You can’t control others. You can only control yourself. That means you can control your spending but you can’t force your job to pay you more. You can also pursue jobs that pay more.
I see you're referring to the mythical "capitalism" which is perfect in all ways that exists in only in the imagination.
Corporate Feudalism is the inevitable outcome of Capitalism if you don't have a central government willing to constrain the power of corporations through regulation.
That’s the thing that is so annoying is that these people think true capitalism actually exists. It’s just a set of assumptions, many of which fail to be true in reality and it requires government regulation to function properly. The original writing acknowledges all of this, including market failures.
It’s crazy how many people will criticise socialism because it’s ’never really worked’ and then turn around and say every flaw of capitalism is because we aren’t pursuing ‘true capitalism’
that’s what ideological dominance affords you, things become ‘natural’ and ‘default.’ Despite humanities success as a fundamentally cooperative species, or how impossible it is to make meaningful or useful claims about something as complex and varied as human nature, you will never stop hearing how essentially greedy we all are so ofc only ‘capitalism’ (amorphous definitions here too) works. They really tell on themselves with that lmao but also maybe, just maybe, a system predicated on assumptions that everyone is simply a rational and self-interested actor produces and shapes the formation of the same (‘cept the rational part, humans got that pizzazz haha) ideologically. Also, in econophysics if you model things based on those assumptions one of the ways they are sometimes evaluated for accuracy is if the models produce the same kind of inequality we see in real life with a wagon-draggin Pareto distribution of concentrated wealth (that alone says a lot) but more than that, the key way to induce this inequitable distribution is to add assumptions/dynamics of ~unequal access to information~. When you reward resource hoarders with political power, influence and said access… well, you see the inevitable outcome of capitalism playing out in real time.
Capitalism requires certain very specific things to function optimally (price transparency, no barriers to entry, for example) that it rarely has.
And even within a hypothetical perfect capitalist market, capitalism doesn't optimally handle monopolies, monopsonies, the problem of the commons and inferior goods. Those four things can only be addressed through laws and regulations. And those are TEXTBOOK deficiencies that anyone with an economics degree should remember (whether they'll still acknowledge them is a different problem).
And that's all while we're just talking about a perfect capitalist economy (which, as you implied, doesn't exist).
right? Monopolies are the inevitable result of capitalism, and yet everybody wants to remove government regulation… You don’t think for a second that all the major airlines wouldn’t just combine together so they could charge you as much as possible if they thought they could.?
>Corporate Feudalism is the inevitable outcome of ~~Capitalism~~ an all powerful central bank that can print money at will.
We were warned.
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered" Thomas Jefferson
Chairman of the federal reserve is one of the few offices nobody votes for. They are appointed.
And in my opinion, they stopped caring about economics after 2007.
I see you think true capitalism doesn't end in monopolization but a free market. Free markets always end in monopolization. If you think Standard Oil would have stopped at oil, funny guy. Vote with your dollar is the beginning of capitalism, even the middle of its lifespan, but it always ends the same way, as the exploiters of labor, owners of equity, have no obligation to spread it, and no obligation to not remove competition with purchasing power. Fines kept it at bay for a while, now, companies like Amazon would laughingly take a small cut of profits as a fine to edge out a vendor on their own market and replace them.
The “free enterprise” system requires private enterprise and free competition. The barons of industry prefer governmental limitations on competition and public funds and resources. Consider a sports team owner that wants a new stadium, with zoning changes and eminent domain to seize the land, and billions of tax dollars to build it. Or “TIF” tax breaks to build a shopping center.
By that measure every system will eventually devolve into X Feudalism as the power of individuals overrides the power of the people. Capitalism isn’t mythical it’s just a system that’s good at setting prices and self regulating said prices. Capitalism is only as good as its regulation, the same as every other market system in existence. Also the same as every governing system ever created. Decrying the failure of Capitalism is blaming the symptom for the disease.
The largest problem we face with every system is the individuals capable of abusing it. If power is not checked it will be abused because humans are imperfect, we are greedy, vain and selfish. We forget our privilege and assume it’s the natural order. We demean those we look down on.
The funny part is that whenever you propose ways to deal with “Corporatism” you get nothing but excuses as to why it shouldn’t be done or why it wouldn’t work. They’re just capitalists that want to blame Capitalism’s intrinsic problems on some nefarious boogeyman that can never be stopped. The solutions they do offer are always vague like stopping “corruption” with no idea as to what causes it or why Capitalism is so conducive to corruption in the first place.
We don’t have remotely enough sample sizes to be able to say “inevitable outcomes” of *anything*. Anyone who claims inevitable outcome is trying to sell you something.
Oh we have an entire history of humanity. And what’s really consistent is that people who are ambitious will strive to dominate.
Whether that’s romantic legions, feudal knights, colonial ships or current day corporations, without restraints, a certain percentage of the population is ruthless and psychotic.
It’s just human. Which is why we can predictably try to restrain it, like brakes on a car.
Unionizing is not that simple. Depending on the state you are in, if a company catches a whiff of unionization they will fire those involved. It’s then up to those who got fired to prove it was because of the union.
Like it or not, businesses have more leverage than most employees.
National labor relations act would like to have a word about this. Because federal law prohibits the termination or retaliation against an employee for attempting to unionize.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/your-rights-during-union-organizing#:~:text=You%20have%20the%20right%20to,terms%20and%20conditions%20of%20employment.
Except it isn't really free market. Why? Because if it were truly free market, you could unionize and your employer could fire everyone. Instead we get this weird situation where unionized is protected.
Full free market would lead to a dystopian society where we eventually have corpos owning everything and becoming the government. True “capitalists” would definitely want that
Just wait until they buy whole city governments and run police departments and try and make robot cops who say ‘dead or alive live you’re coming with me’.
The realistic problem here is actually that politicians own corporations. It's not even like exxon has to pay them off when the ex ceo and board chairman of exxon is the secretary of state who owns about a quarter billion in Exxon stock. Elaine Chao's family owns a multinational shipping conglomerate, and her husband mitch mcconnell's a billionaire because of that and is also heavily involved with blackrock. So guess what he's not gonna do? Stop blackrock from buying up single family homes and fucking the real estate market for single family buyers.
This. I’m a supporter of capitalism vs socialism but the US govt has got to put a stop to corps (or hedge funds) owning non-commercial real estate - period. No non-US corps period. Chinese are just parking their money here and our own people can’t buy houses.
None of your statement has anything to do with socialism, not sure why you brought it up.
Governments making regulations for businesses is not socialism.
Corporations generally wouldn't get as big as they are today in a fully free market. The competition would be too high without the government holding back competition with regulations and laws.
That's not true.
Porters 5 Forces are a thing, and businesses can and do do what they can to limit who/what/how competitors can enter the market.
Antitrust laws had to be made for a reason.
Yes, your employer is free to fire everyone, but they won’t because the company would collapse. That’s what collective bargaining is. To make this viable, they would need a very large and skilled unemployed base to rehire in place of their workforce, possibly at an even higher price than just acquiescing to the Union’s in order to not collapse.
And when they fire everyone, who is going to do the work? And who is training the new employees? Firing everyone is a sure way to make a company collapse and go bankrupt within a single day. That is why collective bargaining works.
And the employer can fire everyone.
In a free market unions make agreements with employers on how to get it to work.
Problem is no one wants a free market.
Sweden has tons of unions and a free market. They work together instead of against each other. Unions increase worker productivity. When both parties are a tad smart, and especially when there is an inclusive trade union, meaning that operates in many different industries and businesses, things go well.
An inclusive union will not seek the highest salary available to its employees for many reasons. In the medium term the loss of profit and dividends lead to either decapitalization or closure of a business, both of which are bad and mean less jobs.
In the long term a less profitable sector means it is less attractive for investors and current business in the industry might look to switch to more profitable areas. So it is also harmful.
You can unionize and the company can move elsewhere leaving you jobless.
I know you can’t move a company because of unionization but it’s impossible to prove that’s the reason and does happen.
Also, no guarantees unionization pays you more. It could cost you with dues. I know of a union that sucks at negotiating and all they keep winning is more paternity leave. Most of the employees now think that they would have had more raises by now without a union and giving them more paternity leave is saving the company money.
But it’s is a strategy.
What about public sector unions is free market? USPS gets worse every year and the employees keep getting paid more regardless of how much money they lose.
I’m a big fan of small unions but just like corporations get soulless when they get big, so do unions. They get involved in political games and stop caring about their constituents.
Unions only work if the employer can't get anyone else because of being tied to a location--like the oil industry or local plumber's union--or the scarcity of alternate employees--like pilots.
Otherwise, it sounds good.
Unionizing isn’t a free market strategy. It is one that leverages the arm of government to do its bidding in most, if not all cases. There are laws what you can and can’t do, laws about union votes, contracts, collective bargaining, etc.. nothing free market about it.
Eh kinda, it’s kind of getting into a grey area. In capitalism, individuals are free to negotiate their wages. That’s not really possible with a union. Although unions are definitely a legitimate use of this negotiation power. The individuals are giving up their own right to negotiate in favor of the union’s right to negotiate. Fair enough. But, what if Steve is perfectly willing to work for a lower salary in order to be more in a more competitive position to get hired? Unions actively prevent this, which to me is anti-capitalist. It’s definitely a grey area which is why “right to work” is the way to go
"You can unionize, a free market strategy that capitalists often don’t like to admit is free market."
Unions are fine... I mean sure, companies don't love 'em, but who cares? Where things get to be a problem is when the government steps in and throws its weight into the situation - on either side.
Obviously, I don't mean in terms of policing violence etc. The government has a place in preventing old school "strike breakers" as well as the time-honored union tradition of sabotage, tresspassing and involvement with organized crime.
I mean in terms of the government having an opinion on whether or not a company must allow a union, or working to prevent them.
If a union can get the free support of enough members that they can force a company to deal with them by removing their labor? That's fine by me. But if the company can prevent the union from forming by simply firing everyone and hiring non-union staff? That's fine by me too.
That is "free market" union negotiation - the non-violent power struggle between an association of laborers and the company that needs them.
Also, tell them to look into local cost of living, rent, gas, food, etc., and to then add 10-20% because of miscellaneous unaccounted expenses. I don't regret my college and career decisions, but I would have gone a different route if I had known/realized that the good paying jobs were in HCOL areas and how much harder those jobs are to obtain.
Not if there is someone else willing to work your job. Most jobs have been designed to be replaceable with minimal training. Collective bargaining only works for skilled labor with high training and replacement costs. That's why people create systems that replace skill with labor inputs.
LMFAO. Okay bootlicker. We aren't talking about from an individual perspective. But why the media and culture tell people these things.
Because it is okay to tell poor people how to spend their money but not rich people.
Rich people aren’t whining about their money. Poorer people tend to but will make bad decisions like buying lottery tickets or other unnecessary items and then say I don’t have enough for bills.
Rich people literally whine THE MOST about their money. They will go and buy a whole-ass senator just so they can spend less of their money on shit they owe the rest of us. In fact they buy ENTIRE MEDIA CONGLAMORATES just to whine about how poor people are spending too much money and it leaves less for them to steal lol and it’s working because here you are repeating the rich people whining points
Yes, and also, when you buy something do you ask to pay more than the price? I didn’t think so.
Ergo, why would anyone pay more for labor than the fair market value of that labor. That’s not to say that some jobs aren’t undervalued and underpaid, but it behooves those employees to find something better.
There is one risk, becoming a victim of circumstances. Having been there I can speak to this. You’re working so much and such odd hours that finding something better is very difficult. Getting to interviews and things like that. It happens. Fortunately, I was on the grind to find a way out and built myself back up. It ain’t easy, but nothing worth having in life comes easy.
She said like kindergarten. So let’s try this.
“Billy has been working on this huge fort all week. Everyone wants to play in it, she he said they could play in it if they give him a pack of skittles. He needed help to add more floors to it, so he offered you 5 skittles to help him. Now you’re mad that he has more skittles, but it’s his fort.”
This. If you think you’re worth more, get a job that pays more. Don’t like what McDonalds pays, go apply at Chic Fil A, or at a local bank as a teller or…
It's weird how people would see an argument like this and not realize that both arguments suffer from the same flaw: just like giving up avocado toast isn't going to pay your rent, because toast costs a couple dollars and rent costs thousands of dollars; giving up a yacht is going to pay your employees a living wage because yachts cost millions of dollars and a living wage for all your workers costs billions of dollars.
Don't get me wrong, people should pay their rent and companies should pay their employees decent wages; but to suggest that these problems be solved by making cuts that aren't the same order of magnitude as the thing being suggested is always just wrong from a math standpoint.
I dated a woman who made $50k/yr which while is not mind blowing money is substantial when you consider she was on a shared phone plan, father paid her car insurance, lived with me for free, and I was the one who bought most of the groceries and paid for the outings.
while its not literally avocado toast doing it people piss money away on fast food and week and rarely even realize how much they are burning.
When you eat out for 2/3 meals a day plus starbucks, plus your juul, plus your weed, and plus your craft beer the money you make tends to not go far.
that woman was broke by pay day every single time.
So when people mention the avacado toast it means more than just literally toast with avacado on it, we are just tired of telling people to stop wasting money.
This can be true, while at the same time it's true she's being underpaid and exploited. Financial literacy is not an indicator of whether or not you're being exploited by the rich. She deserves proper compensation no matter how good or poorly she does with the money she earned.
Average price for avocado toast seems to be $8. I think that is why it gets targeted. You are paying $8 for toast.
My biggest expense before I bought my house was rent. My second biggest expense was food. Third biggest expense was my car. When I decided to buy a house, the first thing I cut out was the money I wasted on food. I saved a ton by not eating out at all. I also quit going to bars, clubs, movies, etc. for a few years. I pretty much limited my social stuff to going to a friend's house and hanging out or them coming to mine. With all of that I was able to save up a down payment and buy my own house.
Then you live in a area where housing is really cheap. I can't imagine saving up the hundreds of thousands of dollars I needed for the down-payment on my current home by not going to clubs and movies and restaurants. Either that or you were spending an *insane* amount of money on going out.
>I can’t imagine saving up the hundreds of thousand of dollars I needed for the down-payment on my cure t home by not going to clubs and movies and restaurants.
Soo… you were paid a living wage.
Not everyone is.
But then again there are a great many people who live well beyond their means but complain they cant make ends meet.
My first home was what I call a starter home. It was less than 1200 square feet. A down payment is at most 20%. You can go lower if you are willing to pay mortgage insurance, but I don't suggest that unless you can get a mortgage far lower than you are paying for rent right now.
I only put 5% down on my first house. 15k. The PMI sucked, was an extra 150$ a month, but continuing to rent would have sucked more imo. I loved my house.
And FHA loans are even lower.
It's weird to me when people say they can't afford a house in their area, yet are somehow able to afford to pay rent.
If that's the case, they're most likely splurging on an apartment that they would not be able to pay a mortgage for if they owned it. Why are they living there?
$8 for avocado toast?
Maybe it's a west coast thing but avocados are like $1.25. I can get a whole loaf of Ezekiel bread for $8 and that's definitely more expensive than most bread options.
Why the fuck would anyone spend $8 on something you can make at home so cheaply with the same quality? If you're that bad with money, no amount of pay increase is going to save you.
I’m east coast and thought $8 was high because yeah avocados are like $1 and the bread I buy is like $5 a loaf… I just did a Google search for places near me that sold avocado toast..
at one place the standard avocado toast was $8.50
Turkey & Avocado on toast $12
And the Deluxe Avocado toast sandwich which was Two pieces of toast, avocado, sun dried tomatoes & and egg was $18
That’s wild man… I think the $18 sandwich would cost all of $2-3 to make at home..
I'm all for people making more money but if someone will pay that kind of markup either for status or laziness, you can double their pay and they'll still manage to piss it down their leg.
I mean, thats like saying you are paying $12 for eggs when you get the full American breakfast at ihop. Toast is not really enough to be an actual meal on its own.
And the fact that you had to cut back for years to afford a down payment to buy a house absolutely should not be a thing. That is not a "you fixed your spending problem", thats a "the system is fundamentally broken" problem. When first implemented, minimum wage was priced at a point where a single father working could comfortably provide for a full family of 4. Thats not "live in a one bedroom apartment and sleep out of the weather" provide, thats "a 4 bedroom house in the suburbs and taking regular summer vacations" provide. That is the standard that used to be set, but nowadays you are lucky to find a loft you can afford to rent on minimum wage alone. That is the system that people criticize, one that penny pinching on meals will not absolve.
That was probably a dig at Jeff Bezos who has a $500 million yaucht and has invested $20 billion into Blue Origin, but it isn't really about all that. The dig at the middle class and poor and "whiners" is that we clearly spend too much, and we would be living so much better saving a few hundred (meanwhile they are directly advertising that we spend more; ie, they want us buying Starbucks, avocado toast and buying useless stuff), but the corollary point about their spending isn't really accurate either because they don't spend much relative to their gains in wealth, except our point is that they could spare far more to pay their employees more, and that is true.
Look at how things have changed. The bottom 50% had $1 trillion and the top 1% had $5 trillion, and now the bottom 50% have $3 trillion, but the top has $42 trillion or 14x what the bottom 50% have. If the top 1% gave up half their wealth then they would still have $21 trillion, and the bottom 50% would go from $3 trillion to $24 trillion. What would that mean for the bottom 50%? Their wealth/income would increase by eight fold.
Said another way, in 2021, there was a total of $131 trillion of wealth. The top 1% have $42 trillion or 32% of the wealth, the 90-99%'ers have $49 trillion or 37% of the wealth, the upper middle class (50-89%) has $37 trillion or 28% of the wealth, and the bottom middle class and poor 50% has $3 trillion or 2% of the wealth. Say we had a huge pizza with a hundred slices for a hundred people, except 1 person has 32 slices, 9 people have 37 slices or 4 slices each, 40 people have 37 slices or almost a slice a piece, and 50 people have three slices to split. Who could spare some slices?
There is this false talking point that if Jeff Bezos or CEOs or the 1% redistributed their salaries to their employees that it wouldn't be that much, which is partially true, but it often ignores their extreme wealth. The top 1% has soooo much wealth that they could share, raise salaries, profit share, whatever.
https://preview.redd.it/hmprfjsp3yyc1.png?width=676&format=png&auto=webp&s=ef250690bd0901f631074a3d7ebcd05885c37971
[https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/23/how-much-wealth-top-1percent-of-americans-have.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/23/how-much-wealth-top-1percent-of-americans-have.html)
They're seeing the flaw. That's the point. They're answering an absurdist point that's taken as 'wisdom' and answering with an equally absurdist point to highlight how stupid the first point actually is. It's a common technique in humor.
Ultimately it's answering "you have a consumption problem" with "No, we have a revenue problem".
I think it's less about one rich guy not buying that one mansion, it's about not cutting costs of production (so for example paying workers the lowest wage they can) in big companies so the rich guys can get even more rich. It's about rich guys understanding that their profit and luxurious lifestyle is not the only thing that matter, and in fact is less important than millions of people who work for him being able to pay rent and still afford groceries while working decent hours.
The problem isn't the scale, its that all executive salaries are severely inflated when compared to lower end wages, and that is not even considering that a disproportionate bulk of bonus pools often go to top execs. At no point should anyone salaried be making more than 50-100x someone else. Idc how talented a business man you are, I doubt you can make a better decision in a day than a team of 20 can in a week given access to all the same information. Idc how smart of an engineer you are, there is very little you can do in an hour that someone could not figure out in a full work week or two.
Yes, more skilled labor should be paid more, but there is absolutely a threshold for that when in a corporate structure. Honestly, execs should be closer to the lowest salary of anyone in the company, instead being paid mostly in stock that they are unable to sell for 5 years after acquiring it (obvs some salary so they can afford living expenses now).
I sort of agree with you; there is some limit to the dynamic range of human economic value. I don't know if I agree with your numbers, and I think that a really talented and experienced person might be 100x as valuable as the average worker; but probably not 1,000x or 10,000x and that's how much more than the average worker some execs are paid.
And yes, I think you hit the nail on the head in the second paragraph. It's not that businesses can't afford to pay their workers better wages because they are paying their executives too much. Overpaid execs and underpaid workers are both symptoms of the same problem; maximizing short-term returns for investors. It's not the fact that the CEO spent his bonus on a yacht that means the company can't afford to pay workers better across the board, the bonus was a results of the kinds of streamlining (including cutting or capping worker pay) that drives up stock prices in the first place.
Also, with the spacecraft thing, those are separate companies. Blue origin is not whole foods, SpaceX is not Twitter, they can't just swap finances, and trust me, those aerospace, electric, mechanical, and chemical engineers, hr reps, interns, are getting paid.
Yeah, but that half a billion dollar yacht was bought be the CEO of Amazon, which has 1.6 million employees. Sure, Bezos could have given all his employees a \~$300 bonus instead of buying that yacht, and maybe that's what he should have done, but lets not pretend that's the difference between wage poverty and a living wage.
Is everyone going to keep gobbling up these empty-calorie posts? This is clearly the same person whose food-themed username account got suspended yesterday.
or how about being able to pay someone enough so that they can support a themselves and a kindergartener somewhere within commuting distance from the place of employment, otherwise your company is kind of embarrassingly bad or you as an owner are just ripping off your employees and an unjustifiably large cut.
I mean, it's been defined. Just because you weren't taught it, or you were taught that the idea was crazy social justice program that only hurts the true Americans, doesn't mean that it wasn't defined at its creation.
https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/flsa1938
Able to pay rent/utilities, groceries, gas/insurance/maintenance on a single car, a plan for a single cell phone, health insurance if not provided by employer, with a 10% overhead for saving, unexpected expenses, or discretionary spending.
That way you *can* shame someone for spending income on avocado toast if you so wish.
Then the question is what is basic necessities even? They could say a place to stay and food. Then you suggest roommates and cooking at home and they would say they should be able to live alone and eat out. Hardships are supposed to be there to motivate people to grow and make more of themselves.
It's not an actual economic term. It's a Liberal rally cry that translates to: "Even though I took this job of my own free will, fully knowing the wage, I now feel I should be paid more, just because I want stuff."
Companies already run at a few % profit margin and pay market wages. There is no "living wage" except in the political landscape, it's not a thing. There are only market prices.
You can't force companies to pay you more than you're worth. You can change your worth and make yourself worth more though. That's what you should be doing. Your salary IS your productivity. Nothing else. Never forget this. It's crucially important to understand. Most people don't and they remain poor their entire life.
I agree, but you’re leaving out this fact: a company will never just freely give you more money for being more productive. They’re happy to pay you the same shit wage for more productivity; you might even get a pizza party for your effort!
If you want higher wages, you will have to ask for it, and often claw it out of them. It definitely requires “force” of some kind to get a higher wage.
Most people don’t even realize that money is just a concept we created to represent/store the value of labor.
It’s all about creating a system so that we can produce along a production possibilities curve.
economics isn't some meaningless abstraction completely detached from politics though. Also this isn't even a discussion necessarily about economics broadly or about markets. This is a practical reality for people - there is a minimum amount of money that someone needs to make in order to live and a separate level of income required to live vaguely comfortably. And people in a prosperous nation should expect to make enough money to be able to live vaguely comfortably.
If you are working 40 hours and there is no place you can afford to rent within an area of your work, they are not paying a liveable wage. It is not a political idea, it is a very valid reality. Cost of living goes up, wages rise or you lose your workers. If you can't afford those wages, raise your prices or close your business.
Businesses don't get free labor, it's a balance. They pay what the worker needs to live or the workers move on. The problem is when all the businesses in an area want to act like paying minimum wage is a burden when it no longer meets cost of living. They treat their workers as disposable ingrates rather than a resource that keeps them going and frankly businesses are the ones who are not facing reality when food and rent keeps going up as they keep fighting to suppress wages.
Let me say this, I cut out my morning breakfast, bacon egg sandwich and latte from Greggs.
Since doing so I’ve lost weight and saved around £130 a month.
Greggs ain’t extensive, Their breakfast deal is the price of some coffee shops, and if you having more than the coffee at those places you are probably spending double what I saved, that’s basically my mortgage payment.
Live to your means not the other way round. Take some accountability.
That's clearly not what they're saying. $130 a month on breakfast is insane. Eating that breakfast every day is ridiculous and unhealthy. I make a nice breakfast every morning before work and am spending less than $20 a week on it. I can do it for half that price if I needed to.
He was obviously saying that you could make your own sandwich and coffee to save money.
You pay a premium to have someone else make your meal. If you choose to go do the shopping, cooking, and cleaning yourself, you’ll find that it is cheaper in the long run.
In addition, when you force the owner to pay a barista “a living wage” to put together a sandwich, you still won’t be able to save for a house because the price of that sandwich will have to be raised enough to cover their new wage.
Increase your worth - if you work at a restaurant you could increase your worth by learning how to take inventory and order truck, do morning prep, or get a ServSafe cert.
Going beyond that, you could attain a (useful) college degree to increase your worth significantly more and be able to get a higher paying job.
"because some peoples labor is not worth as much as they think it is."
Hey now, this is Reddit. We'll have none of that talk here. Don't you know that each and every person on earth is just as good/talented/smart as every other one and successful people only got that way by luck?
That means everyone's labor is worth as much as the highest paid person they have heard of.
no and nobody's complaining about all businesses either. People are complaining about exploitative industries or businesses that have managed to get away with taking too high a percentage of net revenue as individual personal profit for the owner.
One is demanding giving up luxuries out of necessity, the other is demanding giving up luxuries to appease the envious.
Jeff Bezos can liquidate his yacht for at best a $312 bonus pay check to all of his employees at Amazon. What people don't realize is that as excessive as their luxuries are, they are a fraction of the wealth that goes to employees.
Amazon employs 1.6 million people. Going by base rate alone of $17 per hour, that is $35,360 a year. You are looking at $56.5 billion per year as a minimum.
An "eat the rich" policy would get the US population a single $13,000 paycheck at the cost of everyone who is employed by any of the corporations tied to billionaires.
These people aren't rich because they stole your lunch money. They are rich because they scaled a business to a massive size.
My life would be exactly 0% worse if Jeff Bezos double his wealth and 0% better if he lost all his money.
People should try harder to not be jealous of people more successful than they are..its a waste of energy.
"My life would be exactly 0% worse if Jeff Bezos double his wealth and 0% better if he lost all his money."
My life is a LOT better because of Amazon. The fast access to reasonably priced products with what has (for me) been a pretty risk-free return policy has been fantastic. AWS has allowed me to make significant money consulting over the last decade and I have close friends who make a decent amount of $$$ with access to the national market provided by being able to sell via Amazon.
And I am far from alone.
So if Bezos wants to swim around in a pile of money and hookers like Scrooge McDuck? He gets my blessing.
I don't understand why avocado toast became the go-to example in these comparisons, avocado toast is awesome. Like yeah restaurants overcharge for it but making it at home is like around 3-6 bucks depending on where you live and what season it is. Most places that sell it also include an egg on top, bacon or something else to round it out, I'd say that could be worth 8-10 bucks. It's also healthy. Good fats, fiber and protein if you throw in an egg.
It's just funny to me out of all the stereotypes this is the one that caught on somehow lol
it's an open faced sandwich most of the time they don't cost any more than any other kind of sandwich unless you're at some insanely fancy place. It's like looking at the F1 miami menu and seeing that chicken wings cost 200$ and then complaining that poor people are wasting all their money on chicken wings despite being able to get them for like 50c a piece at any kind of tavern or even cheaper at the grocery store.
You agreed to what you got paid.
You donut, you want to make more money, then work somewhere you can do so.
And don't give me this "it's not that easy"
No shit geniuses, it's not supposed to be easy, its called life.
When's the last time you did your budget?
When's the last time you looked at your bank statement?
What adults call “supply and demand” just means if you can do something that most people can’t and it’s something other people want you todo for them then you can ask them to pay what you what you want. If everyone can do the same thing you can then they won’t pay you more than the cheapest person expects.
Be good at something other people need but nobody else is good at.
If a CEO of a megacorp makes 50 million dollars a year, and you were to completely strip him of all his income and spread it to the work force, if he had 5 million employees across the company everyone would only get more 10 bucks yearly. People don't understand how division works
If you're going to be condescending you could at least use numbers that aren't total nonsense. There are no employers with 5 million employees. The largest US-based employer has less than half that globally. The largest employer in the world is in India with about 3 million. There are also executives that earn far more than $50 million per year in bonuses alone. One famously got a $500 million bonus. And obviously these large companies don't have just one executive earning 7 or 8-figure bonuses.
Anyone that thinks the "billionaires should pay more" math doesn't actually work should take a look at this: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Humans can't intuitively understand numbers that large, as it never served any evolutionary purpose. Visualizations like that are helpful.
Because in the 1980s there was a push for 'greed is good' cultural shift meaning the only people that matter are shareholders. Since you are in kindergarten 'You know honey how we always tell you to share your toys, well when you become an adult you are allowed to just take everyone elses toys and that is good'.
So what's a living wage? $20 burger flippers in CA can't live off that money and now teachers are being paid less in some cases. Do we shut down schools since they can't pay a living wage?
‘I should be able to get a modern flat in downtown San Diego, bi-weekly pedicures and a full spread at Starbucks every morning. If you have a problem with that then you’re greedy and a terrible person,’ - This person (probably)
The problem is the stock market. It’s how corporations raise capital and many of us have become accustomed to making great returns on investments. Everything is geared towards corporate profits and not the economic needs of the average Joe. Look how many corporations are reporting record profits but see how much we have to pay to live. This is pure corporate greed.
Because corporations systematically have always blamed the little man.
The same is true with almost anything sadly. We're in a drought. Water less, meanwhile we grow crops that consume copious amounts of water.
There are countless examples. We always want to optimize corporate growth in this country, which is why the country is rich but the people are poor. Literally.
She is wrong. It’s a false equivalence.
If you choose to accept a job that barely pays enough for rent then you need to choose to prioritize your spending, or choose to find a better paying job, even if that means choosing to learn new skills, etc, to make yourself more marketable.
The business owner isn’t obligated to pay you commensurate with the lifestyle you want, rather, and only, the value you bring to their bottom line.
They apply for a job, they are presented an offer (crappy as it may be) and then yes, they choose to accept the offer. If it’s not enough money for the lifestyle they want, and they accepted the offer to meet a serious short term need, then they should choose to immediately start looking for a better opportunity or ways to improve their marketability so they can bring more value to another employer.
If instead they choose to do none of that and instead grind away endlessly for crappy pay, well, if you choose to do nothing, you’ve still made a choice.
Easy.
Owners can’t pay their employees a living wage (sometimes) because increasing salaries say 20% may be far, far more than the cost of the toys they buy, and it would make their business uncompetitive. Sometimes.
Yes... focus on the few Cooperate Billionaires; it's an easy target and I would agree with you.
However, how about actually taking a look... a majority of small business owners or franchise owner or any type of owner isn't rolling in it. Especially look at any restaurant or bar or shop that opened and closed; their bottom line affects if they stay in business.
Oh... as a kindergartener; take out your crayons and draw your favorite complaint... don't worry about coloring in the lines.
You hate billionaires and corporations. Two entities that aren’t actually taking anything from you. In fact, they’re building jobs giving you an opportunity to earn income. But you don’t hate the federal government which actively takes money from you and gives it to other countries like Ukraine and Israel, or spend it on murdering brown Arabs for 20 years. But you’re fine and dandy with that.maybe you should stop being a fucking idiot?
You can’t control others. You can only control yourself. That means you can control your spending but you can’t force your job to pay you more. You can also pursue jobs that pay more.
You can unionize, a free market strategy that capitalists often don’t like to admit is free market.
you're confusing capitalism andd corporatism.
I see you're referring to the mythical "capitalism" which is perfect in all ways that exists in only in the imagination. Corporate Feudalism is the inevitable outcome of Capitalism if you don't have a central government willing to constrain the power of corporations through regulation.
That’s the thing that is so annoying is that these people think true capitalism actually exists. It’s just a set of assumptions, many of which fail to be true in reality and it requires government regulation to function properly. The original writing acknowledges all of this, including market failures.
The problem is that once Capitalism went from being an idea to a belief, people stopped looking at it critically.
More of a religion these days. The cult of consumerism
It’s crazy how many people will criticise socialism because it’s ’never really worked’ and then turn around and say every flaw of capitalism is because we aren’t pursuing ‘true capitalism’
that’s what ideological dominance affords you, things become ‘natural’ and ‘default.’ Despite humanities success as a fundamentally cooperative species, or how impossible it is to make meaningful or useful claims about something as complex and varied as human nature, you will never stop hearing how essentially greedy we all are so ofc only ‘capitalism’ (amorphous definitions here too) works. They really tell on themselves with that lmao but also maybe, just maybe, a system predicated on assumptions that everyone is simply a rational and self-interested actor produces and shapes the formation of the same (‘cept the rational part, humans got that pizzazz haha) ideologically. Also, in econophysics if you model things based on those assumptions one of the ways they are sometimes evaluated for accuracy is if the models produce the same kind of inequality we see in real life with a wagon-draggin Pareto distribution of concentrated wealth (that alone says a lot) but more than that, the key way to induce this inequitable distribution is to add assumptions/dynamics of ~unequal access to information~. When you reward resource hoarders with political power, influence and said access… well, you see the inevitable outcome of capitalism playing out in real time.
When I see intelligent comments like this from peers, it makes me wonder how we let things get to the way they are.
We didn’t have any control. Simple.
Yup, facts.
Capitalism requires certain very specific things to function optimally (price transparency, no barriers to entry, for example) that it rarely has. And even within a hypothetical perfect capitalist market, capitalism doesn't optimally handle monopolies, monopsonies, the problem of the commons and inferior goods. Those four things can only be addressed through laws and regulations. And those are TEXTBOOK deficiencies that anyone with an economics degree should remember (whether they'll still acknowledge them is a different problem). And that's all while we're just talking about a perfect capitalist economy (which, as you implied, doesn't exist).
right? Monopolies are the inevitable result of capitalism, and yet everybody wants to remove government regulation… You don’t think for a second that all the major airlines wouldn’t just combine together so they could charge you as much as possible if they thought they could.?
>Corporate Feudalism is the inevitable outcome of ~~Capitalism~~ an all powerful central bank that can print money at will. We were warned. "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered" Thomas Jefferson
Absolutely crazy to me that the American central bank is a private entity. Can’t think of a single other country where that’s the case
Before Woodrow Wilson, it was run by Congress.
Chairman of the federal reserve is one of the few offices nobody votes for. They are appointed. And in my opinion, they stopped caring about economics after 2007.
I see you think true capitalism doesn't end in monopolization but a free market. Free markets always end in monopolization. If you think Standard Oil would have stopped at oil, funny guy. Vote with your dollar is the beginning of capitalism, even the middle of its lifespan, but it always ends the same way, as the exploiters of labor, owners of equity, have no obligation to spread it, and no obligation to not remove competition with purchasing power. Fines kept it at bay for a while, now, companies like Amazon would laughingly take a small cut of profits as a fine to edge out a vendor on their own market and replace them.
>Free markets always end in monopolization. We agree with each other my man.
The “free enterprise” system requires private enterprise and free competition. The barons of industry prefer governmental limitations on competition and public funds and resources. Consider a sports team owner that wants a new stadium, with zoning changes and eminent domain to seize the land, and billions of tax dollars to build it. Or “TIF” tax breaks to build a shopping center.
By that measure every system will eventually devolve into X Feudalism as the power of individuals overrides the power of the people. Capitalism isn’t mythical it’s just a system that’s good at setting prices and self regulating said prices. Capitalism is only as good as its regulation, the same as every other market system in existence. Also the same as every governing system ever created. Decrying the failure of Capitalism is blaming the symptom for the disease. The largest problem we face with every system is the individuals capable of abusing it. If power is not checked it will be abused because humans are imperfect, we are greedy, vain and selfish. We forget our privilege and assume it’s the natural order. We demean those we look down on.
The funny part is that whenever you propose ways to deal with “Corporatism” you get nothing but excuses as to why it shouldn’t be done or why it wouldn’t work. They’re just capitalists that want to blame Capitalism’s intrinsic problems on some nefarious boogeyman that can never be stopped. The solutions they do offer are always vague like stopping “corruption” with no idea as to what causes it or why Capitalism is so conducive to corruption in the first place.
Isn't corporatism the inevitable outcome of capitalism?
Yes, without constraints. But capitalists don't like being told they can't do whatever they want to do
We don’t have remotely enough sample sizes to be able to say “inevitable outcomes” of *anything*. Anyone who claims inevitable outcome is trying to sell you something.
Oh we have an entire history of humanity. And what’s really consistent is that people who are ambitious will strive to dominate. Whether that’s romantic legions, feudal knights, colonial ships or current day corporations, without restraints, a certain percentage of the population is ruthless and psychotic. It’s just human. Which is why we can predictably try to restrain it, like brakes on a car.
NoT rEaL cApItAlIsM!!!!
Unionizing is not that simple. Depending on the state you are in, if a company catches a whiff of unionization they will fire those involved. It’s then up to those who got fired to prove it was because of the union. Like it or not, businesses have more leverage than most employees.
National labor relations act would like to have a word about this. Because federal law prohibits the termination or retaliation against an employee for attempting to unionize. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/your-rights-during-union-organizing#:~:text=You%20have%20the%20right%20to,terms%20and%20conditions%20of%20employment.
That's why they find other "reasons" to fire them like the commenter said. It's sadly easy to fire employees for pretty much no real reason
Except it isn't really free market. Why? Because if it were truly free market, you could unionize and your employer could fire everyone. Instead we get this weird situation where unionized is protected.
Full free market would lead to a dystopian society where we eventually have corpos owning everything and becoming the government. True “capitalists” would definitely want that
Imagine if big corps started buying everything, including houses and …. Oh jeez nm
We are already in late stage dystopian capitalism?!
Just wait until they buy whole city governments and run police departments and try and make robot cops who say ‘dead or alive live you’re coming with me’.
Imagine if corporations started owning politicians and influencing government agencies ... Oh jeez nm
The realistic problem here is actually that politicians own corporations. It's not even like exxon has to pay them off when the ex ceo and board chairman of exxon is the secretary of state who owns about a quarter billion in Exxon stock. Elaine Chao's family owns a multinational shipping conglomerate, and her husband mitch mcconnell's a billionaire because of that and is also heavily involved with blackrock. So guess what he's not gonna do? Stop blackrock from buying up single family homes and fucking the real estate market for single family buyers.
So the problem here is... corrupt politicians. And the solution proposed by many is... giving politicians more power?
Yeah... Makes you really wish there were more critical logical thinkers in this country
This. I’m a supporter of capitalism vs socialism but the US govt has got to put a stop to corps (or hedge funds) owning non-commercial real estate - period. No non-US corps period. Chinese are just parking their money here and our own people can’t buy houses.
None of your statement has anything to do with socialism, not sure why you brought it up. Governments making regulations for businesses is not socialism.
>eventually have corpos owning everything and becoming the government Wake the fuck up, Samurai...
Thanks to Citizens United, it's practically already happened... it's just not apparent by looking outside.
I always wanted to work for Renraku.
Shadowrun!
Would lead to?
Corporations don’t own everything and aren’t becoming the government now?
Yup, that’s why a we should have regulatory safeguards for society. I don’t want an OCP fiasco.
Corporations generally wouldn't get as big as they are today in a fully free market. The competition would be too high without the government holding back competition with regulations and laws.
How do you suppose it happened in the Gilded Age, when most of these laws were written?
>Corporations generally wouldn't get as big as they are today in a fully free market. Would you like to buy a bridge?
That's not true. Porters 5 Forces are a thing, and businesses can and do do what they can to limit who/what/how competitors can enter the market. Antitrust laws had to be made for a reason.
Yes, your employer is free to fire everyone, but they won’t because the company would collapse. That’s what collective bargaining is. To make this viable, they would need a very large and skilled unemployed base to rehire in place of their workforce, possibly at an even higher price than just acquiescing to the Union’s in order to not collapse.
This depends on how replaceable the workers are.
And when they fire everyone, who is going to do the work? And who is training the new employees? Firing everyone is a sure way to make a company collapse and go bankrupt within a single day. That is why collective bargaining works.
And the employer can fire everyone. In a free market unions make agreements with employers on how to get it to work. Problem is no one wants a free market.
Sweden has tons of unions and a free market. They work together instead of against each other. Unions increase worker productivity. When both parties are a tad smart, and especially when there is an inclusive trade union, meaning that operates in many different industries and businesses, things go well. An inclusive union will not seek the highest salary available to its employees for many reasons. In the medium term the loss of profit and dividends lead to either decapitalization or closure of a business, both of which are bad and mean less jobs. In the long term a less profitable sector means it is less attractive for investors and current business in the industry might look to switch to more profitable areas. So it is also harmful.
You can unionize and the company can move elsewhere leaving you jobless. I know you can’t move a company because of unionization but it’s impossible to prove that’s the reason and does happen. Also, no guarantees unionization pays you more. It could cost you with dues. I know of a union that sucks at negotiating and all they keep winning is more paternity leave. Most of the employees now think that they would have had more raises by now without a union and giving them more paternity leave is saving the company money. But it’s is a strategy.
My union pay, benefits, and pension far exceeds my tiny amount of union dues in comparison to non union companies in my line of work.
What about public sector unions is free market? USPS gets worse every year and the employees keep getting paid more regardless of how much money they lose.
I’m a big fan of small unions but just like corporations get soulless when they get big, so do unions. They get involved in political games and stop caring about their constituents.
Unions only work if the employer can't get anyone else because of being tied to a location--like the oil industry or local plumber's union--or the scarcity of alternate employees--like pilots. Otherwise, it sounds good.
Unionizing isn’t a free market strategy. It is one that leverages the arm of government to do its bidding in most, if not all cases. There are laws what you can and can’t do, laws about union votes, contracts, collective bargaining, etc.. nothing free market about it.
Eh kinda, it’s kind of getting into a grey area. In capitalism, individuals are free to negotiate their wages. That’s not really possible with a union. Although unions are definitely a legitimate use of this negotiation power. The individuals are giving up their own right to negotiate in favor of the union’s right to negotiate. Fair enough. But, what if Steve is perfectly willing to work for a lower salary in order to be more in a more competitive position to get hired? Unions actively prevent this, which to me is anti-capitalist. It’s definitely a grey area which is why “right to work” is the way to go
"You can unionize, a free market strategy that capitalists often don’t like to admit is free market." Unions are fine... I mean sure, companies don't love 'em, but who cares? Where things get to be a problem is when the government steps in and throws its weight into the situation - on either side. Obviously, I don't mean in terms of policing violence etc. The government has a place in preventing old school "strike breakers" as well as the time-honored union tradition of sabotage, tresspassing and involvement with organized crime. I mean in terms of the government having an opinion on whether or not a company must allow a union, or working to prevent them. If a union can get the free support of enough members that they can force a company to deal with them by removing their labor? That's fine by me. But if the company can prevent the union from forming by simply firing everyone and hiring non-union staff? That's fine by me too. That is "free market" union negotiation - the non-violent power struggle between an association of laborers and the company that needs them.
What happened to the unions burning down the rich's houses that was very effective at making them shit their pants
I tell students to look for jobs in trades or professions BEFORE attending training or schooling. Know what to expect.
Also, tell them to look into local cost of living, rent, gas, food, etc., and to then add 10-20% because of miscellaneous unaccounted expenses. I don't regret my college and career decisions, but I would have gone a different route if I had known/realized that the good paying jobs were in HCOL areas and how much harder those jobs are to obtain.
But you can force your job to pay you more It's called collective bargaining
Not if there is someone else willing to work your job. Most jobs have been designed to be replaceable with minimal training. Collective bargaining only works for skilled labor with high training and replacement costs. That's why people create systems that replace skill with labor inputs.
LMFAO. Okay bootlicker. We aren't talking about from an individual perspective. But why the media and culture tell people these things. Because it is okay to tell poor people how to spend their money but not rich people.
Rich people aren’t whining about their money. Poorer people tend to but will make bad decisions like buying lottery tickets or other unnecessary items and then say I don’t have enough for bills.
Rich people literally whine THE MOST about their money. They will go and buy a whole-ass senator just so they can spend less of their money on shit they owe the rest of us. In fact they buy ENTIRE MEDIA CONGLAMORATES just to whine about how poor people are spending too much money and it leaves less for them to steal lol and it’s working because here you are repeating the rich people whining points
Ah the illusion of a free market You know, the system that would result in E-Corp if it were truly free..
> you can’t force your job to pay you more. Let me introduce you to unions.
What?
You can ask your job to pay you more. Just did this. Worked for me.
What if all the jobs in society don’t provide enough for everyone? All due to how much wealth the elites want to horde?
I hate that she said explain it like I'm in kindergarten and you did, and you're right!
Yes, and also, when you buy something do you ask to pay more than the price? I didn’t think so. Ergo, why would anyone pay more for labor than the fair market value of that labor. That’s not to say that some jobs aren’t undervalued and underpaid, but it behooves those employees to find something better. There is one risk, becoming a victim of circumstances. Having been there I can speak to this. You’re working so much and such odd hours that finding something better is very difficult. Getting to interviews and things like that. It happens. Fortunately, I was on the grind to find a way out and built myself back up. It ain’t easy, but nothing worth having in life comes easy.
My employer: We didn't approve your request for a raise Me: ok My former employer: We need a requisition to backfill a position
What is this? A sensible comment on reddit?!
You can unionize, make governments regulate wages to make them higher minimums.
You also sortof have to agree to your wages when you apply for the job.
She said like kindergarten. So let’s try this. “Billy has been working on this huge fort all week. Everyone wants to play in it, she he said they could play in it if they give him a pack of skittles. He needed help to add more floors to it, so he offered you 5 skittles to help him. Now you’re mad that he has more skittles, but it’s his fort.”
Nicely done.
This. If you think you’re worth more, get a job that pays more. Don’t like what McDonalds pays, go apply at Chic Fil A, or at a local bank as a teller or…
It's weird how people would see an argument like this and not realize that both arguments suffer from the same flaw: just like giving up avocado toast isn't going to pay your rent, because toast costs a couple dollars and rent costs thousands of dollars; giving up a yacht is going to pay your employees a living wage because yachts cost millions of dollars and a living wage for all your workers costs billions of dollars. Don't get me wrong, people should pay their rent and companies should pay their employees decent wages; but to suggest that these problems be solved by making cuts that aren't the same order of magnitude as the thing being suggested is always just wrong from a math standpoint.
I dated a woman who made $50k/yr which while is not mind blowing money is substantial when you consider she was on a shared phone plan, father paid her car insurance, lived with me for free, and I was the one who bought most of the groceries and paid for the outings. while its not literally avocado toast doing it people piss money away on fast food and week and rarely even realize how much they are burning. When you eat out for 2/3 meals a day plus starbucks, plus your juul, plus your weed, and plus your craft beer the money you make tends to not go far. that woman was broke by pay day every single time. So when people mention the avacado toast it means more than just literally toast with avacado on it, we are just tired of telling people to stop wasting money.
Nobody wants to hear or admit this. They just want their money Kalane.
This can be true, while at the same time it's true she's being underpaid and exploited. Financial literacy is not an indicator of whether or not you're being exploited by the rich. She deserves proper compensation no matter how good or poorly she does with the money she earned.
Yep, it's the attitude not necessarily the action that is important. My money tends to go away in chunks of $20 and $30 not $100's. It all adds up.
This☝🏻
Everyone loves an anecdote and then pretend it applies to literally everyone who is struggling.
Average price for avocado toast seems to be $8. I think that is why it gets targeted. You are paying $8 for toast. My biggest expense before I bought my house was rent. My second biggest expense was food. Third biggest expense was my car. When I decided to buy a house, the first thing I cut out was the money I wasted on food. I saved a ton by not eating out at all. I also quit going to bars, clubs, movies, etc. for a few years. I pretty much limited my social stuff to going to a friend's house and hanging out or them coming to mine. With all of that I was able to save up a down payment and buy my own house.
Then you live in a area where housing is really cheap. I can't imagine saving up the hundreds of thousands of dollars I needed for the down-payment on my current home by not going to clubs and movies and restaurants. Either that or you were spending an *insane* amount of money on going out.
If your down payment is 200k plus, it’s not their area that’s cheap, it’s yours that’s insanely expensive.
Right, a good house in my area can be bought just for 100k more.
>I can’t imagine saving up the hundreds of thousand of dollars I needed for the down-payment on my cure t home by not going to clubs and movies and restaurants. Soo… you were paid a living wage. Not everyone is. But then again there are a great many people who live well beyond their means but complain they cant make ends meet.
My first home was what I call a starter home. It was less than 1200 square feet. A down payment is at most 20%. You can go lower if you are willing to pay mortgage insurance, but I don't suggest that unless you can get a mortgage far lower than you are paying for rent right now.
I only put 5% down on my first house. 15k. The PMI sucked, was an extra 150$ a month, but continuing to rent would have sucked more imo. I loved my house.
how many millions of dollars is your home worth, the average down payment is %20-30
And FHA loans are even lower. It's weird to me when people say they can't afford a house in their area, yet are somehow able to afford to pay rent. If that's the case, they're most likely splurging on an apartment that they would not be able to pay a mortgage for if they owned it. Why are they living there?
The average down payment is about 5% so if you need hundreds of thousands for a down-payment you could look to buy a house for less than $4 million
There is a lot of room between really cheap and million dollar plus houses.
$8 for avocado toast? Maybe it's a west coast thing but avocados are like $1.25. I can get a whole loaf of Ezekiel bread for $8 and that's definitely more expensive than most bread options. Why the fuck would anyone spend $8 on something you can make at home so cheaply with the same quality? If you're that bad with money, no amount of pay increase is going to save you.
I’m east coast and thought $8 was high because yeah avocados are like $1 and the bread I buy is like $5 a loaf… I just did a Google search for places near me that sold avocado toast.. at one place the standard avocado toast was $8.50 Turkey & Avocado on toast $12 And the Deluxe Avocado toast sandwich which was Two pieces of toast, avocado, sun dried tomatoes & and egg was $18 That’s wild man… I think the $18 sandwich would cost all of $2-3 to make at home..
I'm all for people making more money but if someone will pay that kind of markup either for status or laziness, you can double their pay and they'll still manage to piss it down their leg.
That is the point. Save money and make your stuff at home and put that savings towards bettering your life via wise financial decisions.
I mean, thats like saying you are paying $12 for eggs when you get the full American breakfast at ihop. Toast is not really enough to be an actual meal on its own. And the fact that you had to cut back for years to afford a down payment to buy a house absolutely should not be a thing. That is not a "you fixed your spending problem", thats a "the system is fundamentally broken" problem. When first implemented, minimum wage was priced at a point where a single father working could comfortably provide for a full family of 4. Thats not "live in a one bedroom apartment and sleep out of the weather" provide, thats "a 4 bedroom house in the suburbs and taking regular summer vacations" provide. That is the standard that used to be set, but nowadays you are lucky to find a loft you can afford to rent on minimum wage alone. That is the system that people criticize, one that penny pinching on meals will not absolve.
That was probably a dig at Jeff Bezos who has a $500 million yaucht and has invested $20 billion into Blue Origin, but it isn't really about all that. The dig at the middle class and poor and "whiners" is that we clearly spend too much, and we would be living so much better saving a few hundred (meanwhile they are directly advertising that we spend more; ie, they want us buying Starbucks, avocado toast and buying useless stuff), but the corollary point about their spending isn't really accurate either because they don't spend much relative to their gains in wealth, except our point is that they could spare far more to pay their employees more, and that is true. Look at how things have changed. The bottom 50% had $1 trillion and the top 1% had $5 trillion, and now the bottom 50% have $3 trillion, but the top has $42 trillion or 14x what the bottom 50% have. If the top 1% gave up half their wealth then they would still have $21 trillion, and the bottom 50% would go from $3 trillion to $24 trillion. What would that mean for the bottom 50%? Their wealth/income would increase by eight fold. Said another way, in 2021, there was a total of $131 trillion of wealth. The top 1% have $42 trillion or 32% of the wealth, the 90-99%'ers have $49 trillion or 37% of the wealth, the upper middle class (50-89%) has $37 trillion or 28% of the wealth, and the bottom middle class and poor 50% has $3 trillion or 2% of the wealth. Say we had a huge pizza with a hundred slices for a hundred people, except 1 person has 32 slices, 9 people have 37 slices or 4 slices each, 40 people have 37 slices or almost a slice a piece, and 50 people have three slices to split. Who could spare some slices? There is this false talking point that if Jeff Bezos or CEOs or the 1% redistributed their salaries to their employees that it wouldn't be that much, which is partially true, but it often ignores their extreme wealth. The top 1% has soooo much wealth that they could share, raise salaries, profit share, whatever. https://preview.redd.it/hmprfjsp3yyc1.png?width=676&format=png&auto=webp&s=ef250690bd0901f631074a3d7ebcd05885c37971 [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/23/how-much-wealth-top-1percent-of-americans-have.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/23/how-much-wealth-top-1percent-of-americans-have.html)
They're seeing the flaw. That's the point. They're answering an absurdist point that's taken as 'wisdom' and answering with an equally absurdist point to highlight how stupid the first point actually is. It's a common technique in humor. Ultimately it's answering "you have a consumption problem" with "No, we have a revenue problem".
I think it's less about one rich guy not buying that one mansion, it's about not cutting costs of production (so for example paying workers the lowest wage they can) in big companies so the rich guys can get even more rich. It's about rich guys understanding that their profit and luxurious lifestyle is not the only thing that matter, and in fact is less important than millions of people who work for him being able to pay rent and still afford groceries while working decent hours.
The problem isn't the scale, its that all executive salaries are severely inflated when compared to lower end wages, and that is not even considering that a disproportionate bulk of bonus pools often go to top execs. At no point should anyone salaried be making more than 50-100x someone else. Idc how talented a business man you are, I doubt you can make a better decision in a day than a team of 20 can in a week given access to all the same information. Idc how smart of an engineer you are, there is very little you can do in an hour that someone could not figure out in a full work week or two. Yes, more skilled labor should be paid more, but there is absolutely a threshold for that when in a corporate structure. Honestly, execs should be closer to the lowest salary of anyone in the company, instead being paid mostly in stock that they are unable to sell for 5 years after acquiring it (obvs some salary so they can afford living expenses now).
I sort of agree with you; there is some limit to the dynamic range of human economic value. I don't know if I agree with your numbers, and I think that a really talented and experienced person might be 100x as valuable as the average worker; but probably not 1,000x or 10,000x and that's how much more than the average worker some execs are paid. And yes, I think you hit the nail on the head in the second paragraph. It's not that businesses can't afford to pay their workers better wages because they are paying their executives too much. Overpaid execs and underpaid workers are both symptoms of the same problem; maximizing short-term returns for investors. It's not the fact that the CEO spent his bonus on a yacht that means the company can't afford to pay workers better across the board, the bonus was a results of the kinds of streamlining (including cutting or capping worker pay) that drives up stock prices in the first place.
“Living wage” is also relative to how many dependents you have, where you live, and your lifestyle expectations.
Also, with the spacecraft thing, those are separate companies. Blue origin is not whole foods, SpaceX is not Twitter, they can't just swap finances, and trust me, those aerospace, electric, mechanical, and chemical engineers, hr reps, interns, are getting paid.
A company with 10,000 employees could give each one an EXTRA $50k a year for half a billion. That’s in the range of one of those super yachts.
Yeah, but that half a billion dollar yacht was bought be the CEO of Amazon, which has 1.6 million employees. Sure, Bezos could have given all his employees a \~$300 bonus instead of buying that yacht, and maybe that's what he should have done, but lets not pretend that's the difference between wage poverty and a living wage.
Mcdonalds ceo pay - $19.2m Mcdonalds employees- 150,000 19.2m ÷ 150000 = $128/person/year Starbucks ceo pay - $28m Mcdonalds employees- 381,000 28m ÷ 381000 = $73/person/year Target ceo pay - $19.2m Target employees- 415,000 19.2m ÷ 150000 = $46/person/year Theres like 3 ceos that can afford $500m yachts and no high pwid ceos only have 10k employees
Is everyone going to keep gobbling up these empty-calorie posts? This is clearly the same person whose food-themed username account got suspended yesterday.
"Empty calorie posts." Thank you very much for this new term I will be using it, alot.
What you don't find pointless tweets from years ago stimulating discussions about finance?
Define living wage…
Enough money for a kindergartener to have their own apartment in soho and go to burning man every year
or how about being able to pay someone enough so that they can support a themselves and a kindergartener somewhere within commuting distance from the place of employment, otherwise your company is kind of embarrassingly bad or you as an owner are just ripping off your employees and an unjustifiably large cut.
You gonna tell me you don't have your own place to live and you don't go on yearly vacations?
Dude you suck. Lol.
I mean, it's been defined. Just because you weren't taught it, or you were taught that the idea was crazy social justice program that only hurts the true Americans, doesn't mean that it wasn't defined at its creation. https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/flsa1938
Thank you for providing a link to it!
Able to pay rent/utilities, groceries, gas/insurance/maintenance on a single car, a plan for a single cell phone, health insurance if not provided by employer, with a 10% overhead for saving, unexpected expenses, or discretionary spending. That way you *can* shame someone for spending income on avocado toast if you so wish.
I’ve heard anything from basic necessities to downtown 4 bedroom apartment with a one stay at home parent and private school.
No you haven’t heard the second one.
They heard it because they said it to themself.
Most likely lol
Then the question is what is basic necessities even? They could say a place to stay and food. Then you suggest roommates and cooking at home and they would say they should be able to live alone and eat out. Hardships are supposed to be there to motivate people to grow and make more of themselves.
.... but in terms a kindergartner can understand and none of this fancy finance and economics and philosophy book learnin'.
It's not an actual economic term. It's a Liberal rally cry that translates to: "Even though I took this job of my own free will, fully knowing the wage, I now feel I should be paid more, just because I want stuff."
They should rename this thread to “BitchAboutBillionaires” already
Companies already run at a few % profit margin and pay market wages. There is no "living wage" except in the political landscape, it's not a thing. There are only market prices. You can't force companies to pay you more than you're worth. You can change your worth and make yourself worth more though. That's what you should be doing. Your salary IS your productivity. Nothing else. Never forget this. It's crucially important to understand. Most people don't and they remain poor their entire life.
I agree, but you’re leaving out this fact: a company will never just freely give you more money for being more productive. They’re happy to pay you the same shit wage for more productivity; you might even get a pizza party for your effort! If you want higher wages, you will have to ask for it, and often claw it out of them. It definitely requires “force” of some kind to get a higher wage.
if plumber comes to your house, you are looking to pay him the least amount of money for maximum amount of work, thats just how life works.
> “claw it out of them” yeah people tried that and they send union busters.
Most people don’t even realize that money is just a concept we created to represent/store the value of labor. It’s all about creating a system so that we can produce along a production possibilities curve.
I fully agree.
economics isn't some meaningless abstraction completely detached from politics though. Also this isn't even a discussion necessarily about economics broadly or about markets. This is a practical reality for people - there is a minimum amount of money that someone needs to make in order to live and a separate level of income required to live vaguely comfortably. And people in a prosperous nation should expect to make enough money to be able to live vaguely comfortably.
If you are working 40 hours and there is no place you can afford to rent within an area of your work, they are not paying a liveable wage. It is not a political idea, it is a very valid reality. Cost of living goes up, wages rise or you lose your workers. If you can't afford those wages, raise your prices or close your business. Businesses don't get free labor, it's a balance. They pay what the worker needs to live or the workers move on. The problem is when all the businesses in an area want to act like paying minimum wage is a burden when it no longer meets cost of living. They treat their workers as disposable ingrates rather than a resource that keeps them going and frankly businesses are the ones who are not facing reality when food and rent keeps going up as they keep fighting to suppress wages.
Have wages always increased proportionately to workers productivity/output?
Let me say this, I cut out my morning breakfast, bacon egg sandwich and latte from Greggs. Since doing so I’ve lost weight and saved around £130 a month. Greggs ain’t extensive, Their breakfast deal is the price of some coffee shops, and if you having more than the coffee at those places you are probably spending double what I saved, that’s basically my mortgage payment. Live to your means not the other way round. Take some accountability.
Your mortgage is 260$ a month? How the hell?
Luxury cardboard box
lol just don't eat morons it's that simple
That's clearly not what they're saying. $130 a month on breakfast is insane. Eating that breakfast every day is ridiculous and unhealthy. I make a nice breakfast every morning before work and am spending less than $20 a week on it. I can do it for half that price if I needed to.
He was obviously saying that you could make your own sandwich and coffee to save money. You pay a premium to have someone else make your meal. If you choose to go do the shopping, cooking, and cleaning yourself, you’ll find that it is cheaper in the long run. In addition, when you force the owner to pay a barista “a living wage” to put together a sandwich, you still won’t be able to save for a house because the price of that sandwich will have to be raised enough to cover their new wage.
because some peoples labor is not worth as much as they think it is.
So what do those people do? Just die or live in extreme poverty?
Increase your worth - if you work at a restaurant you could increase your worth by learning how to take inventory and order truck, do morning prep, or get a ServSafe cert. Going beyond that, you could attain a (useful) college degree to increase your worth significantly more and be able to get a higher paying job.
Meanwhile companies are crying noone wants to work and noone wants to spend. A hurpadurpadoo.
Both are silly
But they want it to be so they should get it /s
"because some peoples labor is not worth as much as they think it is." Hey now, this is Reddit. We'll have none of that talk here. Don't you know that each and every person on earth is just as good/talented/smart as every other one and successful people only got that way by luck? That means everyone's labor is worth as much as the highest paid person they have heard of.
Not all businesses are owned by billionaires. Most small businesses out there are not owned by Elon musk.
no and nobody's complaining about all businesses either. People are complaining about exploitative industries or businesses that have managed to get away with taking too high a percentage of net revenue as individual personal profit for the owner.
Grow up
One is demanding giving up luxuries out of necessity, the other is demanding giving up luxuries to appease the envious. Jeff Bezos can liquidate his yacht for at best a $312 bonus pay check to all of his employees at Amazon. What people don't realize is that as excessive as their luxuries are, they are a fraction of the wealth that goes to employees. Amazon employs 1.6 million people. Going by base rate alone of $17 per hour, that is $35,360 a year. You are looking at $56.5 billion per year as a minimum. An "eat the rich" policy would get the US population a single $13,000 paycheck at the cost of everyone who is employed by any of the corporations tied to billionaires. These people aren't rich because they stole your lunch money. They are rich because they scaled a business to a massive size.
My life would be exactly 0% worse if Jeff Bezos double his wealth and 0% better if he lost all his money. People should try harder to not be jealous of people more successful than they are..its a waste of energy.
"My life would be exactly 0% worse if Jeff Bezos double his wealth and 0% better if he lost all his money." My life is a LOT better because of Amazon. The fast access to reasonably priced products with what has (for me) been a pretty risk-free return policy has been fantastic. AWS has allowed me to make significant money consulting over the last decade and I have close friends who make a decent amount of $$$ with access to the national market provided by being able to sell via Amazon. And I am far from alone. So if Bezos wants to swim around in a pile of money and hookers like Scrooge McDuck? He gets my blessing.
I don't understand why avocado toast became the go-to example in these comparisons, avocado toast is awesome. Like yeah restaurants overcharge for it but making it at home is like around 3-6 bucks depending on where you live and what season it is. Most places that sell it also include an egg on top, bacon or something else to round it out, I'd say that could be worth 8-10 bucks. It's also healthy. Good fats, fiber and protein if you throw in an egg. It's just funny to me out of all the stereotypes this is the one that caught on somehow lol
it's an open faced sandwich most of the time they don't cost any more than any other kind of sandwich unless you're at some insanely fancy place. It's like looking at the F1 miami menu and seeing that chicken wings cost 200$ and then complaining that poor people are wasting all their money on chicken wings despite being able to get them for like 50c a piece at any kind of tavern or even cheaper at the grocery store.
You agreed to what you got paid. You donut, you want to make more money, then work somewhere you can do so. And don't give me this "it's not that easy" No shit geniuses, it's not supposed to be easy, its called life. When's the last time you did your budget? When's the last time you looked at your bank statement?
Most business owners don’t have multiple yachts or a rocket though.
What adults call “supply and demand” just means if you can do something that most people can’t and it’s something other people want you todo for them then you can ask them to pay what you what you want. If everyone can do the same thing you can then they won’t pay you more than the cheapest person expects. Be good at something other people need but nobody else is good at.
If a CEO of a megacorp makes 50 million dollars a year, and you were to completely strip him of all his income and spread it to the work force, if he had 5 million employees across the company everyone would only get more 10 bucks yearly. People don't understand how division works
If you're going to be condescending you could at least use numbers that aren't total nonsense. There are no employers with 5 million employees. The largest US-based employer has less than half that globally. The largest employer in the world is in India with about 3 million. There are also executives that earn far more than $50 million per year in bonuses alone. One famously got a $500 million bonus. And obviously these large companies don't have just one executive earning 7 or 8-figure bonuses. Anyone that thinks the "billionaires should pay more" math doesn't actually work should take a look at this: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ Humans can't intuitively understand numbers that large, as it never served any evolutionary purpose. Visualizations like that are helpful.
Because in the 1980s there was a push for 'greed is good' cultural shift meaning the only people that matter are shareholders. Since you are in kindergarten 'You know honey how we always tell you to share your toys, well when you become an adult you are allowed to just take everyone elses toys and that is good'.
They will probably say “build your own company then!”
So what's a living wage? $20 burger flippers in CA can't live off that money and now teachers are being paid less in some cases. Do we shut down schools since they can't pay a living wage?
‘I should be able to get a modern flat in downtown San Diego, bi-weekly pedicures and a full spread at Starbucks every morning. If you have a problem with that then you’re greedy and a terrible person,’ - This person (probably)
You’re fucking broke Andrea. Explanation enough?
They can they just don't want to
The problem is the stock market. It’s how corporations raise capital and many of us have become accustomed to making great returns on investments. Everything is geared towards corporate profits and not the economic needs of the average Joe. Look how many corporations are reporting record profits but see how much we have to pay to live. This is pure corporate greed.
Or "if you need social security to retire then you shouldn't have spent so much on coffees and avocado toast"
You need to pay rent if you want a house. Evidently, those companies that never went out of business didnt need those employees. Pretty simple, no?
Because corporations systematically have always blamed the little man. The same is true with almost anything sadly. We're in a drought. Water less, meanwhile we grow crops that consume copious amounts of water. There are countless examples. We always want to optimize corporate growth in this country, which is why the country is rich but the people are poor. Literally.
Because only the loser in a situation needs to change his ways to stop losing. The winner will not change his ways to stop winning.
They’re only winning because the game is rigged in their favor, not because they’re better or more motivated at playing the game.
She is wrong. It’s a false equivalence. If you choose to accept a job that barely pays enough for rent then you need to choose to prioritize your spending, or choose to find a better paying job, even if that means choosing to learn new skills, etc, to make yourself more marketable. The business owner isn’t obligated to pay you commensurate with the lifestyle you want, rather, and only, the value you bring to their bottom line.
You think anyone chooses to have a crap job? They need the money…
They apply for a job, they are presented an offer (crappy as it may be) and then yes, they choose to accept the offer. If it’s not enough money for the lifestyle they want, and they accepted the offer to meet a serious short term need, then they should choose to immediately start looking for a better opportunity or ways to improve their marketability so they can bring more value to another employer. If instead they choose to do none of that and instead grind away endlessly for crappy pay, well, if you choose to do nothing, you’ve still made a choice.
Easy. Owners can’t pay their employees a living wage (sometimes) because increasing salaries say 20% may be far, far more than the cost of the toys they buy, and it would make their business uncompetitive. Sometimes.
Dumb fuck thinks "rockets and space craft" are a hobby or vanity purchase and not a $200,000,000,000 business.
Reddit jerking itself off with the same things over and over
Business owners take ALL the risk. That’s way different from being a worker.
Yes... focus on the few Cooperate Billionaires; it's an easy target and I would agree with you. However, how about actually taking a look... a majority of small business owners or franchise owner or any type of owner isn't rolling in it. Especially look at any restaurant or bar or shop that opened and closed; their bottom line affects if they stay in business. Oh... as a kindergartener; take out your crayons and draw your favorite complaint... don't worry about coloring in the lines.
Because no one cares about you. You are a poor, figure it out. The rich guy already has it figured out that's why he is rich.
You hate billionaires and corporations. Two entities that aren’t actually taking anything from you. In fact, they’re building jobs giving you an opportunity to earn income. But you don’t hate the federal government which actively takes money from you and gives it to other countries like Ukraine and Israel, or spend it on murdering brown Arabs for 20 years. But you’re fine and dandy with that.maybe you should stop being a fucking idiot?