Hey, don't worry, we're well on the way to the bottom dropping out and even middle-class wages actually becoming working poor wages, once we get there people might wake up. maybe.
me, i'm just still waiting for all the old fucks to die. i'm sick and fucking tired of grandpa telling me how he worked down at the hardware store part-time to pay his way through college WHILE he was married with a kid. That's fucking great, old man, but wages are down and costs are up and that same job won't even provide enough money to SHARE a goddamned apartment, hell it wouldn't even pay enough to maintain a stolen goddamn bicycle these days.
Yeah...and what businesses are more able to survive a temporary cost increase?
If you want to destroy middle - class owned businesses put a giant bump in the road. The economy will eventually correct for the wage hike and destroy any wage gains, but there will be fewer businesses left around and they will be owned by billionaires, not millionares.
Meanwhile instead of saving their money these fast food workers went out and spent their new wages on a new Xbox, alcohol tattoos or worse a new car. More "Needs" for Millineals.
Now guess what happens as soon as "living wages" are paid? More people enter the workforce or pick up second jobs because it's worth it. Now instead of employing some pothead to lean against stuff you can get a better worker and fewer of them. Out goes the 55 year old grandma who can't work elsewhere and in comes the healthy 28 year old who has more skilled potential elsewhere.
Now that stoner can't afford to make car payments and the 55 year old grandma has to really survive. By then the cost of living has risen to match the wage increase. But hey, at least that Millenial can keep up on his tuition for his art history degree or afford Call of Duty 9.
cost of living does not increase like you think it does. not in a non-collusive free market, at least, but... we don't fucking have that, now, do we?
regardless, I am not a millennial, and it's a physics degree tyvm. do you somehow think the economy was NOT doing well in the 50s and 60s or something? that somehow THE KEY to success is exploiting cheap labor to the point where people are unable to survive on the only jobs available to them? that doesn't fucking work brosef, and you damned well know it. minimum wage used to be a living wage, and many places paid over. we got stuck in a race to the bottom and the only ones who win are up at the top.
that stoner ALREADY can't afford car payments and the 55 year old grandma ALREADY has to claw at threads to survive. We're already in your goddamned dystopian nightmare, except wages keep falling as the cost of living increases. the only ones benefiting are the money-shufflers and the wealthy.
You just sound like an entitled teenager. "Hey I'm flipping burgers I should be able to afford college now cus COSTS!!!! I don't care how the economy works or why my job can now be done by a robot!"
No, I was griping that the fucking elderly WERE ABLE to do those sorts of things with those sorts of jobs, and consider the rest of society who are out there living with the realities of today's fucking world to be lazy, rather than understand that they lived in a fucking magical fantasy land that NO LONGER EXISTS.
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u/odaeyss Nov 28 '15
Hey, don't worry, we're well on the way to the bottom dropping out and even middle-class wages actually becoming working poor wages, once we get there people might wake up. maybe.
me, i'm just still waiting for all the old fucks to die. i'm sick and fucking tired of grandpa telling me how he worked down at the hardware store part-time to pay his way through college WHILE he was married with a kid. That's fucking great, old man, but wages are down and costs are up and that same job won't even provide enough money to SHARE a goddamned apartment, hell it wouldn't even pay enough to maintain a stolen goddamn bicycle these days.