Yup you got it worse. Way worse. I am 57 and I will give you an example or more.
From 1985 to 1989 I worked at places like a pizza joint, flower shop and copy shop. I made 8 bucks an hour, back then. Minimum wage was 3.35 an hour. Topped out at 9 bucks an hour managing a pizza joint in 1989 before i joined the Army.
I rented a 1 bedroom cottage in Palo Alto for 800 bucks a month.
I bought a 1969 Mercury cougar for 500 bucks.
Concert tickets were 20 bucks a piece.
Everything cost more now but the lower tiered wages never kept up.
More like they lost all ethics and morality since those get in the way of money. The other thing is the corporate culture nowadays is seeing how they can skim without getting caught.
You just said the exact same thing as the comment you’re replying to but in a less articulate form. If a company is optimized for value extraction it is inherently NOT optimized for ethics based decisions.
If I made 100 bucks in tips in a night that’s the best night I’ve had in weeks and that was earlier this year (no longer a delivery driver). Delivery fees *fucked* drivers.
You do realise that $23 AUD is $15 USD. It’s not that much. Australians are also getting screwed. Our cost of living is outrageous not to mention our housing situation
I mean that's still more than double the minimum wage in America, plus we have good public healthcare. So yeah if we're getting screwed then you guys are getting triple screwed.
Costco pays people about 20 to start and they have benefits. Also have pizza.
Edit. This is becoming one of my top rated comments and I didn’t even mention the $1.50 hot dog drink combo.
You guys are awesome.
In California the starting pay is $17.50 (I want to say that's national, but I don't know off the top of my head), with pay increasing with hours worked. I'm a few months over a year and hitting $19.50 next month. Part time is guaranteed 24 hours a week, and there are a lot of resources available to me as an employee.
If you apply, also make sure to bring an application/resume to the store physically and ask to be introduced to the hiring manager - most warehouses won't even consider your application if you haven't done that. New hires are brought on in groups, so you may want to check in every month or two. Costco doesn't work around other job schedules if you're working another job, but they do work with school schedules.
Apologies for the unsolicited advice, working at Costco was a huge improvement over my previous jobs and I wish more places offered the same environment.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to rewrite your comment using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator found [here](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=8&year1=198501&year2=202304), using January 1985 for a reference point:
“From 1985 to 1989 I worked at places like a pizza joint, flower shop and copy shop. I made $23 bucks an hour, back then. Minimum wage was $9.63 (today’s is $7.25; last raised in 2009; $7.25 in 2009 is worth $10.42 today).Topped out at $25.88 bucks an hour managing a pizza joint in 1989 before i joined the Army.
I rented a 1 bedroom cottage in Palo Alto for $2300 bucks a month. I bought a 1969 Mercury cougar for $1437. Concert tickets were $57 bucks a piece.”
——————————-
Looking at Palo Alto rentals on Zillow right now, sorted by price:
The cheapest is a 99 square foot shed on someone’s patio for $1295.
There are two separate studios of about 150 square feet each for roughly $1750.
A few studios and single bedrooms, all under or around 400 square feet, for $1750-2025.
And finally, we start getting to 400-500 square feet at $2100!
The median income in Palo Alto in 2021 was $194K, and the poverty line for the city (third most expensive city in California) is $250K. $250,000.
The average 1969 Mercury Cougar goes for $33,895 today. At first glance, I thought the price was so high because it’s a truly vintage car now. So I looked up today’s price of a popular muscle car from twenty years to mirror OP: the 2002 Chevy Camaro. Turns out the average price is in the same range as the Cougar.
Looking at food service jobs in Palo Alto on Simply Hired, the first one is a presumably local sandwich shop, paying a whole $17.25-$17.75/hr. But don’t worry, because “Ike’s crew members make up to $20.25 with estimated tips (YES!! YOU READ THAT RIGHT).”
People commute in too Palo Alto. The problem is when everywhere in the metro area is expensive. So you cannot commute from further away to get a lower house/col.
Same issue in Seattle. I'm a maintenance manager for a residential high rise in the downtown area and we are having massive issues finding workers because the city is so expensive that the majority of the blue-collar workers live like 30-45 minutes away and there are a ton of other similarly paying jobs that are closer.
It's another symptom of the infinite growth expectations from shareholders. In the case of the company I work for, and most of the companies in the downtown area, it's all about expansion. They build a skyscraper, staff it with as few staff as they can get away with, give them budget constraints, and put every extra dollar towards the next skyscraper. They're not worried about giving their tenants a quality product. They're worried about making sure their numbers look good so that they can build another building to keep the line going upward.
For even greater illumination, use regional data. Cost of living and inflation has never been uniformly distributed. A living wage in Fresno is an agonized bankruptcy in San Francisco.
You’re too kind! I just like to whip out that calculator for any discussion of prices, and to cross-check current conditions if I have the time to kill. It really helps to keep things in perspective!
> The median income in Palo Alto in 2021 was $194K, and the poverty line for the city (third most expensive city in California) is $250K. $250,000.
I just threw up a little bit
You can also infer from hourly rates how this translates:
$8 wage and $800 rent, for example, is 100 hours of work. For easy math, working 40 hours per week for 50 weeks means 2,000 hours per year as full time. Assuming FT, they need to spend 1200/2000 hours each year on a place to live, which is 60% of their gross income. Financial advisors usually recommend 30%, roughly, so this was already super expensive back then.
The car, at $500, was less than 1 month rent.
Concert tickets were about 2.5 hours of work.
People can argue about inflation impacting different things differently, and there's problems trying to convert everything cleanly to hours like I did here, but it's helpful to have a range of information to review to get the best interpretation.
There's actually a chrome extension that scans websites for prices and converts them to hours of work for you (you dictate your salary or hourly wage and it does the math). I used it for a couple of weeks and it was eye opening to look at purchases i once considered throw away and realize how many hours of my life i was trading it for.
I think converting to hours of work is actually the most unifying and realistic way to compare real prices over time because at the end of the day money is just a proxy for value and for those that work for a living (instead of living off of trust fund dividends) we are exchanging our labor time for goods and services. The definition of an hour has remained constant so if we convert everything to hours that's actually more useful.
A key point you’re missing here as well is that you didn’t have to take on much debt if any at all to do that. Capital owners are paying workers less and less so we have less money to buy things which means capital owners won’t make as much money. It’s an internal contradiction within capitalism that has tried to resolve itself through credit. You can finance a fucking pizza now
I was talking to an uber driver the other day, who described something similar in the timeframe of the late 80s/early 90s- making less than $10/hour, being able to afford rent in a bachelor, a car, and paying for community college courses. He described the wages as motivational to keep going to classes and earn his degree so that he could earn more later. I said that was great.
Then he launched into a diatribe into which I could not sneak one word wherein he decried the current calls for increases to mininum wage. Made fun of the idea of a "living wage" because jobs like flipping burgers are supposed to light a fire under your ass to get an education to be able to increase your salary, not to actually live on. In his view, if you were non-management at any retail/restaurant/service industry job, that's only supposed to when you're young or your part time job while putting yourself through college.
Unfortunately, he kept talking the entire way to our destination and I didn't want to hang out in the car and continue the conversation, but I was dying to ask him what he paid for rent and to pull up the listings for bachelors in my area and compare. Ask him what he paid in tuition and pull up the local community college's tuition schedule. Ask him how much he paid for his car and pull up classifieds for a honda civic today.
People are fucking delusional - they have no concept of learning or updating their understanding about the way things are. Their either don't realize, or don't care, that their shitty opinions actually reflect the concept of getting to the top of the mountain and then pulling the ladder up behind them.
That's precisely why they don't give a fuck. They won't live long enough to see the devastation to it's full extent, so from a completly selfish point of view, it's not their problem.
I always like to think about the fact that a man could work and support a family without anyone else working. It didn't always go well and older sons would regularly go to work too. However, now both parents have to work and older kids still regularly have to go to work too. And I mean kids in high school getting jobs to help support the family.
A lot of people had a regular job and also did other work to make money, particularly for special purchases. My mother was a housewife for about 6 years but she would pick up work as a census taker or teach classes at our house (astrology) or temporary secretarial work for things like a dryer, new furniture, drapes, doctor bills, a car repair. My father worked as a bank branch manager but also would do taxes on the side during tax season.
Yeah but that usually to make up short falls, like trips, one time large purchase. People now days string together 2 jobs and a side hustle just to keep caught up. My mother was a home maker but would waitress or factory work during peak seasons to pay for her missionary trips.
My father worked Indiana Bell no college just AF training program in telecommunications. Bought a house and raised 2 kids. Always had cars, motorcycles, and guns. Nothing new but not crap. We were lower middle class but not on assistance.
For reference I am 55 years old. I watched my grandfather retire from Chrysler with full pension, I got braces at 12 because my father was in a union…by the time I was 18-21 I watched pensions start to disappear (evaporate) or guys fired a year from their 20 year retirements, (think SL scandal & Enron) and then unions get eroded.
Capitalism is a process of financial extraction. Capitalism’s purpose is to create capital. It isn’t for the advancement of humanity. We are in the endgame.
What kills me about the 80"s is how the two career family was sold as liberation for women when it was actually economic necessity cause suddenly your mortgage rates were 15 percent.
Yep, I said that years ago. We framed being a stay at home parent as lazy and unproductive. Now look at how society has faired after removing both parents from the picture. Turns out being a parent is kind of important. Now we have damaged multiple generations for the owner class bottom line.
In Cameron's case, though, that was the intended effect, because who cares about "the poors" and their support mechanisms.
Austerity never applies to the wealthy.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
But it's also the team sports mentality, our team, our religion, our in-group, is better than yours and we personally identify with the ringleader because of race, class, gender, etc. and have been promised we deserve the same status of such ringleader by virtue of our membership.
I don't care if it's lazy, I hate working. I hate being forced to do something for money 8 hours a day when someone else is making my salary in a month for making farting videos on TikTok. Please end my life.
Or choose to work for yourself (which has a whole other set of issues), or for a non-profit (again, it’s own issues). But yes, the core problem with capitalism is that the owners pay you less than the value you generate, sometimes dramatically so.
Republicans want women to be 1950's SAHMs with as many kids as their bodies will pump out.
They're not willing to pay the wages that would support that family idea, though.
Agreed. Being a stay at home parent is still framed as lazy and unproductive. When people ask me what my wife does and I tell them she's a stay at home mom, I'll get reactions ranging from disappointment to wtf. What most people DONT realize is that we don't have a fucking choice because our son has autism and cannot be placed in daycare. No one wants to watch him either.
No one has any idea of what may or may not be going on in the home and its none of their fucking business. I don't feel like I need to tell every person I encounter that my son is autistic either.
I think it’s important to note though that for low income or PoC households, women always worked. As servants, as nannies, helping their husbands at their own shops and work, etc.
My grandmother was an immigrant and worked full time as a secretary in NYC. My mother was pretty much on her own... was told to knock on the neighbor's door if she needed anything. She was 7. There was no such thing as daycare back then (1950). Her stepfather couldn't hold a job if he managed to get hired. They came from Germany and people had prejudice against Germans after WW2 and they had accents.
The benefits from [FDR’s new deal](https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/history/us-history/african-americans-and-the-new-deal/) were felt almost exclusively by white Americans. The only thing that differentiated it from Nazi Germany’s [Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_People%27s_Welfare) was rather than sending the undesirables to camps we [redlined](https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america) them into ghettos. There has always been and always will be an underclass under capitalism. Fascism is just [the authoritarian and nationalistic tendencies of liberal democracy](https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-is-possible-not-in-spite-of-liberal-capitalism-but-because-of-it/) expressed in their most extreme and violent form. Until you remove the root of the problem there will always be a portion of society [exploited for profit](https://www.ilo.org/newyork/voices-at-work/WCMS_244965/lang--en/index.htm) no matter how far you push them from view.
Working class and poor families frequently had both parents working outside the home. Both my grandmothers worked full time. My mother was born in 1943 and my father was the eldest too and was born in 1938. Also... 1930s was The Great Depression and jobs were hard to come by and there was not welfare/TANF, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, school lunches nor SNAP back then. It was really hard to make any money. The real estate market crashed d/t so many foreclosures-- particularly farms. People were malnourished. Mostly it was upper middle class people who could afford homes and housewives. Even the old shows-- like Jackie Gleason -- Jackie and his wife lived in a cold water flat in NYC and he was a bus driver, most people rented back then. Single people lived in boarding houses--renting a room when they traveled to find work. I recommend reading some Studs Terkel to find out what it was like for people back in the day, their jobs, what it was like during the Depression, even in the 1950's
And for the UK "People of the Abyss" by brilliant American author, Jack London. It's earlier than the depression, around 1900s to 1910 period. He went "undercover" as a homeless person in London and it's really unbelievable. However, in many ways I do think we're headed back to similar now the way things are going.
Women’s Lib started as a movement to give women the freedom to choose between being a stay at home mother and having a career and to be paid equally for the work being done. (Equal to the pay rate men were given for the same work) Now women have to work to keep a roof over the house and food in the fridge. Plus women are still doing the bulk of the household work and childcare. I’ve never felt liberated to work so hard.
Early feminism was aware of these issues. They knew at the time that women entering the workforce would depress wages across the board, unless women were guaranteed equal protection under the law - meaning it would be illegal to pay women less for the same work. The equal rights amendment would have done this, but it was narrowly defeated in the 80s by the new "culture warriors" of the right wing, Phyllis Schlafly among them, who led the lifestyle of a liberated woman and spent it trying to deny other women the right to be like her.
You know what they want?
They want obedient workers.
Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork.
Just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
Now they're coming for your Social Security money.
They want your f**kin' retirement money.
They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
George Carlin
The older I get, the clearer it becomes that Ronald Reagan was one of the worst presidents in US history. SO MANY of the problems we have today started because of his administration.
Good ole Reagan and the rise of what we now call republicans made our lives this way. The statistics support that statement too. Though some republican buckwheat SOB will likely tell me that’s not correct.
When my dad graduated, you could support a wife and baby and a starter home with a starter job right out of high school. Instead, he worked summers and used that money to pay for an entire year of university and his own living expenses. That's right. A summer's worth of work paid for a year of school *and* an entire year's living expenses. He did not have to work while taking classes, just when school was out.
It took my wife and I living with our mother in law to afford a home. I mean we live in Colorado but we make decent money and it still took 3 incomes to afford it.
As an IT professional the amount of time I have to spend on a home lab, certifications and learning at home takes away from time with my family. This is because on the job they spread IT professionals too thin and dont hire enoigh people so everyone can get proper ongoing job and industry training.
Compared to guys who used to work on the line at Ford or Engineers where they would continiously provide training. That is all gone now. They expect the employee to eat all the cost and time to learn new things.
And some other points to consider:
We are currently more wealthy as a country than at any other point in our whole history. It is the distribution that has changed. CEOs used to make 17 times what an average worker made - now it is 400 times. A person making $100 an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from the year zero until today - would be less wealthy than many of the wealthiest Americans. 100 of those imaginary 2023 year old 24/7 $100 an hour workers combined still would have less wealth than some Americans. Point is - yes, our tax system can and should change. The people who have most benefitted can afford to give more back to the society that has made them so absurdly wealthy. BTW, if you took 1 minute to read this, assuming Elon Musk has his wealth earning 8% annual interest - a low estimate, Elon just gained $30,441during that minute.
It’s literally free for them at our local university. If a person under 60 wants to audit, they have to pay the full course fee.
While it might be nice for Linda and Elmer to expand their brains some, I think auditing should be free for everyone. You’re getting the knowledge, it’s space available anyway, you just don’t get the credit towards a degree.
And who foots the bill? Or are they admitting that current college prices are a scam that can be arbitrarily lowered whenever they feel the recipient of the course shouldn’t have to pay the other 98% of the bill
I've decided I don't care if my 3 kids live with me until they're 30. I will NOT subject them to being forced to work shitty jobs to survive and subsidize the rent market with their best years and well-being.
This will completely disregard whatever my income is, or theirs. If they want to continue to live rent free, my house will be there for them. I am going to break this shitty cycle of forcing young adults into poverty only to the benefit of landlords and shitty corporations that under-pay their employees.
Do it. Once they get to a working age in their 20's and are making decent money, let them live at home rent free and subsidize what costs you can such as insurance or food.
My mom did that for a few years for me. I was able to save up 15k, pay off my car, and get my credit score up to 700+. Changed my life. Now my only debt is student loans - but regardless I have five figures saved in the bank, and the job field is open to me because my extensive resume.
Yes.. and I'm in my 50s. In the US.. We've created a world that's unlivable for you. First ,we paralyze you with soul crushing student loan debt when you're just getting started in life, and second the distribution of wealth has made it impossible for you to get ahead... AND AI will now be reducing the number of people needed in the workforce. I don't see how it all continues without a reckoning at some point.
My friend pointed out that companies are no longer trying to buy our current wealth, they're trying to buy our future wealth. That's why you now see deals like buy an Xbox at $35 for 24 months... They're leveraging our future earnings, not our current ones
Yup, you used to just be able to buy something and own it, a complete full product. If it broke or didn't work there was a warranty or replacement program the company provided at no cost to you. Now you buy something and you need a subscription to the service it runs on, or you pay for the privilege of a service and the company can change their terms and offerings without your control, or you choose between just under basic functionality with a ton of ads for free and a subscription fee for the "full" service.
The reckoning is getting the dinosaurs out of office and putting in new, relevant ideas that will benefit younger people. I’m shocked my generation doesn’t have more of a voice at the table. And it’s not going to get better until we do.
Because you can't run for office without bending the knee to the corporate overlords. If you're not one of the anointed candidates like Kamala the Cop or Pete vulture capital Buttigieg you will get blacked out of the media. If by some miracle of effort and luck you can win, the system will consume you (see AOC sell her soul for committee seats and a pat on the head by Nancy the multi-millionaire "public servant").
The party system is fundamentally unjust. Loyalty is to the party, not to the constituents, and the party only listens to consultants who don't care about anything except enriching themselves. The culture of acquiescing to terroristic threats from the extreme right has moved the Overton window so far right that we now have to choose between the party of outright fascism and the party of fascist enablers with a few fascists sprinkled in (looking at you Mansion and Cuellar).
My dad told me yesterday about how many pensions he receives from jobs and that I need to start thinking about that. I kept telling him ‘hardly any job fields do that anymore! It’s not a thing!’ I’m a nurse (RN) and I believe only the VA provides a pension and they are notoriously incredibly difficult to get hired by them. SMH.
Hell, no pension, no saving, sad 401k that gets hit every 6-8 year recession. No home and now they want the Social Security that we all paid into our whole lives, and that they used to fill out the general budget without every returning a dime to the funds. They just passed the debt ceiling legislation be adding to the work requirements for assistance with medical insurance. No stipulation for retirement or disability. Work or die faster. Wage Slavery is a real thing.
> 401k that gets hit every 6-8 year recession
I'm pissed the money that's supposed to support me in retirement--if I can ever retire--is invested in the stock market, only to be lost when a bunch of wall street bankers fuck up the economy. At least with a pension the money was guaranteed.
I am in the Cabo that believes the big stockholders skim the cream of the 401k investments by creating the fall of the market via recession politics and manipulation. Pretty sure that is why they dreamt the damn thing up.
The older generation doesn't realize how much things have changed, as unfortunately many of them were locked into benefits that are no longer offered.
When I was a rising Sr in highschool I really wanted to work at our local pool, but they were only hiring part time. I really needed full time, so I took a job at a lakeside swimming place 30 minutes away. A week or so after I accepted the job, the local pool called and offered me full time work. I wanted so bad to take it, but my Dad lectured me and said I'd already given my word to this other place and that it would be disloyal to quit. Note, I hadn't even started yet... Anyway I turned down the local pool and went to work at the other place. They fired me after 3 days with no notice. Just told me they hadn't gotten as many sign ups as they wanted and to not bother coming in anymore. Thanks Dad.
Knew a lady worked her entire life for one company (Kellogg) after a couple years claiming it..the company said it was out of money (2008) and just stopped paying her!
I am forty, so I was kinda able to be aware of the changes as they were going on in the 80's from the political things my family spoke about. I kept some interest in what was going on until recent years when a lot of us came to the conclusion that the system is really rigged to keep the rich making money and everyone else working with no balance in life.
We are a miserable nation of laborers in America, painted over with this dream of opportunity and freedom of choice with a blanket promise as empty and colorless as a presidential campaign slogan. We were promised by people, who had no idea what they were saying, that we could be anything we wanted when we grew up. No one read the fine print and asterisks attached to that statement.
I have kids and two little grandkids now, and I worry for the latter the most. I worry about what kind of world they will grow up in and what direction they will have to grow into to make a life for themselves that isn't a mindless slog that puts them in an early grave.
Our generation was just being born, at the oldest we were 7 years old. That's when our parents looked at us and said, "You know what? Fuck these little bastards. If only there was a way we could abuse and control their entire quality of life." Do not forget that it was *all* of our parent's doing. You cannot make excuses, "oh it's not like they created Equifax" fuck off. They are the ones who voted the politicians and legislators in to office who created the whole system. Our parents may as well have handed us over directly to the government. As long as they got their 30 pieces of silver, right?
Problem is, *we are*. Just in the past week union-busting legislation was passed that ensures corporate profits must be protected, otherwise unions cannot strike. The strike was the most powerful tool useable in a worker's defense, and now it has been effectively neutered. Legislators **we** allowed to be in office passed that. Our children, and our following generation, as well as our generation, we all will suffer for that law.
We are just as guilty by letting it happen and doing nothing about it. My question is, are we actuall going to do nothing about it?
That's a good point. These 60, 70, 80 year olds keep getting re-elected over and over, and at this stage in their lives they're going to vote for whatever gets themselves the most. They're not going to vote for the common interest, nor are they going to vote to protect the future. They have no future, they're only going to take as much as they can for themselves.
Right there with you. Luckily pressure is mounting and the extreme greed is expediting the timeline.
Whatever happens won’t be fun but it will be necessary
There are three big differences to getting started now then the Boomers had it:
Housing costs (Rent and especially to own).
Health insurance (Even company sponsored plans can take a bite out of your paycheck).
Higher Education expenses ( Put many in a huge debt hole right as you start your career).
Of course there are others as well, general wage stagnation verse inflation over this time period (especially in the last two years).
I really feel bad for the younger generation, it is more difficult and I believe it is only going to get worse.
>Health insurance (Even company sponsored plans can take a bite out of your paycheck).
I have what the ACA called a "cadillac" plan due to my crohn's. It takes over $400 a month out of my pay. ($446 to be exact)
Yep, back on the Boomer age everyone had full coverage for themselves and their families and the organization picked up the entire costs. Also, there were no ridiculously high deductibles and co-pays.
This is a huge cost for mane employees
Yes..it sucks. However, we need to think about how much worse it would be if we didn't have the ACA ( hint : many of us would be denied insurance ). And the ACA came damned close to not happening.
USA needs a general labor strike. Obviously this so hard to do because people don’t have savings.
Really what it is going to take is for people to stop buying stupid shit, save money for a few months of expenses, then strike.
If it could be organized on a large scale and enough people agree to plan for a strike, the country would feel it within a couple days. And we all just need to save so we can pay bills for 2-3 months and it would be highly effective.
Just think if 20 million + people stopped going to work. If people can’t get gas or food because people don’t show up to work, I’d bet some concessions come real quick especially if the organized strike was known to be able to last a couple months.
> we all just need to save
Check out US credit card debt crisis. People have so much debt now that when they receive their monthly salary, a large % of it might already be gone.
If I list out all of my monthly expenses (rent, utilities, bills, gas, phone bill, food, Spotify Premium [i allow myself this one luxury]) compared to my monthly income after tax, I have about $34 left over. So I do not/can not save, and a flat tire, illness, or any large expense leads to disaster.
Add Mulroney and Thatcher to the list. The USA, UK, and Canada have fucked over their populations since then, Liberals included as they kept the charade going. I call them the 3 Amigos, they're a s bad as the movie was.
The American Superiority Complex has been prevalent since Woodrow Wilson. He cleared the way, then Goldwater and Nixon laid the foundation, and Reagan began building. It's astounding how quickly it's snowballed into a teetering tower in the last decade, though. My fingers are crossed it'll come crashing down soon.
Yup those that voted for Regan were so looking forward to their stacks of gold bricks and yachts when they retire
Now that they don’t have that it’s blaming everyone under 40 and any minority type group they can get their hands on as an excuse
One of my far right friends I still follow posted an “article” how housing price inflation is bc of open borders…like what? How are the poor Mexican/South American immigrants y’all hate so much…buying houses for $500K? These people have no critical thinking skills
Try saying “hey we have no federal maternity leave and 30’other countries get a year” you’re met with WELL GO LIVE THERE THEN
Like what? Why don’t you want better things too?
I mean how many Sunday morning Fox News pundits today will bring up stimulus checks?
Meanwhile it’s all arguing about drag shows while kids at church are still get raped…
Country is absolutely fucked, we’re in straight Idiocracy except instead of sitting around masturbating and drinking Mountain Dew they’re angry and trying to control everyone else
The thought of Trump running for president from jail or with an ankle monitor was beyond even Idiocracy! We’re fucked. And I’m 56 but my kids are 17 and 19 and I just ache for them and try to be positive, but I don’t feel very positive.
Same here. I am 58, my kids are 18 and 20. All of them will be doing semester abroad; I am begging them to marry a European whether they love him or not. The passport, it's so loveable.
They also use fear mongering to make you scared of the “illegal” to increase border surveillance. Jokes on them, that’s big government which they claim to hate. Fuck Reganomics that was a lie to make you suck corporate cock and get fucked by it. Regan also cut education and creating a whole generation of dumb fucks that are incapable of critical thinking. They created a whole age group of people who think going to college and being educated is a bad thing and “creates liberals”. No it does not. It creates free thinkers who will use critical thinking for themselves. And not let opinion pieces like Ben Shapiro spoon feed them bullshit.
>Like what? Why don’t you want better things too?
NOT if there's _ANY_ chance The "THEM People" will benefit in ANY way, _EVER_ .
This faction of murican society would walk straight into the depths of a volcanic hell if one of their " leaders " promised a paradise "free" of 'them people'.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Ronald Reagan was the worst and most damaging president we’ve ever had. He set the ground work for dismantling democracy and the middle class, leaving us with the nightmare gig economy we are currently forced to serve in order to survive. May he rot in hell.
Yup, may that bigot rot in hell and wait for heaven to trickle down. Also fuck boomer generation as a whole for being by and large class traitors and voting him in. They don’t deserve to spend the last of their days retired on a beach, they deserve to spend them dying in the back of a Wal-Mart storage room.
To be fair, some of it was Nixon's fault too. Either way both Nixon and Reagan literally committed treason by colluding with America's enemies to get elected.
To be quite honest, old people f\*cked themselves too they just don't realize it. They gutted SS, pensions, employee and retirement protections, social services, and basically made healthcare unaffordable.
They are basically one scam, one medical accident, or the loss of their housing (rent increases, natural disaster, unpaid home equity loan) from total ruin.
Which in turn also screws young people even more because they aren’t turning over like they should. Old people hang on to jobs and homes for dear life because they can’t afford to leave. So there aren’t started homes and job openings (particularly in leadership) for young people to come into
They were 100% fine until COVID destroyed their retirement savings, which until that point looked like it was going to be juuuust enough to get by, assuming they could sucker a few desperate children or grandchildren into taking care of them on the false premise that there will be a substantial inheritance.
It’s not just young people, friend. I’m 35 (not young, not old either), and the only way I’m getting a house is if there’s any inheritance from her mum left when my mum passes, or I win the lottery.
It sounds mean, but I honestly have no sympathy listening to most of my boomer family members' and peers woes.
It's like, Patti, your husband was a firefighter, you were a stay at home mom and you have 3 houses, a boat, a RV and you go to Europe twice a year, what are you complaining about!?
Meanwhile I'm an engineer and my wife is a nurse and we had to flee our home state just to afford a house that a retail worker could have bought a generation ago. IDGAF about any of your problems, I'm sorry.
It terrifies me to think of what it will be like for the next generation if this continues...
If you look at the psychology of the Boomer generation they are characteristically short sighted. They voted for legislators who benefitted them in that moment at the expense of their children and grandchildren. And now they won’t fucking retire because they’re so god damn selfish OR they realize the safety nets that they gutted in the name of tax cuts aren’t available to them and they can’t enjoy a 30 year retirement.
Between 1946-1969 my grandfather (b. 1928) supported a wife, raised and ultimately put two children through university, bought a 2500 sq ft house in what is today Silicon Valley (back then it was, as he described it, a wide space in the road) and had two cars and a comfortable pension, plus great health care.
He was a semi-illiterate manual labourer and high school janitor.
That house was sold in 2003 for $550,000, it's probably worth closer to two million now. I have three degrees and work longer hours than he did, and on my latest salary I would literally never be able to afford that house - it is more than 15 times my gross salary - let alone support a family in it.
Typical millennial story.
You know one thing they had back then that we don't now? a 91% tax rate on the ultra rich, and generally very high taxes on wealth all around. They also had powerful unions.
I think that Reagan really baked it into the system.
But I think it really started in the 70's when really began to enter the workforce in significant numbers.
But, instead of boosting families up - corporations decided that doubled household incomes could now afford to pay twice as much for the stuffs of life. Yet, their costs did not increase - and the rise of the corporate profit above all culture began.
The worst part is the current younger generation is royally f#$ked when we get older. Pensions are nearly extict, 401k (a thing that was never meant to replace pensions only subsidise) are not gling to be enough, and they don't pay us enough to save for anything.
We will reach an age when we can no longer physically work, and there will be no safe guatds in place by that time. The only viable option for the elderly will be prison, bc it's currenly the only place that guarentees healthcare.
Our parents can sell there houses to help fund their nursing home years. What happens to a generation that doesn't have the house?
I recently heard a stat in a news story that 40% of American workers under the age of 40 have a side job now. And then companies wonder why we're "not dedicated". Pay us enough to be dedicated to a single job and you'll be good to go, my corporate overlords.
my company is sending a part time employee who barely can work the two shifts he's scheduled a week...to SEATTLE, ALL EXPENSES PAID. For two weeks, that shit stain has a paid hotel room, per diem, and his flights were covered too. Hey did I mention, he put in his two weeks notice right before he left? So when he gets back, he's scheduled one day (which he absolutely won't work) and thats it.
Life is fucking *absurd*.
They also had this thing called a pension, it's a thing of the ancient past now, but almost all large companies provided them and allowed their workers to retire and live handsomely afterwards, they no longer exist outside of government for the most part
They're Fucked. With a capital F.
Almost every gen Z and even a good portion of millenials I know are still living with family, their parents, or with other people to cut down on living costs. The world continues to increase in cost while the price of labor is stagnating.
Most are still struggling with getting anything more than 20 dollars an hour and in todays world, thats barely naking a living. God forbid we talk about anyone making minimum wage. Its not even realistic to pay someone that little and expect them to work.
Buying a house is a wetdream for most. People are living paycheck to paycheck let alone being able to save money.
College is laughably unnaffordable and everyone knows its a debt trap at this point. Your likelyhood of getting hired out of school is incredibly unlikely for most majors unless you have experience of some kind and even then you're last on the list of canidates.
Companies do not give a shit about you anymore. Even 30 years ago you had some measure of good companies that actually cared about their employees and todays corporate culture labels anyone as expendable. Benefits are always a last concern and they'll fire you the next day if you're inconvenient.
We're not even talking about pollution, resource consumption, overpopulation, geopolitics, etc. Its a bad look across the board right now and its only going to get worse, especially with the current state of policies in the US and abroad. People as a whole need to start reigning in their politicians to make change happen.
There are so many more of us than them. Why aren't we actually organizing to peacefully take our money back from the millionaire and billionaire boomer class? Are we just lazy? We could actually do a general strike. If we organized. We could elect people who reflect our common sense values. Not push themselves to the top and poop on everybody else. Why are there multiple 80+ Year old pushing 90 politicians being elected over and over again? Who is voting for these people?
There’s a reason healthcare is tied to employment in the US. The system is working as intended. This is not a mistake as far as our leadership is concerned.
Voting is the arena the ruling class have the most control over; it’s a game they get to set the rules of. We see this all the time with gerrymandering and voter id laws. It’s why generally if you want big systemic change you won’t get it (in the West/US) from engaging in electoral politics. You can get some small tactical wins, especially on the local level, but you can’t “dismantle the masters house with the masters tools”
As to “why aren’t we organizing”, it’s a little more nuanced than that, though I get why you feel that way. Many of us are in the ways we can. I know people forming unions, running mutual aid groups, community defense groups, and so on. But the collective might of labor in the US is about as beaten down and divided against itself as anywhere. A huge chunk of the population either doesn’t see the problem, actively hopes to be a member of the exploiting class someday, or sees the issues but is so tired from scrapping for survival that doing much about it does not seem feasible. The demographic diversity of the US is also frequently exploited by the ruling class to create “tiers” of workers based on gender/ethnicity and other factors in order to keep a subset of the workers pushing the people “below” them down, rather than uniting over the broader shared economic interest.
I know this does paint something of a bleak picture, but there are beacons of hope. Places like this sub show that more and more people are becoming malcontented about things and willing to talk about it. That’s the first step. The reality is capitalism is a machine that eats itself. As this posts shows, the standard of living is now declining for the average worker as the “infinite growth” needed to sustain this economic system is showing its impossibility more and more by the day. Therefore more and more people will get more and more disillusioned. The goal is to find those people and organize them and offer them solutions in the form of unionizing and building stronger communities of workers. That work is happening, it’s just always going to be the messiest here in America because we embody the contradictions of capitalism the most.
Most people can't take the time to fight back because their families will starve and they'll lose their housing over missing a single paycheck. This was by design. We've been distracted, divided, and robbed blind. They have us in a chokehold.
My father didn't have a secondary education just finished high-school and supported the family of 3 kids and 2 parents in a decent sized house for years, on his single income. That isn't even possible now unless there's some extenuating circumstances, like inheritance or whatever.
I'm in my 30's so don't know if that's "old". But I think EVERYONE who's not wealthy is f-ed. The 0.1-percenters keep us all at each other's throats so we don't organize en masse to try taking control of the system. Young people have a lot more competition to deal with than our grandparents did when they were starting out, it seems. That's partly a consequence, I think, of sending everyone to university. Now we have all these college grads with "good degrees" but few decent-paying jobs. And because college degrees are now as common as toilet paper, companies can make ridiculous demands of job applicants and employees. We all walked right into this.
But older people today who were never part of the upper middle classes have a high chance of having slid down into poverty AND they suffer age discrimination so that no one wants to hire them after around 35 years old. Younger if they're in the tech industry. There are PLENTY of older people who've been wage slaves their entire lives. It doesn't benefit anyone excluding them from our fight.
We should stop singling out groups among the struggling-poor. If we're all in this together, we have a much stronger voice and can impact the industries and policies keeping the wage-slave culture alive.
There were only 4 billion people in the world in 1975 and now it's double that. At the same time the population was doubling, automation eliminated jobs and globalization started moving them to the cheapest bidder.
I’ve really started noticing it too, there are literally people everywhere. All the swimming holes and places I’ve loved for so many years are just trashed and overrun or even completely closed off due to abuse. I’m so sad about it.
It’s always been ‘ we need more housing , we need more housing’ and now once pristine areas are covered in cement. Didn’t anyone ever think ‘ we need less people’? I know I did/ do.
it makes me really sad
Welcome to late stage Capitalism. Rather unfortunate we find ourselves in this situation, friends.
The real question is what are we prepared to do about it? Can the workers achieve enough unity and collaboration to make demands and meaningful changes to the system? Or are we stuck in wage slavery forever?
Until people realize that corporations control both parties and a majority of policy created in this country does not favor the people then it will only continue to get worse.
There are a lot of things wrong here and a lot of work to be done to tackle each issue but if the collective would focus on making lobby illegal and removing money from politics that would be a tremendous first start.
I used to make bank and be able to save a lot of money. Now I'm barely scraping by. I actually have a really good resume and a good job in the STEM field. I have the same sort of jobs with the same sort of pay I made a decade ago. That's the problem. Cost of living has sky rocketed and yet salaries have stagnated for years.
I wish more younger folks ran for office at all levels of government to make changes, and that we took those elections seriously. Of course, I would hate being a politician, so I won't even take my own advice here or blame anyone else for feeling the same way.
I am a GenX-er and I’m here to tell you that — to my mind — each generation has it worse and worse. Compare Boomers to Millennials and it’s basically like living in 2 different countries.
My verdict is out on Gen Z, but I don’t think they’re going to buck the trend.
Y’all are dealing with serious shit we never had on our shoulders. The fact that you guys are activists and unionizing — I think you’re amazing for what some of you are doing.
GenX should have fought back more but we were too busy thrift shopping for flannel shirts.
I think it’s beyond peaceful protest time. These fuckers have been hoarding wealth and turning idiots into fascists for 40 years and we’re all like “huh turns out all these people legislating disparu aren’t in good faith” all the time but nothing ever happens. Lobbyism is a cancer, and the politicians who are in bed with donor money should be drug out by their fat feet
You're fucked if you think a college degree means fuck all. Quite honestly if you graduated around 2006 (like me) and bought into the whole "YOU HAVE TO GO TO COLLEGE" propaganda (also like me), you'll likely have wasted a shit ton of time and money. As someone who has spent the last decade trying to undo 7 years of trying to go to school, my advice to you: learn a trade.
The college bubble created a race to the top only those who were already better off would win. What is left is a massive chunk of "losers" with worthless college degrees and a completely oversaturated white collar work force. You're a dime a dozen now. At best. Conversely, the college bubble siphoned otherwise blue collar workers - like me. I was made to work with my hands, but I was lead to believe I shouldn't. There is a wealth of blue collar opportunity right now. The likes we haven't seen in decades. Don't miss out on it.
You are right, and it's not just you. I'm 54, and I live in Australia, so this data is for the Australian market, but I believe it is similar (or worse) in the US.
In 1965 (when my parents were of the right age to buy property), the average annual wage was $3,120, and the average house in Sydney cost $4,500. Less than 1.5 times the annual wage.
In 2000, when I was looking at buying a house, the average annual wage was $34,745, and the average house in Sydney cost $312,000. Very close to 9 times the annual wage.
Now, the average wage is $90,800, and the average house price in Sydney is $1,211,488. More than 13 times the average wage.
The boomers had it easy. Everyone else gets to suck it.
BTW, the problem is property owners and developers lobbying for property to be treated as an investment vehicle. This cycle can be broken. Japan had this problem, and fixed it by enacting policies that meant that property values gradually depreciated. Terrible for investors, but housing is now affordable in Japan.
Yeah and in the UK a lot of the older generation voted for brexit to go back to those halcyon days they remembered as being so amazing before we joined the EU....
Leaving the rest of us well and truly fucked for decades
It's not just young people who are fucked. Anyone who doesn't already have at least a million is good and screwed. I'm probably going to die on the job and I'm over 50. We need to understand that the war was never white vs black or xtian vs islam or straight vs queer. It's always been rich vs everyone else. It's past time that we figure this out collectively and start fighting back. We outnumber them by a very wide margin and they don't even know how to work the coffee maker.
Back then in 1960's and 1970's, my grandma and her husband could afford a house, a car, and raise five children- one of which was mentally handicapped... all on his single income as a produce manager while she was a SAH mom.
Now in her 80's, my grandma sees the plight I am going through as a full-time worker barely making ends meet and she's struggling to come up with $400 for new glasses. She's been voting Republican the vast majority of her years...and still is. She's not a Boomer- but a Silent Generation. It's not just the Boomers who did this to us- it's the Silent Generation too. They're still out there voting, and many of them still vote for policy makers that would "Make America Great Again" - you know, the 1950's and prior America that really only benefited cis white men.
When Trump was elected, the Silent Generation would have been 71 years old or older. With many people living longer, they are still making up a significant portion of the voters.
Yup you got it worse. Way worse. I am 57 and I will give you an example or more. From 1985 to 1989 I worked at places like a pizza joint, flower shop and copy shop. I made 8 bucks an hour, back then. Minimum wage was 3.35 an hour. Topped out at 9 bucks an hour managing a pizza joint in 1989 before i joined the Army. I rented a 1 bedroom cottage in Palo Alto for 800 bucks a month. I bought a 1969 Mercury cougar for 500 bucks. Concert tickets were 20 bucks a piece. Everything cost more now but the lower tiered wages never kept up.
Managing a pizza place for $9 an hour in 1985 when my local Little Caesar’s pays their managers $10.50 an hour in 2023.
And when it was bust I hopped in my car and delivered pizzas. Made about 40-100 bucks a night in tips.
To me thats really it; the flexibility. If you didnt have money you could make money. Easy come easy go. Everything is locked up now.
Corporations have optimized for value extraction. This is the world we live in.
More like they lost all ethics and morality since those get in the way of money. The other thing is the corporate culture nowadays is seeing how they can skim without getting caught.
You just said the exact same thing as the comment you’re replying to but in a less articulate form. If a company is optimized for value extraction it is inherently NOT optimized for ethics based decisions.
Damn. If I made 100 bucks in tips that was a pretty decent night, and that was 5 years ago.
If I made 100 bucks in tips in a night that’s the best night I’ve had in weeks and that was earlier this year (no longer a delivery driver). Delivery fees *fucked* drivers.
Same lol
lol @ boomers saying "you guys are lazy!!" when the equivalent would be uber driving or pizza delivery paid $60 ~an hour
Heck I work in healthcare and I have been doing it for 10+ years and if my wife didn't work as well we would be close to being below the poverty line.
Dude was making the equivalent of like $25 an hour to manage that pizza joint by today's standards.
Which is nothing for a management position relative to cost of living and the amount of responsibility you take on
I get $20 managing a taco shop. This existence is ridiculous.
Minimum wage in Australia just got increased ~6% to $23.23 to keep up with inflation. Americans are getting screwed!
You do realise that $23 AUD is $15 USD. It’s not that much. Australians are also getting screwed. Our cost of living is outrageous not to mention our housing situation
I mean that's still more than double the minimum wage in America, plus we have good public healthcare. So yeah if we're getting screwed then you guys are getting triple screwed.
Wtf
$9/hr is over $25 in 2023 monopoly money, I'd kill to work at a pizza joint for even $20/hr
Costco pays people about 20 to start and they have benefits. Also have pizza. Edit. This is becoming one of my top rated comments and I didn’t even mention the $1.50 hot dog drink combo. You guys are awesome.
In California the starting pay is $17.50 (I want to say that's national, but I don't know off the top of my head), with pay increasing with hours worked. I'm a few months over a year and hitting $19.50 next month. Part time is guaranteed 24 hours a week, and there are a lot of resources available to me as an employee. If you apply, also make sure to bring an application/resume to the store physically and ask to be introduced to the hiring manager - most warehouses won't even consider your application if you haven't done that. New hires are brought on in groups, so you may want to check in every month or two. Costco doesn't work around other job schedules if you're working another job, but they do work with school schedules. Apologies for the unsolicited advice, working at Costco was a huge improvement over my previous jobs and I wish more places offered the same environment.
The nearest costco is over an hour from me lol
Costco is also extremely picky about who they hire.
Testing for pot in legal states? Fuck off with that shit. It's not the 50s
They only do a mouth swab for their drug tests…so don’t smoke for 3 days and you’re good.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to rewrite your comment using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator found [here](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=8&year1=198501&year2=202304), using January 1985 for a reference point: “From 1985 to 1989 I worked at places like a pizza joint, flower shop and copy shop. I made $23 bucks an hour, back then. Minimum wage was $9.63 (today’s is $7.25; last raised in 2009; $7.25 in 2009 is worth $10.42 today).Topped out at $25.88 bucks an hour managing a pizza joint in 1989 before i joined the Army. I rented a 1 bedroom cottage in Palo Alto for $2300 bucks a month. I bought a 1969 Mercury cougar for $1437. Concert tickets were $57 bucks a piece.” ——————————- Looking at Palo Alto rentals on Zillow right now, sorted by price: The cheapest is a 99 square foot shed on someone’s patio for $1295. There are two separate studios of about 150 square feet each for roughly $1750. A few studios and single bedrooms, all under or around 400 square feet, for $1750-2025. And finally, we start getting to 400-500 square feet at $2100! The median income in Palo Alto in 2021 was $194K, and the poverty line for the city (third most expensive city in California) is $250K. $250,000. The average 1969 Mercury Cougar goes for $33,895 today. At first glance, I thought the price was so high because it’s a truly vintage car now. So I looked up today’s price of a popular muscle car from twenty years to mirror OP: the 2002 Chevy Camaro. Turns out the average price is in the same range as the Cougar. Looking at food service jobs in Palo Alto on Simply Hired, the first one is a presumably local sandwich shop, paying a whole $17.25-$17.75/hr. But don’t worry, because “Ike’s crew members make up to $20.25 with estimated tips (YES!! YOU READ THAT RIGHT).”
This comment really put things in perspective. Thanks for that.
People commute in too Palo Alto. The problem is when everywhere in the metro area is expensive. So you cannot commute from further away to get a lower house/col.
Same issue in Seattle. I'm a maintenance manager for a residential high rise in the downtown area and we are having massive issues finding workers because the city is so expensive that the majority of the blue-collar workers live like 30-45 minutes away and there are a ton of other similarly paying jobs that are closer.
Why won’t the owner/leadership pay them more to compensate
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It's another symptom of the infinite growth expectations from shareholders. In the case of the company I work for, and most of the companies in the downtown area, it's all about expansion. They build a skyscraper, staff it with as few staff as they can get away with, give them budget constraints, and put every extra dollar towards the next skyscraper. They're not worried about giving their tenants a quality product. They're worried about making sure their numbers look good so that they can build another building to keep the line going upward.
For even greater illumination, use regional data. Cost of living and inflation has never been uniformly distributed. A living wage in Fresno is an agonized bankruptcy in San Francisco.
If I could I would give you an award
You’re too kind! I just like to whip out that calculator for any discussion of prices, and to cross-check current conditions if I have the time to kill. It really helps to keep things in perspective!
> The median income in Palo Alto in 2021 was $194K, and the poverty line for the city (third most expensive city in California) is $250K. $250,000. I just threw up a little bit
You can also infer from hourly rates how this translates: $8 wage and $800 rent, for example, is 100 hours of work. For easy math, working 40 hours per week for 50 weeks means 2,000 hours per year as full time. Assuming FT, they need to spend 1200/2000 hours each year on a place to live, which is 60% of their gross income. Financial advisors usually recommend 30%, roughly, so this was already super expensive back then. The car, at $500, was less than 1 month rent. Concert tickets were about 2.5 hours of work. People can argue about inflation impacting different things differently, and there's problems trying to convert everything cleanly to hours like I did here, but it's helpful to have a range of information to review to get the best interpretation.
There's actually a chrome extension that scans websites for prices and converts them to hours of work for you (you dictate your salary or hourly wage and it does the math). I used it for a couple of weeks and it was eye opening to look at purchases i once considered throw away and realize how many hours of my life i was trading it for.
I think converting to hours of work is actually the most unifying and realistic way to compare real prices over time because at the end of the day money is just a proxy for value and for those that work for a living (instead of living off of trust fund dividends) we are exchanging our labor time for goods and services. The definition of an hour has remained constant so if we convert everything to hours that's actually more useful.
A key point you’re missing here as well is that you didn’t have to take on much debt if any at all to do that. Capital owners are paying workers less and less so we have less money to buy things which means capital owners won’t make as much money. It’s an internal contradiction within capitalism that has tried to resolve itself through credit. You can finance a fucking pizza now
I was talking to an uber driver the other day, who described something similar in the timeframe of the late 80s/early 90s- making less than $10/hour, being able to afford rent in a bachelor, a car, and paying for community college courses. He described the wages as motivational to keep going to classes and earn his degree so that he could earn more later. I said that was great. Then he launched into a diatribe into which I could not sneak one word wherein he decried the current calls for increases to mininum wage. Made fun of the idea of a "living wage" because jobs like flipping burgers are supposed to light a fire under your ass to get an education to be able to increase your salary, not to actually live on. In his view, if you were non-management at any retail/restaurant/service industry job, that's only supposed to when you're young or your part time job while putting yourself through college. Unfortunately, he kept talking the entire way to our destination and I didn't want to hang out in the car and continue the conversation, but I was dying to ask him what he paid for rent and to pull up the listings for bachelors in my area and compare. Ask him what he paid in tuition and pull up the local community college's tuition schedule. Ask him how much he paid for his car and pull up classifieds for a honda civic today. People are fucking delusional - they have no concept of learning or updating their understanding about the way things are. Their either don't realize, or don't care, that their shitty opinions actually reflect the concept of getting to the top of the mountain and then pulling the ladder up behind them.
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Kinda in the same boat, what I do is after everything is paid off I’ll take half of whatever is left and throw it in savings.
You guys have savings?
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*Sob* $200?? Last time I worked I had $20-50 left over. It's such a depressing scam.
Y'all have money left over?
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We are all fucked. AI and climate change will kill us all. The world ends when the boomers die and they don’t give a fuck.
That's precisely why they don't give a fuck. They won't live long enough to see the devastation to it's full extent, so from a completly selfish point of view, it's not their problem.
Congrats to the boomers for winning the financial lottery. In order for there to be a lottery winner, a lot of people have to pay for it.
I always like to think about the fact that a man could work and support a family without anyone else working. It didn't always go well and older sons would regularly go to work too. However, now both parents have to work and older kids still regularly have to go to work too. And I mean kids in high school getting jobs to help support the family.
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A lot of people had a regular job and also did other work to make money, particularly for special purchases. My mother was a housewife for about 6 years but she would pick up work as a census taker or teach classes at our house (astrology) or temporary secretarial work for things like a dryer, new furniture, drapes, doctor bills, a car repair. My father worked as a bank branch manager but also would do taxes on the side during tax season.
Yeah but that usually to make up short falls, like trips, one time large purchase. People now days string together 2 jobs and a side hustle just to keep caught up. My mother was a home maker but would waitress or factory work during peak seasons to pay for her missionary trips. My father worked Indiana Bell no college just AF training program in telecommunications. Bought a house and raised 2 kids. Always had cars, motorcycles, and guns. Nothing new but not crap. We were lower middle class but not on assistance. For reference I am 55 years old. I watched my grandfather retire from Chrysler with full pension, I got braces at 12 because my father was in a union…by the time I was 18-21 I watched pensions start to disappear (evaporate) or guys fired a year from their 20 year retirements, (think SL scandal & Enron) and then unions get eroded. Capitalism is a process of financial extraction. Capitalism’s purpose is to create capital. It isn’t for the advancement of humanity. We are in the endgame.
That shit ended in the 80s.
What kills me about the 80"s is how the two career family was sold as liberation for women when it was actually economic necessity cause suddenly your mortgage rates were 15 percent.
Yep, I said that years ago. We framed being a stay at home parent as lazy and unproductive. Now look at how society has faired after removing both parents from the picture. Turns out being a parent is kind of important. Now we have damaged multiple generations for the owner class bottom line.
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In Cameron's case, though, that was the intended effect, because who cares about "the poors" and their support mechanisms. Austerity never applies to the wealthy.
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Why do the Tories keep winning?
Same reason right wing parties still exist everywhere. Fear and anger. People are pretty dumb and those two emotions are very easy to manipulate
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." But it's also the team sports mentality, our team, our religion, our in-group, is better than yours and we personally identify with the ringleader because of race, class, gender, etc. and have been promised we deserve the same status of such ringleader by virtue of our membership.
I don't care if it's lazy, I hate working. I hate being forced to do something for money 8 hours a day when someone else is making my salary in a month for making farting videos on TikTok. Please end my life.
Even worse is working 8 hours a day just to get by while someone else is literally making their money off of your work!
That's every job unless you're a CEO. Lol.
Or choose to work for yourself (which has a whole other set of issues), or for a non-profit (again, it’s own issues). But yes, the core problem with capitalism is that the owners pay you less than the value you generate, sometimes dramatically so.
Non-profits will end up exploiting your passion and desire to help.
Hating work is not lazy. Just human.
Republicans want women to be 1950's SAHMs with as many kids as their bodies will pump out. They're not willing to pay the wages that would support that family idea, though.
Agreed. Being a stay at home parent is still framed as lazy and unproductive. When people ask me what my wife does and I tell them she's a stay at home mom, I'll get reactions ranging from disappointment to wtf. What most people DONT realize is that we don't have a fucking choice because our son has autism and cannot be placed in daycare. No one wants to watch him either. No one has any idea of what may or may not be going on in the home and its none of their fucking business. I don't feel like I need to tell every person I encounter that my son is autistic either.
I hate that we are all defined by what we “do” instead of who we are and what we enjoy.
I think it’s important to note though that for low income or PoC households, women always worked. As servants, as nannies, helping their husbands at their own shops and work, etc.
My grandmother was an immigrant and worked full time as a secretary in NYC. My mother was pretty much on her own... was told to knock on the neighbor's door if she needed anything. She was 7. There was no such thing as daycare back then (1950). Her stepfather couldn't hold a job if he managed to get hired. They came from Germany and people had prejudice against Germans after WW2 and they had accents.
The benefits from [FDR’s new deal](https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/history/us-history/african-americans-and-the-new-deal/) were felt almost exclusively by white Americans. The only thing that differentiated it from Nazi Germany’s [Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_People%27s_Welfare) was rather than sending the undesirables to camps we [redlined](https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america) them into ghettos. There has always been and always will be an underclass under capitalism. Fascism is just [the authoritarian and nationalistic tendencies of liberal democracy](https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-is-possible-not-in-spite-of-liberal-capitalism-but-because-of-it/) expressed in their most extreme and violent form. Until you remove the root of the problem there will always be a portion of society [exploited for profit](https://www.ilo.org/newyork/voices-at-work/WCMS_244965/lang--en/index.htm) no matter how far you push them from view.
Working class and poor families frequently had both parents working outside the home. Both my grandmothers worked full time. My mother was born in 1943 and my father was the eldest too and was born in 1938. Also... 1930s was The Great Depression and jobs were hard to come by and there was not welfare/TANF, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, school lunches nor SNAP back then. It was really hard to make any money. The real estate market crashed d/t so many foreclosures-- particularly farms. People were malnourished. Mostly it was upper middle class people who could afford homes and housewives. Even the old shows-- like Jackie Gleason -- Jackie and his wife lived in a cold water flat in NYC and he was a bus driver, most people rented back then. Single people lived in boarding houses--renting a room when they traveled to find work. I recommend reading some Studs Terkel to find out what it was like for people back in the day, their jobs, what it was like during the Depression, even in the 1950's
And for the UK "People of the Abyss" by brilliant American author, Jack London. It's earlier than the depression, around 1900s to 1910 period. He went "undercover" as a homeless person in London and it's really unbelievable. However, in many ways I do think we're headed back to similar now the way things are going.
Women’s Lib started as a movement to give women the freedom to choose between being a stay at home mother and having a career and to be paid equally for the work being done. (Equal to the pay rate men were given for the same work) Now women have to work to keep a roof over the house and food in the fridge. Plus women are still doing the bulk of the household work and childcare. I’ve never felt liberated to work so hard.
Early feminism was aware of these issues. They knew at the time that women entering the workforce would depress wages across the board, unless women were guaranteed equal protection under the law - meaning it would be illegal to pay women less for the same work. The equal rights amendment would have done this, but it was narrowly defeated in the 80s by the new "culture warriors" of the right wing, Phyllis Schlafly among them, who led the lifestyle of a liberated woman and spent it trying to deny other women the right to be like her.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. Just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. Now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your f**kin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. George Carlin
The older I get, the clearer it becomes that Ronald Reagan was one of the worst presidents in US history. SO MANY of the problems we have today started because of his administration.
Good ole Reagan and the rise of what we now call republicans made our lives this way. The statistics support that statement too. Though some republican buckwheat SOB will likely tell me that’s not correct.
Right when Regan started his presidency.
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When my dad graduated, you could support a wife and baby and a starter home with a starter job right out of high school. Instead, he worked summers and used that money to pay for an entire year of university and his own living expenses. That's right. A summer's worth of work paid for a year of school *and* an entire year's living expenses. He did not have to work while taking classes, just when school was out.
It took my wife and I living with our mother in law to afford a home. I mean we live in Colorado but we make decent money and it still took 3 incomes to afford it.
A good union job at the factory could support a family of four that would go on vacations, possibly even had 2 cars.
As an IT professional the amount of time I have to spend on a home lab, certifications and learning at home takes away from time with my family. This is because on the job they spread IT professionals too thin and dont hire enoigh people so everyone can get proper ongoing job and industry training. Compared to guys who used to work on the line at Ford or Engineers where they would continiously provide training. That is all gone now. They expect the employee to eat all the cost and time to learn new things.
And some other points to consider: We are currently more wealthy as a country than at any other point in our whole history. It is the distribution that has changed. CEOs used to make 17 times what an average worker made - now it is 400 times. A person making $100 an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from the year zero until today - would be less wealthy than many of the wealthiest Americans. 100 of those imaginary 2023 year old 24/7 $100 an hour workers combined still would have less wealth than some Americans. Point is - yes, our tax system can and should change. The people who have most benefitted can afford to give more back to the society that has made them so absurdly wealthy. BTW, if you took 1 minute to read this, assuming Elon Musk has his wealth earning 8% annual interest - a low estimate, Elon just gained $30,441during that minute.
Wait til u hear about 10 dollar a credit university classes being offered to boomers now, cuz they need the cheap education the most right??
It’s literally free for them at our local university. If a person under 60 wants to audit, they have to pay the full course fee. While it might be nice for Linda and Elmer to expand their brains some, I think auditing should be free for everyone. You’re getting the knowledge, it’s space available anyway, you just don’t get the credit towards a degree.
And who foots the bill? Or are they admitting that current college prices are a scam that can be arbitrarily lowered whenever they feel the recipient of the course shouldn’t have to pay the other 98% of the bill
I've decided I don't care if my 3 kids live with me until they're 30. I will NOT subject them to being forced to work shitty jobs to survive and subsidize the rent market with their best years and well-being. This will completely disregard whatever my income is, or theirs. If they want to continue to live rent free, my house will be there for them. I am going to break this shitty cycle of forcing young adults into poverty only to the benefit of landlords and shitty corporations that under-pay their employees.
Do it. Once they get to a working age in their 20's and are making decent money, let them live at home rent free and subsidize what costs you can such as insurance or food. My mom did that for a few years for me. I was able to save up 15k, pay off my car, and get my credit score up to 700+. Changed my life. Now my only debt is student loans - but regardless I have five figures saved in the bank, and the job field is open to me because my extensive resume.
I got kicked out at 18 and it put me in poverty for 12 years... It's such a bad system.
Good person.
I have 16 year old coworkers working 60+ hours a week.
Yes.. and I'm in my 50s. In the US.. We've created a world that's unlivable for you. First ,we paralyze you with soul crushing student loan debt when you're just getting started in life, and second the distribution of wealth has made it impossible for you to get ahead... AND AI will now be reducing the number of people needed in the workforce. I don't see how it all continues without a reckoning at some point.
I don't understand their thinking. If everyone is so broke, who will buy their stuff?
My friend pointed out that companies are no longer trying to buy our current wealth, they're trying to buy our future wealth. That's why you now see deals like buy an Xbox at $35 for 24 months... They're leveraging our future earnings, not our current ones
This coupled with the the concept of having a "membership" for everything. Ownership seems to be a thing of the past
Yup, you used to just be able to buy something and own it, a complete full product. If it broke or didn't work there was a warranty or replacement program the company provided at no cost to you. Now you buy something and you need a subscription to the service it runs on, or you pay for the privilege of a service and the company can change their terms and offerings without your control, or you choose between just under basic functionality with a ton of ads for free and a subscription fee for the "full" service.
Great Financial Collapse 2: The Last Credits
That’s why they invented credit cards
The reckoning is getting the dinosaurs out of office and putting in new, relevant ideas that will benefit younger people. I’m shocked my generation doesn’t have more of a voice at the table. And it’s not going to get better until we do.
Because you can't run for office without bending the knee to the corporate overlords. If you're not one of the anointed candidates like Kamala the Cop or Pete vulture capital Buttigieg you will get blacked out of the media. If by some miracle of effort and luck you can win, the system will consume you (see AOC sell her soul for committee seats and a pat on the head by Nancy the multi-millionaire "public servant"). The party system is fundamentally unjust. Loyalty is to the party, not to the constituents, and the party only listens to consultants who don't care about anything except enriching themselves. The culture of acquiescing to terroristic threats from the extreme right has moved the Overton window so far right that we now have to choose between the party of outright fascism and the party of fascist enablers with a few fascists sprinkled in (looking at you Mansion and Cuellar).
My dad told me yesterday about how many pensions he receives from jobs and that I need to start thinking about that. I kept telling him ‘hardly any job fields do that anymore! It’s not a thing!’ I’m a nurse (RN) and I believe only the VA provides a pension and they are notoriously incredibly difficult to get hired by them. SMH.
Hell, no pension, no saving, sad 401k that gets hit every 6-8 year recession. No home and now they want the Social Security that we all paid into our whole lives, and that they used to fill out the general budget without every returning a dime to the funds. They just passed the debt ceiling legislation be adding to the work requirements for assistance with medical insurance. No stipulation for retirement or disability. Work or die faster. Wage Slavery is a real thing.
> 401k that gets hit every 6-8 year recession I'm pissed the money that's supposed to support me in retirement--if I can ever retire--is invested in the stock market, only to be lost when a bunch of wall street bankers fuck up the economy. At least with a pension the money was guaranteed.
I am in the Cabo that believes the big stockholders skim the cream of the 401k investments by creating the fall of the market via recession politics and manipulation. Pretty sure that is why they dreamt the damn thing up.
The older generation doesn't realize how much things have changed, as unfortunately many of them were locked into benefits that are no longer offered. When I was a rising Sr in highschool I really wanted to work at our local pool, but they were only hiring part time. I really needed full time, so I took a job at a lakeside swimming place 30 minutes away. A week or so after I accepted the job, the local pool called and offered me full time work. I wanted so bad to take it, but my Dad lectured me and said I'd already given my word to this other place and that it would be disloyal to quit. Note, I hadn't even started yet... Anyway I turned down the local pool and went to work at the other place. They fired me after 3 days with no notice. Just told me they hadn't gotten as many sign ups as they wanted and to not bother coming in anymore. Thanks Dad.
Knew a lady worked her entire life for one company (Kellogg) after a couple years claiming it..the company said it was out of money (2008) and just stopped paying her!
I am forty, so I was kinda able to be aware of the changes as they were going on in the 80's from the political things my family spoke about. I kept some interest in what was going on until recent years when a lot of us came to the conclusion that the system is really rigged to keep the rich making money and everyone else working with no balance in life. We are a miserable nation of laborers in America, painted over with this dream of opportunity and freedom of choice with a blanket promise as empty and colorless as a presidential campaign slogan. We were promised by people, who had no idea what they were saying, that we could be anything we wanted when we grew up. No one read the fine print and asterisks attached to that statement. I have kids and two little grandkids now, and I worry for the latter the most. I worry about what kind of world they will grow up in and what direction they will have to grow into to make a life for themselves that isn't a mindless slog that puts them in an early grave.
Credit scores started in 1989. Wtf
Our generation was just being born, at the oldest we were 7 years old. That's when our parents looked at us and said, "You know what? Fuck these little bastards. If only there was a way we could abuse and control their entire quality of life." Do not forget that it was *all* of our parent's doing. You cannot make excuses, "oh it's not like they created Equifax" fuck off. They are the ones who voted the politicians and legislators in to office who created the whole system. Our parents may as well have handed us over directly to the government. As long as they got their 30 pieces of silver, right?
100% Let us never do to the young what was done to us
Problem is, *we are*. Just in the past week union-busting legislation was passed that ensures corporate profits must be protected, otherwise unions cannot strike. The strike was the most powerful tool useable in a worker's defense, and now it has been effectively neutered. Legislators **we** allowed to be in office passed that. Our children, and our following generation, as well as our generation, we all will suffer for that law. We are just as guilty by letting it happen and doing nothing about it. My question is, are we actuall going to do nothing about it?
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That's a good point. These 60, 70, 80 year olds keep getting re-elected over and over, and at this stage in their lives they're going to vote for whatever gets themselves the most. They're not going to vote for the common interest, nor are they going to vote to protect the future. They have no future, they're only going to take as much as they can for themselves.
Right there with you. Luckily pressure is mounting and the extreme greed is expediting the timeline. Whatever happens won’t be fun but it will be necessary
There are three big differences to getting started now then the Boomers had it: Housing costs (Rent and especially to own). Health insurance (Even company sponsored plans can take a bite out of your paycheck). Higher Education expenses ( Put many in a huge debt hole right as you start your career). Of course there are others as well, general wage stagnation verse inflation over this time period (especially in the last two years). I really feel bad for the younger generation, it is more difficult and I believe it is only going to get worse.
>Health insurance (Even company sponsored plans can take a bite out of your paycheck). I have what the ACA called a "cadillac" plan due to my crohn's. It takes over $400 a month out of my pay. ($446 to be exact)
Yep, back on the Boomer age everyone had full coverage for themselves and their families and the organization picked up the entire costs. Also, there were no ridiculously high deductibles and co-pays. This is a huge cost for mane employees
Yes..it sucks. However, we need to think about how much worse it would be if we didn't have the ACA ( hint : many of us would be denied insurance ). And the ACA came damned close to not happening.
I think about this a lot. So close to getting repealed too. So many of us would have been *screwed.*
A world built on exploitation and the destruction of our planet. What could go wrong?
USA needs a general labor strike. Obviously this so hard to do because people don’t have savings. Really what it is going to take is for people to stop buying stupid shit, save money for a few months of expenses, then strike. If it could be organized on a large scale and enough people agree to plan for a strike, the country would feel it within a couple days. And we all just need to save so we can pay bills for 2-3 months and it would be highly effective. Just think if 20 million + people stopped going to work. If people can’t get gas or food because people don’t show up to work, I’d bet some concessions come real quick especially if the organized strike was known to be able to last a couple months.
> we all just need to save Check out US credit card debt crisis. People have so much debt now that when they receive their monthly salary, a large % of it might already be gone.
If I list out all of my monthly expenses (rent, utilities, bills, gas, phone bill, food, Spotify Premium [i allow myself this one luxury]) compared to my monthly income after tax, I have about $34 left over. So I do not/can not save, and a flat tire, illness, or any large expense leads to disaster.
>USA needs a general labor strike. Obviously this so hard to do because people don’t have savings Also because general strikes are illegal here
Worker's rights weren't brought about by legal strikes in the first place, and if we get desperate enough, we can do it again.
Yep, it all started when Reagan got elected
Add Mulroney and Thatcher to the list. The USA, UK, and Canada have fucked over their populations since then, Liberals included as they kept the charade going. I call them the 3 Amigos, they're a s bad as the movie was.
I disagree... Three Amigos! Is fucking hilarious. They were acting like idiots for a movie not to fuck over society at large.
I was gonna say, it's not just an American thing...uk is dire too
The American Superiority Complex has been prevalent since Woodrow Wilson. He cleared the way, then Goldwater and Nixon laid the foundation, and Reagan began building. It's astounding how quickly it's snowballed into a teetering tower in the last decade, though. My fingers are crossed it'll come crashing down soon.
Yup those that voted for Regan were so looking forward to their stacks of gold bricks and yachts when they retire Now that they don’t have that it’s blaming everyone under 40 and any minority type group they can get their hands on as an excuse One of my far right friends I still follow posted an “article” how housing price inflation is bc of open borders…like what? How are the poor Mexican/South American immigrants y’all hate so much…buying houses for $500K? These people have no critical thinking skills Try saying “hey we have no federal maternity leave and 30’other countries get a year” you’re met with WELL GO LIVE THERE THEN Like what? Why don’t you want better things too? I mean how many Sunday morning Fox News pundits today will bring up stimulus checks? Meanwhile it’s all arguing about drag shows while kids at church are still get raped… Country is absolutely fucked, we’re in straight Idiocracy except instead of sitting around masturbating and drinking Mountain Dew they’re angry and trying to control everyone else
The thought of Trump running for president from jail or with an ankle monitor was beyond even Idiocracy! We’re fucked. And I’m 56 but my kids are 17 and 19 and I just ache for them and try to be positive, but I don’t feel very positive.
Yes. Mine are in their early 20s, both working full time for $16-17/hour. There’s no way they will be moving out any time soon.
Same here. I am 58, my kids are 18 and 20. All of them will be doing semester abroad; I am begging them to marry a European whether they love him or not. The passport, it's so loveable.
They also use fear mongering to make you scared of the “illegal” to increase border surveillance. Jokes on them, that’s big government which they claim to hate. Fuck Reganomics that was a lie to make you suck corporate cock and get fucked by it. Regan also cut education and creating a whole generation of dumb fucks that are incapable of critical thinking. They created a whole age group of people who think going to college and being educated is a bad thing and “creates liberals”. No it does not. It creates free thinkers who will use critical thinking for themselves. And not let opinion pieces like Ben Shapiro spoon feed them bullshit.
>Like what? Why don’t you want better things too? NOT if there's _ANY_ chance The "THEM People" will benefit in ANY way, _EVER_ . This faction of murican society would walk straight into the depths of a volcanic hell if one of their " leaders " promised a paradise "free" of 'them people'.
Pretty much everything that makes my life difficult is related to his administration.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Ronald Reagan was the worst and most damaging president we’ve ever had. He set the ground work for dismantling democracy and the middle class, leaving us with the nightmare gig economy we are currently forced to serve in order to survive. May he rot in hell.
Yup, may that bigot rot in hell and wait for heaven to trickle down. Also fuck boomer generation as a whole for being by and large class traitors and voting him in. They don’t deserve to spend the last of their days retired on a beach, they deserve to spend them dying in the back of a Wal-Mart storage room.
You can thank his puppet masters for that. Every president is useless until you figure out who their backers are.
To be fair, some of it was Nixon's fault too. Either way both Nixon and Reagan literally committed treason by colluding with America's enemies to get elected.
Can't forget Jack Welch though.
To be quite honest, old people f\*cked themselves too they just don't realize it. They gutted SS, pensions, employee and retirement protections, social services, and basically made healthcare unaffordable. They are basically one scam, one medical accident, or the loss of their housing (rent increases, natural disaster, unpaid home equity loan) from total ruin.
Which in turn also screws young people even more because they aren’t turning over like they should. Old people hang on to jobs and homes for dear life because they can’t afford to leave. So there aren’t started homes and job openings (particularly in leadership) for young people to come into
They were 100% fine until COVID destroyed their retirement savings, which until that point looked like it was going to be juuuust enough to get by, assuming they could sucker a few desperate children or grandchildren into taking care of them on the false premise that there will be a substantial inheritance.
It’s not just young people, friend. I’m 35 (not young, not old either), and the only way I’m getting a house is if there’s any inheritance from her mum left when my mum passes, or I win the lottery.
It sounds mean, but I honestly have no sympathy listening to most of my boomer family members' and peers woes. It's like, Patti, your husband was a firefighter, you were a stay at home mom and you have 3 houses, a boat, a RV and you go to Europe twice a year, what are you complaining about!? Meanwhile I'm an engineer and my wife is a nurse and we had to flee our home state just to afford a house that a retail worker could have bought a generation ago. IDGAF about any of your problems, I'm sorry. It terrifies me to think of what it will be like for the next generation if this continues...
I’m avoiding that problem entirely by not having kids. Sorry corporate bastards, no more labour source for you - I’m ending it with me.
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Sadly you are exactly correct.
If you look at the psychology of the Boomer generation they are characteristically short sighted. They voted for legislators who benefitted them in that moment at the expense of their children and grandchildren. And now they won’t fucking retire because they’re so god damn selfish OR they realize the safety nets that they gutted in the name of tax cuts aren’t available to them and they can’t enjoy a 30 year retirement.
Lead paint and leaded fuel stunted their empathy
Between 1946-1969 my grandfather (b. 1928) supported a wife, raised and ultimately put two children through university, bought a 2500 sq ft house in what is today Silicon Valley (back then it was, as he described it, a wide space in the road) and had two cars and a comfortable pension, plus great health care. He was a semi-illiterate manual labourer and high school janitor. That house was sold in 2003 for $550,000, it's probably worth closer to two million now. I have three degrees and work longer hours than he did, and on my latest salary I would literally never be able to afford that house - it is more than 15 times my gross salary - let alone support a family in it. Typical millennial story. You know one thing they had back then that we don't now? a 91% tax rate on the ultra rich, and generally very high taxes on wealth all around. They also had powerful unions.
I think that Reagan really baked it into the system. But I think it really started in the 70's when really began to enter the workforce in significant numbers. But, instead of boosting families up - corporations decided that doubled household incomes could now afford to pay twice as much for the stuffs of life. Yet, their costs did not increase - and the rise of the corporate profit above all culture began.
The worst part is the current younger generation is royally f#$ked when we get older. Pensions are nearly extict, 401k (a thing that was never meant to replace pensions only subsidise) are not gling to be enough, and they don't pay us enough to save for anything. We will reach an age when we can no longer physically work, and there will be no safe guatds in place by that time. The only viable option for the elderly will be prison, bc it's currenly the only place that guarentees healthcare. Our parents can sell there houses to help fund their nursing home years. What happens to a generation that doesn't have the house?
I recently heard a stat in a news story that 40% of American workers under the age of 40 have a side job now. And then companies wonder why we're "not dedicated". Pay us enough to be dedicated to a single job and you'll be good to go, my corporate overlords.
my company is sending a part time employee who barely can work the two shifts he's scheduled a week...to SEATTLE, ALL EXPENSES PAID. For two weeks, that shit stain has a paid hotel room, per diem, and his flights were covered too. Hey did I mention, he put in his two weeks notice right before he left? So when he gets back, he's scheduled one day (which he absolutely won't work) and thats it. Life is fucking *absurd*.
"Just exist on crumbs for 40 years, procreate, and die, please." - Average C.E.O.
They also had this thing called a pension, it's a thing of the ancient past now, but almost all large companies provided them and allowed their workers to retire and live handsomely afterwards, they no longer exist outside of government for the most part
They're Fucked. With a capital F. Almost every gen Z and even a good portion of millenials I know are still living with family, their parents, or with other people to cut down on living costs. The world continues to increase in cost while the price of labor is stagnating. Most are still struggling with getting anything more than 20 dollars an hour and in todays world, thats barely naking a living. God forbid we talk about anyone making minimum wage. Its not even realistic to pay someone that little and expect them to work. Buying a house is a wetdream for most. People are living paycheck to paycheck let alone being able to save money. College is laughably unnaffordable and everyone knows its a debt trap at this point. Your likelyhood of getting hired out of school is incredibly unlikely for most majors unless you have experience of some kind and even then you're last on the list of canidates. Companies do not give a shit about you anymore. Even 30 years ago you had some measure of good companies that actually cared about their employees and todays corporate culture labels anyone as expendable. Benefits are always a last concern and they'll fire you the next day if you're inconvenient. We're not even talking about pollution, resource consumption, overpopulation, geopolitics, etc. Its a bad look across the board right now and its only going to get worse, especially with the current state of policies in the US and abroad. People as a whole need to start reigning in their politicians to make change happen.
There are so many more of us than them. Why aren't we actually organizing to peacefully take our money back from the millionaire and billionaire boomer class? Are we just lazy? We could actually do a general strike. If we organized. We could elect people who reflect our common sense values. Not push themselves to the top and poop on everybody else. Why are there multiple 80+ Year old pushing 90 politicians being elected over and over again? Who is voting for these people?
There’s a reason healthcare is tied to employment in the US. The system is working as intended. This is not a mistake as far as our leadership is concerned.
Voting is the arena the ruling class have the most control over; it’s a game they get to set the rules of. We see this all the time with gerrymandering and voter id laws. It’s why generally if you want big systemic change you won’t get it (in the West/US) from engaging in electoral politics. You can get some small tactical wins, especially on the local level, but you can’t “dismantle the masters house with the masters tools” As to “why aren’t we organizing”, it’s a little more nuanced than that, though I get why you feel that way. Many of us are in the ways we can. I know people forming unions, running mutual aid groups, community defense groups, and so on. But the collective might of labor in the US is about as beaten down and divided against itself as anywhere. A huge chunk of the population either doesn’t see the problem, actively hopes to be a member of the exploiting class someday, or sees the issues but is so tired from scrapping for survival that doing much about it does not seem feasible. The demographic diversity of the US is also frequently exploited by the ruling class to create “tiers” of workers based on gender/ethnicity and other factors in order to keep a subset of the workers pushing the people “below” them down, rather than uniting over the broader shared economic interest. I know this does paint something of a bleak picture, but there are beacons of hope. Places like this sub show that more and more people are becoming malcontented about things and willing to talk about it. That’s the first step. The reality is capitalism is a machine that eats itself. As this posts shows, the standard of living is now declining for the average worker as the “infinite growth” needed to sustain this economic system is showing its impossibility more and more by the day. Therefore more and more people will get more and more disillusioned. The goal is to find those people and organize them and offer them solutions in the form of unionizing and building stronger communities of workers. That work is happening, it’s just always going to be the messiest here in America because we embody the contradictions of capitalism the most.
Temporarily impoverished millionaires will be the death of us all. “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
Most people can't take the time to fight back because their families will starve and they'll lose their housing over missing a single paycheck. This was by design. We've been distracted, divided, and robbed blind. They have us in a chokehold.
My father didn't have a secondary education just finished high-school and supported the family of 3 kids and 2 parents in a decent sized house for years, on his single income. That isn't even possible now unless there's some extenuating circumstances, like inheritance or whatever.
I'm in my 30's so don't know if that's "old". But I think EVERYONE who's not wealthy is f-ed. The 0.1-percenters keep us all at each other's throats so we don't organize en masse to try taking control of the system. Young people have a lot more competition to deal with than our grandparents did when they were starting out, it seems. That's partly a consequence, I think, of sending everyone to university. Now we have all these college grads with "good degrees" but few decent-paying jobs. And because college degrees are now as common as toilet paper, companies can make ridiculous demands of job applicants and employees. We all walked right into this. But older people today who were never part of the upper middle classes have a high chance of having slid down into poverty AND they suffer age discrimination so that no one wants to hire them after around 35 years old. Younger if they're in the tech industry. There are PLENTY of older people who've been wage slaves their entire lives. It doesn't benefit anyone excluding them from our fight. We should stop singling out groups among the struggling-poor. If we're all in this together, we have a much stronger voice and can impact the industries and policies keeping the wage-slave culture alive.
I fear for my son. The world just seems meaner now.
I agree. And I think people are meaner because things are so much harder now. People are desperate.
There were only 4 billion people in the world in 1975 and now it's double that. At the same time the population was doubling, automation eliminated jobs and globalization started moving them to the cheapest bidder.
I’ve really started noticing it too, there are literally people everywhere. All the swimming holes and places I’ve loved for so many years are just trashed and overrun or even completely closed off due to abuse. I’m so sad about it. It’s always been ‘ we need more housing , we need more housing’ and now once pristine areas are covered in cement. Didn’t anyone ever think ‘ we need less people’? I know I did/ do. it makes me really sad
Welcome to late stage Capitalism. Rather unfortunate we find ourselves in this situation, friends. The real question is what are we prepared to do about it? Can the workers achieve enough unity and collaboration to make demands and meaningful changes to the system? Or are we stuck in wage slavery forever?
As a young person, I've given up on society. I'm just waiting on all the boomers to die to see what comes after them. Probably more shit.
Until people realize that corporations control both parties and a majority of policy created in this country does not favor the people then it will only continue to get worse. There are a lot of things wrong here and a lot of work to be done to tackle each issue but if the collective would focus on making lobby illegal and removing money from politics that would be a tremendous first start.
I used to make bank and be able to save a lot of money. Now I'm barely scraping by. I actually have a really good resume and a good job in the STEM field. I have the same sort of jobs with the same sort of pay I made a decade ago. That's the problem. Cost of living has sky rocketed and yet salaries have stagnated for years.
I wish more younger folks ran for office at all levels of government to make changes, and that we took those elections seriously. Of course, I would hate being a politician, so I won't even take my own advice here or blame anyone else for feeling the same way.
Exactly why I won't have kids. I'm assuming most everyone else also deciding not to procreate has the same line of thought.
I am a GenX-er and I’m here to tell you that — to my mind — each generation has it worse and worse. Compare Boomers to Millennials and it’s basically like living in 2 different countries. My verdict is out on Gen Z, but I don’t think they’re going to buck the trend. Y’all are dealing with serious shit we never had on our shoulders. The fact that you guys are activists and unionizing — I think you’re amazing for what some of you are doing. GenX should have fought back more but we were too busy thrift shopping for flannel shirts.
I think it’s beyond peaceful protest time. These fuckers have been hoarding wealth and turning idiots into fascists for 40 years and we’re all like “huh turns out all these people legislating disparu aren’t in good faith” all the time but nothing ever happens. Lobbyism is a cancer, and the politicians who are in bed with donor money should be drug out by their fat feet
I cant wait for the day, VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN!!!!!
Haha, yeah, my retirement plan is "I hope I die before I'm a burden on my loved ones."
It has been a downward trend for anyone younger than Boomers. Just the more recent generations have been fucked over worse.
You're fucked if you think a college degree means fuck all. Quite honestly if you graduated around 2006 (like me) and bought into the whole "YOU HAVE TO GO TO COLLEGE" propaganda (also like me), you'll likely have wasted a shit ton of time and money. As someone who has spent the last decade trying to undo 7 years of trying to go to school, my advice to you: learn a trade. The college bubble created a race to the top only those who were already better off would win. What is left is a massive chunk of "losers" with worthless college degrees and a completely oversaturated white collar work force. You're a dime a dozen now. At best. Conversely, the college bubble siphoned otherwise blue collar workers - like me. I was made to work with my hands, but I was lead to believe I shouldn't. There is a wealth of blue collar opportunity right now. The likes we haven't seen in decades. Don't miss out on it.
You are right, and it's not just you. I'm 54, and I live in Australia, so this data is for the Australian market, but I believe it is similar (or worse) in the US. In 1965 (when my parents were of the right age to buy property), the average annual wage was $3,120, and the average house in Sydney cost $4,500. Less than 1.5 times the annual wage. In 2000, when I was looking at buying a house, the average annual wage was $34,745, and the average house in Sydney cost $312,000. Very close to 9 times the annual wage. Now, the average wage is $90,800, and the average house price in Sydney is $1,211,488. More than 13 times the average wage. The boomers had it easy. Everyone else gets to suck it. BTW, the problem is property owners and developers lobbying for property to be treated as an investment vehicle. This cycle can be broken. Japan had this problem, and fixed it by enacting policies that meant that property values gradually depreciated. Terrible for investors, but housing is now affordable in Japan.
Everyone who is not currently retired with a good pension or wealthy is fucked. It’s only a matter of time before the bottom falls out.
Yeah and in the UK a lot of the older generation voted for brexit to go back to those halcyon days they remembered as being so amazing before we joined the EU.... Leaving the rest of us well and truly fucked for decades
It's not just young people who are fucked. Anyone who doesn't already have at least a million is good and screwed. I'm probably going to die on the job and I'm over 50. We need to understand that the war was never white vs black or xtian vs islam or straight vs queer. It's always been rich vs everyone else. It's past time that we figure this out collectively and start fighting back. We outnumber them by a very wide margin and they don't even know how to work the coffee maker.
Back then in 1960's and 1970's, my grandma and her husband could afford a house, a car, and raise five children- one of which was mentally handicapped... all on his single income as a produce manager while she was a SAH mom. Now in her 80's, my grandma sees the plight I am going through as a full-time worker barely making ends meet and she's struggling to come up with $400 for new glasses. She's been voting Republican the vast majority of her years...and still is. She's not a Boomer- but a Silent Generation. It's not just the Boomers who did this to us- it's the Silent Generation too. They're still out there voting, and many of them still vote for policy makers that would "Make America Great Again" - you know, the 1950's and prior America that really only benefited cis white men. When Trump was elected, the Silent Generation would have been 71 years old or older. With many people living longer, they are still making up a significant portion of the voters.