Millennials 'set to earn less than Generation X' • Hacker News Board

Re: Millennials 'set to earn less than Generation X'

#201

Post by nikdaheratik » Wed, Jul 20, 2016, 6:05 AM UTC

ionised wrote: post #144

arca_vorago wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is something I've been ranting about this very thing for years, often to much undeserved derision in my opinion. You touch the point but don't nail it down. You need to identify exactly what you have in common with the Texan vs the Chinese man. I would argue this is the beauty of the true American exceptionality, in that the American Revolution, despite the British propoganda attempting to paint it as hardly mo…

Are you serious? The US was founded by wealthy land owners because they preferred to keep their money rather than pay taxes to the British Empire. I sympathise with that but lets not pretend it was founded with the freedoms and protections of ALL people in mind. Slaves and women were not granted those rights. The country was founded by oligarchs for oligarchs and it has remained that way.

I think that's a bit harsh when you consider that they could have just set up another monarchy and made themselves the newest round of nobility or something. It was a cutting edge experiment in liberty at the time.

You have a point about the government being set up to serve the wealthy and propertied, but that's likely true no matter which time period you live in.

Re: Millennials 'set to earn less than Generation X'

#202

Post by nikdaheratik » Wed, Jul 20, 2016, 6:23 AM UTC

ktRolster wrote: post #92

aioprisan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the past administrations faced such partisan Congresses, they've only gotten more extreme over the years.

None of the past administrations faced such partisan Congresses, This is unthinking lack of research. You only need to go back to Clinton to find a congress that vociferously was against him, to the point they impeached him. Clinton handled it because he was very good at handling compromise and the politics game.

Or maybe it's from someone who actually has paid attention to what is happening in Congress. I've read several blogs from political scientists (Jonathan Bernstein, for example) who have pointed out exactly how obstructionist the GOP controlled Congress was compared to other situations with split government.

Just hitting the highlights: the Senate for 6 out of 8 years has routinely refused to confirm justices, including at the SC level, and refused to confirm administration officials both via filibuster threats from the GOP. Through the House, they've actually shut down the government multiple times (Newt only tried this once, and it backfired badly) and they've threatened to default on all government debt, which is completely unprecedented. And all of this was driven by the GOP.

That you can even compare this to 2 years of partial obstruction under Clinton shows how little attention you actually have paid to this.

[Edit] Here's an example article that describes the situation just three years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/13...

Re: Millennials 'set to earn less than Generation X'

#203

Post by quadrangle » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:52 AM UTC

pasquinelli wrote: post #55

quadrangle wrote: post #17

Should be "get paid less". We really need to end the framing of whatever people are paid as assuming that it's equal to what they earn (as in what they actually deserve given actual work value etc)

What someone gets paid has to be, overall, less than what they earn, overall. Otherwise it'd be uneconomical for their employer.

Although it's stretching far outside this immediate generational discussion, he premise that employers should profit by always paying employees less than the value they generate is itself the very definition of capitalist exploitation. There's absolutely no reason this type of profit-driven employment relationship is the only way to structure a successful economy for a society.

Anyway, to the exact topic at hand: The consolidation of power by corporations and capital basically means a different power structure. We can accept the profit premise and still recognize that the employees' pay goes up and down in relation to their power in the relationship. Before unions, employers were happy to pay poverty wages and profit handsomely. Yes, there's a point where no profit or actual loss means they can't keep the employee, but there's a huge margin between the cheapest dirt pay you can get a desperate immigrant to accept and the pay you can manage to pay an organized, powerful union employee while still profiting. The power balance between employees and employers has changed over the last couple generations with the rise of unions and public works and minimum wage and worker protection laws and then today's conglomerations of oligarchies and the undermining of unions and of laws that protect workers' interests.