This is exactly what workers mean when they say the stock market isn’t the economy.
Yeah but their entire retirement is based on it!
Such an insidious way of keeping workers complicit in our capitalist hellscape.
Oof, somehow this escaped me, even though I participate, while hating it, and thinking at least a bit about that fact along the way. The thing doesn't have to even be deliberate if it's effective - accidentally-discovered techniques often work as well as planned/sought ones.
By which I mean, of course this situation is not some deliberate "super-rich cabal" silly scenario, but damn if the levers don't work exactly that way. My and my family's future well-being, as a strictly mandatory goal to pursue, is turned into fuel for a machine I hate (contributing to 401k), and the hope I've been soft-coerced into is a hope that the hateful thing spits out enough at the end for me to keep:
a roof over our heads, not otherwise guaranteed nor likely
continued medical care through life post-employability, not otherwise guaranteed, only somewhat likely (Medicare)
the limited dignity of dying with some care, but true misery along the way, as it is for almost anyone who doesn't "luck into" a sudden end...again, not otherwise guaranteed, nor fucking likely (end of life care is an absolute disaster in this country)
The folks with the resources and "character" to enjoy, exploit, and move stocks love this. The new yachts we buy them, ridiculous "homes", and the unbelievably fresh new whatever's on their idiot status comparison instruments are never-before-seen and even more egregiously wasteful than their awful rivals'.
The folks doing less well than me? I mean we don't even hear their misery, except in limited outbursts at strange times in retail and food industry settings or other such. The folks actually working themselves to death, SO many of us, are too fucking busy to even properly cry out.
Their entire retirement is held hostage by it. Fixed it for ya.
Lol, you think we'll be able to retire 😂
I've lucked out and tracking to retire at 60 but my grandfather has been retired about as long as I've been alive (55).
I'm 30 next month, I joined the military right out of high school, and I specifically remember them teaching us a bit about 401k's because of our ability to participate in TSP.
The instructor very clearly told us, the average American needs $1 million in their retirement account when they to to retire to live comfortably. Not extravagantly, comfortably.
Just a couple weeks ago I saw an article saying the average American now needs $2 million in their retirement account to be to retire comfortably, and this is assuming they don't have a mortgage payment, etc.
So in 11 years, the amount needed to retire comfortably has doubled, and yet my wages haven't doubled... Minimum wage hasn't increased in decades, sure they're talking about $15/hr now, but that should've been 10 years ago. With inflation, minimum wage should be around $26/hr, yet even in my blue state, it's like $15.60/hr or something, it's barely over $15.
Throw in the recent news about the inevitable and quickly approaching AMOC collapse and the climate hellscape that's going to come with it... Our futures were robbed from us for profit, and even if I started making triple what I make now, I'll never be able to retire, nor do I even have a retirement account anymore (I cashed mine out to help me during some really rough financial times right after the pandemic, y'know, when the government told the average American to go fuck themselves). And I was one of the few among my friends who even had one.
So, like many people around my age, my retirement will either be societal collapse in the next couple decades, or a bullet to the head (if I could even afford the bullet) as I die in old age, homeless, while we probably have six trillionaires at that point.
Tax.
Tax them like there is no tomorrow.
Billionaires should simply not exist. Put a cap on total net worth and if you pass that, income tax goes to 100. If your networth goes up anyway because of stocks or whatever, tax that too. Tax stocks, homes, boats, etc.
Enormous wealth should be like the speed of light. The closer you get there, the heavier it becomes to stay there, you need to spend more and more energy to get less and less higher.
This should not be a crazy idea.
Billionaires have such a heavy say in our government that it will never go that way unless it's forced.
gilded age
Reforming capitalism will only delay end stage, not prevent it.
Imagine getting something like the early 20th century labor movement going these days. Seems impossible right? We we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started? We wasted those lives lost and ruined because we thought capitalism could be salvaged. It is not salvageable.
We we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started?
30 years of relative prosperity?
Also, I don't understand how you think we'd be able to abolish capitalism without much more blood, sweat, and tears than would be spent building a labor movement. I also think that a strong labor movement would be a necessary prerequisite to abolishing capitalism. I don't see how you build a movement to abolish capitalism with millions of isolated, fractured consumers. By magic? Will AI or crypto solve this? 😄
Profits shouldn't exist. They should be required to put that money back into the company and take a salary for themselves. Idk how this works with shareholders but they can get fucked for all I care at this point.
We used to have progressive income taxes that did this.
Reagan, Thatcher and their ilk pulled them because "trickle down, a rising tide lifts all boats, thousand points of light, blah blah blah"
A rising tide lifts all boats has always struck me as a strange metaphor for them to use. To me that conjures up thoughts of welfare, UBI, irreducible minimums, safety nets, etc. It seems like a great metaphor for the opposite of what they're using it for.
Companies need shareholders to get off the ground, and you don't have to be rich to be a shareholder. That's the whole idea... otherwise only the mega rich have the capital to start businesses.
Paying C-suites this much is just idiotic though. I own a few stocks, and seeing some of the companies pay executives and upper management so much to feud and slowly destroy companies makes me sick. It is not what anyone sane wants unless they're parasitic daytraders or drinking the corporate kool-aid.
Greedy capitalism is the problem, but it's also a culture problem, I think.
The way you fix this is with higher, and enforced, corporate taxes. If the corporation doesn't keep the money anyways, they flow it back in.
Not essentially, we are. Soon we will have great depression 2.0
That is an impressive typo
Very simply. Raise their taxes.
Less simply. Remove the cap on social security tax. Tax long term capital gains beyond a certain amount as regular income. Put the top rate income tax closer to 90%. Fix the god damn estate tax situation. Why on god's green earth do the children of Sam Walton occupy so much space on the Forbes 400.
France will review your company's ledger if you want to fire people en masse. If you can afford to keep them you can't fire them
I mean, I guess, but why complicate this stuff. We already have the systems and administration to do taxes. We could break up monopolies and enforce the laws we already have.
I'd keep it real real simple for folks. We should stop letting corporations and their owner class privatize the gains and stick the rest of society with the losses. Take the 2008 fiasco, if we are bailing out a bunch of companies we should be bailing out a bunch of home owners.
Still doesn't feel good to get fired and get an unemployment check with all sort of conditions attached, just because some company decided to clean up operations after hiring way too much.
Non sequitur to my point, but to what you wrote...
I would support that any bailouts come with the condition that 50%+ of the share capital is given to a Sovereign Fund. There should be no corporate welfare... Only investment opportunities.
Why complicate the onion by adding more layers? Why do we want a sovereign fund? Your solution just seems like another way to funnel more money to US corporations. We already let them switch to defined contribution 401k retirement funds. More money to companies public or private is just more money empowering little corporate fiefdoms.
We should simply tax these corporations and their owner class at a much higher rate. Take that money and fund social programs. For example, it is completely idiotic to have healthcare tied to employment and subsidizing it through the gov't.
If we removed corporate welfare from our system it would be really bad until something else took its place. We subsidize our entire food production system, removing that would drive up the cost of food. The Jones Act subsidizes our shipping industry. The price of drugs would also probably sky rocket the second you remove the public funding that goes into the early stage research.
And what happens to our military industrial complex when you remove corporate welfare?
The problem is we have Bezos playing rocket man and newspaper baron to the tune of three billion dollars a year. We have Musk fucking with our elections to the tune of some hundred million dollars a month. They have this money because we don't tax them. Tax that money away and they won't be fucking with shit.
Or we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people's labor
Hence the rising fascism. The corporate class knows the only way to get the common people to continue to support them is through scaremongering about imagined threats.
We have been in a new gilded age since the end of the 90s...
There's like 600k people dying of cancer at any given time, and seperately theres only like 800 billionaires who are probably somewhat directly responsible for their cancer and lack of access to medical care. If I had a bucket list bc I was dying of cancer, I know what would be on it.
Terms of enrampagement
Did you see Regis this morning?
We have to scare the rich. Organize, agitate, break shit, etc. They have been too successful at dividing us along arbitrary lines. No war but class war. Fight back.
Partially thanks to media like you, squints eyes fortune.com...
Can we continue with the trend and start having unions "talk" to the CEOs? 👀
We’re also in the Business Plot 2
Yeah, well, what are YOU going to do about it?!
I wish it was a Gilded Age. At least Rockefeller and Vanderbilt had some fucking taste.
All of this will happen before, and all of it will happen again. Except uglier and dumber.
I'm ready to eat the rich and sacrifice myself for the next generation, but I'm not a leader, I'm good at building scaffolds though. I wish we had a François Hanriot or a John Brown
Well too bad, that's leader talk. We need you to keep fighting until nature sacrifices you.
Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.
So we've got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.
An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege
An ever growing number of working poor who need two paychecks to live
Sounds like Tsarist Russia, with no single royal family to execute.
Anyone? There are lots of houses worth less than $1,000,000. Sure, by the time a mortgage is paid off and you fully own the house yourself a person should also have some savings, but I certainly wouldn't expect that to be universal.
My house is now worth a bit over $350,000. And although that is less then $1,000,000 I bought it at $185,000 (and had to use every penny saved to get a down payment) just a decade ago. Even in my small rural town I currently could not afford to buy the house I live in, I doubt this will improve in time.
I might not be a millionaire, but I would guess I am now in a smaller class of people that owns where they sleep. And if the market keeps doing whats its doing I might be a millionaire in time (this is not overall a good thing).
Plus the bank owns any house with a mortgage. It's not your house until it's paid off. Can't be a millionaire with $400,000 in assets and $375,000 in debt.
I am not sure you understand how a mortgage works. Why would I have $375,000 on a mortgage for a house I bought for $185,000 over a decade ago?
The bank "owns" only what is owning on the mortgage with the property and buildings on it as collateral. Even if I stopped paying all together (for some reason) the bank does not want the house, they want the money and will force a sale though foreclosure.
The issue is that we now have two "classes" of non rich people, those that spend money on rent (a cost without equity) and those like me ether old enough or lucky enough to have a mortgage where the money we spend on a mortgage (reducing that debit) is not wasted and the value of our homes keeps going up.
Wasn't speaking to your specific home value. I was adding to the point that every homeowner is not a millionaire.
If someone has a house worth $350,000 but they've only paid off $50,000 from the principal, then they aren't worth $350,000. I'd argue they're not even worth $300,000.
Miss a few payments, and they lose the house plus whatever payments they'd already made. That's not personal wealth. We're just living in the bank's house until it's paid off and the deed gets transferred.
Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.
So we’ve got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.
An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege
I mean this simply cannot be true.
If everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, then in order for the "number of millionaires" to be "ever dwindling" we would need not only a housing shortage, but an eroding quantity of housing or a drastic drop in home ownership rates. Neither is happening. The home ownership rate in 2024 is 65.8% according to this site: https://www.simplyinsurance.com/how-many-homeowners-in-the-us/ which puts us at a much improved rate of ownership from when the housing crash happened in 2008, when we were running somewhere in the low 60s.
So not everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, or millionaires numbers aren't dwindling. It simply cannot be the case that what you're saying here is all true.
Why don't they notice they're killing us all?
They definitely notice, why do you think they’re pushing the birth rate and great replacement theory BS so damn hard? They want everyone young, broke and uneducated so they can keep the grift going.
You think it's that they don't notice, and not that that notice, but don't care?
They'd care because if the masses are too poor to afford their products, that's actually a threat to their power.
They would, then, but that is not now. Right now they are concerned with us not having enough children, because capitalism requires population growth, and, as places become richer, they have fewer children. The most industrialized places are in decline, outside of immigration. So this is where you see the consternation of the rich and powerful.
....So pay us so we can afford kids?
Doesn't work, places have tried that. The collection of conditions are not conducive to it, for most people. That's why it is getting very "handmaid's tale" in rhetoric from a lot of the rich and powerful.
They're sociopaths. They don't care about us.
Weird, employment is up right near full employment, real wages are up, and quality of life has never been higher by any metric.
Is this just about tech layoffs due to overtraining the workforce and excess supply? Neat.
This is exactly what workers mean when they say the stock market isn’t the economy.
Yeah but their entire retirement is based on it!
Such an insidious way of keeping workers complicit in our capitalist hellscape.
Oof, somehow this escaped me, even though I participate, while hating it, and thinking at least a bit about that fact along the way. The thing doesn't have to even be deliberate if it's effective - accidentally-discovered techniques often work as well as planned/sought ones.
By which I mean, of course this situation is not some deliberate "super-rich cabal" silly scenario, but damn if the levers don't work exactly that way. My and my family's future well-being, as a strictly mandatory goal to pursue, is turned into fuel for a machine I hate (contributing to 401k), and the hope I've been soft-coerced into is a hope that the hateful thing spits out enough at the end for me to keep:
The folks with the resources and "character" to enjoy, exploit, and move stocks love this. The new yachts we buy them, ridiculous "homes", and the unbelievably fresh new whatever's on their idiot status comparison instruments are never-before-seen and even more egregiously wasteful than their awful rivals'.
The folks doing less well than me? I mean we don't even hear their misery, except in limited outbursts at strange times in retail and food industry settings or other such. The folks actually working themselves to death, SO many of us, are too fucking busy to even properly cry out.
Their entire retirement is held hostage by it. Fixed it for ya.
Lol, you think we'll be able to retire 😂
I've lucked out and tracking to retire at 60 but my grandfather has been retired about as long as I've been alive (55).
I'm 30 next month, I joined the military right out of high school, and I specifically remember them teaching us a bit about 401k's because of our ability to participate in TSP.
The instructor very clearly told us, the average American needs $1 million in their retirement account when they to to retire to live comfortably. Not extravagantly, comfortably.
Just a couple weeks ago I saw an article saying the average American now needs $2 million in their retirement account to be to retire comfortably, and this is assuming they don't have a mortgage payment, etc.
So in 11 years, the amount needed to retire comfortably has doubled, and yet my wages haven't doubled... Minimum wage hasn't increased in decades, sure they're talking about $15/hr now, but that should've been 10 years ago. With inflation, minimum wage should be around $26/hr, yet even in my blue state, it's like $15.60/hr or something, it's barely over $15.
Throw in the recent news about the inevitable and quickly approaching AMOC collapse and the climate hellscape that's going to come with it... Our futures were robbed from us for profit, and even if I started making triple what I make now, I'll never be able to retire, nor do I even have a retirement account anymore (I cashed mine out to help me during some really rough financial times right after the pandemic, y'know, when the government told the average American to go fuck themselves). And I was one of the few among my friends who even had one.
So, like many people around my age, my retirement will either be societal collapse in the next couple decades, or a bullet to the head (if I could even afford the bullet) as I die in old age, homeless, while we probably have six trillionaires at that point.
Tax.
Tax them like there is no tomorrow.
Billionaires should simply not exist. Put a cap on total net worth and if you pass that, income tax goes to 100. If your networth goes up anyway because of stocks or whatever, tax that too. Tax stocks, homes, boats, etc.
Enormous wealth should be like the speed of light. The closer you get there, the heavier it becomes to stay there, you need to spend more and more energy to get less and less higher.
This should not be a crazy idea.
Billionaires have such a heavy say in our government that it will never go that way unless it's forced.
Reforming capitalism will only delay end stage, not prevent it.
Imagine getting something like the early 20th century labor movement going these days. Seems impossible right? We we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started? We wasted those lives lost and ruined because we thought capitalism could be salvaged. It is not salvageable.
30 years of relative prosperity?
Also, I don't understand how you think we'd be able to abolish capitalism without much more blood, sweat, and tears than would be spent building a labor movement. I also think that a strong labor movement would be a necessary prerequisite to abolishing capitalism. I don't see how you build a movement to abolish capitalism with millions of isolated, fractured consumers. By magic? Will AI or crypto solve this? 😄
Profits shouldn't exist. They should be required to put that money back into the company and take a salary for themselves. Idk how this works with shareholders but they can get fucked for all I care at this point.
We used to have progressive income taxes that did this.
Reagan, Thatcher and their ilk pulled them because "trickle down, a rising tide lifts all boats, thousand points of light, blah blah blah"
A rising tide lifts all boats has always struck me as a strange metaphor for them to use. To me that conjures up thoughts of welfare, UBI, irreducible minimums, safety nets, etc. It seems like a great metaphor for the opposite of what they're using it for.
Companies need shareholders to get off the ground, and you don't have to be rich to be a shareholder. That's the whole idea... otherwise only the mega rich have the capital to start businesses.
Paying C-suites this much is just idiotic though. I own a few stocks, and seeing some of the companies pay executives and upper management so much to feud and slowly destroy companies makes me sick. It is not what anyone sane wants unless they're parasitic daytraders or drinking the corporate kool-aid.
Greedy capitalism is the problem, but it's also a culture problem, I think.
The way you fix this is with higher, and enforced, corporate taxes. If the corporation doesn't keep the money anyways, they flow it back in.
Not essentially, we are. Soon we will have great depression 2.0
That is an impressive typo
Very simply. Raise their taxes.
Less simply. Remove the cap on social security tax. Tax long term capital gains beyond a certain amount as regular income. Put the top rate income tax closer to 90%. Fix the god damn estate tax situation. Why on god's green earth do the children of Sam Walton occupy so much space on the Forbes 400.
France will review your company's ledger if you want to fire people en masse. If you can afford to keep them you can't fire them
I mean, I guess, but why complicate this stuff. We already have the systems and administration to do taxes. We could break up monopolies and enforce the laws we already have.
I'd keep it real real simple for folks. We should stop letting corporations and their owner class privatize the gains and stick the rest of society with the losses. Take the 2008 fiasco, if we are bailing out a bunch of companies we should be bailing out a bunch of home owners.
Still doesn't feel good to get fired and get an unemployment check with all sort of conditions attached, just because some company decided to clean up operations after hiring way too much.
Non sequitur to my point, but to what you wrote... I would support that any bailouts come with the condition that 50%+ of the share capital is given to a Sovereign Fund. There should be no corporate welfare... Only investment opportunities.
Why complicate the onion by adding more layers? Why do we want a sovereign fund? Your solution just seems like another way to funnel more money to US corporations. We already let them switch to defined contribution 401k retirement funds. More money to companies public or private is just more money empowering little corporate fiefdoms.
We should simply tax these corporations and their owner class at a much higher rate. Take that money and fund social programs. For example, it is completely idiotic to have healthcare tied to employment and subsidizing it through the gov't.
If we removed corporate welfare from our system it would be really bad until something else took its place. We subsidize our entire food production system, removing that would drive up the cost of food. The Jones Act subsidizes our shipping industry. The price of drugs would also probably sky rocket the second you remove the public funding that goes into the early stage research.
And what happens to our military industrial complex when you remove corporate welfare?
The problem is we have Bezos playing rocket man and newspaper baron to the tune of three billion dollars a year. We have Musk fucking with our elections to the tune of some hundred million dollars a month. They have this money because we don't tax them. Tax that money away and they won't be fucking with shit.
Or we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people's labor
@news
Hence the rising fascism. The corporate class knows the only way to get the common people to continue to support them is through scaremongering about imagined threats.
We have been in a new gilded age since the end of the 90s...
There's like 600k people dying of cancer at any given time, and seperately theres only like 800 billionaires who are probably somewhat directly responsible for their cancer and lack of access to medical care. If I had a bucket list bc I was dying of cancer, I know what would be on it.
Terms of enrampagement
Did you see Regis this morning?
We have to scare the rich. Organize, agitate, break shit, etc. They have been too successful at dividing us along arbitrary lines. No war but class war. Fight back.
Partially thanks to media like you, squints eyes fortune.com...
Can we continue with the trend and start having unions "talk" to the CEOs? 👀
We’re also in the Business Plot 2
Yeah, well, what are YOU going to do about it?!
I wish it was a Gilded Age. At least Rockefeller and Vanderbilt had some fucking taste.
All of this will happen before, and all of it will happen again. Except uglier and dumber.
I'm ready to eat the rich and sacrifice myself for the next generation, but I'm not a leader, I'm good at building scaffolds though. I wish we had a François Hanriot or a John Brown
Well too bad, that's leader talk. We need you to keep fighting until nature sacrifices you.
Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.
So we've got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.
An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege
An ever growing number of working poor who need two paychecks to live
Sounds like Tsarist Russia, with no single royal family to execute.
Anyone? There are lots of houses worth less than $1,000,000. Sure, by the time a mortgage is paid off and you fully own the house yourself a person should also have some savings, but I certainly wouldn't expect that to be universal.
My house is now worth a bit over $350,000. And although that is less then $1,000,000 I bought it at $185,000 (and had to use every penny saved to get a down payment) just a decade ago. Even in my small rural town I currently could not afford to buy the house I live in, I doubt this will improve in time.
I might not be a millionaire, but I would guess I am now in a smaller class of people that owns where they sleep. And if the market keeps doing whats its doing I might be a millionaire in time (this is not overall a good thing).
Plus the bank owns any house with a mortgage. It's not your house until it's paid off. Can't be a millionaire with $400,000 in assets and $375,000 in debt.
I am not sure you understand how a mortgage works. Why would I have $375,000 on a mortgage for a house I bought for $185,000 over a decade ago?
The bank "owns" only what is owning on the mortgage with the property and buildings on it as collateral. Even if I stopped paying all together (for some reason) the bank does not want the house, they want the money and will force a sale though foreclosure.
The issue is that we now have two "classes" of non rich people, those that spend money on rent (a cost without equity) and those like me ether old enough or lucky enough to have a mortgage where the money we spend on a mortgage (reducing that debit) is not wasted and the value of our homes keeps going up.
Wasn't speaking to your specific home value. I was adding to the point that every homeowner is not a millionaire.
If someone has a house worth $350,000 but they've only paid off $50,000 from the principal, then they aren't worth $350,000. I'd argue they're not even worth $300,000.
Miss a few payments, and they lose the house plus whatever payments they'd already made. That's not personal wealth. We're just living in the bank's house until it's paid off and the deed gets transferred.
I mean this simply cannot be true.
If everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, then in order for the "number of millionaires" to be "ever dwindling" we would need not only a housing shortage, but an eroding quantity of housing or a drastic drop in home ownership rates. Neither is happening. The home ownership rate in 2024 is 65.8% according to this site: https://www.simplyinsurance.com/how-many-homeowners-in-the-us/ which puts us at a much improved rate of ownership from when the housing crash happened in 2008, when we were running somewhere in the low 60s.
So not everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, or millionaires numbers aren't dwindling. It simply cannot be the case that what you're saying here is all true.
Why don't they notice they're killing us all?
They definitely notice, why do you think they’re pushing the birth rate and great replacement theory BS so damn hard? They want everyone young, broke and uneducated so they can keep the grift going.
You think it's that they don't notice, and not that that notice, but don't care?
They'd care because if the masses are too poor to afford their products, that's actually a threat to their power.
They would, then, but that is not now. Right now they are concerned with us not having enough children, because capitalism requires population growth, and, as places become richer, they have fewer children. The most industrialized places are in decline, outside of immigration. So this is where you see the consternation of the rich and powerful.
....So pay us so we can afford kids?
Doesn't work, places have tried that. The collection of conditions are not conducive to it, for most people. That's why it is getting very "handmaid's tale" in rhetoric from a lot of the rich and powerful.
They're sociopaths. They don't care about us.
Weird, employment is up right near full employment, real wages are up, and quality of life has never been higher by any metric.
Is this just about tech layoffs due to overtraining the workforce and excess supply? Neat.
Inequality is up.
Wasn't this also the case in the gilded age?