- cross-posted to:
- funny@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- funny@lemmy.ml
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and every time the rich get richer, funny that.
Crisis seems like the natural operating mode of c*pitalism
If it worked to funnel money to the wealthy the first time why not the second? Or third… and so on.
well new time iwth gen z, people dont want to work for the richest people for minium salary and opputinity, meanwhile boomer generation just work to work and earn some money, and get some children to fight for even more spare jobs… AI days coming sooner or later yep yep. still respect them for building our country. but honestly idk why your life should be the job your working on, when the job treats you like bad fish that when you do something to get any attention, your fired.
Pretty much, all that stocks getting sold must be bought by someone.
It starts to make sense when you realize that each of those events is basically a fire sale for billionaire investors.
Just look at income inequality before/after each of those events.
This is the truth.
The economic crisis’s have all been real, they all really have been huge events that have restructured life for everyone, it’s just that they’re not accidental, they’re not unforseen consequences of policy decisions nobody could have imagined… they’re engineered, or foreseen with great clarity.
And every time, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the so-called middle-class shrinks even more. Prices go up, we all have to work a few more hours in the week, we get less in return, our future dreams dwindle, and we plug into social media and AI slop and drugs and alcohol to placate us while we say “I just gotta save up enough so I can…”
And those savings NEVER increase. There is always some event, some family crisis, some medical problem or a car breaks down or your parent dies or the company you work at gets bought out and your 6 years of experience only makes you a liability for the new management team who wants to make a culture of “young, energetic pioneers.” (who they can pay less.)
The wealthy are at their happiest and strongest when they exist as they have for centuries, land-owners up high, living off the hard work and struggles of thousands of people beneath them, shaving a bit off everyone’s pay, offloading their problems to people who are already struggling. They want to run around in the manor and keep getting wasted and banging winches while we serfs toil in the fields we don’t own.
I wish upon a star that we could be a generation that takes power back for the average worker and uses our strength in numbers as leverage to have a better quality of life by making the wealthy pay their fair share.
But it’s looking like our historic legacy is going to be that of a fool generation that votes against their own interests and refuses to stand up for themselves.
A very embarrassing time to be an American.
we could be a generation that takes power back
The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.
Even if it all went down tomorrow, even if we all locked arms and marched on Washington and installed a group of compassionate leaders who want to make sure all people are treated fairly and that we all had basic rights… we would still have to share this land with the millions of people who hate us for wanting better outcomes. There would still be hostile, evil forces twisting the minds of the stupid into hating their neighbors.
It’s such a larger problem than the wealthy hoarding all the money. We’re facing the absolute limit of human capacity to mitigate outside influence, we have every possible entity, commercial or political, trying to make us feel a thing, make us think a thing, make us serve them. We are attacked all day from every side with malicious lies and narratives meant to make us be quiet and hide. Even if it doesn’t work on most of us, if it only works on a fraction of a fraction of the people, we still have millions who hate you and want you dead simply because you might think that your tax money should go into making all our lives better equally.
The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.
This is a message the media owners want us all to accept.
In my experience, very few people want to die or commit violence for some billionaire’s agenda.
Most people just want to live their lives and maybe live to see the assholes in charge have to pretend to care what the rest of us think.
Reactionaries are paper tigers. They’ll flee or switch sides when the going gets rough.
Seeing shit like this play out just makes it harder to keep going. At this point it’s a matter of when I do it, not if. What point is there if it’s only getting worse? I’ve seen my best years by now
Your choice, of course.
But there’s something to be said for living as well as well can in spite of the bullshit. Especially if there’s folks that rely on us.
The most punk thing for me to to as a person of queer is to keep living, but God is it hard to find the spirit.
I get that.
I take some comfort that - I know I won’t outlive every asshole, but I think I can outlive a bunch of them.
(This bunch in particular. A bunch of them are ancient.)
what did you expect? You were born in 1984 ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
edit: added link to book
Born then too, I always hoped it wasn’t prophetic.
Nah what we have is way worse
I don’t think boomers are very good at running things.
They grew up in a for the most part prosperous time, middle class had 2 cars in the driveway, jobs were easier to obtain, it’s no wonder alot of them think the way they do.
Think about it this way: They were literally the most spoiled highest quality-of-life group of humans to ever exist on Earth in any timeline.
- Ubiquitous access to healthcare and vaccinations for longer life.
- Access to pensions and retirement options no longer available where the employer did all the legwork to ensure they had a future post-work so they didn’t have to learn a thing about investing or retirement savings.
- Infrastructure that was borne from the Great Depression, so they had roads, bridges, dams all built up to last their lifetime with no care about maintenance, as they figure, “oh it was always there, it will always be there,” so no money was committed to maintenance we are now having to do, freeing that money up to live like kings and queens in the short-term.
- Easy to access jobs, homes, boats, cars with little to no education or financial acumen. Just that “walk in and hand them a resume” trope they love to perpetuate.
- The most modern travel technology and geopolitical climate to go on vacation pretty much anywhere on the planet, and access to time to have vacation.
- Relatively calm planetary climate so they didn’t have to worry about things like today’s weather weirding with tornadoes where they shouldn’t be, hurricanes going inland, hail everywhere, and on and on, all the while driving their 5 MPG giant SUVs all over the country while tossing their food wrappers on the side of the road.
- Cheap (during the majority of their lives) to relocate anywhere in the US or abroad if they wanted to work or live somewhere else, or be “snowbirds” when they’re too wimpy to tolerate the winter in their home states.
- The same geopolitical climate prevented them having to grow up in war-torn anywhere.
- Access to any kind of entertainment imaginable any time anywhere.
- Artificially post-world-war inflated US economy that took some decades to spin down (that “Great Again” they fap to) - which only happened because the US joined so late and had few losses ourselves. The war never happened at home, so we got out for minimal effort/casualties/infrastructure loss.
- And they got to adult in an age of computer technology that enables them as olds to not have to drive their car, pick up food, or do any errands they don’t want to do themselves, all without having to learn any technical skills because the tech was designed for idiots.
No human generation before or after them got to, or likely will ever, experience such a prosperous story-arc. They should consider themselves damn lucky and act like it, while supporting future generations to have a sliver of what their spoiled asses were able to enjoy.
I just disagree that they had it so good.
Modern technology like cell phones, computers, medicines and treatments have upended how things work. Imagine how hard it would be to go to a college or university and not have access to google or reddit. Or how hard it would be to have to type up multiple copies of everything instead of just sending an email with multiple recipients.
MMR vaccines starting with measles in 63, mumps in 67 and rubella in 69, Polio in 55-61ish, Haemophilus influenzae type b '85. Anyone who is a boomer lived in a period where these things were still a problem in day to day lives.
Their car crashes resulted in fatalities. Ours are generally minor injuries in comparison. The way cars are designed have changed.
They had one or two power outlets per room, if any at all. They didn’t have much insulation, let alone sound proofing.
They had to pay a commission to a travel agent to go on vacation, they couldn’t just look things up for themselves and had to rely on friends or the agent as to how it is.
If you wanted to look something up you had to go to a library.
Few actually owned multiple cars. Growing up in a middle class household in the 80s we had a single car and our family vacation was camping.
There was a constant threat of nuclear war.
Air travel for a long, long time was exclusively reserved for the wealthy and those in business.
Labor laws, as few as we have today, were even worse.
By the time computers came around they were too old to actually partake by and large. My boomer grandparents (because that’s the actual boomer age now in their 80s) are dying or are dead and they’ve never had a cell phone.
Easy to access jobs, homes, boats, cars with little to no education or financial acumen. Just that “walk in and hand them a resume” trope they love to perpetuate.
It’s never been that easy! It’s always been easy to find a job that pays for a room, but much more is a luxury for so many. There’s obviously exceptions but I see loads of people making >200k today without advanced degrees. Anybody who got into programming ~4+ years ago is living like a king today by comparison to most of the ‘middle class’ in the 50s, 60s, 70s or 80s.
But do they? No? Why? Because the are spoiled rotten. When Boomers were young, the weren’t called Boomers. The were called the „Me-Generation“. And rightfully so, cause most of them only think about personal short term gains.
Giant caveat that is only for white dudes.
Boomers grew up in a world with a 91% top-tier income tax rate that drove businesses to spend their excess income on products and services, which became their parents’ paychecks.
All of them with only 1 parent working and the other managing the home
Exactly what my depression era grandma says of them.
Take heart, in 10 years the worst of the boomers in power today will be dead. In 20 years there will be almost no boomers left. Hopefully there will be enough of a country left to fix once they’re all dead.
You’re forgetting that there are many brainwashed younger people who totally bought the bullshit. It won’t be easy.
Not so much forgetting as ignoring and downplaying for my own mental health.
I’m in the prime time of of my life, waiting 10-20yrs just sounds very depressing
waiting that long sounds worse the older you get.
in 10 years the worst of the boomers in power today will be dead.
I remember thinking this about the WW2 generation back in the 90s. The result:
In about 25 years most countries will be warzones and anyone that cant afford whatever the elite are charging for the few freshwater sources left on the planet will be dead or enslaved. anyone within twenty degrees of the equator will have fled or be dead, and anyone living above ground anywhere else will live in nonpermanent shelters due to the yearly storms that destroy standing structure.
boomers will be taking the worlds habitable range with them, and leaving us with a nightmare.
That’s an excellent reason to try and live in the moment and enjoy what you have while you have it.
I don’t mean to be that guy, but look which US political party was in charge for each of those dates…
2002 - Bush II, Republican
2008 - Bush II, Republican
2020 - Trump, Republican
2025 - Trump, Republican
Cheat sheet.
Trump approves, “The economy does better under Democrats than the Republicans”
Donald Trump, 2004, on the CNN Show ‘The Apprentice’
I don’t know who came up with this “once a generation” bullshit, but you can see that economic crises were more often than once a decade in 20th century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_economic_crises#20th_century
They were every fifteen years pretty regularly
It’s the same crisis, in various stages of escalation. The rich are squeezing more and more of the lower and middle class all over the world, and there is almost nothing left to squeeze.
The next few years will bring a massive collapse in government services (the USA is starting) for ordinary people, because that is one of the last things that the rich can still squeeze out.
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
This will mean war, and they will send you all into it.
Unless we stop it now. Tax the rich.
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
It’s already starting to happen. Half of consumer spending in the US is done by just the top 10% of earners. For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
You’ve gone and mixed up correlation and causation here.
The top 10% arent spending 50% of the money because they are the glorious saviors of the economy, protecting and nurturing it while us poor people thoughtlessly hoard and save all our wealth. It’s actually quite the opposite.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing. It’s a symptom of the concentration of wealth.
But if you’re a politician and want a quick, popular, short-term solution you get quicker effects giving the big spenders more money. It would be better to lift everyone, but that takes a lot more work.
Which is what’s been happening for decades, and has gotten us into this mess. We’ve been kicking a lot of cans and we’re running out of road.
Except that isn’t true at all. The COVID stimulus checks were a huge boon to the economy and cost about 800 billion dollars, meanwhile just the first round of trump tax cuts are projected to cost the US 1.5trillion. Dollar for dollar, providing spending power to the lower income earners generates more economic stimulus. Talk to someone making less that 200k a year, and there is a laundry list of items they need or want to purchase. Ask a billionaire what they are waiting for the money to buy, and it’s nothing. When you have an unlimited check book, why would you wait?
The whole reason why the top 10% spend 50% of the economy, is because they have 99% of the disposable income. The idea that the poorer 90% of us are hoarding money more than the freaking multi-million/billionaires is laughably out of touch.
Exactly. The only real problem with the covid stimulus was that they were implemented quickly, and that they occurred simultaneously with covid-related supply chain disruptions. That’s why so much inflation happened. You could make that level of stimulus permanent without any inflationary effect as long as you slowly ramped up the stimulus over a decade or so. You wouldn’t want to implement a $20k/year UBI overnight. That would cause huge inflation. But if you slowly ramped it up, that would give time for the production system to slowly expand to meet the need.
this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
This is probably true for industries like fashion, but I disagree with this point applying in general. There is only so much food, gasoline, and paper products an individual is willing to buy, no matter how rich.
The restaurant industry, for example, would collapse as we know it if most non-wealthy people suddenly don’t have any extra income to spend on prepared food. They need velocity in orders just to remain open at all. I doubt most places could remain open off of a few rich people buying a lot.
This isn’t to say that they won’t stop extracting more from the lower earners. Many of them would be fine killing off industry if it makes themselves richer. I personally think all of it’s a short-sighted cash grab that’s gonna keep poisoning the economy until something changes.
Except they could still do that level of spending while not perched atop a massive hoard, and the rest could do cumulatively more spending via their sheer numbers if said hoard were distributed more evenly.
That’s why I support a maximum wealth cap. My preferred figure is 1000x median household income. Anything beyond that is taxed at 100%. I don’t even care what the wealthy do with the money over that wealth cap. Donate it, spend it on conspicuous consumption, I don’t care. What matters is that the wealth isn’t pooling at the top, allowing the wealthy to outbid everyone else for things like housing.
Hell, imagine a world like that. Maybe at the end of each year, the rich burn off all their excess wealth by throwing giant lavish parties that they invite the entire populace of their cities to. Or maybe they just cut everyone a check. If you’re forced to burn off all your excess cash, you might as well burn it in a way that makes you popular.
Trump45 term benefitted signifciantly from QE based suppressed low rates that inflated financial assets, and so made rich people richer without creating inflation as wages and jobs were flat (until way down from covid mismanagement). He/sycophantic media could boast about economy without improving people’s lives.
This hits too hard. I was born in 83, so even the ages line up.
82 here and obligatory fuck this timeline
82, born April 1st. Life has been a joke, that’s for sure.
Same year here… fuck us, amirite?
Don’t forget - you were also BORN into a once in a generation economic crisis: The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of approximately a third of the savings and loan associations in the United States between 1986 and 1995. These thrifts were banks that historically specialized in fixed-rate mortgage lending.
I’m tired, boss.
Capitalism cannot continue to exist without it begging for socialist bailouts.
Just proves that socialism is superior. It can even float a shit system like capitalism as it continues to fail.
The only way to really make capitalism work in the long term is if you pair it with sufficient social spending to provide a substantial redistributive effect. A free market, if you can maintain it, is a wonderful thing. Competition breeds innovation and efficiency. The problem is that there’s nothing capitalists hate more than a free market. As soon as any company gets big enough, or any capitalist gets wealthy enough, they start directing their wealth to buying public policy that will give them an unfair advantage in the market. And as soon as any company gets enough market share, they start engaging in uncompetitive business practices if not heavily regulated.
Marx was fundamentally right. Capitalism is an unstable system. Even if you could magically start a society with a perfectly free market, it would inevitably collapse into oligarchy. And when the oligarchs push things far enough that enough people are desperate enough, oligarchy collapses into fascism.
The free market has a lot of merit to it. But ironically, the only way you can maintain even a vaguely free market is by heavy handed government intervention. You need a large redistributive mechanism to prevent wealth accumulation at the top, and you need strict regulation on the size of businesses to prevent them from dominating markets. Free markets require heavy government intervention in order to persist long term.
You need a large redistributive mechanism to prevent wealth accumulation at the top, and you need strict regulation on the size of businesses to prevent them from dominating markets.
We had those things, and we can bring them back. If we survive the next four years, I suspect most Americans will be less opposed to a wealth tax and an FTC/DOJ that can actually do its job.
Sounds like it’s time to stop believing the way headlines and pundits phrase things.
And the wealthy manage to come out on top every single time.
When you’re the ones manufacturing the crisis, it’s easier to prepare and profit from it
When they should really come out 6 feet under.
Buy blue chip stocks during recessions and sell after recovery
Kinda hard to buy when you dont have any fuckin money
If you didn’t buy so many pumpkin spice lattes and avocado toasts you would have been rich by now
Got it. I’m gonna have a nice hot avocado late and some cinnamon sticks on pumpkin toast
I’m starting to notice a problem…
Wait are you serious?
I’ve never joked in my life
Instructions unclear, invested life savings in pumpkin spice latte and avocado toast stocks
You god dang gen z’s are going to get my CFA designation revoked
I’m actually an elder millennial, but I guess I can hold off on any further investment until you get your Classified Fowl Arbitration cert reinstated 🤷
I see you’re also an expert in bird law
I renounced my Chick-fil-A designation after I got disciplined for playing the south park episode
Instructions unclear, invested life savings in a company that produces blue corn tortilla chips.
I invested early but ate them after a month because I was afraid they’d get stale.
I accidentally ended up with a semi trailer full of blue corn tortilla chips?
Well tostitos is owned by pepsico which is a matured company of 126 years so I would consider that a blue chip blue corn chip stock
Brother I’m still recovering from the last time I took the internet’s advice on stocks.
Unrelated, but fuck Ryan Cohen.
I think this thread has been very clear about what stocks to buy and it’s your fault if you don’t get it (when you figure it out, let me know too)
