unions across every industry to align their contracts to end at the same time on May 1st, 2028 (International Labor Day), specifically so that we can prepare for a general strike. Gives the already organized unions time to build up a strike fund and non-organized folks time to get organized.
If there was an IT workers union with presence in my state I would absolutely do the same, though to be fair I could probably just take a week off that might not end until the owner class comes humble to the table.
Might be worth your while to look into Locals in your area that aren't necessarily IT focused unions. Some unions (like the Teamsters and others) will still help you organize under their union even though they typically represent workers in a specific industry. I don't have an office workers union local in my neck of the woods, but I've been giving it some thought as well.
People who can't afford three days off work will certainly fare well by not participating in a general strike.
/S
If I had never sold or lost a single bitcoin I mined I could afford to pay for a few thousand people to cover the costs, even more for the most needed protesters, the fast food workers. If I were a billionaire I would literally break my fortune to pay for every fast food worker in the U.S. (in their pockets, to be clear) to take a week off.
I would live on ramen and burning newspaper for warmth if it would guarantee that even 5% of the fast food and restaurant workforce took off for a week.
We could do a general strike.
What's a point?
One percent relative what the market was at the starting point.
The market today is 237 % of starting point (probably 1990).
Entire country? Which country? We're talking about our whole western civilisation.
The data I'm using is for the US.
Inflation isn't prices growing faster than wages, it's just prices growing in general. Don't let anyone tell you that gentle inflation is bad for poor people.
Debtors gain from inflation because they pay their fixed debts with currency worth less. When interest rates are low, refinance or borrow at low fixed rates. When inflation rises, your fixed debt costs go down in real terms.
If you want wages to increase, support a higher minimum wage.
This isn't just inflation over 50 years. This is divergence in the inflation of wages and core inflation. So prices over all have risen by 137 points more than wages have risen. This isn't the talk about inflation vs deflation vs death spirals. This is everything slowly becoming less affordable over time. And it really doesn't matter if the money is worth less when the interest rate on the loan is far beyond inflation in the first place. You either pay it back quickly (monthly on a card) or watch it spiral out of control rapidly because adjustable rate loans work off of inflation and your wages didn't go up to match. So now you have that much less money a month to buy food.
Theoretically inflation is good for borrowers. In practice you need a certain base of money for that to be true. If you can't cover increased costs over the life of the loan then inflation is going to take you behind the shed.