There was a 45 minutes YouTube of a lecture from a Harvard professor talking about how even though Wages are mostly keeping pace with inflation, the cost of necessities is actually rising higher than inflation and it is more the optional goods that are distorting the inflation rate by having their costs decrease constantly (super cheap plasma / LCD tvs, while the bargain brand price of clothes, food, housing/rent etc has been rising faster than inflation).
Right. Necessities are more expensive, luxuries are cheaper. Food in particular seems to be galloping up in price. The media/government don't seem to want to acknowledge this.
How can you be poor if you own a refrigerator? It's all about priorities, man.
My wife has a friend who lives in a pretty nice house, two cars, etc., but she wore flip flops most of the winter because she claims she could not afford shoes. I have a hard time believing that (she could buy a pair of shoes for $30 at dsw or something), but it is definitely true that there are people with lots of luxuries who can't put food on the table.
A.) Your wife's friend doesn't know how to prioritize if she has all that and can't buy shoes. At the very least she could've popped it on her credit card like (I'm assuming) the cars and such are on. Now that I've typed all this out, I feel like I'm being a bit rude here, but I think it's a fair point.
B.) That comment was a joke based on the incredibly ludicrous segment Fox News ran over the summer about the "myth" of poverty, citing how many Americans have luxuries like air conditioning and a refrigerator and a microwave.
While I'm sure that there are people who are living beyond their means, the ridiculousness of what some people in the zeitgeist claim against teh poorz is just insulting. So that's what I was shooting at, that sentiment which I think is tied into the media ignoring rising costs like food.
I really wish I could find a better graph of real wages by qunitile from 1970 to now. :-/
This is a very long video but you only need to skip to the 9 minute mark and wait for her to talk about the green line. You probably need the follow up graphs about savings to put it in perspective. This was even before the official recession of 2008.
Almost everyone is hurting right now. I don't mean, they can't attain a '50s style American dream. They are struggling every damn day with the real possibility of homelessness or some form of jail related to crimes that poor people cannot avoid (such as not paying child support).
It's not just the unemployed and underemployed though. Many people are doing the same job they were a decade ago, but getting paid much less than they would have a decade ago, and newly employed people are looking at very intense work for not much more than minimum wage with absolutely no benefits in industries that would have supported a family of four and aging parents 10-15 years ago.
It started happening gradually in all sorts of ways. Employers outsourced, so competing domestic employees had to work for less. Employers made all their employees work through staffing agencies so that they could eliminate all their benefits and pay them less for doing the exact same job. The collapse of 2008 has just solidified everything - now almost no one in the private sector gets benefits, vacations, overtime pay, or any hope at all for retirement.
Since you like anectdotes, I might as well share one, since maybe that will help me relieve some of this emotion and not make posts that don't contain more substance. Like you, I am also highly intelligent (or I used to be). Technically, my IQ was in the 99th percentile. The only reason I bring this up is because I believe it lead me to hang out in circles of intelligent people. This is where the anecdote and empirically insignificant info comes in.
I had a "good" job. I was making more money than any of my friends that are around my age, which is terribly sad because it was nowhere near enough for a sustainable life that creates a good environment to raise children in. There was no way in hell I ever would have been able to afford things like a mortgage, car payments, insurance, food, and gas and that's obviously omitting many typical bills and expenses. Even if they gave me a significant raise every year I was not even close, and obviously there were no benefits with this job (which is the norm for almost anyone now).
It's so painfully obvious to me that all of these problems stem from a usury based society, and of course the fact that all real estate has been claimed for some time now.
Usury is a fundamentally flawed concept; unless of course you want to enslave (only in the sense that they must work for virtually nothing) the vast majority of people. If you take out a loan, because you did not have enough money and your lender obviously has much more than you, then all you are doing is widening the gap of wealth infinitely. They used to only have twice as much as you, but you paid them back with interest so now they have proportionally, relatively even more than you. This is unsustainable. We are seeing the result of this all the time. When you infinitely make poor people more impoverished this is what you get. We may as well be living in the dark ages. This is not a modern standard of life. It doesn't matter if you have a smart phone when you can't afford food and healthcare.
There are of course other factors: many ways inflation is created and assets are directly acquired and controlled, but that is much more than I care to get into right now.
I guess so far that the only difference we are sure about between you and I is that I was raised in the middle class, not the upper middle class. I should have had every opportunity for success, but the truth is that the middle class no longer exists.
Now I know the economy is bad but this is downright hyperbolic
Well I was speaking in reference to earlier posts, so my anectdotal evidence mostly deals with twenty-somethings. I know they are not the only ones that suffered, but I do believe it is especially hard on this age group.
I'm not sure which part you are saying is hyperbolic. Even if you think the average person could set out in this age group and get a job that would pay rent with roommates help that is not a sustainable life that promotes child rearing.
Oh wait I see it is bolded. I'm sorry, but I still believe this is true. That's why all those for sale signs in front of homes popped up at the same time and have stayed there ever since. That's why no one can afford to retire. That's why these nonretirees have their offspring draining them into a life where nursing homes won't exist, and their children will have exactly no hope once their parents pass. I am not special here. This is common knowledge.
Well believe its true or not, it isn't. It is factually false.
The median household income is still $50,000 a year, and even the average person below the poverty line isn't facing jail because of poverty. It isn't even true among part time retail employees as an average, or among the unemployed.
People facing homelessness (unless you mean just losing their homes, which is still not even the average, whats the default rate? 5%?) is an incredibly tiny percentage of the whole, and no amount of anecdotal evidence changes that. If there were 5.5 million homeless or nearly homeless people in New York I think OWS would be a little bigger and significantly more dangerous
This isn't to say times are great, out of my graduating class at community college one out of ten people I've kept up with (anecdote ahoy) hasn't been able to find work at all, and another portion is working at shit jobs. The average person is at an entry level position in a career though. BLS statistics seem to indicate this is true for most places.
I can't find numbers on the salary cuts people who have lost their jobs and found permanent reemplyment are taking. The underemplyment numbers that people have posted (people taking part time work when seeking full time work) just don't seem that useful, since they don't tell us what the long term effect of having lost their jobs in this economy will be.
I am trying to make the point that none of that matters. It doesn't matter if you are even still employed with the same job because everyone has taken massive cuts to pay and benefits or at least have not been able to keep up with inflation and rising costs. No one has any buying power.
Stagnant consumer spending could be based on increasing private debt, couldn't it? Are wages growing with inflation? Because if wages are rising but not faster than, or at least equal to, inflation ,buying power is still decreasing. And if you have to spend the extra money on credit card bills that doesn't really help. Not that I'm advocating people ignore their personal debt or that we should have government funded debt forgiveness.
There was a 45 minutes YouTube of a lecture from a Harvard professor talking about how even though Wages are mostly keeping pace with inflation, the cost of necessities is actually rising higher than inflation and it is more the optional goods that are distorting the inflation rate by having their costs decrease constantly (super cheap plasma / LCD tvs, while the bargain brand price of clothes, food, housing/rent etc has been rising faster than inflation). Which is why consumer purchasing power is down. Too much of the profits are being retained at upper levels of management / investors, and taxes are not redistributing them enough for infrastructure and social safety net maintenance.
Almost everyone is hurting right now. I don't mean, they can't attain a '50s style American dream. They are struggling every damn day with the real possibility of homelessness or some form of jail related to crimes that poor people cannot avoid (such as not paying child support).
It's not just the unemployed and underemployed though. Many people are doing the same job they were a decade ago, but getting paid much less than they would have a decade ago, and newly employed people are looking at very intense work for not much more than minimum wage with absolutely no benefits in industries that would have supported a family of four and aging parents 10-15 years ago.
It started happening gradually in all sorts of ways. Employers outsourced, so competing domestic employees had to work for less. Employers made all their employees work through staffing agencies so that they could eliminate all their benefits and pay them less for doing the exact same job. The collapse of 2008 has just solidified everything - now almost no one in the private sector gets benefits, vacations, overtime pay, or any hope at all for retirement.
Since you like anectdotes, I might as well share one, since maybe that will help me relieve some of this emotion and not make posts that don't contain more substance. Like you, I am also highly intelligent (or I used to be). Technically, my IQ was in the 99th percentile. The only reason I bring this up is because I believe it lead me to hang out in circles of intelligent people. This is where the anecdote and empirically insignificant info comes in.
I had a "good" job. I was making more money than any of my friends that are around my age, which is terribly sad because it was nowhere near enough for a sustainable life that creates a good environment to raise children in. There was no way in hell I ever would have been able to afford things like a mortgage, car payments, insurance, food, and gas and that's obviously omitting many typical bills and expenses. Even if they gave me a significant raise every year I was not even close, and obviously there were no benefits with this job (which is the norm for almost anyone now).
It's so painfully obvious to me that all of these problems stem from a usury based society, and of course the fact that all real estate has been claimed for some time now.
Usury is a fundamentally flawed concept; unless of course you want to enslave (only in the sense that they must work for virtually nothing) the vast majority of people. If you take out a loan, because you did not have enough money and your lender obviously has much more than you, then all you are doing is widening the gap of wealth infinitely. They used to only have twice as much as you, but you paid them back with interest so now they have proportionally, relatively even more than you. This is unsustainable. We are seeing the result of this all the time. When you infinitely make poor people more impoverished this is what you get. We may as well be living in the dark ages. This is not a modern standard of life. It doesn't matter if you have a smart phone when you can't afford food and healthcare.
There are of course other factors: many ways inflation is created and assets are directly acquired and controlled, but that is much more than I care to get into right now.
I guess so far that the only difference we are sure about between you and I is that I was raised in the middle class, not the upper middle class. I should have had every opportunity for success, but the truth is that the middle class no longer exists.
Now I know the economy is bad but this is downright hyperbolic
Well I was speaking in reference to earlier posts, so my anectdotal evidence mostly deals with twenty-somethings. I know they are not the only ones that suffered, but I do believe it is especially hard on this age group.
I'm not sure which part you are saying is hyperbolic. Even if you think the average person could set out in this age group and get a job that would pay rent with roommates help that is not a sustainable life that promotes child rearing.
Oh wait I see it is bolded. I'm sorry, but I still believe this is true. That's why all those for sale signs in front of homes popped up at the same time and have stayed there ever since. That's why no one can afford to retire. That's why these nonretirees have their offspring draining them into a life where nursing homes won't exist, and their children will have exactly no hope once their parents pass. I am not special here. This is common knowledge.
Well believe its true or not, it isn't. It is factually false.
The median household income is still $50,000 a year, and even the average person below the poverty line isn't facing jail because of poverty. It isn't even true among part time retail employees as an average, or among the unemployed.
People facing homelessness (unless you mean just losing their homes, which is still not even the average, whats the default rate? 5%?) is an incredibly tiny percentage of the whole, and no amount of anecdotal evidence changes that. If there were 5.5 million homeless or nearly homeless people in New York I think OWS would be a little bigger and significantly more dangerous
This isn't to say times are great, out of my graduating class at community college one out of ten people I've kept up with (anecdote ahoy) hasn't been able to find work at all, and another portion is working at shit jobs. The average person is at an entry level position in a career though. BLS statistics seem to indicate this is true for most places.
Edit: I'm making this overly confusing. The highest part of that graph is at 15-20k.
OWS is all the people who have a fear of being homeless that actually are willing to protest about it. There are many others, and some who are in denial. OWS just sees what's coming. I think it's hilarious to hear people complain about the protestors, because if something doesn't change you WILL have that many homeless people, so what's the difference?
What are the options, really? You can have several roommates and scrape by on rent until you inevitably lose your job. They are not going to sit around and wait on you to find another one. You go home and live with the folks for a while, but dad just had to take out a second mortgage and will never retire. You are getting older and it looks like you will never catch up.
A generation of young adults who are living with or dependent on their parents is not sustainable. Even if they do manage to have a place to stay for the next ten years there is no security at all.
I'm not sure if you see the whole picture when you bring up people losing their homes by default, because many of them just tried to sell immediately once the shit hit the fan. I know I'm not the only one that saw the sudden rash of homes for sale. All of those people have shifted to a less sustainable living arrangement, and no one is buying their homes because the generation that should be buying homes can't afford them.
And yes, people go to jail for being poor. They drive without insurance, they can't pay child support, they sometimes are charged with vagrancy, and they have public defenders, etc.
In that video I posted she explains why households require both parents to be working just to survive, and how any slip at all (illness, loss of a job) makes them miss a mortgage payment.
The average person is at an entry level position in a career though. BLS statistics seem to indicate this is true for most places.
I'm not sure I even believe in something as an entry level position for most industries anymore. You are basically just saying that people are who work are at the bottom rung. This is not a good thing. We both know that most jobs don't lead anywhere anymore. Even if you are promoted a few times, keeping a job at the same company is incredibly tentative.
I mean if the average person is at an entry level position, that means that all of our experienced, older people are at an entry level position. If their jobs are anything like mine was, they still won't be able to afford necessities after years of raises and promotions.
I really wish I could find a better graph of real wages by qunitile from 1970 to now. :-/
This is a very long video but you only need to skip to the 9 minute mark and wait for her to talk about the green line. You probably need the follow up graphs about savings to put it in perspective. This was even before the official recession of 2008.
I linked that same video on the last page
I was hoping more for a simple chart. But if we Elect Elizabeth Warren I'm sure she'll produce more than enough data for us to harp on, hah!
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
The median household income is still $50,000 a year, and even the average person below the poverty line isn't facing jail because of poverty.
This is true, and the data is not normally distributed, so you should use the median as the average and the expected value. I'm not trying to argue with that. In that sense, maybe I was a little hyperbolic. It's strange how that graph looks like if you cut the tail off it should be normally distributed like most human traits are. It's not even skewed left or right - it's just fucked.
Honestly, though, 50k a year is not much for one household. Most of the people who I would consider "making it" seem to be in pretty similar situations. They are in their 30s, and I don't really consider older people because they either have a completely different host of issues, or are at least somewhat established in the community. I don't even consider 20s at all because I don't know anyone in that age range that is "making it".
The ones in their 30s who came a little before the shit-storm seem to be in a situation where both parents are working and usually one makes around 50-70k a year with some benefits (at least health insurance that I know of), and the other makes around 20-30k a year with no benefits. So they are making it in the sense that they have a mortgage, two cars, and children, but at the same time we are talking some seriously shitty houses, shitty cars that break down constantly and have around 200k miles, and are struggling every day with debt collectors' phones calls and constant disputes just like they live in the ghetto. They are constantly playing this game of shifting money around trying to figure out day by day how to afford the simple things. Even if they had more than one week of vacation, they couldn't afford to do anything significant. These are just the ones who seem to be "making it". Forget savings. Forget retirement.
Interestingly, in most of the situations that I know of, it is actually the female that has the job that pays almost twice as much and includes benefits. My personal assumption is that for a while many females attained similar jobs to their male counterparts, but when the shit hit the fan, it was easier to lay off the males because they were already paying the females less than the males.
Goddamn our anectdotes.
I guess we shouldn't forget either, that the 50k median is across entire country. That can mean very different things depending on where you live.
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Almost everyone is hurting right now. I don't mean, they can't attain a '50s style American dream. They are struggling every damn day with the real possibility of homelessness or some form of jail related to crimes that poor people cannot avoid (such as not paying child support).
It's not just the unemployed and underemployed though. Many people are doing the same job they were a decade ago, but getting paid much less than they would have a decade ago, and newly employed people are looking at very intense work for not much more than minimum wage with absolutely no benefits in industries that would have supported a family of four and aging parents 10-15 years ago.
It started happening gradually in all sorts of ways. Employers outsourced, so competing domestic employees had to work for less. Employers made all their employees work through staffing agencies so that they could eliminate all their benefits and pay them less for doing the exact same job. The collapse of 2008 has just solidified everything - now almost no one in the private sector gets benefits, vacations, overtime pay, or any hope at all for retirement.
Since you like anectdotes, I might as well share one, since maybe that will help me relieve some of this emotion and not make posts that don't contain more substance. Like you, I am also highly intelligent (or I used to be). Technically, my IQ was in the 99th percentile. The only reason I bring this up is because I believe it lead me to hang out in circles of intelligent people. This is where the anecdote and empirically insignificant info comes in.
I had a "good" job. I was making more money than any of my friends that are around my age, which is terribly sad because it was nowhere near enough for a sustainable life that creates a good environment to raise children in. There was no way in hell I ever would have been able to afford things like a mortgage, car payments, insurance, food, and gas and that's obviously omitting many typical bills and expenses. Even if they gave me a significant raise every year I was not even close, and obviously there were no benefits with this job (which is the norm for almost anyone now).
It's so painfully obvious to me that all of these problems stem from a usury based society, and of course the fact that all real estate has been claimed for some time now.
Usury is a fundamentally flawed concept; unless of course you want to enslave (only in the sense that they must work for virtually nothing) the vast majority of people. If you take out a loan, because you did not have enough money and your lender obviously has much more than you, then all you are doing is widening the gap of wealth infinitely. They used to only have twice as much as you, but you paid them back with interest so now they have proportionally, relatively even more than you. This is unsustainable. We are seeing the result of this all the time. When you infinitely make poor people more impoverished this is what you get. We may as well be living in the dark ages. This is not a modern standard of life. It doesn't matter if you have a smart phone when you can't afford food and healthcare.
There are of course other factors: many ways inflation is created and assets are directly acquired and controlled, but that is much more than I care to get into right now.
I guess so far that the only difference we are sure about between you and I is that I was raised in the middle class, not the upper middle class. I should have had every opportunity for success, but the truth is that the middle class no longer exists.
Now I know the economy is bad but this is downright hyperbolic
Well I was speaking in reference to earlier posts, so my anectdotal evidence mostly deals with twenty-somethings. I know they are not the only ones that suffered, but I do believe it is especially hard on this age group.
I'm not sure which part you are saying is hyperbolic. Even if you think the average person could set out in this age group and get a job that would pay rent with roommates help that is not a sustainable life that promotes child rearing.
Oh wait I see it is bolded. I'm sorry, but I still believe this is true. That's why all those for sale signs in front of homes popped up at the same time and have stayed there ever since. That's why no one can afford to retire. That's why these nonretirees have their offspring draining them into a life where nursing homes won't exist, and their children will have exactly no hope once their parents pass. I am not special here. This is common knowledge.
Well believe its true or not, it isn't. It is factually false.
The median household income is still $50,000 a year, and even the average person below the poverty line isn't facing jail because of poverty. It isn't even true among part time retail employees as an average, or among the unemployed.
People facing homelessness (unless you mean just losing their homes, which is still not even the average, whats the default rate? 5%?) is an incredibly tiny percentage of the whole, and no amount of anecdotal evidence changes that. If there were 5.5 million homeless or nearly homeless people in New York I think OWS would be a little bigger and significantly more dangerous
This isn't to say times are great, out of my graduating class at community college one out of ten people I've kept up with (anecdote ahoy) hasn't been able to find work at all, and another portion is working at shit jobs. The average person is at an entry level position in a career though. BLS statistics seem to indicate this is true for most places.
Edit: I'm making this overly confusing. The highest part of that graph is at 15-20k.
OWS is all the people who have a fear of being homeless that actually are willing to protest about it. There are many others, and some who are in denial. OWS just sees what's coming. I think it's hilarious to hear people complain about the protestors, because if something doesn't change you WILL have that many homeless people, so what's the difference?
What are the options, really? You can have several roommates and scrape by on rent until you inevitably lose your job. They are not going to sit around and wait on you to find another one. You go home and live with the folks for a while, but dad just had to take out a second mortgage and will never retire. You are getting older and it looks like you will never catch up.
A generation of young adults who are living with or dependent on their parents is not sustainable. Even if they do manage to have a place to stay for the next ten years there is no security at all.
I'm not sure if you see the whole picture when you bring up people losing their homes by default, because many of them just tried to sell immediately once the shit hit the fan. I know I'm not the only one that saw the sudden rash of homes for sale. All of those people have shifted to a less sustainable living arrangement, and no one is buying their homes because the generation that should be buying homes can't afford them.
And yes, people go to jail for being poor. They drive without insurance, they can't pay child support, they sometimes are charged with vagrancy, and they have public defenders, etc.
In that video I posted she explains why households require both parents to be working just to survive, and how any slip at all (illness, loss of a job) makes them miss a mortgage payment.
The median household income is still $50,000 a year, and even the average person below the poverty line isn't facing jail because of poverty.
This is true, and the data is not normally distributed, so you should use the median as the average and the expected value. I'm not trying to argue with that. In that sense, maybe I was a little hyperbolic. It's strange how that graph looks like if you cut the tail off it should be normally distributed like most human traits are. It's not even skewed left or right - it's just fucked.
Honestly, though, 50k a year is not much for one household. Most of the people who I would consider "making it" seem to be in pretty similar situations. They are in their 30s, and I don't really consider older people because they either have a completely different host of issues, or are at least somewhat established in the community. I don't even consider 20s at all because I don't know anyone in that age range that is "making it".
The ones in their 30s who came a little before the shit-storm seem to be in a situation where both parents are working and usually one makes around 50-70k a year with some benefits (at least health insurance that I know of), and the other makes around 20-30k a year with no benefits. So they are making it in the sense that they have a mortgage, two cars, and children, but at the same time we are talking some seriously shitty houses, shitty cars that break down constantly and have around 200k miles, and are struggling every day with debt collectors' phones calls and constant disputes just like they live in the ghetto. They are constantly playing this game of shifting money around trying to figure out day by day how to afford the simple things. Even if they had more than one week of vacation, they couldn't afford to do anything significant. These are just the ones who seem to be "making it". Forget savings. Forget retirement.
Interestingly, in most of the situations that I know of, it is actually the female that has the job that pays almost twice as much and includes benefits. My personal assumption is that for a while many females attained similar jobs to their male counterparts, but when the shit hit the fan, it was easier to lay off the males because they were already paying the females less than the males.
Goddamn our anectdotes.
I guess we shouldn't forget either, that the 50k median is across entire country. That can mean very different things depending on where you live.
And most 20 something's I know make 6 figures. That's the problem with having a non-representative group of acquaintances.
Let's not forget that if 50k is the median, half the country makes more than that. Things are bad for a lot of people, bu there are also people getting by just fine.
Right ancedotal experience can skew your perception: Most Americans have full time jobs, most homeowners still have their homes, and not just like 51% most either, its up near 80/90. Americans still on the whole are individually richer and better off than most of the people of the rest of the world.
This does not mean that things aren't getting worse for the median worker: expenses are going up, labor protections are under attack, that kind of thing. There are millions of people having a really hard time. Fuck I had to live in someone's basement for 6 months while my former employer lied to avoid paying unemployment and I had to fight them over it. Times are tough for many people.
But it's just disingenuous to claim that it's anything approaching the majority or even average. Hell even look at liberal arts majors: something like 90% of those guys have full time work.
If things were as bad as you say Bersheli for the majority of people, we'd be near or at popular violent uprising against the wealthy ala the great depression
Let's not forget that if 50k is the median, half the country makes more than that. Things are bad for a lot of people, bu there are also people getting by just fine.
Aggregate numbers hide the reality of the situation.
When you break out median income by age and race, it becomes abundantly clear that only certain segments of the population are "getting by just fine."
Let's not forget that if 50k is the median, half the country makes more than that. Things are bad for a lot of people, bu there are also people getting by just fine.
Aggregate numbers hide the reality of the situation.
When you break out median income by age and race, it becomes abundantly clear that only certain segments of the population are "getting by just fine."
Yeah raw medians are... that's barely even a statistic. I mean median income is a starting point, not a conclusion.
I probably should not have used the term "expected value" and instead used central tendency. I just don't find much solace in the fact that most people still have their homes when we already knew in 2007 before the collapse that everyone was one inevitable occurrence (illness, loss of job, unexpected expense, rising cost, lowered pay) from missing a mortgage payment.
It's weird for me because where I live the cost of living (at least housing costs) is supposed to be much lower than the rest of the country, but 50k is still not a lot to work with.
The reason there's no violent uprising is because right now we are at a stage where people can still just keep getting deeper into debt. That just means all those people who had one mortgage now have two or have other loans. Most people are never going to have the possibility of a third or fourth mortgage, so if it comes to that who knows what kind of reaction we will see.
Let's not forget that if 50k is the median, half the country makes more than that. Things are bad for a lot of people, bu there are also people getting by just fine.
Aggregate numbers hide the reality of the situation.
When you break out median income by age and race, it becomes abundantly clear that only certain segments of the population are "getting by just fine."
Yeah raw medians are... that's barely even a statistic. I mean median income is a starting point, not a conclusion.
He said the majority of America was facing homelessness or jailtime, this is a ridiculous claim. For most people the recession means a drop in standard of living, not total poverty.
Almost everyone is hurting right now. I don't mean, they can't attain a '50s style American dream. They are struggling every damn day with the real possibility of homelessness or some form of jail related to crimes that poor people cannot avoid (such as not paying child support).
It's not just the unemployed and underemployed though. Many people are doing the same job they were a decade ago, but getting paid much less than they would have a decade ago, and newly employed people are looking at very intense work for not much more than minimum wage with absolutely no benefits in industries that would have supported a family of four and aging parents 10-15 years ago.
It started happening gradually in all sorts of ways. Employers outsourced, so competing domestic employees had to work for less. Employers made all their employees work through staffing agencies so that they could eliminate all their benefits and pay them less for doing the exact same job. The collapse of 2008 has just solidified everything - now almost no one in the private sector gets benefits, vacations, overtime pay, or any hope at all for retirement.
Since you like anectdotes, I might as well share one, since maybe that will help me relieve some of this emotion and not make posts that don't contain more substance. Like you, I am also highly intelligent (or I used to be). Technically, my IQ was in the 99th percentile. The only reason I bring this up is because I believe it lead me to hang out in circles of intelligent people. This is where the anecdote and empirically insignificant info comes in.
I had a "good" job. I was making more money than any of my friends that are around my age, which is terribly sad because it was nowhere near enough for a sustainable life that creates a good environment to raise children in. There was no way in hell I ever would have been able to afford things like a mortgage, car payments, insurance, food, and gas and that's obviously omitting many typical bills and expenses. Even if they gave me a significant raise every year I was not even close, and obviously there were no benefits with this job (which is the norm for almost anyone now).
It's so painfully obvious to me that all of these problems stem from a usury based society, and of course the fact that all real estate has been claimed for some time now.
Usury is a fundamentally flawed concept; unless of course you want to enslave (only in the sense that they must work for virtually nothing) the vast majority of people. If you take out a loan, because you did not have enough money and your lender obviously has much more than you, then all you are doing is widening the gap of wealth infinitely. They used to only have twice as much as you, but you paid them back with interest so now they have proportionally, relatively even more than you. This is unsustainable. We are seeing the result of this all the time. When you infinitely make poor people more impoverished this is what you get. We may as well be living in the dark ages. This is not a modern standard of life. It doesn't matter if you have a smart phone when you can't afford food and healthcare.
There are of course other factors: many ways inflation is created and assets are directly acquired and controlled, but that is much more than I care to get into right now.
I guess so far that the only difference we are sure about between you and I is that I was raised in the middle class, not the upper middle class. I should have had every opportunity for success, but the truth is that the middle class no longer exists.
Now I know the economy is bad but this is downright hyperbolic
Well I was speaking in reference to earlier posts, so my anectdotal evidence mostly deals with twenty-somethings. I know they are not the only ones that suffered, but I do believe it is especially hard on this age group.
I'm not sure which part you are saying is hyperbolic. Even if you think the average person could set out in this age group and get a job that would pay rent with roommates help that is not a sustainable life that promotes child rearing.
Oh wait I see it is bolded. I'm sorry, but I still believe this is true. That's why all those for sale signs in front of homes popped up at the same time and have stayed there ever since. That's why no one can afford to retire. That's why these nonretirees have their offspring draining them into a life where nursing homes won't exist, and their children will have exactly no hope once their parents pass. I am not special here. This is common knowledge.
Well believe its true or not, it isn't. It is factually false.
The median household income is still $50,000 a year, and even the average person below the poverty line isn't facing jail because of poverty. It isn't even true among part time retail employees as an average, or among the unemployed.
People facing homelessness (unless you mean just losing their homes, which is still not even the average, whats the default rate? 5%?) is an incredibly tiny percentage of the whole, and no amount of anecdotal evidence changes that. If there were 5.5 million homeless or nearly homeless people in New York I think OWS would be a little bigger and significantly more dangerous
This isn't to say times are great, out of my graduating class at community college one out of ten people I've kept up with (anecdote ahoy) hasn't been able to find work at all, and another portion is working at shit jobs. The average person is at an entry level position in a career though. BLS statistics seem to indicate this is true for most places.
Edit: I'm making this overly confusing. The highest part of that graph is at 15-20k.
OWS is all the people who have a fear of being homeless that actually are willing to protest about it. There are many others, and some who are in denial. OWS just sees what's coming. I think it's hilarious to hear people complain about the protestors, because if something doesn't change you WILL have that many homeless people, so what's the difference?
What are the options, really? You can have several roommates and scrape by on rent until you inevitably lose your job. They are not going to sit around and wait on you to find another one. You go home and live with the folks for a while, but dad just had to take out a second mortgage and will never retire. You are getting older and it looks like you will never catch up.
A generation of young adults who are living with or dependent on their parents is not sustainable. Even if they do manage to have a place to stay for the next ten years there is no security at all.
I'm not sure if you see the whole picture when you bring up people losing their homes by default, because many of them just tried to sell immediately once the shit hit the fan. I know I'm not the only one that saw the sudden rash of homes for sale. All of those people have shifted to a less sustainable living arrangement, and no one is buying their homes because the generation that should be buying homes can't afford them.
And yes, people go to jail for being poor. They drive without insurance, they can't pay child support, they sometimes are charged with vagrancy, and they have public defenders, etc.
In that video I posted she explains why households require both parents to be working just to survive, and how any slip at all (illness, loss of a job) makes them miss a mortgage payment.
The median household income is still $50,000 a year, and even the average person below the poverty line isn't facing jail because of poverty.
This is true, and the data is not normally distributed, so you should use the median as the average and the expected value. I'm not trying to argue with that. In that sense, maybe I was a little hyperbolic. It's strange how that graph looks like if you cut the tail off it should be normally distributed like most human traits are. It's not even skewed left or right - it's just fucked.
Honestly, though, 50k a year is not much for one household. Most of the people who I would consider "making it" seem to be in pretty similar situations. They are in their 30s, and I don't really consider older people because they either have a completely different host of issues, or are at least somewhat established in the community. I don't even consider 20s at all because I don't know anyone in that age range that is "making it".
The ones in their 30s who came a little before the shit-storm seem to be in a situation where both parents are working and usually one makes around 50-70k a year with some benefits (at least health insurance that I know of), and the other makes around 20-30k a year with no benefits. So they are making it in the sense that they have a mortgage, two cars, and children, but at the same time we are talking some seriously shitty houses, shitty cars that break down constantly and have around 200k miles, and are struggling every day with debt collectors' phones calls and constant disputes just like they live in the ghetto. They are constantly playing this game of shifting money around trying to figure out day by day how to afford the simple things. Even if they had more than one week of vacation, they couldn't afford to do anything significant. These are just the ones who seem to be "making it". Forget savings. Forget retirement.
Interestingly, in most of the situations that I know of, it is actually the female that has the job that pays almost twice as much and includes benefits. My personal assumption is that for a while many females attained similar jobs to their male counterparts, but when the shit hit the fan, it was easier to lay off the males because they were already paying the females less than the males.
Goddamn our anectdotes.
I guess we shouldn't forget either, that the 50k median is across entire country. That can mean very different things depending on where you live.
And most 20 something's I know make 6 figures. That's the problem with having a non-representative group of acquaintances.
Let's not forget that if 50k is the median, half the country makes more than that. Things are bad for a lot of people, bu there are also people getting by just fine.
I'd like to start at 100k, but the only image I have of the Census Bureau data is pretty low res - it's straight hurting my eyes. We know from that data that only the top 10% make over 135k and that's just the entire household. That's not an individual.
I think we can safely assume you are in a small minority.
I just don't consider that getting by fine. We know that savings are definitely a thing of the past, and retirement is getting there. That's pretty much undisputed.
I guess another factor in why we don't see more violence is that maybe we took something away from the protests of the 60s in the US. In that sense, we are already seeing the uprising/reaction.
Let's not forget that if 50k is the median, half the country makes more than that. Things are bad for a lot of people, bu there are also people getting by just fine.
Aggregate numbers hide the reality of the situation.
When you break out median income by age and race, it becomes abundantly clear that only certain segments of the population are "getting by just fine."
Yeah raw medians are... that's barely even a statistic. I mean median income is a starting point, not a conclusion.
He said the majority of America was facing homelessness or jailtime, this is a ridiculous claim. For most people the recession means a drop in standard of living, not total poverty.
I tried to clarify that I meant mostly 20 somethings, but yeah the first statement of mine you keep referring to is kind of misleading. Most of the rest of the same post I did mean almost everyone, though.
Bersheli on
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I guess another factor in why we don't see more violence is that maybe we took something away from the protests of the 60s in the US. In that sense, we are already seeing the uprising/reaction.
There's no cause for violence. Things are bad, but they're not horrific. The economy is slowly getting better, there is hope for the first time in four years. If stagnation and double digit real unemployment continues for a while, if things get as shit as Greece (this would take a lot), then we might see violence. But they're not, and so we don't.
Now if we don't start addressing the basic problems of higher cost of living, ballooning personal debt, the long term deficit, and the stark stratification of incomes in 30-50 years, we might see some serious problems. But again, short term and medium term, things just aren't that bad.
I guess another factor in why we don't see more violence is that maybe we took something away from the protests of the 60s in the US. In that sense, we are already seeing the uprising/reaction.
There's no cause for violence. Things are bad, but they're not horrific. The economy is slowly getting better, there is hope for the first time in four years. If stagnation and double digit real unemployment continues for a while, if things get as shit as Greece (this would take a lot), then we might see violence. But they're not, and so we don't.
Now if we don't start addressing the basic problems of higher cost of living, ballooning personal debt, the long term deficit, and the stark stratification of incomes in 30-50 years, we might see some serious problems. But again, short term and medium term, things just aren't that bad.
Everyone currently legally has the ability to vote right now, so the impetus for violence is lessened. The more that Republicans try to voter cage and make voting difficult, the more likely violence will become.
I guess another factor in why we don't see more violence is that maybe we took something away from the protests of the 60s in the US. In that sense, we are already seeing the uprising/reaction.
There's no cause for violence. Things are bad, but they're not horrific. The economy is slowly getting better, there is hope for the first time in four years. If stagnation and double digit real unemployment continues for a while, if things get as shit as Greece (this would take a lot), then we might see violence. But they're not, and so we don't.
Now if we don't start addressing the basic problems of higher cost of living, ballooning personal debt, the long term deficit, and the stark stratification of incomes in 30-50 years, we might see some serious problems. But again, short term and medium term, things just aren't that bad.
Everyone currently legally has the ability to vote right now, so the impetus for violence is lessened. The more that Republicans try to voter cage and make voting difficult, the more likely violence will become.
I'm not sure they're going to be able to get too far with this route. I suspect they'll get part way through before people get pissed off and vote them out. Once the dems get the majority in most of the states with voter suppression laws that do survive court challenge and a Governor willing to support legislation to repeal such laws, it'll happen fairly quickly. Frankly, I'm waiting for someone on the national level to play the "someone's poisoned the water hole" card and pass legislation that does allow states to pursue the photo ID voting laws but the caveat will be that they have to provide free photo ID voter cards to their registered voting population and have to easily accessible.
Even though the economy is getting better it doesn't look like it's going to be fast enough to prevent another round of OWS protests and rallies once we hit spring and have fairly reliable warm weather. I'd also say that current rhetoric from the GOP isn't doing anything to douse the flames either. I'm thinking OWS could be a factor in the fall elections and it could be rather potent by then since we'll have several months of good weather. The only thing that worries me about this is that OWS could theoretically hose things up by either doing something incredible stupid that drives less informed people to vote republican or encouraging people to boycott voting in the fall with the half-assed belief that one party isn't significantly worse than the other.
I guess another factor in why we don't see more violence is that maybe we took something away from the protests of the 60s in the US. In that sense, we are already seeing the uprising/reaction.
There's no cause for violence. Things are bad, but they're not horrific. The economy is slowly getting better, there is hope for the first time in four years. If stagnation and double digit real unemployment continues for a while, if things get as shit as Greece (this would take a lot), then we might see violence. But they're not, and so we don't.
Now if we don't start addressing the basic problems of higher cost of living, ballooning personal debt, the long term deficit, and the stark stratification of incomes in 30-50 years, we might see some serious problems. But again, short term and medium term, things just aren't that bad.
Everyone currently legally has the ability to vote right now, so the impetus for violence is lessened. The more that Republicans try to voter cage and make voting difficult, the more likely violence will become.
I'm not sure they're going to be able to get too far with this route. I suspect they'll get part way through before people get pissed off and vote them out. Once the dems get the majority in most of the states with voter suppression laws that do survive court challenge and a Governor willing to support legislation to repeal such laws, it'll happen fairly quickly. Frankly, I'm waiting for someone on the national level to play the "someone's poisoned the water hole" card and pass legislation that does allow states to pursue the photo ID voting laws but the caveat will be that they have to provide free photo ID voter cards to their registered voting population and have to easily accessible.
Even though the economy is getting better it doesn't look like it's going to be fast enough to prevent another round of OWS protests and rallies once we hit spring and have fairly reliable warm weather. I'd also say that current rhetoric from the GOP isn't doing anything to douse the flames either. I'm thinking OWS could be a factor in the fall elections and it could be rather potent by then since we'll have several months of good weather. The only thing that worries me about this is that OWS could theoretically hose things up by either doing something incredible stupid that drives less informed people to vote republican or encouraging people to boycott voting in the fall with the half-assed belief that one party isn't significantly worse than the other.
I think the vote boycotting thing is the bigger risk, since OWS seemed to be pretty strongly opposed to siding with the democratic party when it was active in the fall.
I remember hearing on VPR how Ben & Jerry's made a gesture of support towards OWS (i think the company, not just the titular founders who aren't officially in charge of it anymore), and how either the offices or factory in VT facilitated some sort of informational meeting on the movement (for people in VT mostly), but this cashflow is indeed serious business to put towards something like OWS.
CptKemzik on
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VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I'm excited to see what happens. There's a rally in Union Square at 5 today, and a March at 6. That's the train station I take to go home, so, convenience.
We, the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors, compelled by our personal convictions and our Company’s mission and values, wish to express our deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement and to those around the country who have joined in solidarity. The issues raised are of fundamental importance to all of us. These include:
The inequity that exists between classes in our country is simply immoral.
We are in an unemployment crisis. Almost 14 million people are unemployed. Nearly 20% of African American men are unemployed. Over 25% of our nation’s youth are unemployed.
Many workers who have jobs have to work 2 or 3 of them just to scrape by.
Higher education is almost impossible to obtain without going deeply in debt.
Corporations are permitted to spend unlimited resources to influence elections while stockpiling a trillion dollars rather than hiring people.
We know the media will either ignore you or frame the issue as to who may be getting pepper sprayed rather than addressing the despair and hardships borne by so many, or accurately conveying what this movement is about. All this goes on while corporate profits continue to soar and millionaires whine about paying a bit more in taxes. And we have not even mentioned the environment.
We know that words are relatively easy but we wanted to act quickly to demonstrate our support. As a board and as a company we have actively been involved with these issues for years but your efforts have put them out front in a way we have not been able to do. We have provided support to citizens’ efforts to rein in corporate money in politics, we pay a livable wage to our employees, we directly support family farms and we are working to source fairly traded ingredients for all our products. But we realize that Occupy Wall Street is calling for systemic change. We support this call to action and are honored to join you in this call to take back our nation and democracy.
— Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors
Im sure there will be people who would handwave this as more hippy-dippy whining or the movement being hypocritical now.
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VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I remember hearing on VPR how Ben & Jerry's made a gesture of support towards OWS (i think the company, not just the titular founders who aren't officially in charge of it anymore), and how either the offices or factory in VT facilitated some sort of informational meeting on the movement (for people in VT mostly), but this cashflow is indeed serious business to put towards something like OWS.
I imagine a whole bunch of people who previously treated the protesters like poor bums that needed to beg for food will now turn around and rage at them because they're being sponsored by big liberal corporation money.
Alright and in this next scene all the animals have AIDS.
The Gothamist article does just that. People who make this argument don't understand OWS. Period.
I'm convinced the Gothamist is where all of NY's 1% go online to vent their anger. I remember trolling their comments for some obnoxious BS and found some people completely willing to openly admit they felt their days were so important they wanted the cops to "beat their way to a solution." I usually get people who try to hide that...but not on the Gothamist.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
In light of all this, later today I think im gonna get some B&J ice cream with my tax-payer funded foodstamps. Someone, somewhere, who earnestly identifies with the "53%" (or whatever the fuck it is), will probably implode as a result.
Especially considering in this thread and others I am certain its been shown by others that throughout history, successful movements have had the support of business owners to some degree.
Are any other businesses realizing they profit more from a better democratically socialized society?
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VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The Gothamist article does just that. People who make this argument don't understand OWS. Period.
I'm convinced the Gothamist is where all of NY's 1% go online to vent their anger. I remember trolling their comments for some obnoxious BS and found some people completely willing to openly admit they felt their days were so important they wanted the cops to "beat their way to a solution." I usually get people who try to hide that...but not on the Gothamist.
Oh, they have a worse community than Yahoo! does by far.
Oh, they have a worse community than Yahoo! does by far.
I'll say, it's impossible to troll someone who has no shame in being a monster. -_-;;
I mean I'll even take youtube comments over the Gothamist. I don't post there anymore; I was losing too much faith in people.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
I remember hearing on VPR how Ben & Jerry's made a gesture of support towards OWS (i think the company, not just the titular founders who aren't officially in charge of it anymore), and how either the offices or factory in VT facilitated some sort of informational meeting on the movement (for people in VT mostly), but this cashflow is indeed serious business to put towards something like OWS.
I imagine a whole bunch of people who previously treated the protesters like poor bums that needed to beg for food will now turn around and rage at them because they're being sponsored by big liberal corporation money.
I would not be surprised.
As I said before, they really need to drop the 100% consensus crap and drop the anarchists and libertarians since that's going to make it harder for them to be taken serious because it makes it easy for saboteurs and clowns to hamper their efforts.
I remember hearing on VPR how Ben & Jerry's made a gesture of support towards OWS (i think the company, not just the titular founders who aren't officially in charge of it anymore), and how either the offices or factory in VT facilitated some sort of informational meeting on the movement (for people in VT mostly), but this cashflow is indeed serious business to put towards something like OWS.
I imagine a whole bunch of people who previously treated the protesters like poor bums that needed to beg for food will now turn around and rage at them because they're being sponsored by big liberal corporation money.
I would not be surprised.
As I said before, they really need to drop the 100% consensus crap and drop the anarchists and libertarians since that's going to make it harder for them to be taken serious because it makes it easy for saboteurs and clowns to hamper their efforts.
Agreed.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
What the hell is their exempt purpose which allows them to be a 501(c)(3)? They are just beggining for an audit. . .
Why? It's a non-profit organization. We're not talking about Ben & Jerry's the company being a 501(c)(3), but former owners who are now running their own NPO.
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A.) Your wife's friend doesn't know how to prioritize if she has all that and can't buy shoes. At the very least she could've popped it on her credit card like (I'm assuming) the cars and such are on. Now that I've typed all this out, I feel like I'm being a bit rude here, but I think it's a fair point.
B.) That comment was a joke based on the incredibly ludicrous segment Fox News ran over the summer about the "myth" of poverty, citing how many Americans have luxuries like air conditioning and a refrigerator and a microwave.
While I'm sure that there are people who are living beyond their means, the ridiculousness of what some people in the zeitgeist claim against teh poorz is just insulting. So that's what I was shooting at, that sentiment which I think is tied into the media ignoring rising costs like food.
This is a very long video but you only need to skip to the 9 minute mark and wait for her to talk about the green line. You probably need the follow up graphs about savings to put it in perspective. This was even before the official recession of 2008.
Well believe its true or not, it isn't. It is factually false.
The median household income is still $50,000 a year, and even the average person below the poverty line isn't facing jail because of poverty. It isn't even true among part time retail employees as an average, or among the unemployed.
People facing homelessness (unless you mean just losing their homes, which is still not even the average, whats the default rate? 5%?) is an incredibly tiny percentage of the whole, and no amount of anecdotal evidence changes that. If there were 5.5 million homeless or nearly homeless people in New York I think OWS would be a little bigger and significantly more dangerous
This isn't to say times are great, out of my graduating class at community college one out of ten people I've kept up with (anecdote ahoy) hasn't been able to find work at all, and another portion is working at shit jobs. The average person is at an entry level position in a career though. BLS statistics seem to indicate this is true for most places.
It seems I've found said video.
Edit: I'm making this overly confusing. The highest part of that graph is at 15-20k.
OWS is all the people who have a fear of being homeless that actually are willing to protest about it. There are many others, and some who are in denial. OWS just sees what's coming. I think it's hilarious to hear people complain about the protestors, because if something doesn't change you WILL have that many homeless people, so what's the difference?
What are the options, really? You can have several roommates and scrape by on rent until you inevitably lose your job. They are not going to sit around and wait on you to find another one. You go home and live with the folks for a while, but dad just had to take out a second mortgage and will never retire. You are getting older and it looks like you will never catch up.
A generation of young adults who are living with or dependent on their parents is not sustainable. Even if they do manage to have a place to stay for the next ten years there is no security at all.
I'm not sure if you see the whole picture when you bring up people losing their homes by default, because many of them just tried to sell immediately once the shit hit the fan. I know I'm not the only one that saw the sudden rash of homes for sale. All of those people have shifted to a less sustainable living arrangement, and no one is buying their homes because the generation that should be buying homes can't afford them.
And yes, people go to jail for being poor. They drive without insurance, they can't pay child support, they sometimes are charged with vagrancy, and they have public defenders, etc.
In that video I posted she explains why households require both parents to be working just to survive, and how any slip at all (illness, loss of a job) makes them miss a mortgage payment.
That was in 2007 and things are far worse now.
I'm not sure I even believe in something as an entry level position for most industries anymore. You are basically just saying that people are who work are at the bottom rung. This is not a good thing. We both know that most jobs don't lead anywhere anymore. Even if you are promoted a few times, keeping a job at the same company is incredibly tentative.
I mean if the average person is at an entry level position, that means that all of our experienced, older people are at an entry level position. If their jobs are anything like mine was, they still won't be able to afford necessities after years of raises and promotions.
I linked that same video on the last page
I was hoping more for a simple chart. But if we Elect Elizabeth Warren I'm sure she'll produce more than enough data for us to harp on, hah!
This is true, and the data is not normally distributed, so you should use the median as the average and the expected value. I'm not trying to argue with that. In that sense, maybe I was a little hyperbolic. It's strange how that graph looks like if you cut the tail off it should be normally distributed like most human traits are. It's not even skewed left or right - it's just fucked.
Honestly, though, 50k a year is not much for one household. Most of the people who I would consider "making it" seem to be in pretty similar situations. They are in their 30s, and I don't really consider older people because they either have a completely different host of issues, or are at least somewhat established in the community. I don't even consider 20s at all because I don't know anyone in that age range that is "making it".
The ones in their 30s who came a little before the shit-storm seem to be in a situation where both parents are working and usually one makes around 50-70k a year with some benefits (at least health insurance that I know of), and the other makes around 20-30k a year with no benefits. So they are making it in the sense that they have a mortgage, two cars, and children, but at the same time we are talking some seriously shitty houses, shitty cars that break down constantly and have around 200k miles, and are struggling every day with debt collectors' phones calls and constant disputes just like they live in the ghetto. They are constantly playing this game of shifting money around trying to figure out day by day how to afford the simple things. Even if they had more than one week of vacation, they couldn't afford to do anything significant. These are just the ones who seem to be "making it". Forget savings. Forget retirement.
Interestingly, in most of the situations that I know of, it is actually the female that has the job that pays almost twice as much and includes benefits. My personal assumption is that for a while many females attained similar jobs to their male counterparts, but when the shit hit the fan, it was easier to lay off the males because they were already paying the females less than the males.
Goddamn our anectdotes.
I guess we shouldn't forget either, that the 50k median is across entire country. That can mean very different things depending on where you live.
And most 20 something's I know make 6 figures. That's the problem with having a non-representative group of acquaintances.
Let's not forget that if 50k is the median, half the country makes more than that. Things are bad for a lot of people, bu there are also people getting by just fine.
This does not mean that things aren't getting worse for the median worker: expenses are going up, labor protections are under attack, that kind of thing. There are millions of people having a really hard time. Fuck I had to live in someone's basement for 6 months while my former employer lied to avoid paying unemployment and I had to fight them over it. Times are tough for many people.
But it's just disingenuous to claim that it's anything approaching the majority or even average. Hell even look at liberal arts majors: something like 90% of those guys have full time work.
If things were as bad as you say Bersheli for the majority of people, we'd be near or at popular violent uprising against the wealthy ala the great depression
Aggregate numbers hide the reality of the situation.
When you break out median income by age and race, it becomes abundantly clear that only certain segments of the population are "getting by just fine."
Yeah raw medians are... that's barely even a statistic. I mean median income is a starting point, not a conclusion.
It's weird for me because where I live the cost of living (at least housing costs) is supposed to be much lower than the rest of the country, but 50k is still not a lot to work with.
The reason there's no violent uprising is because right now we are at a stage where people can still just keep getting deeper into debt. That just means all those people who had one mortgage now have two or have other loans. Most people are never going to have the possibility of a third or fourth mortgage, so if it comes to that who knows what kind of reaction we will see.
He said the majority of America was facing homelessness or jailtime, this is a ridiculous claim. For most people the recession means a drop in standard of living, not total poverty.
I'd like to start at 100k, but the only image I have of the Census Bureau data is pretty low res - it's straight hurting my eyes. We know from that data that only the top 10% make over 135k and that's just the entire household. That's not an individual.
I think we can safely assume you are in a small minority.
I just don't consider that getting by fine. We know that savings are definitely a thing of the past, and retirement is getting there. That's pretty much undisputed.
I tried to clarify that I meant mostly 20 somethings, but yeah the first statement of mine you keep referring to is kind of misleading. Most of the rest of the same post I did mean almost everyone, though.
There's no cause for violence. Things are bad, but they're not horrific. The economy is slowly getting better, there is hope for the first time in four years. If stagnation and double digit real unemployment continues for a while, if things get as shit as Greece (this would take a lot), then we might see violence. But they're not, and so we don't.
Now if we don't start addressing the basic problems of higher cost of living, ballooning personal debt, the long term deficit, and the stark stratification of incomes in 30-50 years, we might see some serious problems. But again, short term and medium term, things just aren't that bad.
Everyone currently legally has the ability to vote right now, so the impetus for violence is lessened. The more that Republicans try to voter cage and make voting difficult, the more likely violence will become.
MWO: Adamski
I'm not sure they're going to be able to get too far with this route. I suspect they'll get part way through before people get pissed off and vote them out. Once the dems get the majority in most of the states with voter suppression laws that do survive court challenge and a Governor willing to support legislation to repeal such laws, it'll happen fairly quickly. Frankly, I'm waiting for someone on the national level to play the "someone's poisoned the water hole" card and pass legislation that does allow states to pursue the photo ID voting laws but the caveat will be that they have to provide free photo ID voter cards to their registered voting population and have to easily accessible.
Even though the economy is getting better it doesn't look like it's going to be fast enough to prevent another round of OWS protests and rallies once we hit spring and have fairly reliable warm weather. I'd also say that current rhetoric from the GOP isn't doing anything to douse the flames either. I'm thinking OWS could be a factor in the fall elections and it could be rather potent by then since we'll have several months of good weather. The only thing that worries me about this is that OWS could theoretically hose things up by either doing something incredible stupid that drives less informed people to vote republican or encouraging people to boycott voting in the fall with the half-assed belief that one party isn't significantly worse than the other.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
I think the vote boycotting thing is the bigger risk, since OWS seemed to be pretty strongly opposed to siding with the democratic party when it was active in the fall.
http://gothamist.com/2012/02/28/occupy_wall_street_sees_cash_infusi.php
It must be to protest EMI clamping down on The Beatles slipping into Public Domain.
From what I've seen on the news and in the university square, it's about the changes to the NHS and the cuts to education spending.
I remember hearing on VPR how Ben & Jerry's made a gesture of support towards OWS (i think the company, not just the titular founders who aren't officially in charge of it anymore), and how either the offices or factory in VT facilitated some sort of informational meeting on the movement (for people in VT mostly), but this cashflow is indeed serious business to put towards something like OWS.
Im sure there will be people who would handwave this as more hippy-dippy whining or the movement being hypocritical now.
The Gothamist article does just that. People who make this argument don't understand OWS. Period.
I imagine a whole bunch of people who previously treated the protesters like poor bums that needed to beg for food will now turn around and rage at them because they're being sponsored by big liberal corporation money.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
I'm convinced the Gothamist is where all of NY's 1% go online to vent their anger. I remember trolling their comments for some obnoxious BS and found some people completely willing to openly admit they felt their days were so important they wanted the cops to "beat their way to a solution." I usually get people who try to hide that...but not on the Gothamist.
Especially considering in this thread and others I am certain its been shown by others that throughout history, successful movements have had the support of business owners to some degree.
Are any other businesses realizing they profit more from a better democratically socialized society?
Oh, they have a worse community than Yahoo! does by far.
I'll say, it's impossible to troll someone who has no shame in being a monster. -_-;;
I mean I'll even take youtube comments over the Gothamist. I don't post there anymore; I was losing too much faith in people.
I would not be surprised.
As I said before, they really need to drop the 100% consensus crap and drop the anarchists and libertarians since that's going to make it harder for them to be taken serious because it makes it easy for saboteurs and clowns to hamper their efforts.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
What the hell is their exempt purpose which allows them to be a 501(c)(3)? They are just beggining for an audit. . .
Agreed.
Why? It's a non-profit organization. We're not talking about Ben & Jerry's the company being a 501(c)(3), but former owners who are now running their own NPO.