I’d say even for the wealthy, their living standards aren’t getting better. At their level of wealth, getting more either means number in accounts goes up if they are passive with it or power over others goes up if they are active with it.
But yeah, capitalism is for those with capital; it’s right in the name.
Yep. Just reading the title, the “economy” is up, and people are worse for it.
The fact is, despite record breaking profit, nearly none of that “growth” is being provided to the people creating the value for companies to sell, and is instead being handed upwards to people with more money than brains, who have “invested” in the business.
The lines on the stock market graphs go up, and the people working for that company who create all the things that are generating the profit, are robbed, and their would-be wages are handed to the shareholders.
Is anyone shocked by this? Is anyone surprised by this?
I work with people that really struggle to grasp this concept. I work rotations and every hitch I find myself spending the first few days explaining that what they call “the economy” I would call the CPI, whereas what capitalists refer to is corporate profits - and never the twain shall meet. But this is yet another complexity that the right benefits from obscuring, and complexity requires thoughtful consideration for understanding. I realize I’m asking a lot from a bunch of blue collar rubes.
Part of it is that when people say the “economy” is up, they’re usually only referring to valuations of public companies which is only part of the picture. The price-to-earnings ratio is so wack right now that many companies are trading at 18x their earnings per share, so while profits may be up, the companies are still wildly overvalued compared to their expected output.
Real wage growth has lagged significantly compared to the historical trend. If the labor market continues to take a beating, consumer spending will tank and bring equities down with it.
I had/have such a hard time convincing people that this isn’t traditional inflation as much as it’s corporate price gouging. This is being done to us, not a result of Biden’s economic policies
It’s too uneven. Personally our household is doing better because both kids are working and the company I work for ditched plans to go public, and a couple of other factors. But:
Car insurance increased sharply (probably counted as money coming into the economy)
Homeowners insurance increased
Food prices increased.
Wages don’t increase as much as household costs. Until the wages of everyday people are growing faster than their expenses, they aren’t doing better. Again, personally we are, but I don’t think that can be extrapolated out, most households don’t have an opportunity to deploy more people to work.
Fuckers always trot out that wage growth shit. They truly don’t understand that most people’s wages have not increased. If they have they likely have not even kept up with inflation.
I’m an accountant and the measurements used in economics are kind of backwards, they worry about payroll cost, that’s true but what the fuck? They measure economic growth as though companies are people and people are expenses.
We need employee owned businesses all round and then that measure might make sense. But as it stands now, it’s literally measuring inequality.
because it doesnt matter how great the economy is, because only the rich and businesses benefit from it.
Meanwhile us peasant folk are still struggling to buy overpriced essentials and afford the worst, most unsuitable, barely qualifying roofs over our heads.
That’s so great you bring up one a day. My wife had bought some and said how many of these am I supposed to take. And we laughed because it was such a dumb thing to say. Then we read the bottle and we were like this is ridiculous.
It is why Subway will always be the cake bread place in my head, great case with simple reasoning.
I also love how it was not due to food quality laws but tax that caught them, no VAT on simple food stuff but VAT applies to confections like candy and cake. So what is the legal difference between cake and bread? The sugar content, and the fact subway instead of changing their bread fought that in court is just peak subway cake bread to me.
We’ve known the ownership class was treated differently after the bank bailouts in 2008 which ran entirely contrary to capitalist theory as it was taught: if your company fails, then your company fails, and its detritus will feed growth elsewhere.
But it turns out some companies are special and are too big to fail because when they go, dozens of other propped up companies collapse with them.
I can’t help but wonder if we let that catastrophe happen, would it serve as a reminder why capitalism needs to be strictly regulated? Because we undid all the regulations erected thanks to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007, and private equity is still demolishing huge chunks of the economy while investors get rich on bankruptcy shenanigans. This is the same kind of aristocratic bullshit as 1789.
We had a peaceful protest. OWS. Then one night, NYC turned off all the cameras and unpeacefully swept it away. We were told they didn’t have specific demands. But they did, and their grievance was legit regardless.
So now, society is stratified. The ownership class has segregated itself from the working class and they won’t consider grievances from the third estate. We saw during the Obama administration a _recovering economy _is not felt by the working class. We see now they’re glad to install a one-party autocracy to keep it that way.
To be fair this was always the endgame. Our industrialst betters were sore over the New Deal. And later, school integration and interracial marriage.
I think their plan is to literally arm robotic dogs with guns and try to to rule us at gunpoint, kinda like Hebron. See XKCD 1968.
Well, an economy that prices more and more people out of specific markets (like, the average person can’t afford the median home any more and the cost of necessities like food, fuel, clothing and housing has gone up much faster than return on labor) might involve a rising stock market but it is objectively worse if you make your money by working.
It’s almost like pathologically fetishized “growth” (perpetually fetishized by the rich and their trained sycophants in the media, that is) is completely disconnected from the socio-economic condition of the majority of people on this planet.