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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

#651

Post by redisman »

anshumankmr wrote: post #418
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the reasons the modern car has more parts and is not mechanically simple is not the boogeyman of regulations (although I suppose it could have caused some things like say seat belt alerts and airbags) but rather feature creep in the automotive industry, and computerization of everything.

An example of this is the change to automatic transmission from manual has increased costs. People could have voted with their dollars but manual is (unfortunately) on its way out in America. In a way, they have as it seems vast majority of people buying new cars want automatic but the segment who prefer manual were unable to convince others to buy manual. This also came with a caveat as automatic is more expensive t…

I mean it’s just not something most people find appealing. Shifting gears. I’d rather have the car handle that.

What is the pro of manual transmission? I used to have those cars in the EU and thought it was just an annoying extra thing I have to pay attention to when driving.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#652

Post by treis »

mwigdahl wrote: post #557
treis wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>think the important numbers here are the salary and housing cost ones. In 1970 the average house could be purchased for less than 2 years of salary. Today it costs 5.8 years of salary. But no one pays cash for their house. They get a mortgage and so the monthly mortgage payment is (mostly) what matters. Back in the 70s you're paying 10%+ on your mortgage while today it's more like 3.

Sure, but the same inflation that was driving up mortgage rates was also reducing the real value of the balance of the loan. You can't just look at rates here.

We're talking about affordability here. And my point is that to determine if something is affordable you have to look at monthly payment and not the purchase price.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#653

Post by dragonwriter »

kilroy123 wrote: post #465
guerrilla wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you summarize? I don't want to watch this entire video right now even though it seems interesting.

Democracy relies on people being able to vote for what they think is right; with privacy. We removed senators right to vote for the right things in private in ~1970. After this things have gotten very bad in the US–policy wise. Polarization. Extreme lobbing. Partisanship. Fiscal policies that only favor the rich. See this: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com All of this happened after we changed the rules in Congress where…

> We removed senators right to vote for the right things in private in ~1970. After this things have gotten very bad in the US–policy wise. Polarization.

Political polarization has been bad for the US it's entire history. It was certainly worse and more violent in the two decades before 1970 than since, though the last few years have been ramping up.

Partisan polarization was low for much of the post-WWII period because the issues of political polarization were unusually misaligned with the axis between the major parties (because of the unresolved partisan realignments around the New Deal and then Civil Rights which didn't finish shaking out until the early 1990s; as the direction of that shakeout started to become clear by the 1970s, partisan polarization started rising, and really took off from the 1990s, but this partisan polarization isn't a special condition, it's a reversion to the historical norm.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#654

Post by shakezula »

pydry wrote: post #545
shakezula wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the reason countries like NZ seem to be able to quickly and efficiently pass sweeping gun reform laws is because it’s not effecting any major gun producers bottom line. In America that is very much not the situation. Additionally, even if profits were a moot point, the 2nd amendment is a culture war wedge issue that runs bone-deep for the average American.

The gun industry started the culture war for profit and fans the flames for profit. Take away the profit margins and have a few more mass shootings and I imagine the 2nd amendment would melt away as easily as the 4th did.

I disagree that it was the gun industry that started the war, but they absolutely fan the flames for profit.

The 2nd amendment will never go away as long as conservatives use it as a wedge issue. It's far too important as leverage, and they've been incredibly successful in cementing it further into law even very recently. My state just passed Constitutional Carry into law this year.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#655

Post by gruez »

rspeele wrote: post #620
pydry wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because both parties are owned by oligarchs who would lose money if that happened. Minimum wage hikes chew through profits and profits are pretty much the #1 legislative priority because that's the primary concern of those doing the campaign financing. Same reason gun control wont happen no matter how many people get killed - ultimately its because gun manufacturers would lose money. American politics is the art of t…

The biggest gun manufacturer you can buy stock in is Ruger (RGR) with a market cap of 1.17B. Add Smith & Wesson and you're at 2B. Throw in Vista Outdoors which owns many of the top US ammo brands (plus some minor firearm and accessory brands) and you can get the total up to 4.3B. I'll multiply that by 10 to guesstimate privately held companies, local gun stores, and the rest of the long tail. So let's say we're at $4…

>Isn't that kind of podunk scale for an industry to have a rock solid hold on US politics?

relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

>all donations to all candidates, all lobbying, all think tanks, all advocacy organizations, the Washington Post, Vox, Mic, Mashable, Gawker, and Tumblr, combined, are still worth a little bit less than the almond industry. And Musk could buy them all.)

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#656

Post by oblio »

thehappypm wrote: post #458
oblio wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing about US research but Europe has huge pharma companies: Germany has a bunch, France some more, Switzerland, the UK. The US has a very parasitic healthcare system so I wonder how much their expenses are for actual research.

The US’s pharma have done a ton with pandemic medicine. Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, Novavax, Gilead, Merck..

Biontech researched the Pfizer vaccine. It's a German company. AZ is British.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#657

Post by gruez »

cblconfederate wrote: post #366
throwawaycities wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We also need to stop pretending that flat (i.e. depreciating) wages are normal

but wages aren't flat? In gp's post it's only "flat" when adjusting for inflation, which means it's not depreciating.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#658

Post by rspeele »

dhruval wrote: post #469
markvdb wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poverty is not just about absolute purchasing power adjusted for location and time. There is also very much an unspoken social context, sometimes even codified into law. In 1970, obviously nobody expected you to own a smartphone because it didn't exist. Noone had access to such a thing. Not so in 2021 western Europe. The example very much holds in that sense. You could fully participate in society without that expens…

Seems like you are talking about social inequality (a zero sum game) vs poverty (a non zero sum game) The idea that no one was expected to own cell phones so they didn’t enrich our lives is clearly false. Can apply this to any technological advance. So for eg. in the 1800s no one expected you to own a car. So the invention and subsequent technology driven deflation of car prices didn’t make everyone’s lives better.

I get what you're saying and I absolutely think the invention of phones, the internet, etc. made everybody's lives better.

But it's also true that these things become necessities when everybody is expected to have them. There is a low but non-zero level of "keeping up with the Joneses" you have to do just to keep living your life reasonably, because things change around you. Job applications are done over the internet now. Most higher education requires a good computer, webcam, and internet connection. You hail a cab with your phone. People suck at giving directions because they assume you have GPS. Stuff like that.

So I think it is fair to price some of these "luxuries" into the cost of living even though in the past people got along just fine without them.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#660

Post by ericmay »

pydry wrote: post #621
ericmay wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same reason gun control wont happen no matter how many people get killed - ultimately its because gun manufacturers would lose money. Depends on what you mean by gun control though. Many (myself included) are pro 2nd Amendment so it's not just the gun lobby/NRA who oppose some (not all) regulation. I guess my point is that gun control (whatever that means) won't happen not only because of gun lobbyists but because…

It's not the tail wagging the dog, though. The large contingent of Americans who throw their political weight in an organized way behind gun ownership as a point of principle were rallied by the gun manufacturing industry. It wasn't organic. It didn't happen in Australia or New Zealand or the UK even though gun enthusiasts exist in all of those countries.

> It's not the tail wagging the dog, though. The large contingent of Americans who throw their political weight in an organized way behind gun ownership as a point of principle were rallied by the gun manufacturing industry. It wasn't organic.

Idk exactly what you mean by organic, but if it means what I think you're trying to say, idk what's more organic than creating the Second Amendment which was created long before there were gun lobbyists.

> It didn't happen in Australia or New Zealand or the UK even though gun enthusiasts exist in all of those countries.

America is a different country isn't it?

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