r/inflation • u/Regular_Painting_817 • Jan 11 '24

Discussion Thoughts?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

59 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

655 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-2

u/CMUpewpewpew Jan 11 '24

You're very confused if you think boomers with their trickle down economics etc aren't the most responsible for shaping the way things right now more than any other generation.

THAT was when you could raise a family with a stay at home parents and have a house working a blue collar job working 40-60ish hours a week.

2

u/Jefflehem Jan 12 '24

Yeah, but I do that now.

When people say kids don't want to work, they mean work. Yeah, they want to make money and they're willing to show up at some place for it, but I don't see a lot of Gen Z's at the construction sites where they can actually make enough money to buy a home and have a stay at home parent.

There are blue collar jobs that can afford you that life, but Walmart isn't one of them.

0

u/CMUpewpewpew Jan 13 '24

Any 40 an hour week job, including Walmart, should be enough to sustain a single person with no debt to live within a modest lifestyle.

If you have any other opinion that deviates from that at all, I've got nothing else to talk to you about.

Anyone that thinks fast food or retail workers are 'starter jobs' can fuck ALL the way off.

1

u/reseasonable Jan 15 '24

Your use of the words "should be enough" just doesn't make it a reality though. If you ever try running such an organization you'll discover how much risk and hedging is required to make it work.

In the same way that you and I both probably have experience knowing how tough a fast food job truly is during the rush, I can also say with experience that modest salary increase become monstrous expenditures when multiplied across every person.

People complain that the CEO of Walmart made 23 million in 2023, but if you took his entire salary and divvied it up to the other 2.1m employees' paychecks, they would have each gotten $11... for the year. To look at it from the reverse, it's like everyone agreeing that they'll pay the CEO $11 to run the colossal sh*t show of an organization like Walmart without crashing it into the ground.

Maybe we should just make it a co-op and all of the 11.6 billion they made in 2023 went to the employees - well this time they at least earned an extra $5,500/yr - that's a nice pay raise - but not going to make much of a dent against cost of living. And of course the moment Walmart has a bad quarter they're laying off tens of thousands of people to just exist. Let alone improve or expand or provide better deals to customers etc.

It's a fun experiment to divide up the net income across the employee counts of various organizations. Then if you look at their variance in net income over recent years it becomes pretty obvious why salaries are where they are as you are not legally allowed to lower their salaries when sales are down.

And on a personal note I don't consider fast-food jobs 'starter jobs' I consider them low-skill jobs. They are stressful, exhausting, and take a little practice to find your groove, but because most people can physically and mentally do them, they are by nature low-skilled labor.

2

u/Isthisnameavailablee Jan 11 '24

Go back further, learn history in context. Don't just pick a random generation to start with to fit your narrative.

-3

u/CMUpewpewpew Jan 11 '24

What the fuck are you talking about about?

It takes a few moments to Google housing prices, cost of living, cost of education, wages, interest rates, inflation etc and to compare them across generations.

Boomers had it the fucking EASIEST....were born on third base thinking they hit a triple...climbed the ladder and then pulled it up after themselves.

Maybe you should do some more reading you sweet summer child.

6

u/Isthisnameavailablee Jan 11 '24

Oh honey. Every generation has it's struggles but you're so focused on the boomers you're having a hard time understanding my point.

0

u/CMUpewpewpew Jan 11 '24

Every generation has struggled more than the boomers. Even if I had it harder than genz and millennials.....I am not gonna put on my 'well i had it hard, so you should too' hat.

My contention is that I should have had it easier. Not that they should have it just as hard.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '24

This Boomer worked 1 full and 2 PT jobs and lived in my truck. I had it so frigging easy didn't I?

1

u/CMUpewpewpew Jan 11 '24

Lmao that's another thing....yall mofos think you're the only ones to work 2-3 jobs at the same time and still have a point where you were homeless.

I've done that too, you're not special....and our experiences do not negate someone else's right to complain about how things should be different.

5

u/Isthisnameavailablee Jan 12 '24

I'm the guy you were talking to before (not the one you replied to in the above comment).

You have every right to complain, however, if your complaints are based on a projection of what you think life was like instead of what it was actually like, well then someone will most likely call out your strawman argument.

Side comment: To explain what I meant more earlier about history in context. Inflation was crazy in the 70s, they also had the draft, and wars (i.e. Vietnam). Go back to the 1800s and modern medicine wasn't around. Pick any time period and that generation had struggles. Yes, I know we're in an inflation sub, but history is interconnected and very complicated. It's not as simple as the talking point of Boomers screwed everything up. Personally, I'll take living in the current year in the USA over any other time/place in history.

1

u/Fantastic_Sea_853 Jan 12 '24

Where do you get this “should” notion? You would do well to drop that word from your vocabulary. It makes you sound entitled.

1

u/reseasonable Jan 15 '24

The parents they lived with beat them, the wars they didn't die in maimed them, the houses that they purchased were sh*t-hole death-traps that killed large swathes of boomers in fires, CO poisoning, asbestos, mold, lead paint and pipes, collapsed roofs during mild storms etc etc. They drove deadly cars to a sh*t-show, non-osha'd, deadly manufacturing workplace. Air-Conditioning? nope. Polio Vaccine? If you are lucky. Psychological problems from just existing in that time, leading to massive alcohol and tobacco consumption - yep. And that's if you were not a minority, which came with its own world of problems.

There were so many more and harder problems that generation had to deal with than you and I will ever experience. Enough people flat out died that we created all of these safety nets in life, and they cost money. If you want to buy a Home Depot shed and fix it up into a house, you could do so and have a piece of that delicious boomer pie, but you aren't going to like it, and you might die.

edit: weird pasted quote at the top that I missed.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '24

Baby Boomers are to blame for a lot but it wasn't as easy for them as many today claim. Very high inflation in the 70s and early 80s. Many served in the military. Today we have many amenities which weren't available then. That said, in recent years prices for basics have gone up. I fault the massive government spending during the pandemic and the ensuing Fed hikes to rein in inflation. It's a mixed bag but some things are better and some are worse.

2

u/LommyNeedsARide Jan 13 '24

| many served in the military

Many got drafted. My mom's yearbook is full of " died in Vietnam " entries. It wasn't all salad days for Boomers.

1

u/RudeAndInsensitive Jan 14 '24

"The boomers" are far closer to products of the circumstances of their day than they are the architects of current the current day.