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Millennials Set To Earn Less Than Generation X (bbc.com)
Reader AmiMoJo writes: Millennials are set to become the first generation to earn less than their predecessors, new research suggests. The Resolution Foundation found that under-35s earned 8,000 pound ($10,600) less in their twenties than Generation X workers. If wages for millennials follow the same path as Generation X, average career earnings will be about 825,000 pound ($1.1m). That would make them the first generation to earn less than their predecessors over the course of their working lives. Research found that some of the pay squeeze was due to under-35s entering the job market as the recession hit, but it also concluded that generational pay progress had ground to a halt even before the financial crisis struck in 2007/8.
No offense, friend, but that is the stupidest goddamn thing I've seen on the Internet in the past half-hour. Lazy thinking like that is how the government gets away with reporting low inflation numbers. The really big ticket items, housing, education, cars, health care have gone up by a factor of ten since the 1980s.
At the same time, the actual starting wages in a Ford plant today is less than it was in 1980.
But at least you'll be able to play Pokemon Go when you're in the bread lines.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Be warned, this is LONG, but it's not a rant, it's a summation. I've tried to edit it down, but I'm my own worst editor, I tend to write (and speak) long. So please bear with me.
OK, here's the deal: Some of you will think this belongs on infowars, or breitbart, or whatever the paranoid-consipiracist right-wingnut site du jour is. Others will think this belongs in motherjones, or huffpost, or whatever the paranoid-conspiracist left wingnut site du jour is. And I'm sure there's people who wrote "WHY IS THIS HERE?!@?!!", I just can't see them since I have no mod points today I'm reading at threshold=1.
Sad truth is both sides are playing us. This story is so whack it could pass for a legit Onion story!
The short of it: This guy Powell -- a Democrat, who served on the boards of 11 big companies wrote a memo in 1971 basically saying Academia was mounting an attack on Free Enterprise. This memo was sent to his buddy, the Director of the US Chamber of Commerce, Eugene Sydnor. Then Powell gets put in the Supreme Court by Nixon.
The result of the memo - which was kept secret from The People for a while - was the rise of Neo-Liberalism, that is, de-regulation, free-trade, and turning our economy from a production economy to a "services" economy - which really means "Financial" economy. Yeah. Banks rule us, and they crashed mightily in 2007-2008, and are still trying to put the pieces back together.
So this Powell memo becomes one of the factors that created the corporate culture we have today. Republicans and Conservatives get the blame, when the idea and first motions were from a Liberal Democrat.
Essentially, the result was the manipulation of media and Academia - through grants, through favors, through good old-fashioned cocksuckery - to shift the thinking of the People to thinking that Free Enterprise was a good thing, that Government shouldn't meddle with business (de-regulation). A number of think-tanks were established, that were pro-business and anti-socialist.
At the same time while all those pieces were put together, Nixon un-hitched the dollar from the gold standard, the 1973 and 1979 energy crisis happened, the economy tanked, and the rest of the 20th century was spent in a downard slope.
This neo-liberal foundation helped shape the Reagan economic policies, the whole trickle-down thing, the reduction of corporate taxes, etc.
By the 90's it looked like the slope had stopped, but in the early 00's it fell off a cliff and it's still doing so.
So yes, people - we got robbed by liberals, democrats, conservatives and republicans combined. But somehow the blame has been shifted to the conservatives, as if it is their fault for breaking the US.
Sources? Citations? Do your own reading. Start with the Powell Memo itself, then some Chomsky, and your own examination of the event past half century. Find out what think-tanks were created and what the spout. Find out what rules were taken out to let business "flourish." This is all out there, in the open, from sites and books that are both conservative and liberal. This is not a one-sided thing, folks.
It'll turn your stomach, it will, doing that kind of reading.
We got played, by both sides, but the foundation was a liberal foundation, upon which most of the economic policies of today were built on.
I don't believe any of these people. Not a one. Especially not Billary, and especially not Trump.
What do we do? Suffer quietly, England-style? Revolution? We're trapped, folks. And what happened here spread to other countries, so emigration to say, England, is not an option, things over there and in Europe are also whacked.
I think we're going to have to let this take its course. Let it burn, stand back and just let it burn. People already are hurting. People already have lost jobs and are having no luck in getting something like what they lost. And we're going to have to let it burn, and once it's all ashes, we'll build it again. But
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Wrong on so many levels.
Perhaps you should read and study the economic history of the US since the 1970s to gain a better perspective on the realities, as opposed to using your half baked assertions.
It has been shown over and over again that since the collapse of unions, the off shoring of manufacturing, globalization, increasing automation, etc that those who used to be in the American Middle Class have had a harder and harder time staying there since the 1970s.
This has nothing to do with organic artisan tacos or PBRs or any other "look at me being the snarky/witty guy!" bullshit you care to throw out there.
As I said, please try to read and understand what has happened in the last 30 years to the American Middle Class.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range