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.
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Almost no one I know can afford missing a week’s worth of work: This is manufactured with stagflation and at-will work laws
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The rich inflaming radical partisanship with traditional and social media to distract from who the real enemy is, reducing social cooperation
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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.
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We could do a general strike.
137 points
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).
gave the entire country a pay cut
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.
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.
And harvested from the stolen land of the indigenous peoples of North America!
Not just their land, but their ideas of “freedom”, “equality”, and “democracy”. Europeans didn’t even know those words until the French Missionaries in the late 1600’s were met with the Indigenous Critique, and how Indigenous Americans had equal rights for men and women, were free to disobey arbitrary authority, had a conglomerate of states that conveined in a “federal” central committee, and could impeach their rulers. Of course, so-called “Enlightenment” philosophers who were just rich trust-fund babies stole that idea to create America and call themselves “Enlightened Thinkers” as if they came up with it themselves, while simultaneously degrading the Indigenous Critique by calling them “savages” who were “less advanced” than Europeans based on evidence they dreamed up while staring at a fireplace (I’m look at you Rousseu and Hobbes), stealing Indigenous politics as their own, and thanking them with ethnic cleansing.
Fuck Europeans.
As a European I agree. The amount of shit we, on our high white horses, caused across the globe is astonishing. It would be interesting to see what the world would have looked like today had there never been any colonization.
I can’t imagine why you’d get downvoted for that. Yes that’s absolutely true and I’m all for a globally equitable wealth redistribution.
It’s the whole “they’re gonna hunt me for sport?!” Meme, I think. They imagine that if we share ownership equitably globally, they will suddenly have to go to eating rats and dying in the streets, when realistically it will just mean a heavier emphasis on industrialization and international public transit, with more equitable distribution of wealth.
For anyone confused: no, I’m not advocating for people taking your gaming PC.
I am
You have a problem, Lemmings
I got ideas…
Careful, you’ll get the tankie label for posts like this around these parts
Most countries have a largely planned economy, including the US.
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
- edited to correct a tragic ragey blunder
Good old Gen SS
I can’t believe I have never seen this joke made in any context before
SS seems powerful, sure but the godlike powers of SSS class generations could put black holes to shame with their inescapable might.
SSSS class generations can harness the power output of a galaxy
No, the Troika changed it when Germany took control of Greece 10 years ago.
We cannot name one gen Alpha and the next Beta, that is too mean
self-restraint, not self-restaint
:)
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.
I think the left’s problem isn’t inclusiveness (in things like this) it’s the inability to give power to “strong” leadership. The same mental firewalls that prevent those on the left from falling victim to mountebanks keeps them from letting others speak on their behalf.
It also creates mental roadblocks for anyone on the left who tries to lead. “How can I speak for these people? I am not one of them.” That’s not a limitation of inclusiveness it’s just empathy. So when anyone on the left challenges a left wing leader with anything, really that leader–if they are truly left leaning–will not fight back without near certainty about their position.
This makes it easy for a left wing leader to denounce the illogical and/or racist positions from those on the right but extremely difficult to take a stand on issues where everything sucks like Israeli/Palestinian conflict or immigration. This leaves them open for charlatans to point to them and say, “See? They’re weak!” Which is the exact thing the right hates and fears from left wing leaders.
Maybe inclusiveness wasn’t the right word to use, but your second and third paragraphs are exactly what I meant. It’s because we want to make sure everyone’s voices are hard and ideas are considered that movements end up standing for everything and nothing at the same time. To me creating that space and opportunity for all ideas and people is inclusivity, which is a great thing overall but can make affecting change difficult when your opposition all fall into line behind “strong” leaders.
We need a raised militia in open, violent rebellion against the police and national guard. Anything less than that is theater.
I hear Texas is already on it.
Lol I’m a millennial too I definitely remember that and it’s not what I’m talking about at all. They just stood around yelling for the most part.
The funny thing is that we have politicians here in Australia that complain about “woke” environmentalists standing up for the environment by sitting down on the road. They’re trying to have them labelled as terrorists for simply sitting down in the street.
Meanwhile in France, Farmers who are angry about stopping of diesel concessions are setting things on fire, blocking streets with tractors and dumping manure and dirt into the street to block public servants responsible into buildings.
The point is two fold, French have always done protests better. And the west conservatives have a massive raging boner for eroding ones rights to protest.
I support protesting wholeheartedly, but blocking a road is among the most moronic ways to protest I can think of.
They are blocking emergency vehicles, people going to work, people doing errands, visiting family, goods being transported etc.
There is a reason people get pissed off and pull them off of the road themselves. It does absolutely nothing to further their cause.
It doesn’t even effect the people they protest against.Imagine missing your kids show, mothers dying breath or the flight to your long awaited vacation and family visit because someone couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to protest than sitting down and being an absolute butthole.
Isn’t the inconvenience literally the point though?
I don’t call people potentially dying an inconvenience.
They have no moral right to decide wether or not people make it to where they are going.So what do they hope to achieve?
If it is awarenes, then there are much better ways of doing itJust wondering if you’ve ever participated in a protest or this is just an academic exercise. In my experience well behaved protests are basically ineffective. It’s true that you can actually end up vilifying the cause in the eyes of people that you’ve inconvenienced.
But that creates social pressure on our leaders to address the problem. Either by compromise with the protests demands or clearing them out by force.
I get that it may block the direct path of an ambulance potentially. But most gps algorithms when they see a ton of stationary phones in the street interpret that as traffic and try to route around it.
At the end of the day, yes there is the small potential for harm to a few individuals, but (hopefully) the benefits to a larger group offset that.
I went to UT and there were protests in the street all the time. It always inconvenienced me and I actually came to blows with a few of the protesters, but they should know that’s a possibility going into it. There’s really no right or wrong here. There’s only large organized group against a few impacted drivers.
I appreciate your arguments but respectfyully disagree.
A GPS guided detour should not be necessary for vital social functions to operate.
I also dislike the small potential for harm to a few individuals when there are better ways to get the point across.Block construction.
Occupy offices and locations.
March.
Send letters and run awareness campaigns.
Vote.Do anything you can that makes people see you. Just don’t block the road. To me that is too risky. If everybody would protest like that to achieve their political goals we would live in total anarchy.
Hope my opinions make sense even though you might disagree.
Totally. No animosity here. Never considered occupying an office.
I have been educating my child on unions and workers’ rights. When he’s old enough, we move on to the proper engineering and maintenance of guillotines.
Have you considered teaching him welding and bulldozer operation?
programming still better
Programming your foot up a billionaire’s ass
It is getting to the point that is the only option. Voting doesn’t matter, protesting doesn’t matter, complaining doesn’t matter. Millennials were raised that those are the processes, we have come to realize they don’t work and our kids are being raised with the understanding that that doesn’t work. If they want things to change, and it literally HAS to, that is what needs to happen. Either accept the status quo or forcefully change it. If I understand history, that is the most American thing you can do.
i’d rather complain than be complacent at least
I’m gonna be honest, I’m a zoomer (ahhh yes I’m a zoomer, I’m a zoomer, yippee! Everyone look at me, I’m the zoomer) and, looking towards the future, my future, I’m already kinda there. I just think we both haven’t quite hit the critical mass where everyone else is at that point, yet, and I think that the narrative about, you know, why things suck, I think that’s been co-opted with a mixed level of success, forcing people to feel “fine” with their circumstances, or, forcing people to feel personally responsible for their circumstances, as the case may be. I also think there’s a good amount of cynicism about standing up to the US government and institutions, since we’ve been fed a shitload of stuff against that, and then, you know, we’re all fucked and have limited resources and whatever. I also think people are probably too nice for their own good, most people just kind of want to chill, even if that means they’re actually not allowed to chill because they have to work 2 jobs and have no energy and one financial emergency could wipe them out instantly.
I dunno, I feel pretty cynical, but I also feel like things will probably get at least a little bit worse, before they get better. I just hope they get worse in the right way, instead of in the whole like, world ending kind of way. Or, localized apocalypse, kind of way, more likely.
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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.
I can’t be sure it’s morally acceptable to bring a new life into the world just to struggle until death.
That has been true for just about everyone throughout history.
the game changes yet again and you get knocked back down to the peg you started on.
People in the developed world not having kids is part of how they ‘win’ the game.
The reason boomers were able to demand so much is because, as the name implies, they’re a big fucking cohort. They were politically influential from the time they could vote. Keeping birthrates depressed and shipping in cheap foreign labour is how those with power keep everyone else powerless.
It’s a weird situation, but the way to improve living standards for future generations is to… have future generations. Even if you don’t feel like you can entirely support them now.
You’ll bring the “Population Bomb” doomers out, proving failed predictions never have consequences for the predictors since they can always say it will happen next year- since 1798
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.
Uhh no. I could do just fine with the rest of my life and a million dollars.
If you keep working and investing etc etc, sure. That’s not what I said.
I said to live off of it, which is generally the implied point of the “millionaire” goal. Retirement and whatnot. The generally accepted number is you can safely pull down (depending on the year and performance etc etc) ~30k, MAYBE 40k per mil you have invested. Fine if you’re still in the workforce and all that but it’s not paying the bills on its own if you have a single M.
Nope. 1 million.
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.
Most of them, yeah, but the few capable and practiced in such actions whisper to the ignorant rich what they are to do.
I’m not pretending the wealthy are a monolithic entity, but I’m also not pretending that 8 people hold more power for political and economic change than 5 billion combined. And even if only 1 of them is a eugenicist (protip: a fucktonne more of them are eugenicists) then they in their own hand has the power to shape politics and money to whatever the fuck their twisted will is.
And some of them is to reduce the ‘excess population’.
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…”
You want to keep them fighting amongs themselves so you limit their resources and opportunities. Don’t want a lot of them suddenly realising there’s a lot more of them than there are of you.
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?
Did you not see the rich’s reaction to Kelly Osbourne’s tactless ‘who will clean our toilets?’ statement?
If anything the last 40 years has taught me that the ultra wealthy have zero understanding of planning for a world beyond the next quarterly report.
The reason ‘why’ is mostly petty af, they consider us unsightly and are annoyed that our brightest are out-competing their trust fund crotchfruit in prestigious education, and are fully aware of the coming economic collapse and want as few as possible rioters banging on the doors of their ultra lux survival compounds.
I dunno, I wonder sometimes if we apply Hanlon’s Razor an
No, all you need to do is talk to them about it without them knowing that you are poor. They will tell you with their own mouths.
Class warfare has existed since before writing, and it exists wherever the wealthy are allowed to take power.
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.
Accidents don’t happen. Keep your dick dry. It’s not hard.
For you, it probably isn’t.
It’s so very easy.
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.
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.
Immigration is the answer, but racism gets in the way.
I don’t really agree, because I consider labor or opportunity based immigration a symptom of continued economic injustice in the global south. Modern societies, among many other things, need to acknowledge the reality that the planet has a material limit on the population it can support.
You’re right. I was thinking that immigration could be an answer under capitalism, but I agree that exploiting immigration maintains inequality.
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How do we tax the rich?
Everything above the neck goes.
Get rid of an income tax and move to a federal sales tax on everything. Provide cost of living stipends for everyone. It could provide a safety net and stop tax avoidance schemes.
Sales tax on everything… isn’t a tax on wealth. Why not just do some of the things Scandinavian countries do?
Why is it so all-or-nothing on any one idea? There is a lot of nuance in how you tax income, and the teeth and regulation in order to effectively tax corporations. E.g. Anything over 400k, taxed at 90%… is something. Suggesting to tax it instead at 0% because you can slap on some flat sales tax… is just silly.
Doesn’t help that politics are very corrupt, politicians can do insider trading, media is owned by private interests, unions are demonised and unsurprisingly workers rights are almost non-existent, and you have a two party system that’s deeply flawed.
The US had a real shot at moving in the right direction, but the DNC saw it fit to sabotage its own candidate. I’d imagine treason charges for something like that… but, not even an apology.
Anyways…
You don’t need to tax wealth. Amased wealth will be taxed when the wealth is spent.
I understood your argument. It’s just not how it works. Even if amassed wealth was used to buy stuff as a exchange of goods, it wouldn’t be anything significant, and it would be less significant the more wealth we’re talking about. That in itself should clue you in on why this doesn’t work.
If taxes is a problem in terms of inequality, why… not tax it more progressively then? That’s the whole point of it. Reduce taxes for lower brackets, increase for higher brackets. Even if you thought 0% tax makes sense, which sort of already exists for the lowest bracket, and you want this to apply to more people… then, just do that, starting at from lower income side. Do the same starting from the upper income side, but there you increase it significantly. How far you go, is politics.
Put into place stricter regulations for the exploitation of workers. Actually enforce this stuff, not just give fines that are less than the gains. Replace your election system, it’s broken. Etc. There are soooo many things, that actually make sense, and would have a good effect. But looking at say 400k+ incomes and thinking “tax it at 0%”. Reagan’s grave would look like the classic zombie stereotype, except it would be his dick protruding from the ground.
The thing a consumption tax fixes is eliminating all the tax avoidance schemes. People living off their wealth don’t pay high taxes, they take out loans against their wealth and pay the loan back at 5% instead of the 20% capital gains tax. Carl Icahn, an investor was able to pay no income tax using this scheme. He had an adjusted gross income of $544 million but deducted it all from paying his 1.2 billion dollar loan.
People living off their wealth don’t pay high taxes
That’s… why you might want to tax wealth? Sales tax does literally nothing to address the problem of neither wealth nor income inequality. Income tax does address some of it. Removing it just because it doesn’t address all of it is absurd. Thinking it is covered by sales tax, is even more so. Those who would be in the lower tax brackets would have less buying power, and those with high incomes would be having a party, well… until the fairly immediate collapse of the economy and the riots start, that is. Just because one aspect doesn’t cover everything doesn’t mean you remove it all-together and replace it with… well, I’m still curious.
The ways to circumvent paying taxes, is what you go after, but you don’t do that by just removing existing obstacles. You do it by adding more obstacles. You can still tax income, and you adjust it to tax the high income earners much more. You evaluate wealth and tax that. You put a tax on absurd inheritances. You limit the profitability of trading necessities (e.g. housing) as goods by also high taxation.
The only thing I objected to in your original comment was to suggest 0% tax on income… and that this is compensated for by increasing sales tax… as if it solves anything at all. Income tax accounts for about 50% of the US federal budget. Tricks to avoid paying income tax are well known, but the idea of not addressing the issue, but instead just “start from scratch”, or suggest to remove something fundamental to the function of a modern state, is … tiresomely American. It’s like the Churchill quote of Americans always doing the right thing, after having tried everything else.
I’m disabled and can’t work in my early 30s now. The numbers for disability benefits haven’t been adjusted for inflation since world war 2. Obviously I can’t afford to live anywhere else.
We’re a crumbling empire, we have an exploding homeless population and the billionaires like it that way. There’s laws in many places here in the US where you can’t use any kind of force to remove homeless people from your private property, if you call the cops in those places, they don’t do anything about it.
Part of the problem is that the billionaires want us all to be terrified of each other and to hate our neighbors so that we beg for authoritarianism…even worse than the authoritarianism we have now.
You can’t remove squatters or trespassers, but god forbid if you light up a joint, they’ll throw you in prison for that.
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.
6 diplomas and no kids and you’re having trouble affording a quarter acre in the boondocks? I’m sorry, I’m going to need more information, that just doesn’t pencil unless you got a bunch of useless degrees, or are refusing to explore the job market.
I’m in Canada. Getting a diploma from a college isn’t a degree. Most are 2-3 year certificate courses. Until recently, colleges in Canada couldn’t even issue degrees. If you wanted a degree from college courses, usually you would earn a diploma and then have further studies at a university before you obtained a degree.
Between the four of us, there are two nurses, one graphic designer, and one IT/systems/network administrator. Our combined household income is above $150,000 CAD per year (probably closer to or more than $200k, but I haven’t crunched the numbers), and our home, which is less than 3000 sq ft, and cost in excess of $700,000 CAD. Monthly we pay over $4500 per month for the mortgage alone, and we have plenty of bills which are additional to that to keep the house running, as any home owner will know.
We live in a rural community in the middle of farmland. It’s a small town type thing, population in this town is under 10k. In town we have a grocery store (just one), I believe there are three pharmacies for some reason, a few medical services (clinic, dentist, eye doctor), and a handful of fast food places including an A&W, subway, pizza hut, and some local places too, mostly pizza places. To get to the next town/city over, you must drive at least 15-20 minutes to reach the city limits of another Township or city, which often doesn’t get you to anywhere you would want to go, and you’re probably going to need to drive at least 10-15 more minutes to get anywhere you would want to go.
Several of us have not insignificant debts, mostly credit cards and vehicle loans, though most of us have paid off our educational loans at this point.
These are all factual statements. As for my opinion… I don’t owe you an explanation. You can not believe me if you wish. I could not possibly care less about what you think of my situation. I don’t say any of this to provide some sort of evidence or proof that the information I initially gave is valid or true; I wrote all this down to provide context because I felt context was warranted. We’re all millennials, born between 1980 and 1990, and we’ve all worked our entire lives to try to get out from under the debt that was pushed on us from post secondary education and from the economy being in the crapper for so long. Nobody got a free ride through college, we all accumulated some educational debts. We’re all hard working people and I don’t need to justify that we’re doing our best. The fact is, this house that we own today, would have cost half as much 15 years ago, possibly less. The problem is, at that time, we were all so saddled with debt we couldn’t have hoped to afford this house even at less than half the cost, at that time. Now that we have enough to actually start the process of having a mortgage and buying a house, the market has gone to such shit that the only way for us to afford it with our stagnant wages is to pool our funds. With a simple meal at a modest restaurant costing over $50 CAD per person, it’s not really a wonder why we’re all struggling. We all require vehicles because there’s next to nothing in our city worth going to, and the local grocery is frequently 50% + more costly than a discount grocery in the next town over (a 20 minute drive at least). So for less than $5 in fuel, we can save literally hundreds per trip on groceries. We couldn’t do that without vehicles. Which isn’t to mention work; we’re all specialised in our fields and as you should be able to imagine, we generally need to go where that work is to earn the wage we deserve. Again, requiring vehicles in most cases.
We’re solidly middle class, and we’re okay being middle class. None of us inherited significant money from family, and only because of a death in our immediate family were we even able to afford the down payment to buy a home. We’re proud of what we have accomplished, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can say that will take that away from us. The fact is, my entire generation has been screwed from the start. There have been more economic crisis and “once in a lifetime” collapses and such that we’ve been held back so significantly that it has become a near impossibility for many people I knew from highschool to achieve the same as we have despite being similarly educated and in a similar social standing.
I do, however, take offense at the implication that we simply suck. That we’ve somehow squandered the opportunities that we have had.
And with that, I bid you good day sir.
Hey, I appreciate the context and explanation. I’m sorry if I came across as offensive, that wasn’t my intent. It appears that I made a couple of assumptions about your situation which weren’t true, and you cleared them up for me.
I’m from the same generation as you, and come from generally the same circumstances (no inheritance, DINK, etc), but I live in the US so I’m not very familiar with Canada’s job market, or wages. I also made a bad assumption about diplomas being bachelor or master’s degrees.
700k house with $4500 monthly mortgage sounds strange as well, but maybe you have a shorter term loan than I expect. I know housing prices in Canada are crazy, but 700k in the middle of nowhere is bonkers.
$200k household income puts 4 adults at about the average salary in Canada. That’s a little distressing given your degreed qualifications, I’d think that IT work and nursing would bump those numbers quite a bit.
I know you didn’t ask for advice, so I’m not going to attempt to give it. Thanks for helping me to understand your situation, sorry again if I sounded like a jerk.
I get it, it’s easy to just react and not think about the tone you may be portraying on the internet.
Remember we’re dealing in Canadian dollars; but the housing market here is nuts. A couple of new builds went up about a block from me and they’re asking for 1.5M each, with about 2/3rds as much house for the price… We have 6-7 bedrooms and those places have 4, IIRC. They’re new, but I don’t think “new” is worth twice the asking price.
My problem is that I’m not terribly far from a Toronto, it’s about an hour drive in light traffic by the highway a bit more when you consider it can take 20 minutes to get to the highway from here. Still 1.5 hours or so from Toronto, and people who live in Toronto who have money and are looking for a small town to live in… My area is pretty appealing to those folks, especially when they can sell their modest tomorrow house for several million dollars (again, Canadian). So if someone is looking to retire to a small community, they can likely sell their home, buy one of those 1.5M houses up the street, and still have money left to retire with…
Toronto’s housing issues have become a problem for the entire region. People are commuting farther and farther to get to Toronto for work because the costs in the city are so outrageous.
My mortgage is a standard 25 year term, but the bank is handling property tax so that drives it up a bit. It’s closer to $4000/mo before the extra stuff. Here, we also need mortgage insurance, home insurance and content insurance. Mortgage insurance is required so the bank can get paid if we are incapable of paying them and the asset disappears (like if we were all at home and the house was destroyed), house insurance is for us, if the house is destroyed and we survive, the home insurance will cover the cost of replacing the house (rebuilding it). Content insurance covers everything we own that is in the house, like our TVs, computers, beds, clothing, etc.
Some of the insurance is mandatory, most of voluntary but a really good idea.
We also have mandatory car insurance here. So between the mortgage and all the insurance we have for home and vehicles, plus property taxes and other things, we’re probably spending above $5k/mo on simple living expenses. Then bills for electricity, heating, internet, cellphones… Our total household expenses are not cheap and they’re not getting any cheaper. Many are poised to increase over time. With the fairly stagnant salaries we bring in, it’s not easy.
I work in IT, I hold the IT certificates, and I’m actually earning the most in the home. Something like 1/3rd of our income is me. Probably more like 40% maybe more. I don’t have the exact figures for what everyone is making, but I’m well above a one-quarter share. Less than half, but above one quarter. My brother, the graphic designer, has had the worst luck with employment and earnings, but he still contributes where he can. It’s just been tough for him, but I won’t get into his situation since that’s not my story to tell.
I recently had a bout of unemployment, and while we have social assistance here for unemployment, it was less than 40% of my normal earnings (there’s a cap that I hit). I’m back at work now and things should ease up financially.
As for advice. One of the certificates I hold is in business. Part of my business studies included personal financial management. I’m certain that any advice you could give, I’ve already heard and told myself over and over again. Knowing what to do and doing it, are two different things entirely. I’ve never had investment money, though I know what to do if I ever do. Most of my earnings go towards keeping things running and doing minor upgrades where I can, when I can. Right now I’m in a bit of a recovery phase, where all my free money will be going to paying down any debts that have arisen from my time unemployed. Once that’s taken care of, I’m hoping to develop a small slush fund for when/if I ever end up in a similar situation and getting my long term debts paid off. This will, unfortunately, take years to accomplish. Most of my money needs to go towards keeping the lights on.
Simply put, losing the house, or falling behind on bills is simply not something that should ever happen. So my focus is clear. Primarily keeping the house in working order and our bills paid. After that pay off any and all existing debts, then finally build funds so I can relax. Even if something were to happen, like when I ended up unemployed, I can survive without further stress and worry… Allowing me to focus on getting a job instead of stressing over what needs to be paid, and where our next meal will come from.
I’m far from the only one struggling. I know you are too. I’m sure many aspects of my story are echoed in your life. The fact is that this cannot continue like this. We need better wages. Prices for goods and services cannot continue to just rise uncontrollably. The middle class is disappearing, we’re not unique in our position and bluntly, it makes me mad that everyone in the middle class seems to be struggling, but nobody cares enough to actually do anything about it. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class gets squeezed between them. Either we gain enough to escape into the upper class, or we’re doomed to fall into the poor house. Most of us are headed down. Some may go up. I probably won’t live long enough to see which way my family goes, and I have no children to suffer through it either way. As long as I can maintain what we have for the next 20-30 years, we should be able to come out on the other side, into retirement and the story will eventually end with us. I’m okay with this. Hopefully whomever gets whatever is left when I die, escapes the trappings of middle class and can move up in the world.
Good luck everybody.
Thanks again for the insight, it sounds like you’ve got things on the right track.
Truthfully, I feel like I’m struggling, but relative to most I’m probably living very well. I own my home near the ocean in a major metro in California.
Any advice I’d feel comfortable giving doesn’t revolve around money investments or savings. When my relationship with my now wife first got serious, we talked transparently about what kind of life (and lifestyle) we wanted. We did a back of the napkin calculation of the minimum income required to support ourselves, and at the time we were very short. We agreed that we would become very aggressive about our careers and income generation. This is why I asked you about whether you’d been exploring the job market with your sights set on long term goals.
My wife and I decided to work together to defray the risk inherent in solving the income problem. We started by having one of us find a job with a salary slightly above our old ones. Then that person became the anchor for the household which enabled the other person to find a job that was far riskier but with much higher financial upside. Once things stabilized with that person’s career, making it less risky, that person became the anchor for the household which permitted the first person to take on risk (and debt) to go back to university for a degree specifically selected to improve their earning potential once they graduated.
Over and over, slingshotting each other forward by taking turns and being very aggressive about generating income, and then investing that income. 20 years later we feel like we can do most of the things we want. We still stress about having enough or being on track for retirement, but it’s a different kind of stress.
Well, that’s certainly a good plan.
At this point I’m not confident that either myself or my SO would be comfortable doing the same strategy. Personally I’d like to return to school and upgrade my diploma to a degree, however, being the highest earner in the home, I can’t really take the several years of unemployment required to do so, even with support from everyone involved. It would simply be too much of a hit to our finances.
I’ve been exploring getting some after-hours training in to enhance my resume, even looking into pursuing a degree part time. The problem I keep facing is that since I’m very rural, the universities that offer degree courses in IT (non-programming) are few and far between, and for the most part, those IT related courses that are required for the degree, are not offered as distance learning. I’m simply too far away to attend a university class, even part time, in person. The closest uni that would offer a course that I’m interested in, would likely be more than an hour drive away each direction. With my current duties and obligations in the home and for work, I just can’t seem to find a way to make that work. Distance learning is my only real viable option, and it’s basically not offered for the program I want.
Unfortunately, my life’s story, while interesting, is full of missteps and failures. As a brief overview, I dropped out of highschool after my parents separated, nearly ended up homeless but my brother gave me a room in his apartment for a year or so for me to get on my feet. I was ~16. I entered the workforce to get off of social assistance, and floundered for several years doing retail work to make it by. After a particularly bad break up, I obtained my highschool equivalent diploma, and started college at ~23yo. I lost about 7 years or more doing menial labor.
I got into trouble during my academics, ended up getting a year long suspension for an action that I thought would be helpful, but the administration at the college took as malicious. Took me almost two years before I decided to return, I was bitter about trying to help, and being punished for it.
I graduated college at ~29yo, with two diplomas (each a “2 year” diploma), and got my first job in my field. That was around 10 years ago. I’m 40 now, I’ll be 41 later this year (in a few months).
I was diagnosed with ADHD at 39, and the same year, I bought a house with my SO, brother and his spouse.
This is the first time in my life I’m not renting. I finally paid off my student loan in 2022, and I fully paid off my vehicle in 2019? I think. I still carry significant debts, mostly credit cards, a lot of it from the seven year gap and from my college days. Though I still have expenses that I have to put on credit, since I don’t currently have a slush fund for incidentals. I usually pay more for things because I always focus on buying things that are durable and reliable more than cost effective in the short term. This leads to spending more up front, but (hopefully) less in the long term. Most of what I own is older, most of it was purchased used, but I haven’t had to replace almost anything I own unless it is so obsolete it no longer functions effectively for what it does. My most significant recurring purchase is for laptops, since college I’ve owned three, all of which have been more than $1500 CAD, frequently more than $2000 CAD… Around $5000 in 10 years. Rivalling that is my cellphone, which is rotated out every 3 years or so, and I buy my phone entirely (rather than lock into a contract with my provider), and they cost around $1000 CAD for every upgrade, every three years. I’m currently on year two of owning my current phone, a pixel 7. My computer’s, laptop, phone and car, are all work-enabling devices for me given my vocation, so those expenses are generally required to be effective in my job. Everything else I’ve purchased has been either less expensive or a one time purchase that I have not had any need to replace.
My strategy is to pay for reliable things up front, to minimize any recurring costs of replacement, and provide a good return on my investment. Hopefully better than that of cheap items that will need to be regularly replaced.
This, hopefully, limits my spending, but my recent unemployment has significantly damaged my finances. I was in a good position prior to the unemployment condition, though with little if any savings, and much of my ongoing expenses taxed my finances since my income from social assistance was so low in comparison to my normal income.
As mentioned, my current plan is to continue to reduce any debts until they are resolved, since I know any investments I make right now, and any interest I earn will be far outweighed by the interest owed on my debts. Once debts are eliminated (aside from the mortgage), I can refocus on saving and building a slush fund for incidentals. Again: this will take years to accomplish. So my only daily focus right now is to maintain my employment so I can continue to pursue my debt payment plan. I need to re-do my budget and assess my financial condition given my new employment, and plan from there. I’m certain I’m making enough for my ongoing expenses, both fixed (mortgage, bills, etc), and dynamic (additional considerations for debts, as well as food, fuel for my car, maintenance, etc); what I need to determine is how much I have above and beyond those required expenses, and allocate some for entertainment, so I don’t lose my mind or burn out working without a break, and a small amount for upgrades, like for my cellphone in a year and a half or so; then push the rest to debt repayments as I am able, and have a bit left over for minor incidentals (under $200).
Budgeting is not an activity I enjoy. It’s necessary, but it’s incredibly hard for me to do given that I have ADHD.
Most of my life and the poor path I had previously (especially prior to college) can be explained by my ADHD condition and being undiagnosed. Now that I’m receiving treatment for it, the effects are significantly reduced.
That’s my story, and it goes so much deeper. I left out a lot of detail for brevity, and all of that detail explains why I ended up here. I’m proud of how much I’ve done despite my obvious challenges, and I’ve accomplished a lot in the short time I’ve been receiving treatment for the condition.
Personally, I like a relatively simple life. I don’t want much. I don’t desire travel or vacations, I’m happiest watching TV on the couch with my SO. My next big spend will likely be a ring. She’s stuck with me for the better part of a decade and she was instrumental in getting the mortgage approved and the house purchased. It’s time.
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.
That’s true to a point. However bigger effects were the rise in executive compensation, the loss of labor and corporate regulations, and the resurgence of the shipping industry such that it was cheaper to ship from China than to make it in the US. It’s true that demand for US manufactured goods has fallen, but there’s no reason our current Service economy should struggle like it is.
I think attributing the “good years” just to post war production is an incomplete explanation. The real issue is irresponsible private ownership and hobbling the value our economy can create.
Creating true value in our work is possible. Once some types of work are done the output can continue to benefit our society for decades. But a confluence of decisions by private owners have meant often we don’t receive that benefit, and instead it’s siphoned away as profit.
I moved from the US to Italy, where everything is cheaper and better quality, and we get free healthcare, free college, retirement pension and six months paid maternity leave. All this on a 35% tax rate. Public daycare is about $300 a month, housing expenses are about half of what I paid in the US, and while groceries are about the same, they are all local, organic, non GMO and -get this - crops are grown for flavor rather than weight. Houses are smaller here and wages are usually lower, but working hours are less and less intense, and the pace of life is much chiller.
Oh wow non GMO groceries what a magical fairy tale land.
enlightened bit of context here.
correct me if i’m wrong, but these are the colloquial “golden days” that so many want to return to, right? a period which undoubtedly contributed to the presumption of american exceptionalism in the minds of its citizens.
if only there was a way to build a future out of transparency and sustainable systems instead of perpetuating our collective delusions.
Thankfully we don’t live in the US then, but these same dark times are washing over us in Europe too :-(
