The disconnect is that the value add provided by labor is being stolen by corporations through wage suppression, union suppression and hoarding capital.
2021 Set an all time record in stock buybacks, $931 billion. That excess capital should have gone to wages but none of it did. This excess capital was hoarded at t time when American’s were reeling from COVID and inflation.
The political infrastructure that used to provide a method for the consumer to push back in the form of market competition is largely gone and the legislatures are more concerned with catering to their donors than caring about their constituents voting power. Once SCOTUS rendered the decision in did in Citizens United v FEC, this was the goal, to make dollars have more power than votes and it was successful.
2019 SCOTUS decision Common Cause v Russo made sure that public voting power would be further eroded by allowing the winning party (party that raised the most money from corporations) to gerrymander districts to insure their hegemony.
Wages have been stagnant since 1970 in that they have not risen, on average in the aggregate (+/-10%). CEO wages have risen over 1300% since 1978. Productivity has risen about 60%. (The mean or median is within 5% of each other on wages).
The USA has a union density of around 10% and has the highest inequality of any G7 nation. Economic mobility in the USA is almost nothing.
Sweden has the least inequality and a union density of around 70% and they have a much higher standard of living.
In the USA the rich are getting very much richer while interquartile wage compression is on the rise. In other words, those in the middle are being pushed down the economic ladder while those already at the top are getting a great deal richer.
No.
Nah..
Nah
Generally true. Compounding this is that the global populations that are actively pumping out babies aren’t the ones providing goods and services.
linkedin easy apply is probably why there are so many applicants. I would guess that its not 800 QUALIFIED applicants for a job but rather people hoping they “get lucky”
I’ve always wanted to build giant trebuchets with gasoline infused explosive bombs. Thanks to this post and my government, I may yet get that chance.
I think the 800 applications for one job opening has a lot more to do with the trend of people “job-hopping” after 1-2 years of working.
I don’t think any of the information there is well sourced or grounded in reality. I think it speaks to a kind of anxiety that people have about things, largely as a result of inflation, and a general distrust of the government and authority.
I don’t think we’ve actually hit the point yet where our society’s demand for labor has fallen well short of the labor that’s available, and really you have to consider both of those as variables; if there’s so much excess labor you would anticipate seeing a precipitous drop off in compensation; lots of places would be paying no more than minimum wage. We don’t really have that situation, and I don’t see much support for the idea that every job is getting 800 applicants. Maybe in isolated markets.
Here’s where I give it some credit and where I think this is coming from though; when it comes to education and training we are completely and totally fucking up.
I think where you’re seeing friction in the job market it’s more a mismatch of skills and training required vs the labor available. I think this is completely predictable. We’ve removed funding for public education to the point that schools are begging for teachers across the country. We’ve tolerated trade schools that were basically predatory lending practices, we’ve let colleges become country clubs with skyrocketing administrative costs and saddled students with huge debt for long degree terms because it fits the business model of the university.
It’s not 1960 anymore, we require different skills and knowledge in the workforce. Things are more complicated, carried, and niche oriented, and that’s fine but our system of education and training has to be hardened and adapted to that and instead we’ve turned it into a business and removed as much public funding as possible.
As for health concerns, I don’t really see any evidence that people are broadly less healthy as a result of stress today than they were 50 years ago. If anything I think we’re just more aware of it today.
I keep wondering if foreign governments operatives are using AI and ChatGPT to write doomsday articles and spread fear. Somebody must be doing that and then I see articles like this and I wonder if it’s a real person actually writing these thoughts. Just something to think about people.
Uncertainty leads to fascism as people take a shitty answer over no answer.
The problem is not that there is a lack of work that needs to be done, the problem is that the market is full of rent seeking plutocrats.
There is work that needs doing that is worth doing. It’s work that people love to do, but they can’t afford to do it because the job pays terribly and the conditions that they have to do them in are awful.
Elimimating rentiers from the market can help. Making sure people’s basic needs are met so that they are free to do the jobs that don’t have an existing market incentive will help. And reorienting government to help people instead of corporations will also help.
The opener and the first bullet point are in contradiction
I’m tired of people saying they are being gaslit. It’s that they aren’t taking in the full context of the updates and admittedly the Biden admin’s messaging here has been weak.
What the update should more clearly be is that when they say we are doing great, we *are* in fact doing great in the context of the global economy post-COVID. People must not be looking outside of our borders at all these past several years because they are not getting this at all. All of our economic peers are still having the hangover over it, including our rivals and allies. The Biden admin deserves a lot of credit for how relatively well we are doing as we are the envy of many other peer economies right now.
What is *not* being said is that that wealth inequality issues that have been steadily building up over decades are now dead and gone. In fact, Democrats have been shouting from the rooftops over this going back at least 20 years. What’s frustrating as a liberal is that we’ve been sounding the alarm here for so long and we were dismissed as being a bunch of extremist lunatics going back to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Now suddenly post-COVID and that (because of?) a Democrat is in office, a whole lot of conservatives are feeling the squeeze here and talking about it as if it is a new problem.
It’s rough to hear as a liberal people complain about being gaslit when are at the least arguably being gaslit about this for decades now. It’s seriously eye-rolling. I’m glad you all conservatives are on board in agreeing there is a problem now and I hope that in the future you won’t decide it’s suddenly no longer an issue if a Republican is in office. Conservatives went from gaslighting us about this to now suddenly “WE NEED A REVOLUTION” in the span of 2 years as soon as Trump left office. Seriously, it’s eye rolling and people need to check their biases here.
That all being said. I don’t believe the problem is that there isn’t enough jobs. It’s that we have no worker protections and have favored the 1% and corporations over workers at every turn, and now people are seemingly surprised when we’re left in the dust.
What we need is unionization and to have some policy to address outsourcing of certain jobs. If necessary, we need to tariff our own corporations like John Deere that are outsourcing the manufacturing jobs just to re-import them from countries with a weak currency, low relative quality of life, and no worker protections. Access to the American market is a key we do hold in government and fact of the matter is we can set some terms on what it takes to access it.
The entire philosophy that “maybe this time if we give even more tax breaks to corporations that they will keep jobs in the US and the wealth will trickle down to working people” needs to die. If this were science then it would be scientific law at this point as it’s been proven over countless times now. We have seen time and time again that these corporations will fight tooth and nail to keep costs down and pay their workers as little as possible at every turn and they will never voluntarily raise wages. They will never pay their workers more when they can give the top leadership and shareholders more money in the short term and if they can buy back their own stocks instead of giving workers a raise.
**To break it down: What happened when we tried to reduce our worker protections and wages to compete with the types of countries we outsource jobs to is that we reduced the standard of living to where we are comparable to the worst off of the workers there.**
The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over (lower taxes on the rich and corporations waiting for it to trickle down) and expect a different result. We need to make some sweeping changes and take power over access to our markets and give power back to unions. Unions are the best tool in the worker’s toolbox we have to bargain with corporations to pay a decent wage.
I think the amount of propaganda pushing for revolutions and civil wars benefits someone/country, and it isn’t us/ours.
Many people are too precious and feel above laboring or working their way up. The jobs people think they deserve to walk into are the high paying kind where you sit on your ass and keep your nails clean. There are thousands of blue collar jobs near you that pay 60-100k if you are not too proud to work.
No. statement made by some moron on facebook.
Yes, this statement is true. The Oligarchy is manipulating the economy for another recession so that it can repeat the “success” of 2008 when they stole millions of homes from people because of their fraudulent mortgages. And then the “greatest upward transfer of wealth” that Jimmy Dore discussed in the “Covid money talks” with Dylan Ratigan.
u/HeroldOfLevi is absolutely right.
If you want more, these YouTube channels explain it. It cannot be understood in a single video so you have some work in front of you.
This reeks of “revolution will be bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Back door support for Project 2025 / Trumpism and implies that “something better” exists out there than what we have. (There isn’t.)
Implies that we need a revolution to fix it (we don’t.)
I think the real root cause is beyond that – and rooted in Thiel and Musk and people who are looking for sort of feudalism.
Yes, absolutely. This statement isn’t biased in any way, breaks free of political party to look at things for just how they are – which is rare to see at all anymore. Anyone with any critical thinking skills can see this is an accurate statement of current economic conditions.
Just keep in mind that corporations employ a minority of Americans, small and medium businesses employ the majority, so things like stock buybacks and other criticisms of public companies may be valid, but don’t drive the majority of imbalances between labor supply and demand.
This problem is exclusive to white collar jobs. The construction and service sector understaffed
In short, things are bad!
The only correction I would make is that the polarization is not due to people being scared. It’s in our nature to be tribal and it’s being used again. Question: Did Kamala Harris decide to claim to be black for political reasons? Follow up question: Whatever answer you gave, explain why the hell does it matter. How does that question in have any relation to her ability to be president. Follow up to the follow up: Why are we discussing it so much and why is it getting so much coverage? We have all chosen teams and my team is against your team.
The results from long term use of fiat money. Inflation is a scam that will water down our economic production until the last drop is gone.
Trickle up via counterfeiting
The constant war in America is capital vs labor. “If there is class warfare in America, my class is winning.” Warren Buffet.
People are scared because of pressure on the job to overperform, work unpaid hours, leave vacation on the table and are in debt at all levels. The capitalist uses a form of extortion and gets govt. to do their bidding.
Society at large suffers.
He’s pushing for revolution, yet Marx was an evolutionist in regard to his theory.
It doesn’t always have to go towards revolution. Many strides in the pursuit of worker rights and power did involve bloodshed, but also of legislative and evolutionary conditions.
26 comments
That statement is mostly true.
The disconnect is that the value add provided by labor is being stolen by corporations through wage suppression, union suppression and hoarding capital.
2021 Set an all time record in stock buybacks, $931 billion. That excess capital should have gone to wages but none of it did. This excess capital was hoarded at t time when American’s were reeling from COVID and inflation.
The political infrastructure that used to provide a method for the consumer to push back in the form of market competition is largely gone and the legislatures are more concerned with catering to their donors than caring about their constituents voting power. Once SCOTUS rendered the decision in did in Citizens United v FEC, this was the goal, to make dollars have more power than votes and it was successful.
2019 SCOTUS decision Common Cause v Russo made sure that public voting power would be further eroded by allowing the winning party (party that raised the most money from corporations) to gerrymander districts to insure their hegemony.
Wages have been stagnant since 1970 in that they have not risen, on average in the aggregate (+/-10%). CEO wages have risen over 1300% since 1978. Productivity has risen about 60%. (The mean or median is within 5% of each other on wages).
The USA has a union density of around 10% and has the highest inequality of any G7 nation. Economic mobility in the USA is almost nothing.
Sweden has the least inequality and a union density of around 70% and they have a much higher standard of living.
In the USA the rich are getting very much richer while interquartile wage compression is on the rise. In other words, those in the middle are being pushed down the economic ladder while those already at the top are getting a great deal richer.
No.
Nah..
Nah
Generally true. Compounding this is that the global populations that are actively pumping out babies aren’t the ones providing goods and services.
linkedin easy apply is probably why there are so many applicants. I would guess that its not 800 QUALIFIED applicants for a job but rather people hoping they “get lucky”
I’ve always wanted to build giant trebuchets with gasoline infused explosive bombs. Thanks to this post and my government, I may yet get that chance.
I think the 800 applications for one job opening has a lot more to do with the trend of people “job-hopping” after 1-2 years of working.
I don’t think any of the information there is well sourced or grounded in reality. I think it speaks to a kind of anxiety that people have about things, largely as a result of inflation, and a general distrust of the government and authority.
I don’t think we’ve actually hit the point yet where our society’s demand for labor has fallen well short of the labor that’s available, and really you have to consider both of those as variables; if there’s so much excess labor you would anticipate seeing a precipitous drop off in compensation; lots of places would be paying no more than minimum wage. We don’t really have that situation, and I don’t see much support for the idea that every job is getting 800 applicants. Maybe in isolated markets.
Here’s where I give it some credit and where I think this is coming from though; when it comes to education and training we are completely and totally fucking up.
I think where you’re seeing friction in the job market it’s more a mismatch of skills and training required vs the labor available. I think this is completely predictable. We’ve removed funding for public education to the point that schools are begging for teachers across the country. We’ve tolerated trade schools that were basically predatory lending practices, we’ve let colleges become country clubs with skyrocketing administrative costs and saddled students with huge debt for long degree terms because it fits the business model of the university.
It’s not 1960 anymore, we require different skills and knowledge in the workforce. Things are more complicated, carried, and niche oriented, and that’s fine but our system of education and training has to be hardened and adapted to that and instead we’ve turned it into a business and removed as much public funding as possible.
As for health concerns, I don’t really see any evidence that people are broadly less healthy as a result of stress today than they were 50 years ago. If anything I think we’re just more aware of it today.
I keep wondering if foreign governments operatives are using AI and ChatGPT to write doomsday articles and spread fear. Somebody must be doing that and then I see articles like this and I wonder if it’s a real person actually writing these thoughts. Just something to think about people.
Uncertainty leads to fascism as people take a shitty answer over no answer.
The problem is not that there is a lack of work that needs to be done, the problem is that the market is full of rent seeking plutocrats.
There is work that needs doing that is worth doing. It’s work that people love to do, but they can’t afford to do it because the job pays terribly and the conditions that they have to do them in are awful.
Elimimating rentiers from the market can help. Making sure people’s basic needs are met so that they are free to do the jobs that don’t have an existing market incentive will help. And reorienting government to help people instead of corporations will also help.
The opener and the first bullet point are in contradiction
I’m tired of people saying they are being gaslit. It’s that they aren’t taking in the full context of the updates and admittedly the Biden admin’s messaging here has been weak.
What the update should more clearly be is that when they say we are doing great, we *are* in fact doing great in the context of the global economy post-COVID. People must not be looking outside of our borders at all these past several years because they are not getting this at all. All of our economic peers are still having the hangover over it, including our rivals and allies. The Biden admin deserves a lot of credit for how relatively well we are doing as we are the envy of many other peer economies right now.
What is *not* being said is that that wealth inequality issues that have been steadily building up over decades are now dead and gone. In fact, Democrats have been shouting from the rooftops over this going back at least 20 years. What’s frustrating as a liberal is that we’ve been sounding the alarm here for so long and we were dismissed as being a bunch of extremist lunatics going back to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Now suddenly post-COVID and that (because of?) a Democrat is in office, a whole lot of conservatives are feeling the squeeze here and talking about it as if it is a new problem.
It’s rough to hear as a liberal people complain about being gaslit when are at the least arguably being gaslit about this for decades now. It’s seriously eye-rolling. I’m glad you all conservatives are on board in agreeing there is a problem now and I hope that in the future you won’t decide it’s suddenly no longer an issue if a Republican is in office. Conservatives went from gaslighting us about this to now suddenly “WE NEED A REVOLUTION” in the span of 2 years as soon as Trump left office. Seriously, it’s eye rolling and people need to check their biases here.
That all being said. I don’t believe the problem is that there isn’t enough jobs. It’s that we have no worker protections and have favored the 1% and corporations over workers at every turn, and now people are seemingly surprised when we’re left in the dust.
What we need is unionization and to have some policy to address outsourcing of certain jobs. If necessary, we need to tariff our own corporations like John Deere that are outsourcing the manufacturing jobs just to re-import them from countries with a weak currency, low relative quality of life, and no worker protections. Access to the American market is a key we do hold in government and fact of the matter is we can set some terms on what it takes to access it.
The entire philosophy that “maybe this time if we give even more tax breaks to corporations that they will keep jobs in the US and the wealth will trickle down to working people” needs to die. If this were science then it would be scientific law at this point as it’s been proven over countless times now. We have seen time and time again that these corporations will fight tooth and nail to keep costs down and pay their workers as little as possible at every turn and they will never voluntarily raise wages. They will never pay their workers more when they can give the top leadership and shareholders more money in the short term and if they can buy back their own stocks instead of giving workers a raise.
**To break it down: What happened when we tried to reduce our worker protections and wages to compete with the types of countries we outsource jobs to is that we reduced the standard of living to where we are comparable to the worst off of the workers there.**
The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over (lower taxes on the rich and corporations waiting for it to trickle down) and expect a different result. We need to make some sweeping changes and take power over access to our markets and give power back to unions. Unions are the best tool in the worker’s toolbox we have to bargain with corporations to pay a decent wage.
I think the amount of propaganda pushing for revolutions and civil wars benefits someone/country, and it isn’t us/ours.
Many people are too precious and feel above laboring or working their way up. The jobs people think they deserve to walk into are the high paying kind where you sit on your ass and keep your nails clean. There are thousands of blue collar jobs near you that pay 60-100k if you are not too proud to work.
No. statement made by some moron on facebook.
Yes, this statement is true. The Oligarchy is manipulating the economy for another recession so that it can repeat the “success” of 2008 when they stole millions of homes from people because of their fraudulent mortgages. And then the “greatest upward transfer of wealth” that Jimmy Dore discussed in the “Covid money talks” with Dylan Ratigan.
u/HeroldOfLevi is absolutely right.
If you want more, these YouTube channels explain it. It cannot be understood in a single video so you have some work in front of you.
[Michael Hudson and Radika Desai](https://www.youtube.com/@GeopoliticalEconomyReport)
[Richard Wolff](https://www.youtube.com/@democracyatwrk)
This reeks of “revolution will be bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Back door support for Project 2025 / Trumpism and implies that “something better” exists out there than what we have. (There isn’t.)
Implies that we need a revolution to fix it (we don’t.)
I think the real root cause is beyond that – and rooted in Thiel and Musk and people who are looking for sort of feudalism.
Yes, absolutely. This statement isn’t biased in any way, breaks free of political party to look at things for just how they are – which is rare to see at all anymore. Anyone with any critical thinking skills can see this is an accurate statement of current economic conditions.
Just keep in mind that corporations employ a minority of Americans, small and medium businesses employ the majority, so things like stock buybacks and other criticisms of public companies may be valid, but don’t drive the majority of imbalances between labor supply and demand.
This problem is exclusive to white collar jobs. The construction and service sector understaffed
In short, things are bad!
The only correction I would make is that the polarization is not due to people being scared. It’s in our nature to be tribal and it’s being used again. Question: Did Kamala Harris decide to claim to be black for political reasons? Follow up question: Whatever answer you gave, explain why the hell does it matter. How does that question in have any relation to her ability to be president. Follow up to the follow up: Why are we discussing it so much and why is it getting so much coverage? We have all chosen teams and my team is against your team.
The results from long term use of fiat money. Inflation is a scam that will water down our economic production until the last drop is gone.
Trickle up via counterfeiting
The constant war in America is capital vs labor. “If there is class warfare in America, my class is winning.” Warren Buffet.
People are scared because of pressure on the job to overperform, work unpaid hours, leave vacation on the table and are in debt at all levels. The capitalist uses a form of extortion and gets govt. to do their bidding.
Society at large suffers.
He’s pushing for revolution, yet Marx was an evolutionist in regard to his theory.
It doesn’t always have to go towards revolution. Many strides in the pursuit of worker rights and power did involve bloodshed, but also of legislative and evolutionary conditions.