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Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

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Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#441

Post by nly »

sigmaprimus wrote: post #431
nly wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> too many young people feel they should get to start at the top. I wouldn't call a dual income couple in their mid 30s paying >40% of take-home pay for a 2 bedroom flat "the top", but ok. I guess my parents who started with a 3 bed family home on a single blue-collar income started at the fucking apex.

So what You are saying is You and your partner are Dual Income No Kids or (D.I.N.K.s) and still struggling to get by? Now is the time to make some changes, You probably both have cell phone contracts totaling over $100 USD per month, chances are there is a just as much going out in other digital subscriptions, maybe You even have that stuff that makes your toilet water blue...literally flushing money away. IDK your s…

It's a nice fantasy, but you need to brush up on Amdahl's law and apply it to saving. Our rent is currently 25% of our joint take home pay. It's contractually tied to inflation and goes up every year. Housing goes to 40-50% if we buy, but half of that will be equity and the other half at least won't be making my landlord, who owns at least a dozen properties, even wealthier.

And we're not DINKs by choice. We want kids.

I put 50% of my personal take-home salary in to savings/investments and have been doing so for 3 years. We have decided not go give more than token gifts this Christmas as we really want to reach our spring savings goal.

Meanwhile house prices have gone up 10-15% over the last year. I earn good money but if it's this tough for me then believe me when I say it's fucking hopeless for most people my age.

I've also heard this bullshit before from older generations, including my parents. Sure they faced hardships. Different kinds of hardships. Unemployment. Inflation. High interest rates...but don't think people have it any easier today because they're they spend $30/mo on a phone contract. Spending $30/mo on Netflix and Disney+ today is like spending $4/mo on whatever crap people wasted money on in the 1970s. They did it too.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#442

Post by lelanthran »

chinathrow wrote: post #248
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #20

We had an all-hands meeting recently where we got to submit anonymous questions. One of the questions was 'with inflation rising at 6%, will the company reconsider their 'standard' 2% raise?' The lady answering looks dead in the camera and goes 'Honestly? No' and goes on to talk about how we're reasonably competitive with the local market. Hey, credit where credit is due, at least she was a refreshingly straight shoo…

> 'Honestly? No' The 'No' alone would be enough, but the 'Honestly?' would me want to look for other jobs right away.

>> 'Honestly? No'

>

> The 'No' alone would be enough, but the 'Honestly?' would me want to look for other jobs right away.

Can you explain why one is worse than the other?

(I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know).

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#443

Post by willcipriano »

montblanc wrote: post #436
willcipriano wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly convinced that having to do things as you described was better for mental health as well. The always on, always connected lifestyle has big downsides.

Driving with a map was better than how it is now? We're 10 years from having the damn thing drive itself for us. I suck at directions, I can imagine without the internet I would just avoid drives to places I wasn't familiar with and miss out on a bunch of things.

Yeah, you have to use a map but your kid only has to interact with the school bullies at school and you aren't temped to reach out to your college fling behind your wife's back beacuse you never see her bikini photos.

Things have gotten better, but in lots of ways they have gotten worse.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#444

Post by bjarneh »

valdiorn wrote: post #395
bjarneh wrote: post #184

Not sure how inflation is calculated globally; but where I live (Norway) we leave housing costs out of inflation. That always seemed very strange to me. Our main cost of living, (which has gone through the roof the last 25 years) is somehow left out of the calculation. My rent, or cost of buying a house - is much more important than the cost of a Snickers bar.

In Iceland, we can't include housing in the calculation, become the vast majority of mortgages are inflation linked; meaning if inflation goes up, so does the remaining capital on your mortgage (yes, it's insane, if you want to know more there's articles online about it). If we included housing, it would push up mortgages, which would make housing more expensive, which would drive inflation, which would push up mortg…

Your mortgages are inflation adjusted? That's completely nuts, if you pay the interest only on your loan it keeps growing to reflect inflation; nice! :-)

> my house has gone up in value by 100k since I bought it 18 months ago

Yikes, that sounds like a heated housing market, unless your house cost £ 20 million to begin with :-)

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#445

Post by inglor_cz »

montblanc wrote: post #397
dan-robertson wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s I think this is obviously false and hurts the credibility of the rest of this comment. There are many pitfalls with measuring long-term inflation. How much did an internet connection cost in the 1970s? What about a computer? What about a smartphone? These modern technologies make peoples lives much better and were somewhere between impossible and impossibly…

> most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s > I think this is obviously false and hurts the credibility of the rest of this comment. In terms of mental health, job security, stability (e.g marriage/divorce rates) they may very well be worse off.

Physical health as well. Obesity has exploded since the 1970s. Normal weight people are already a minority.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#446

Post by prepend »

deadbunny wrote: post #421
montblanc wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does having cheap access to internet makes the quality of your life better Whoa that's a bit of a reach no? How about the ability to drive around with GPS? Or stay easily in touch with family living far away? Taking photos of your baby and having it stored on the cloud for free? The ability to learn almost anything for free? I'm not saying it's all great, it isn't, but we can't deny the benefits.

> How about the ability to drive around with GPS? Maps, and the ability to read them. > Or stay easily in touch with family living far away? Phones, you know good old land lines > Taking photos of your baby and having it stored on the cloud for free? Why do I need physical photos stored in the cloud? > The ability to learn almost anything for free? Have ya heard of libraries? Does technology make these more convenien…

Have you traveled using maps and GPS? They are very different, and not even comparable.

It seems to me like comparing a shovel to a ditch digging machine.

It is possible to navigate using maps. But not practical for the mass audience of GPS who can’t use maps. And impossible for the industries that require GPS (uber types).

Technology is a multiplier that increases the returns on things my removing labor and letting it focus on other, more productive things.

Similarly, arguing that the internet isn’t 1000x easier to learn things because libraries exist is odd to me. Have you ever tried to use a book in a library to find that it’s checked out? Or not available at all. Inter library loans used to take 30 days, if I had access to a good library, and now that information is available to me for free.

This doesn’t mean the world is perfect or that we don’t still have so much work to do. But it’s just an odd perspective that seems unmoored from reality, since these things can be objectively measured.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#447

Post by barney54 »

throwawaycities wrote: post #262
Gareth321 wrote: post #250

Real wages have been flat since the 1970s ( https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us... ). "Okay, so people's living standards are about the same since 1970?" Not even close. The problem with inflation is that its calculation is fraught with all kinds of selective weighting, bias, and politics. Take a look at the relative differences between the things which have decreased and increased in cost in…

Glad this was the top comment. Wages have not kept up with cost of living for 50 years in the US. We need to stop pretending flat wages are some modern problem of inflation, and we need to stop pretending inflation is some problem caused by the pandemic.

Inflation at the levels we are seeing it is certainly a problem caused by the pandemic and the reactions to the pandemic.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#448

Post by sseagull »

Jenk wrote: post #422
guerrilla wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people just really want the right to reign Many people do. I see this as a dangerous problem. Weimar Germany also really wanted the right to reign and it didn't turn out well. The party here was founded in part by two literal Nazis and a bunch of skinheads. I don't really care what people want when they want them to rule.

I'm caught in a (philosophical?) dillemna though: I don't want the right to rise to power because I fear for the future of freedom, but I would be repressing freedom by ostracising/excluding the right from electoral eligibility. Is technocracy the answer? Have some kind of determinable objective truth rule? How do we mitigate for failure to identify the objective truth in that case? .. and on continues the shower tho…

This is the paradox of tolerance. A truly tolerant society would tolerate intolerance, which makes the society not truly tolerant anymore.

So a society would need to be a bit intolerant to stamp out intolerance, making it overall more tolerant.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#449

Post by birdyrooster »

Gareth321 wrote: post #250

Real wages have been flat since the 1970s ( https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us... ). "Okay, so people's living standards are about the same since 1970?" Not even close. The problem with inflation is that its calculation is fraught with all kinds of selective weighting, bias, and politics. Take a look at the relative differences between the things which have decreased and increased in cost in…

When the federal government can dilute the value of money while giving tons of it to banks and mega corps as near free loans, it becomes inevitable that there is a transfer of wealth up from the bottom.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#450

Post by lelanthran »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #349
holografix wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It already came and half went. It was represented by Donald Trump, the rise of the right in Europe and the alignment of Russia and China for short term push back on the west. DT would never have been elected if _any_ of the architects of the GFC had gone to jail. Imho that was Obama’s biggest mistake. Bailouts could be justifiable and understood by the population, no one going to jail was a betrayal. It caused a tipp…

It already came and half went. Yup, and the worse part? Nothing changed. Trump didn't didn't do a single fucking thing of material value to ameliorate the positions of those who voted for him, or the middle class for that matter. And yet he's almost sure to win again in 2024. I think in an astonishingly short amount of time, people in the West forgot what revolution is.

> And yet he's almost sure to win again in 2024.

Wait, what? He's running again?

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