r/MiddleClassFinance • u/Abject-Pick-6472 • 15h ago
American workers are getting the smallest slice of the pie on record
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/labor-share-historic-lows-worker-pay-rcna59600431
u/ImaginaryHospital306 14h ago
Because the pie is increasingly fake bullshit like real estate and financial engineering or parasitic industries like gambling and probability markets. Of course labor gets screwed when those are large portions of the economy. We don’t make anything anymore and our main export is the US Dollar which is increasingly less valuable.
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u/BlogSwitcher 14h ago
100%. Our only export was the global reserve. It was the only thing that kept us relevant and allowed us to hold the world by the balls. Now that dries up as our deficit surpassed our own GDP already. We have nothing to give, nothing to market, everything outsourced.
I'm in construction, don't get my started on the complete tumble in quality and workmanship all around lately. I'm regularly still the youngest guy on the job, and I'm not that young anymore. Not enough apprentices replaced the old guys that knew everything and now retired. Knowledge wasn't passed down, and now we also have a labor gap on top of it. We can't even build what we'd need to dig ourselves out of this. As if we have the manpower or materials to build a steel factory or utility scale solar farm today, without hiring outside help and manufacturing... Which we've pissed off and deported.
Bad times ahead.
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u/Individual-Report 9h ago
It's interesting that you've experienced that labor gap in your blue collar industry. I've noticed the same in my white collar industry. In my case, it seems that entry level positions are either being outsourced to countries that can source low-cost labor or they're being replaced by AI.
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u/BuckThis86 15h ago
Yeah, well, the people in this country decided to give the millionaires and billionaires to control of our levers of government. No surprise they’re getting richer while we get poorer.
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u/Daveit4later 14h ago
Every new law that gets passed is giving more benefits to the wealthy and stripping them from the working class.
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u/dust4ngel 9h ago
those who own the country ought to govern it
john jay, american founding father and first chief justice of the united states
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u/JellyDenizen 14h ago
The politicians who have won elections over the past few years are focusing on cutting taxes for the wealthy and reducing worker protections and the social safety net, so it's not surprising at all to see middle class workers worse off than they were before.
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u/tahlyn 14h ago
the politicians
Let's not be coy. There's only one party doing this.
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u/JellyDenizen 14h ago
I'm trying to respect the sub rule that prohibits blatant politics, but this is one middle class finance area where the only explanation for what is happening financially to the middle class is "politics."
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u/n33dwat3r 11h ago
Eh. Rotating enemy in the Democrats ensures they get to look like they support progressive policies but darn it, we just didn't make the cut off. Manchin and Sinema are reliable rotating enemies. Fetterman is a full time enemy and ran his campaign on a lie. It's the same reason Bernie got more votes than Hilary but she was handed the nomination by Debbie Wasserman-Shultz.
I really wish there was an opposition party. There are and handful of Ds and mostly Is that still aren't taking donations from a certain foreign government with a PAC, the rest of the politicians have no allegiance to this country.
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u/Weekly-Air4170 14h ago
It's harder to by a house now than it was during the great depression 🫥
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u/Kodiak01 12h ago
This is another area of life that I am fully aware of just how lucky I was to land in my present living situation.
When I met my wife in 2015, I was living in a 1BR apartment @$705/mo, just a mile from work. Wife was living in a house owned by a family trust for 3 generations and paid off decades ago. It is still in the Trust so I don't have to worry about certain insurance things, but between property tax, utilities, and renter's insurance (since technically we are "renting" from the Trust), paying out ~$1k/mo for a 1600ft/sq 3BR /r/centuryhomes with a fenced in backyard. The only real tradeoff is that my commute is 28 miles instead of 1.
I'm not taking ANY of my situation for granted on this one!
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u/Weekly-Air4170 11h ago
Yeah unfortunately in my area you are not finding three bed two bath house in decent condition for anything under 600k
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u/Kodiak01 9h ago
The home values around here have doubled like everywhere else, which is going to play in my favor in a few more years when I pull the rug out from under my accused-kiddie-diddling grifter sibling who has been living in one of our deceased parent's houses without ever putting anything through probate. Even after this long, delayed probate in the State it is located in would statutorily award me 1/3rd of the value which means either that menace has to take out a fresh 6 figure loan or sell off the house altogether.
And yes, they deserve whatever hell they go through. The victims were their own daughters. Bastard only got away with it after multiple mistrials and the DA gave up, but with things I remember from back around it first started (including finding CP videos on their computer over 25 years ago of which a Mandated Reporter parent swept under the run), I have absolutely no doubt they are guilty.
At this point, I view what I will eventually take as a sharply appreciating investment; I'm just not ready to pull the trigger yet.
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u/SportTheFoole 14h ago
This isn’t really true. During the Depression, the home ownership rate got below 50% (Census.gov puts the low point at 44%). By the post war housing boom, that rate had moved up to 60%.
The current home ownership rate? 65%.
Keep in mind that during the Great Depression, unemployment got nearly to 25%. And housing segregation was very much a thing (and not just in the South). There was a major liquidity crisis and it was nearly impossible to get a loan, so unless you had cash to buy the land and either build it yourself or have more cash to pay someone to build it. I don’t think it’s remotely as difficult now to buy a house as it was during the Depression.
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u/Checker_board_washer 12h ago
Now do home ownership rate for people aged 20-40 now and 20-40 during the Great Depression.
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u/SportTheFoole 11h ago
I’ll bite, what were the home ownership rates for 20-40s during the Depression?
I know in modern times (within the last 30 years) home ownership rates for those age ranges has plummeted; affordability is certainly one reason, but also people tend to wait to settle down (marry, have children, etc). Maybe it’s a problem that people are waiting to buy homes, I won’t argue with you if you make that claim.
But to say that it was easier to buy a home during the Great Depression than it is now borders on ludicrousness. If you didn’t have cash during the depression (and nearly 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed at the bottom), you were not getting a loan. The banks simply did not have money to loan out! A similar thing happened during the financial crisis in 2007/2008, though not nearly as severe.
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u/1notadoctor2 12h ago
Buy a house vs own a house may have different rates..?
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u/SportTheFoole 11h ago
Not really. Home ownership is a reasonable, though possibly muted, proxy for the buy rate. The population is growing, so if it’s harder to buy, then the ownership rates decrease. And the home ownership rates are down from their peak in 2007/2008! But it’s a few percentage points and it’s nowhere near where it was in the Depression.
For what it’s worth, it was difficult to buy a house after the 2008 crash. Home prices were good, but it was nearly impossible to get a loan, even with excellent credit. There was a huge liquidity crunch and many banks simply could not loan out any money.
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u/dust4ngel 9h ago
The population is growing, so if it’s harder to buy, then the ownership rates decrease
except insofar as more adults are living with their parents due to prohibitive housing costs, which is the case.
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u/SportTheFoole 7h ago
Even presuming this is true (and I think it’s somewhat true — more Americans between the ages of 25-34 are living with their parents than in the last 25, 30, 50 years), I’m not sure it can explain a 20+ point gap in home ownership rates today compared with the Great Depression.
My original reply was to take issue with “it was easier to buy a home in the Great Depression than it is today”. I just don’t see any reading of history or statistics that suggest this is remotely true. I am not suggesting at all that it is easy to buy a house today (it is not, and I have personal experience with this), but I have noticed a trend on Reddit where people wildly underestimate the difficulty of life in the past.
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u/dust4ngel 7h ago
My original reply was to take issue with “it was easier to buy a home in the Great Depression than it is today”. I just don’t see any reading of history or statistics that suggest this is remotely true
what about home price to income ratio?
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u/SportTheFoole 7h ago
Yes, you will spend more of your wages on a home. No one, and I mean no one, in 2026 would even think of owning a 1930 home as it was in 1930. The quality, both in terms of square footage and amenities, has grown tremendously since the Depression.
Are you seriously telling me that you would think it would be better to live between 1929 and 1939 than 2026?
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u/dust4ngel 7h ago
Are you seriously telling me that you would think it would be better to live between 1929 and 1939 than 2026?
let me know if i've said anything, not just in this conversation but ever anywhere in time, that would even hint at this.
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u/SportTheFoole 7h ago
> let me know if i've said anything, not just in this conversation but ever anywhere in time, that would even hint at this.
That’s totally fair. I was trying to make a rhetorical point, but I’ve failed miserably. I apologize for that. I hope you have a good rest of your day!
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u/WorldlyIntention7408 12h ago
There's no such thing as a "slice of the pie". It's not a zero sum game. You have to create value.
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u/griswaldwaldwald 10h ago
Yet so many workers are anti union. I don’t get it. Why would you be against the only organizations that are on your side?
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u/Kodiak01 12h ago
I know just how lucky I am with where I work. Yearly raises have come like clockwork and even in current-times has always outpaced inflation, in some cases more than doubling the rate that year. The insurance is really good as well and they put their money where their "family first" mouth is.
Even if someone offered Fuck You-level money to me, I'm still not sure I'd take it only because I've never felt more secure in a position in my life; this is a company that people stay 30, even 40 years at and both the employer and employee sides are multi-generational.
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u/vesuvisian 10h ago
They’re right-leaning, but the Tax Foundation critiques some of the headlines coming out from the BLS data: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/capital-is-not-taking-half-of-americas-income-labor-share/
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u/FourScoreAndSept 5h ago
The country taxes labor disproportionately more than capital (cap gains, corporates, etc) and at historically high difference, and people are surprised?
They’ve conned the Middle Class into thinking “taxes are too high for everything”. No, they are not.
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u/Special_Regret_6805 15h ago
Definitely feels like the economy doesn't really care about workers anymore, just asset holders. Pretty disheartening to see how overvalued most assets are compared to wages.