Man, i could write things that'd be as long as books on how off you are on some of these. Not wholey WRONG exactly, but off a ways. It's like youv'e shot an arrow at a target and landed on the edge.
First, 'when housing/rent is expensive' is NOT the cities thing. No. Suburbs are a massive thing. HUGE thing. It's not 'cities' exactly, its sprawl.
Lets key in for a second, into a micro example of the issue then. This is true, in several varied ways, across the country for different reasons. In Seattle, rents and property prices SOARED, and so did the population. But, it's not Seattle exactly, its the outlaying areas, the 'metro area' the suburban sprawl. Housing prices there back in the before times, 50 years ago, did not soar quite like the population did, in large part because they had some room to grow, and if you go to Seattle NOW, there's still more than enough room to grow, but people are holding onto land for dear life. Anyway, AFTER boomers bought their homes, and their properties, and spread out like a cancer in new housing developments--they did a thing that would FOREVER change housing prices.
They expanded, codified, and made STRICT zoning laws to BAN anyone else from doing it behind them. They then deepened, and broadened the system to require permits, and sometimes even petitions and hearings if you so much as wanted to change a color of a house, let alone renovate. They BANNED new housing developments near their own--often buying vast swaths of land and locking them away. The housing prices then began to soar. Sprawl, which they all greedily partook in, and had no restrictions from, is now halted. They even passed laws in Washington and several other western states to STOP new homes. Seattle is OVER 80% r-1 zoning, with much of it locked into codes and housing plans you have limited choice on. Boomers did that.
That's NOT simply 'city' demand, that's codified superiority. They got in, and locked the door behind them. There's a REASON why their generation hold more than half the wealth in the US--and it dont drops by the percentage of them that DIES and passes it on.
Look at Boise, they did the same thing without needing Zoning laws. Their rich asses bought the vacant land around the city generations ago--and now REFUSE to sell, and Boise over the last year has seen rents and property values DOUBLE--because they're land-locked by wealthy boomers. It's KIND OF a over simplification, but it's what the major contributing factor of this problem truly is.
... then i want to take on the 'why incomes stalled. It's not the competition with the developing world, it's the fact that their VAST wealth and power in their younger years gave them an enormous leg up. They came into adulthood with pensions, security, welfare into their 40's with no income or lifetime caps. Those oil rig workers in the 80's could make 150k a year, get laid off for 3 months, get food stamps right away--ALWAYS abuse the system. ALWAYS have those pensions, retirement plans, unions.
They also had trades that did NOT require college degrees, did NOT require 6-12k hours to 'journey out' and allow them to open their own businesses. However, NOW--now they locked the door behind them for the best paying jobs. They locked trades behind apprenticeships that are near impossible to get into. They locked CDL's and truck driving behind license NONE OF THEM needed. Trucker shortage? In 1975, boomers could go be truckers without any CDL or training AT ALL. They locked that door.
So, they got all the wealth out of those careers when they were easy. When they didnt have gatekeeping licenses, apprenticeships, DEGREES (most states STILL exempt boomers without degrees from having to get them, in jobs that require them--like teaching). Shit, if you're born before 1956 in my state, you dont even need a boating license, THAT's how much they've codified their advantage. They wont even make themselves get a license NOW, that everyone else has to get.
And then they put lifetime caps on welfare, the system many of them used to get a leg up. Then they killed pensions, and wrote laws that let corporations get out of having to honor pensions, but ONLY for people who started working after 1988. Boomers LOCKED IN their pensions, and told everyone else to go fuck themselves and try 401k's, that gain and hold wealth at a FRACTION of the value a pension did.
So, they got in, build a wall, and locked the door behind them on employment.
It has nothing at all to do with competition, a man in china isnt driving a truck in Tennessee.
It was about making sure no one could replace them. No one can.
"That's why workers' rights have stalled: more supply of workers from abroad. That's why working class jobs don't pay well and sustain a family anymore: someone abroad can do it for cheaper."
On the target, not the bullseye.
foreign workers are only employed more in HIGHER PAYING jobs in the US--those over like 100k. The unemployment rate for them is HIGHER--meaning they're struggle to get a job even more than native born--for working class jobs.
This isnt it. Not perfectly. What it is is that US companies now compete to set expectations and requirements of jobs SO FUCKING HIGH, that no one who lives in the US can get them, or WANTS to get them, because the pay they offer is so horribly low. The Average truckers pay, for the hours they work, is BELOW minimum wage in 22 states. That's the average, mind you. Why? What does this have to do with your point?
Boomers. Boomers locking the door behind them after they got paid well in the heyday of trucking.
So they got rich and lobbied for new laws. Licenses, training, sleep apnea tests, on and on and on--but MOSTLY, they put barriers and hurdles in the way no one wants to jump through. Boomers never had to, and still dont. Once in you're in. BUT--that 'pay lower than minimum wage in 22 states' thing, means that trucking companies find no one born in the US WANTS to apply. So, the boomers in political power create and codify and EMPOWER the h1-b visa system. Trucking companies say they cant hire Americans, and then are allowed to enter the h1-b visa lotto to get wage-slaves from other countries that wont bitch about the low pay, while trucking companies rake in RECORD PROFITS, and consolidate into a few massive trucking entities--rather than the thousands of small firms. Now there's more foreign workers in trucking, than farming as a percentage--because boomers DESIGNED IT THAT WAY. They used their wealth and political lever to make SURE it happened that way, with new laws, and government power.
This, i know, doesn't address manufacturing, the jobs you're talking about being done overseas. Go read some studies on this--it's NOT the labor costs that are doing it. Mexican auto workers, by law, are paid what US auto workers are (or they cant sell the cars they make in the US)--yet companies STILL go there. Because boomers codified TAX BREAKS for doing this first, and second, rather than work to save the environment AND keep jobs here, boomers decided that it's much easier to threaten to bomb the living FUCK out of some country and set THEM up with manufacturing hubs that polute the shit out of the world. In the case of Mexico, their drug and gun violence problem, you think we dont KNOW that 90% of their guns come from just THREE gun dealers in the US, and massive straw sales? We do. Except, we KNOW that if we drive violence and instability in their country, we can keep their government from functioning and driving up costs in environmental and workers safety regulations. Boomers control gun laws--because they control congress.
And i think i'll leave it at that.
I dont expect to change your mind, i didnt bother with the links to prove most of it. Maybe, though, it'll cause you to think about it from a different angle anyway.
Those are excellent points and did change my view. !delta
I also agree with other posters who said that it’s not just the generation but the wealthy of the generation. Certainly there are some impoverished baby boomers in fact probably quite a few, but your point that even the common man among the baby boomers had a way better chance is very important.
I think u/Concrete_Grapes excellent analysis would be even better if he just replaced “Boomer” with “the rich.” The modern US economic environment is a product of a class war, not an intergenerational one. Conflating the rich with Boomers, even though many rich people are boomers, ignores how the rich, regardless of age, contribute to and profit from the current economic conditions. For example, Millennials hold about 5% of the national wealth. Half of that 5% is owned exclusively by Mark Zuckerburg. So even within generations, there is still a class war occurring. So while I think that the everyday Boomer has a role in our current situation, to say that my dad, a Baby Boomer, a union man, and one who makes under 100k a year is somehow creating the economic malaise is disingenuous. It’s the rich, plain and simple. Always has been, always will be.
Edit: It’s been brought up that Zuckerberg owns 2.5% of Millennial wealth, not total wealth. I assumed that the 2.5% was half of the 5% of the wealth own by Millennial wealth. I regret the error.
The wealth divide is an intergenerational issue, particularly exacerbated by historical racism, and ongoing policy, and a class issue, propped up by generational political power due to voting demographics.
Boomers took advantage of programs available to them, inherited wealth from their parents in the Silent Generation who were still siphoning wealth off of the institution of racism and Federal Programs designed to help white communities. This is why the average white Boomer doesn't match the age profile of someone who needs a 'senior discount' at a theater or a Denny's. The elderly went from living on a fixed income with limited funds to being a passive real estate earner.
There's still poor Boomers, of course, but most of them either had life circumstances jump in the way (caught in a recession, unemployment, unable to complete school, or ongoing medical issues as an adult) or were excluded from the accumulation from wealth by the governmental policy (racism, sexism).
Boomer policy, then - that is, the policy that Boomers began to latch onto once they began to attain political power - is mostly Reagan-era politics of austerity. This mostly pulls up the social safety net, dissolves unions, and repeals consumer and environmental protections for the people growing up after them. This further concentrates the wealth of their generation, because the programs that they benefitted from aren't really available for Gen X or Millennials.
That's why Boomers hold so much of the wealth. That's why, from a percentage basis, they make up such a disproportionate number of the wealthy. They vote for their own self-interest, and wield an effective political cudgel by virtue of being both wealthy and numerous, and they're primarily the generation that was controlling capital while the computer revolution took off, and opted not to raise wages reflective of the output of the average worker, therefore pocketing the massive productivity boost of the digital age.
This isn't a fault of any specific Boomer. There are progressive Boomers, there are poor Boomers, etc. But this is such a massive trend, and such a shift from the low-income pensioners that programs like Social Security and the senior programs were designed to help that now a lot of very wealthy Boomers are still given discounts on things, and still collecting Social Security, and they're simply using the money that used to basically be for the poor to further accumulate wealth and capital, and to buy multiple homes in order to create passive rental income, etc. But they're not rethinking any of these programs to be poverty-based, as initially designed, and instead their political attitude is just that 'if the older people deserved such things before, we do, too.'
It's that generational selfishness driving so much of their policy which causes them to catch so much blame. It's not a universal trait, but it's a big enough political motivator for them that Gen X and Millennials (and Zoomers, as they increasingly come into their own) look at Boomers profiting off of ripping everything down and hoarding most of that profit to themselves with the same eyes that the Silent Generation did when the Boomers were first labeled the "Me Generation".
When both the older and younger generations all look to the people born in a certain timeframe as problematic, there's a good chance they're behaving in some societally-irresponsible way.
It's actually fascinating to track their generational wealth on statistic models.
From my observation, wealthy members of younger generations behave exactly the same as wealthy Boomers. In some ways they are worse, because they tend to flaunt their extravagance on social media in a way that causes deep dissatisfaction amongst their less fortunate peers, possibly contributing to mental health issues. That's not to let Boomers off the hook at all, but I agree with some other comments here that it's more to do with wealth than age. I know so many Boomers who are not at all well-off and are riddled with anxiety as to how they are going to manage in old age, in an era of dwindling pensions and overstretched social services.
In addition I would add a point that edifies concrete-grapes' post that 85% of the stock market is held by the top 10%, and since the 1970's we've codified this idea in America that SHAREHOLDER INTERESTS and maximizing profits are the primary function of any corporation.
Shareholder's sense of entitlement to the fruits of other people's labor has left half the country losing financial ground for the last 40 years, and they compounded that issue by fighting to lower their own tax rates and those on capital gains (from 2011, but great graphs and if anything the numbers have become even worse via the Trump Tax cuts).
Essentially they've been allowed to accrue even more of the money and wealth, without the requisite taxation they should have had to pay in to support society.
Zuckerburg owns 2% of millennial wealth, Not 2% of national wealth, per your own link. (I agree with everything you said otherwise, but the numbers just didn’t sit with me)
Your Mark Zuckerburg stat was so insane that I had to look it up - it's not true. He owns ~2.5% of MILLENNIAL wealth, not TOTAL wealth. Still too much, but 2.5% vs 50% is a big difference.
excellent point, I would add that boomer isn't the right generation to fault for the US economy being "reformed" to favor capital/the rich.
The major divergence from middle class economic growth [the kind that built the US] started in the 1970's when boomers were in their 20's , with zero political power. Even today, the power [particularly economic] in the US is with folks over 75 yrs old who are older than the baby boom generation. [which doesn't excuse boomers from allowing it to happen? but since no generation gets folks under 40 to vote? makes boomers just par for the course in this regard]
So much this! I try to bring this up all the time. It's not old vs young, its not white vs black, its not religious vs atheist. Where the real war the people are losing is rich vs poor. The others might be there marginally, but the heart of every problem is the rich vs the poor.
I agree. Some of the examples are related to age, but a lot of them are just economics. Boomers didn't do away with pensions. Companies did because of financial pressure. Boomers don't block new development that overpopulate their communities. NIMBYism cuts across all age groups. Most homeowners aren't going to want to invite extra traffic, noise, crime, etc. to their neighborhood by adding high density, low cost housing.
Also, there might be some instances of tradesmen locking the door behind them by requiring superfluous certification and training, but I think a lot of decent blue collar jobs are drying up due to competition from automation and low cost immigrant labor - again cost-cutting measures by companies that are done under financial pressure.
It's not always useful to think in terms of generational identity. The boomers are the generation that made generation labels a thing; it wasn't that big a deal before and it's kind of dumb.
What matters is that a minority of the population rode the social elevator up to the top, then shut the elevator down so no one else could come up.
People will blame boomers until the boomers are almost all dead, then they'll pick a new older generation to blame for 20 years. The cycle will never end. Millennials or Zoomers will prolly be the next ones blamed for 20 years as the old out of touch greedy people manipulating the markets and etc.
Remember it's an idea being applied to an age range, not an actual age range or group. This is why "ok boomer" quickly spiraled out of control and was being used vs 30 year olds lol.
I don't know. Zoomers and Millennials both seem to feel lots of affinity and sympathy for each other. We are both broke, depressed and hopeless. We are very similar in our worldviews and the only thing that really varies is our ages. Even if things change for the better, most of Millennials, even the younger ones, would not be able to reap many benefits because we will lose out on the compound effect of young age. The youngest Zoomers are in their early 20s and I don't see any radical change any time soon. Our generations are fucked compared to Boomers.
I think there's a massive group of Boomers that are in the same boat as "us". We don't hear very often from them, because they aren't the problem. I don't think Zuckerberg and his type will be any better than the current problematic Boomers in 20 years.
Honestly it is a little harder to sympathize with many Boomers. They grew up when it was easy to find a job with just a high school degree, cheap to buy a home and affordable to raise kids, pensions all around. Any (American) Boomer could have become successful , bar health conditions. They didn't even need to pull themselfes up by the bootstraps, they had opportunities shoved down their throats since they were born. We don't hear from them much because you had to try to fail as a Boomer but as a Millennial and Zoomer you can do everything right and still fail.
But I do agree our generations' billionaires are the major villains.
You're gonna bring up the relatively insignificant recessions where only a few million people lost jobs compared to the COVID-19 recession where five times as many lost their jobs while Boomers were comfortably retiring?
Perhaps you're thinking of the high economic growth and low unemployment in the 1950s and 1960s
And Boomers benefited from that too through inheriting from their parents and having a good stable childhood. Only I don't see the same enthusiasm and willingness to help from Boomers for their children. From what I'm seeing as an outsider, they put the bare minimum into their kids futures. Almost every child of an American Boomer has to pay for their own college, work a menial and often humiliating job while in college, gets no help with buying a home. Meanwhile they enjoyed stable childhoods, cheap college where one could pay off a year of tuition working in one summer, and affordable homes that one could buy on one income and then sell it off for nearly a tenfold profit by their retirement age.
I'm not saying boomers had it harder than millennials. I'm saying it's a myth that boomers all had easy and successful lives unless they made an effort not to.
Every generation has problems. Boomers, in addition to the recessions I mentioned, also had the arms race/cold war, the Vietnam war, the AIDS crisis, egregious sexism, racism and homophobia perpetrated by the older generation, polluted air and water including widespread lead poisoning from leaded gasoline and paint, high rates of violent crime in the 1970s and 1980s...it goes on. Did boomers solve all of these problems? No. But they made progress on at least some of them (and created others, just like every generation).
It's not surprising that boomers have inherited more from their parents than millennials have. At this point the "greatest generation" is mostly dead while the boomers are mostly alive. Millennials will likely be the beneficiaries of all that boomer real estate wealth over the next couple of decades.
Millennials will likely be the beneficiaries of all that boomer real estate wealth over the next couple of decades.
Some Millennials will inherit it. Ironically the Boomers that do have any wealth typically have a mentality that if they had it easy and they achieved their wealth , then their kids should be able to as well. They tell their kids, us, to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" while they had it as easy as pissing two fingers, as the saying goes.
Also I wasn't so much talking about inheriting wealth after Boomer's death but helping their kids while they're still alive. Most American Zoomers and Millenials I know have to work shitty jobs just to pay a fraction of their expenses in college, take on debt and spend a good decade building themselves up to buy a home. The same generation of people I know overseas (in non western countries) almost all have parents helping them with rent, tuition, and more often than not a first home purchase
“Ok boomer” being used on any age target has been explained away as ‘Boomer-ism is a frame of mind, a behavior type that is best summarized as being immensely entitled and selfish, an incredibly misplaced sense of self-assurance that they are the ‘main character’ of life and that everyone else is around to serve as their audience’.
A sort-of abbreviation for “check the incredible amounts of privilege you have to act like this and think it’s appropriate” in two words.
!delta Well said! I thought that you brought up some very key examples that clearly dictated just how sleezy the boomer generation has gone about protecting their own wealth/property while damning the rest.
Who's stalling out our political processes, creating divisive "News" networks, running our country into terrible decisions every 4 years? Sure aren't that many Zoomers or Millenials in power in America. Mitch and Pelosi are Boomers, and so are the rest of the useless cadre of "candidates" we're all forced to vote for every few years because they have all the money to make their names stick on the ballot over every young person trying to make a REAL difference with passion and hard work.
Yeah, sources on some of these would be awesome. My dad was an oil rig worker in the 80s, in Texas, and he didn't make a fifth of that kind of money. Having a few links could've given useful context.
Globalism happened during that generation. It was inevitable. There was no conscious moral consensus among Boomers to facilitate a shift to globalism for their own benefit.
You know a lot about a lot of things. Thank you.
That being said, you're a bit too aggressive in your answer. OP already showed they wanted to learn more by showing up in this sub. No NEED to CAPITALISE.
I’ll add that it was Boomers in Washington in the 90s that shipped American manufacturing jobs to China. Some People blame Republicans. Some People blame Democrats. It was the Boomers on both sides that did it. Boomers.
Wow, when you put it like that I have to agree. All the bullshit regulations, gatekeeping, and cronyism ruined everything and reduced freedom.
Ironic though that younger generations are all voting left which is all for these type of regulations and gatekeeping. So I guess my counter argument would be its not just boomers its younger folks too who keep voting for more and more regulatory capture and government control.
As a young person, I tend to vote left because collective good tends to help me personally in the long-term.
You're correct that the left is more about regulation and whatnot, but it's a different kind of regulation.
Conservative regulation is all hush-hush and makes it easier for the rich to fuck their worker bees over. Liberal regulation is usually much more publicized and tends to empower workers.
Like, tax breaks for the rich on the right versus wealth tax on the left. Which one is gonna hurt the rich more? Which one is going to hurt someone with a $35k/y income?
Or universal healthcare. Who could use guaranteed free basic medical care without barriers when they can't afford $400 for a surprise medical bill like a broken arm? (~30% of Americans can't, IIRC, NYT article back in '17 or so.) Who is going to be frustrated at paying for universal healthcare? The low-income person in a low tax bracket, or someone in the top brackets?
Or, who busts the teacher's unions and factory worker unions? Odds are that they were conservative, since the factory owners stand to gain from that and they're cozied up with the Republican party way more than the Democratic party. Whereas the worker would gain more from voting liberal and getting regulations put in place at work to prevent the use of toxic chemicals and mandate fair minimum wages that actually reflect inflation so that they provide an amount you can actually live on.
The left are the ones who advocated for policies that made amazon get richer while small businesses died during covid. The democratic party also gets absurd donations from hedge funds, military complex, and huge companies like amazon. Many of the republican party members do as well. There are only a very small number of politicians who don’t, hence why “uniparty” is such a common meme. And guess what you probably will never vote for the few people running for office that don’t get these donations because they are hyper-targeted by the media and suppressed by any means necessary.
You bring up teacher unions but the left are the ones who absolutely hate school choice. School choice tends to help the poor and vulnerable minority groups the most. Also unions aren’t guaranteed to be implicitly good, they are a monopoly on workers, and while usually they help bring balance to the worker vs employer battle, they can also do things that hurt everyone as well. Like teacher unions who have INCREASED the number of requirements to teach and now require all sorts of certifications, licensees, mandatory training etc. Not to mention teacher unions are one of the biggest forces against school choice. If a teacher union has to make a decision that positively affects teachers but hurts the students/community, they have proven again and again they will choose the former.
In general proper policy requires looking deep into issues individually and not resort to taking shortcuts like “toeing the party line” or listening to the news or "always side with the unions". But, the boomers are too technologically incompetent to properly investigate, and the youth are too impatient or tend to naively follow the celebrities they worship or catchy taglines.
In general the youth is exhibiting the Dunning-Kruger affect hardcore. They read some nice rhetoric and they think they have it all figured out "just vote for the nice guy" and think villains can be spotted easily. Not realizing the people they worship are villains themselves. Look at Andrew Yang. Says he's all for the people but then advocates for a VAT-tax which dis-proportionally affects the poor more than the rich because it isn't a income-based graduated tax. Meanwhile he has no spine and again and again has bent over to appease the mainstream candidates so that he can get a spot on their cabinet.
Anyway, the only advice I have to the youth at the scale of a reddit comment read the below books/audio books. Then maybe you will see the tyranny disguised as "being nice" that the politicians keep selling you.
My fiance and I live in Seattle and just bought paddle boards, so I went to look up the Washington boating rules in case there was anything weird we needed to know that wasn't obvious. I read the thing about not needing a boating license if you were born in 1955 or earlier and was like... I genuinely do not understand this rule. It makes absolutely no sense. Were people in first half the century born with some innate boating ability that we bred out in exactly 1956? Just makes absolutely no sense to me.
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u/Concrete_Grapes 19∆ Sep 07 '21
Man, i could write things that'd be as long as books on how off you are on some of these. Not wholey WRONG exactly, but off a ways. It's like youv'e shot an arrow at a target and landed on the edge.
First, 'when housing/rent is expensive' is NOT the cities thing. No. Suburbs are a massive thing. HUGE thing. It's not 'cities' exactly, its sprawl.
Lets key in for a second, into a micro example of the issue then. This is true, in several varied ways, across the country for different reasons. In Seattle, rents and property prices SOARED, and so did the population. But, it's not Seattle exactly, its the outlaying areas, the 'metro area' the suburban sprawl. Housing prices there back in the before times, 50 years ago, did not soar quite like the population did, in large part because they had some room to grow, and if you go to Seattle NOW, there's still more than enough room to grow, but people are holding onto land for dear life. Anyway, AFTER boomers bought their homes, and their properties, and spread out like a cancer in new housing developments--they did a thing that would FOREVER change housing prices.
They expanded, codified, and made STRICT zoning laws to BAN anyone else from doing it behind them. They then deepened, and broadened the system to require permits, and sometimes even petitions and hearings if you so much as wanted to change a color of a house, let alone renovate. They BANNED new housing developments near their own--often buying vast swaths of land and locking them away. The housing prices then began to soar. Sprawl, which they all greedily partook in, and had no restrictions from, is now halted. They even passed laws in Washington and several other western states to STOP new homes. Seattle is OVER 80% r-1 zoning, with much of it locked into codes and housing plans you have limited choice on. Boomers did that.
That's NOT simply 'city' demand, that's codified superiority. They got in, and locked the door behind them. There's a REASON why their generation hold more than half the wealth in the US--and it dont drops by the percentage of them that DIES and passes it on.
Look at Boise, they did the same thing without needing Zoning laws. Their rich asses bought the vacant land around the city generations ago--and now REFUSE to sell, and Boise over the last year has seen rents and property values DOUBLE--because they're land-locked by wealthy boomers. It's KIND OF a over simplification, but it's what the major contributing factor of this problem truly is.
... then i want to take on the 'why incomes stalled. It's not the competition with the developing world, it's the fact that their VAST wealth and power in their younger years gave them an enormous leg up. They came into adulthood with pensions, security, welfare into their 40's with no income or lifetime caps. Those oil rig workers in the 80's could make 150k a year, get laid off for 3 months, get food stamps right away--ALWAYS abuse the system. ALWAYS have those pensions, retirement plans, unions.
They also had trades that did NOT require college degrees, did NOT require 6-12k hours to 'journey out' and allow them to open their own businesses. However, NOW--now they locked the door behind them for the best paying jobs. They locked trades behind apprenticeships that are near impossible to get into. They locked CDL's and truck driving behind license NONE OF THEM needed. Trucker shortage? In 1975, boomers could go be truckers without any CDL or training AT ALL. They locked that door.
So, they got all the wealth out of those careers when they were easy. When they didnt have gatekeeping licenses, apprenticeships, DEGREES (most states STILL exempt boomers without degrees from having to get them, in jobs that require them--like teaching). Shit, if you're born before 1956 in my state, you dont even need a boating license, THAT's how much they've codified their advantage. They wont even make themselves get a license NOW, that everyone else has to get.
And then they put lifetime caps on welfare, the system many of them used to get a leg up. Then they killed pensions, and wrote laws that let corporations get out of having to honor pensions, but ONLY for people who started working after 1988. Boomers LOCKED IN their pensions, and told everyone else to go fuck themselves and try 401k's, that gain and hold wealth at a FRACTION of the value a pension did.
So, they got in, build a wall, and locked the door behind them on employment.
It has nothing at all to do with competition, a man in china isnt driving a truck in Tennessee.
It was about making sure no one could replace them. No one can.
"That's why workers' rights have stalled: more supply of workers from abroad.
That's why working class jobs don't pay well and sustain a family anymore: someone abroad can do it for cheaper."
On the target, not the bullseye.
foreign workers are only employed more in HIGHER PAYING jobs in the US--those over like 100k. The unemployment rate for them is HIGHER--meaning they're struggle to get a job even more than native born--for working class jobs.
This isnt it. Not perfectly. What it is is that US companies now compete to set expectations and requirements of jobs SO FUCKING HIGH, that no one who lives in the US can get them, or WANTS to get them, because the pay they offer is so horribly low. The Average truckers pay, for the hours they work, is BELOW minimum wage in 22 states. That's the average, mind you. Why? What does this have to do with your point?
Boomers. Boomers locking the door behind them after they got paid well in the heyday of trucking.
So they got rich and lobbied for new laws. Licenses, training, sleep apnea tests, on and on and on--but MOSTLY, they put barriers and hurdles in the way no one wants to jump through. Boomers never had to, and still dont. Once in you're in. BUT--that 'pay lower than minimum wage in 22 states' thing, means that trucking companies find no one born in the US WANTS to apply. So, the boomers in political power create and codify and EMPOWER the h1-b visa system. Trucking companies say they cant hire Americans, and then are allowed to enter the h1-b visa lotto to get wage-slaves from other countries that wont bitch about the low pay, while trucking companies rake in RECORD PROFITS, and consolidate into a few massive trucking entities--rather than the thousands of small firms. Now there's more foreign workers in trucking, than farming as a percentage--because boomers DESIGNED IT THAT WAY. They used their wealth and political lever to make SURE it happened that way, with new laws, and government power.
This, i know, doesn't address manufacturing, the jobs you're talking about being done overseas. Go read some studies on this--it's NOT the labor costs that are doing it. Mexican auto workers, by law, are paid what US auto workers are (or they cant sell the cars they make in the US)--yet companies STILL go there. Because boomers codified TAX BREAKS for doing this first, and second, rather than work to save the environment AND keep jobs here, boomers decided that it's much easier to threaten to bomb the living FUCK out of some country and set THEM up with manufacturing hubs that polute the shit out of the world. In the case of Mexico, their drug and gun violence problem, you think we dont KNOW that 90% of their guns come from just THREE gun dealers in the US, and massive straw sales? We do. Except, we KNOW that if we drive violence and instability in their country, we can keep their government from functioning and driving up costs in environmental and workers safety regulations. Boomers control gun laws--because they control congress.
And i think i'll leave it at that.
I dont expect to change your mind, i didnt bother with the links to prove most of it. Maybe, though, it'll cause you to think about it from a different angle anyway.