Are you telling me that I don’t actually need the 70" TV I rent?
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I don’t know what’s best for you. That’s up to you.
Just don’t live at 135% of your means and then complain that you’re drowning in debt and unable to invest… that the system is rigged.
A system where pols are increasingly corrupt and don’t vote in the interest of their constituents, massive corps actively fight to make competition literally illegal, a national budget/waste that makes the death star look like a good investment, and a society that spends 10 times the amount teaching people how to accumulate debt over any type of money management.
The system IS rigged. It’s just our daily lives that aren’t on a micro level.
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It’s not rigged; it’s da racist and sexist.
Is now a better time to reach financial independence than 25/50/100 years ago for someone born to modest means?
I would say yes. The information age has made making better decision a few clicks away if you care to look.
I personally know a low voltage wiring contractor that used to clear about $70k/year with his business, not two years ago. He and a buddy got together and scared up $25k to start a call center business two years ago. Now he clears $80k/month and has 88 employees. They got the financing and business plan help through the internet.
What time period was fairer or better to the lower classes in your opinion?
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Median household income is the same now as it was in 1996. Except prices on literally everything have skyrocketed. As I said above, in a “system” sense, ie macro sense, we were certainly more likely to be financially independent 20-25 years ago.
Which is great. But for every 1 of your friend, there’s 3 guys that shit the bed with it.
The period between Bush Sr’s first term and Clinton’s last one.
So the internet bubble… I can see that. Wages are stagnant because of globalist competition. It’s cheaper to make products elsewhere or import H1B’s to do the jobs here. Competition is a real bitch.
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Being beaten, shot, killed, profiled and generally treated like a second class citizen are micro aggressions? What?
I think you are mixing up SJWs and Black people.
I’d say no. In the post-WWII era, people had far more financial independence and security. Look at the modern age - higher education inflation in double digits, home price inflation (driven in part by the competition to get into decent school districts), health care cost inflation, the list goes on - all while wages are stuck (but income is growing, like crazy in some cases, just not for the wage earner) and job insecurity is high. The internet isn’t solving any of these things.
Entrepreneurship is low - the costs of starting up are high, due in part to excessive regulation, but also due to problems with health care: most startups simply can’t afford to pay for employee health care (if they are large enough to be required to, and if they are small, it’s even more prohibitive). The excessive regulation, in many cases, isn’t strictly a function of “big government” and nosy liberals getting in the way of businesses doing their thing - it’s a function of some “big business” helping keep barriers to entry in place to keep out upstarts. It’s at its worst in banking and health care.
People can and should get away from the dumb consumerism that prevents them from building economic security and wealth - I’m all for that, I really am (I’m really frugal myself), but they’ll have to not only reorient their lives, but they’ll have to actively ignore the constant voices telling them that the American Dream amounts to little more than access to cheap stuff, which is the heart of our economic policies these days, and which is dead wrong.
But even if said families tightened their belts and reduced frivolous or questionable consumption habits, none of that will fix the problems I referenced above. That’ll take policy, big policy.
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Good post. The trillion dollar question is “what policy will make the middle class stronger?” When I look for countries with strong middle classes they are very few and far between. Countries like Germany use the weak nations to devalue the Euro so they can export on top of very strict import controls. They subsidize popular industries to a much greater extent than the US.
I’m not sure how those type of solutions would work in the US. Our crooked pols picking winners and losers more than they do now doesn’t give me warm fuzzy feelings.
I think the time you’re talking about (post WW2) was an anomaly that won’t ever happen again. Every other industrialized nation that could compete with us laid in ruin. We were the only game in town.
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Competition rarely drives increases in lower end job pay. It’s almost exclusively the minimum wage hikes. Jobs within ~20% of the minimum wage tend to increase with the minimum wage instead of other market factors. You’re also left with areas that just aren’t densely populated enough to get “competition” pay.
But then again, the minimum wage isn’t meant to be based off of inflation or anything logical like that. We just base it off of “how much do we feel like paying poor people today.”
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I don’t know about rarely, but I sat through a two-hour meeting on how to entice fork truck drivers to stay with us vs. leave to make a whole $12/hr… And, I’ve sat through a number of other meetings regarding labor competition for entry-level warehouse employees with pay ranging from high $10s to $15/hr. Labor markets can be very competitive even at the low end of earnings.
It’s even more cynical than that. Minimum wage means “I’d pay you less, but legally I’m not allowed to.”
To be fair companies that hire minimum wage people very often get the bottom of the barrel. Snotty kids with no experience at anything who no-call no-show all the time. But just how much experience and brain power do you need to drop fries into hot grease or microwave a sammich? They take all the risk of hiring unproven people and then keep the useful ones buy bumping their pay a bit.
You can get a combo meal (sammich+fries+drink) for $5 or $6 most places. How damn much could they afford to pay people? There’s almost no room for margin there.
Minimum wage is meant for entry level people with zero experience. You shouldn’t be working for minimum wage for very long. If you are it’s time to find a new gig or re-evaluate how hard you’re working.
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That’s a ~60% increase over the federal minimum wage. I was referring to jobs much closer to the bottom (ie, fast food, retail, etc).
Was this due to exclusively to competition or was lack of prospects also a problem. With a national unemployment of ~5% I have a hard time believing people won’t jump for a 10-15hr job if you’re not simply running into a shortage of bodies.
McDonald’s profit margin last year was ~20%. 27.6bil in sales 5.5bil in profit.
If you’re talking local hole in the wall mom and pop restaurants, I agree. But I also believe most of those tiny companies are already except from the minimum wage (I might be outdated here).
In a micro sense, sure. In a macro sense, someone has to do these jobs that literally run the entire economy. Unless we want Walmart to only start operating in the hours that kids aren’t in school, we’re always going to have adults working these jobs for a living.
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I was recently reading a bit about anti-trust laws due to an assignment about the beer industry and I’d like to see if you (or anybody else) have any ideas about how they could be reformed to encourage more small business and entrepreneurship. The beer industry is only one example of oligarchies that have a lot of control compared to a small business. It also seems that once a business gets good enough to be established they get bought out from one of the big guys.
Sorry, I forget how much higher MD is over the minimum sometimes.
It’s competition over the labor pool so I guess it depends on how you look at it, but part of it was definitely other competitors taking our fork truck drivers and other entry-level employees due to the concentration of warehouses within a relatively close proximity. We have a couple of warehouses and each has their own competition issues.
Assuming this is accurate (seems high) you have to remember there’s a difference between corporate making X profit % and an individual franchise’s profit %. The individually owned franchises operate much closer to margin.
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How do micro-breweries fit in? It seems like they’ve really popped up over the last 5+ years. I basically only buy beer from smaller less known breweries thse days.
And therein lies the rub. While the corp side of McDonalds can force the franchises to eat these costs, they have all the power and franchise owners become the “bad guy.”
I would fully prefer the corp side eats the majority of a pay raise. Unfortunately, they’ll continue to force it on the franchises and the public will side with these business owners without paying attention to where the decisions come from.
I worked at McD for my 2nd job when I turned 15.5. The owner of our McD owned a total of 3 of them, had a wife that didn’t work (she was always stopping by to literally hang up her arts and crafts in the break room), both of them drove new Lexus and were on vacation out of the country constantly.
I fully get this is a sample size of 1, I just have a hard time seeing how these franchise owners are hurting when I see rising McD prices and stagnant wages. That math doesn’t math.