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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?
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.
But there's actually an outrageous amount of wealth in the west. It just needs to be redistributed.
It's not an easy problem to fix, but it's relatively simple.
Unfortunately, much of that wealth was stolen from the global south via colonization. Redistribution of ownership must be done at a global, international level.
We're DINKs just starting to push into the "living a comfortable life" range. As in, we can do what we want and enjoy doing it.
However, bringing a kid into that picture throws all of that away. Hospital bills, diapers, just the costs in general would wipe us out.
We most likely wouldn't qualify for any reimbursements and are already maximizing the ones we have such as house financing and taxes.
I obsessively try to keep my "IOUs" to a minimum meaning aggressive mortgage payments and credit cards within the limitations of what I can pay off immediately but even that is difficult.
The house needs work - new siding and windows, unexpected issues like the boiler dieing etc. And I'm generally fearful of what we'd find behind the siding (termites??? everything not up to code?) A new job like that could turn into $40-50K that we just don't have floating around.
I don't go to doctors because I was afraid of what I might find. I'm lucky in the fact that my insurance is now pushing in the correct direction but still ludicrously expensive... And I mean ludicrously for the lack of services available that won't cost me an additional fortune.
The wife also works a must-commute 9-5. Not sure how she, or both of us would be able to handle childcare needs and not feel like we would be neglecting the kid.
When would I ever be able to afford a kid in these situations?
And I am lucky to say that we are DINKs that are getting paid relatively well... How can people that are below us in income survive having kids?
Maybe gen a will be the ones with the balls to actually rise up, set everything on fire, and kill the people responsible for destroying everything. Because of the rest of us are just sitting around complaining.
And yes, I admit, I'm in that category.
It looks like if gen Z’s massive wave of unionization doesn’t work that’ll be the case. Gen A is likely the water war generation unless we clean up our act enough for it to be gen ß
fails self-restraint check
gen β, not ß
Ah, gen Z
Us millenials tried that. It was called Occupy Wall Street and we got tear gassed, beaten, and driven away. And then there was a massive effort to erase what they could from media and history, and tarnish the rest.
It was a massive turning point for our generation. It broke us. We went from angry to depressed. We couldn't beat them. They have the power of massive physical violence behind them, AND control of the media.
Gen Z is trying via unionization, which is a tactic much more likely to succeed. Don't try to overthrow those in power, they're too powerful for that. Build up your own power first in whatever manner possible, and then use their own levers of control against them.
Unions need to make a move on the media next. Shawn Fein has been very good at this but it needs more action.
Occupy Wall Street started strong but quickly decended into uncoordinated nonsense. The initial message was simple, popular, and actionable about how it's bullshit that global austerity and government cutbacks were hurting the 99% whilst the 1% who caused the crash got off scott free with massive bailouts and tax cuts.
Because it was a "leaderless" collective action it quickly got occupied itself by all sorts of weird and wacky movements who diluted the message and gave the right wing media all the ammo they could ever want to paint the whole thing as "just some crazy hippies chatting shit about communism" or whatever.
It's pretty typical of movements on the left unfortunately. Everyone wants to be super inclusive so all ideas are equally important and you can't just dismiss ideas as not being relevant without creating a load of infighting. The alternative however means people with bad ideas (ones who often have more time and energy to boot) can easily take over the conversation and your whole message gets diluted, confused, and easily disarmed by the media.
The most important thing is the rich getting richer
The Market Has Spoken: Get Fucked.
A riveting exploration of the markets and society of the 21st century that will be written in 2200 lol
It's not even about money anymore.
I'm not positive that the world is going to be a comfortable place to live in at all in the next 40-80 years. I can't be sure it's morally acceptable to bring a new life into the world just to struggle until death. I know if I were given the choice I would have rather just not have been, it's not worth struggling forever just to barely get by until the game changes yet again and you get knocked back down to the peg you started on.
It's class warfare, plain and simple.
The owner class has collectively decided there are too many worker class people and have gone out of their way to make sure that fewer and fewer are born, and to actively punish those who choose to have children.
One thing I want to point out because I'm sure some rightie tightie always whitie is going to come by and say 'Butbutbut... there are more millionaires now than evar!!!11!1one1!!'
Yes.
They are trust fund kiddies, nearly all of them.
Upward mobility has been actively crippled by stagflation and several 'once in a lifetime economic crises' all in the span of 20 years.
Even lower end millionaires are scared of this and claim they are struggling.
Eat the rich, it is the only solution.
Being a millionaire isn't even enough anymore. You have to be at least a multimillionaire to live off of it.
Yeah, because they know that they are the next 'middle class' that will be targeted for extraction.
No joke I used to do consulting work for fast food franchise owner with 4 locations, the guy netted 800k a year with investments added.
Caught him several times literally sweating in fear that he wasn't going to be able to afford his kids private school and that he'd have to sell a franchise to stay above water.
Would be nice to get some class solidarity with them, but they've spent generations spitting on us so I really don't think they'll ever join the cause.
Hell, most of them blame US for the inflation that has made their money worth less.
That's giving them too much credit. They're just greedy and trying to manipulate markets to hoard as much wealth as possible and they don't care what happens to the workers.
I agree with your stance on policy, but honest question here:
I hear lots of theories that the ownership class are trying to limit reproduction of the classes below them.
Why though? Don't they want a huge population of desperate workers that keep fueling their profits and keeping their well-manicured hands from doing any real work?
I dunno, I wonder sometimes if we apply Hanlon's Razor and it really is an extreme example of incredibly shortsighted capitalist stupidity: "Yeah we're running out of workers but that's not a problem THIS quarter..."
People who think of their children and want to give them the best future but don't have the money for it don't have children. People who don't care about the future of their children, ended up having children.
This leads to more children being born with shitty parents who don't care about them.
This is a bit unfair. There are lots of circumstances that result in children that weren't planned. Lots of millennials grew up being told to just pop out the babies and the rest will happen. No the fuck it doesn't. Not anymore anyway. Maybe that was true at some point but now what happens is they have to work harder than ever while daycare raises their kids. Meanwhile, they have to work a second job to just pay for daycare. When I was a kid I remember my mom getting a lot more gov assistance than seems to ever happen for people now. It was rough but we never had to worry a out keeping a roof over our heads or food on our table. Half those life changing programs are gone now. At least in my area.
meanwhile 1000 and 1 Stinkpieces are being written about population decline, blaming young generations for not getting busy while job and housing prospects go down the shitter.
And every single one of them was written to get the worker rats to breed beyond their means and be easier to exploit.
I am that educated couple. Wife has an associates and was just able to find a small job. I have associates, BS, and MA and can't even get a fucking interview because I don't have the absolutely insane list of qualifications on my resume that these companies are demanding for a half-decent paying job. I did everything I was supposed to and they still won't fucking pay me.
I am in my late 30s and was only just able to buy this month. It's the cheapest place I could find in my city, and the mortgage repayment will clean me and my SO out to the point where we can't afford to run a car. We're both in full time employment with an MSc.
I went to college, acquired two diplomas, my SO went to college and acquired one as well. My brother has two as well if I recall correctly, and his wife has one as well.
Together, we are four college graduates with upwards of six diplomas between us.
The four of us also had to pool our finances to afford one home.
Quad income, one house.
It's not a small house but it's not exactly in a high demand city (we're pretty far out in a rural area, surrounded by farmland). I also wouldn't describe the house as large. If my SO and I, or my brother and his wife were to buy this place it might be "large" but with four of us here, it's fairly modest. We have no significant land, less than a quarter of an acre, and there's nothing special about the house that makes it cost more (in fact, there were several things that should have lowered the cost). Yet here we are, scraping by with multiple incomes barely able to save at all because the monthly cost of the mortgage is so high... And we need to save, because all of those savings need to exist for when the water heater and furnace and air-conditioner inevitably fail.... They're not new, this is not a new home. I'm still finding aluminum wires that I have to rip out and replace, because if the place burns down and my insurance finds a scrap of aluminum wire, they'll deny me any coverage for the damage.
My SO and I have no children. That fact is never changing.
After WW2 almost every other developed nation was in ruin. The US was "the only game in town" when it came to production. This caused US labor to be in high demand and priced at a premium compared to places like in Europe or Japan, who were more concerned about rebuilding than exporting goods.
THIS is how a high school dropout could afford a house and a family. Because that high school dropout was basically your only option for labor. As those other countries finished rebuilding a lot manufacturing jobs left and things started to get "back to normal".
The US was in a unique position but like most things it was just squandered. Now the US is "regressing towards the mean". This is going to be the new normal because the last 40-50 years was an exception.
Europe was reduced to rubble, but my grandfathers, who were children during the war and after, both still managed to build a house, raise two kids each and set money aside; one of my grandmothers worked as a seamstress and those grandparents not only built houses for themselves and each kid, but essentially owned a whole block in our village. The other grandfather was the son of an orphan, still managed to do well.
I had to take a job that requires great effort, stress and skill and keeps me away from home 40% of the time, it pays well but still I couldn't dream to be able to do the same as they did.
Agree. I am that 30 y o still living at home. Work full time, 2 jobs and STILL cannot afford a rent without it decimating me to the ground. Its nothing to do with my budget: i get close to 3k/mo yet if i try to rent some place, i will pretty much have only about 400/500 left a month…. In a european capital. What is the point of renting in these conditions? And yes i know rationally its possible with my salary but i choose its more fruitful to help parent and be able to save rather than live ln the verge every month without being able to do much.
The Corporations and Governments broke the social contract, not you. Remember that ish when things pop off. Workers were never to blame.
I honestly think free childcare would solve a lot of problems as well
This is why billionaires are so obsessed with developing AI systems to replace all the serfs who will now never be born.
Is anyone on Lemmy doing okay? I always come to the comments of these posts and see the doom and gloom. I’m a millenniaI. I paid off my student loans. I own a home I can afford. I’m debt free besides my mortgage. I have an emergency fund. I have a 401k that’s on track. I worked hard and made sacrifices to get where I am. I can only assume there are others out there who have done the same.
Millenial here, not in tech. SINK. Skilled blue collar labor. Not union (for now...my next job I want to get in a union shop). I work hard, but I was also very lucky.
The #1 thing I did, by far and away, to crawl out of the grinding poverty that I was born into, was to leave my shithole Southern state and move to California.
I now make enough money that I'm on track for my own retirement, and I'm also funding my parents' retirement. I'll be a millionaire within a few years if things stay on track.
I did NOT pull myself up by my bootstraps. I worked very hard, had a government social system designed to support me rather than keep me down, and had several lucky breaks. Now I pay a shit ton of taxes and I'm glad to do so. California has been VERY good to me, and whatever taxes they feel entitled to is okay by me.
There are plenty of people in your situation (I'm also one of them), but the fact is that (unless you're at the very top of the pyramid) nearly everyone (including people like us) is a bit worse off than they would have been at a comparable stage in life 30 - 60 years ago.
I had to work hard and make sacrifices to make it, however with my qualifications my parents (and even moreso my grandparents) generation would have just walked into secure, high-paying jobs with real prospects of advancement. Instead I've got to constantly be switching jobs and looking out for myself in order to not fall behind. I know the rules of the game, so I do what I have to do.
Now just imagine people who 50 years ago would have been 'making it with sacrifices and hard work', since (virtually) everyone is now a bit worse off, their situation has shifted to 'underwater despite sacrifices and hard work'.
TLDR: The average millennial is poorer than past generations and it's harder to make it than before. This doesn't mean that there aren't large amount of individual millennials (like us) who DO make it, although even for this group (unless they are at the top of the pyramid) it's harder than before.
Well, that's great. It's very easy to make this about you and fail to see what many others face. I hope you never have to face the brutal hardships caused by not being in the right place with the right connections and the other life circumstances that can lock people into a life of deeper or generational poverty. But it could be the tide just hasn't risen to a level with your head barely above the turbulence stuck treading water with no way out. In an instant, everything could get turned upside down and through no fault of your own, now the world is a different place all of a sudden. But it's not any different, you've just joined the millions of others who got the rug pulled from beneath them earlier than you.
I too have been quite successful in life through hard work, discipline and the right life situations that gave me the opportunities to carve my own path in life doing what I love. I can still see how things have collapsed and I would never question the validity of the millions of others simply because my life experience has been different. This alone makes you venerable to being pushed to the front of the line next.
It's wealth inequality. Capital accumulates capital, and it actually means something because wealth is control, and things like housing that determine control over people's lives are forms of wealth that get concentrated away from regular people along with everything else.
IMO two main things need to happen:
Oh but they actively took our paychecks too. This wasn't just government welfare for the wealthy and the stock market. When they fired Janet because they only needed one worker instead of two thanks to new software? They didn't pay Bob extra. That's wealth just sucked up into the Executive and Shareholder realm. Then to add salt to the wound of doing two jobs they give Bob a December raise below inflation. (because of course there is still actually more that Bob has to do, the software didn't fix everything.) So now they get Janet's pay and the extra revenue they denied Bob, because of course their prices damn sure went up in step with inflation.
This kind of fuckery has resulted in an estimated upwards transfer of around 47 Trillion dollars.