Sonikku wrote: shredingskin wrote: Before a man, a family and a job meant a middle class family.
Today families have to work mother, father and even kids to reach an acual "middle class".
What is getting so expensive ?? We live pretty better today, is it entertainment, fuel, tech, what the fuck is that makes it this expensive ??
Today, if you don't have a computer, internet access and a cellphone, you are functionally poor.
I think the global inflation is getting weirder.
I guess that the average is pretty much better, and we just "want to have more" (and I don't mean it in only a consummerist way).
The cost of college tuition is like 700% of what it was three decades ago in a time frame when wages for everyone but the elite either stayed the same or went down. Housing/rent/utilities also continue to grow when most wages stay the same = net loss. This is why I dispute the claim from the GoP that minimum wage can stay the same forever "because they don't deserve more money for the same work". In actuality a dollar doesn't buy today what a dollar bought five years ago. And if the minimum is 7.25 today as surely as it was half a decade ago then you've actually gotten a back door pay cut. Gone are the days when you could buy a semester of college from some minimum wage part time summer job. People in greater debt today are in debt more so for depressed wages and higher costs than they are for simply being more "spendy".
The problem is, the majority of employers are small or medium sized businesses, and legitimately can't afford to give their employees raises. If you force them to do so, the money doesn't just appear out of thin air, so they have to resort to lay-offs. Now you've got a significant number of unemployed people on top of the already insanely high number of non-working, non-retired adults, and those tens of millions of people have no chance at getting a job that they desperately need because all employers either can't afford to hire more help (due to heavy taxes and the higher minimum wage) or have a large percentage (sometimes majority) of their workforce overseas. The latter isn't always due to greed; these big corporations that people like to demonize get hit with taxes exceeding 30%, when they do pay them.
If the spineless traitors that we vote for would stop throwing away the money that many of them have never worked a day in their lives for, maybe we wouldn't be 18 trillion in debt and headed toward another recession/depression. Economic problems can almost always be traced back to ridiculous tax rates and the
extreme irresponsibility of our government spenders.