No the economy is great. What do you mean you can't afford rent or groceries those aren't the economy, peasant!
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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I think it was Howard Zinn who pointed out that βthe economyβ is just a euphemism for corporate profits
Yeah, I'm reading Debt right now and Graeber is hammering on a similar point about "The Economy" and "Economics" being made up by early liberals (real liberals) for ideological reasons.
Unemployment measures are kinda like that. People use it as a shorthand for how good the economy is, but it's most likely an indicator of capital's access to cheap labour
I read peasant with an extra emphasis on the "p". Like Azula from Avatar: TLA
Yeah there's a problem with the economy. I'm not going to let my kids go out and spend half their income on rent. I'll do my damnedest to let them stay with me and built up savings so that when they decide to leave they have the potential to buy a place.
That would have been nice to have, as someone who didn't get that luxury I'm worse off than people making $7/hr less than me because I've been living paycheck to paycheck since I was 18 with no parents to help me and one I have to financially and physically support.
I was kicked out by my parents at 16 for smoking weed. But was able to save $5k and buy a fucking house. I know thats not a thing anymore. And I cant imagine abandoning my children to being a pay pig. Im sorry you dealt with that. I've met ppl that think theyve done enough for their children at 18 and now it 'their turn' and I dont understand it. The rich know about solidarity for their children and will defend them to the hilt. But in a neolib society the workers are sold individualist bullshit.
I wasn't abandoned, my father killed himself because the IRS and bank were coming after him for our home (which we lost after he died). Then my mom moved to Florida (with her boyfriend who she met at his wake and was a highschool friend of my dad's) because she couldn't get a job up here and we had nothing.
I chose to stay with my younger brother because we had life and connections here. My mom just finished getting through the bankruptcy from the unpaid taxes (which was partly due to a client of my father's company lying about making payment leaving my dad with a massive tax bill for money he was never paid). He was also the sole employee of his own company, so it died with him.
fuck,that is some heavy shit, sorry
It happened almost a decade ago now, my younger brother did just pass last year though. No idea what killed him he was found naked and dead on his porch in a closet.
jesus christ
My conditions definitely informed my politics lol
It's nothing that lower interest rates, reducing taxes on corporations, and a few extra pairs of bootstraps can't solve!
Stop being so lazy and pull harder on those bootstraps!
Kids need to stop complaining, and start asking for a job at their dad's company
Obligatory. Apologies for the YouTube.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Lower interest rates for the banks and businesses while consumers get stuck with 30% apr
I just paid my credit card which I do every month to avoid any interest charges, but I don't think I've ever known what my interest rate was. It is 27.95%.
How the fuck is that legal? Wouldn't that be punishable by death in some countries?
It used to be 25% max, which is insane. But now I think it's 30%. No moral country should allow that.
If only these kids wouldn't have gone into massive debt that we forced them to go into and would stop eating avocado toast 25 times a day maybe they'd be able to afford things 
The ruling class is doing just fine, quityerbitchin ingrates!
This is something that used to be considered normal for really rich or really poor people
But the stock market and stuff are high and red and shit, not my problem Jack 
IDK why you didn't buy AMZN stocks when you were 5?
Because I wanted to buy GOOG stocks when i turned 7 years old. But that wouldve been good as well
muh GDP
Calling it now: local governments are gonna start banning multi-family dwellings for bs safety reasons (read: to squeeze even more rent out of the working class). Gotta make all those lazy, good-for-nothing young people pay our hard-working, downtrodden landlords! Then congress will pass a bill with some inane title like, Safe Housing for Seniors to make it so that kids over 18 are legally required to move out and either find an apartment (lol good luck on that), join the military or go to prison.
A less extreme version of what you said already happened across a lot of North America decades ago, and we're living with the consequences. In most cities, it's illegal to build anything other than detached houses on most of the land. There's an empty lot near me that's been undeveloped for a decade because the previous house burned down and the finances of building another detached house there didn't work out for the guy who owned it, but the city wouldn't let him build a duplex with the same footprint because it was "too dense for the character of the neighbourhood."
Get involved in your local government. Tell your city council to stop living at the whims of landlords and to start legalising housing.
Jesus, thatβs infuriating. I really hope some petty rich guy builds that type of home anyway and hires lawyers to handle the resulting lawsuits until all the awful landlords and their allies are insolvent.
Not likely to happen, because those zoning codes are generally on a solid legal footing.
In my own city we're slowly starting to make progress, but it's taking a long time. Minneapolis is one of the places that's doing really well on this front.
In the socdem hell that is Finland this has been built to the states systems for a long time. We can get housing benefits as poors, but those will get cut based on family relations. A poor kid can't move in the same house with a parent no matter what age without these benefits being cut.
Students living at home also are punished for living at home by cutting student benefits, regardless of age and how poor the household is.
Every direction you look there are systems upon systems that maximize the carseral nature of poverty and poverty working as a trap. Including a tax on how much money one can gift to other people. And the poor who have to file for basic income need to present their bank statements and if a relative has helped them with more than 50β¬/month that then gets deducted from the minimal living standard basic income they would get. Same as all side hustle money or tax return or other. So you will never have more than the lowest basic minimum a month no matter what you do. And even this can be cut if you refuse things like work rehab. The minimum basic income here is so low it has been flagged three years in a row by a human rights watch.
The other end of the spectum gets tax cuts for second houses for work, endless support to stay rich.
It's extremely efficiently built and multilayered and the best part is the state is able to frame it as good welfare. It's not, it's a maintenance of a slavery class, which many unemployed are. With 9β¬/day, it's just called "work rehab".
I'm not entirely opposed to capping gifting, it's one of the ways the rich get around inheritance laws and such.
Over here, your welfare is dependent on your partner not earning too much. So, for disabled people you're at much higher risk of abuse being trapped in a relationship, have lower independence, and anyone entering a relationship with you has to take on a financial burden.
Yup same here on that too. Also spouses income impacts your rights. So a lot of domestic abuse or exploitation gets hidden when people (often women) have no personal income and are at home with a spouse who earns so much they don't qualify for the basic income to even theoretically fund getting away, not that it would be enough for that.
Now let's talk about abuse
so a generation hoards all the wealth and creates materially worse conditions for their children and now they're upset that they feel an obligation to support their children well into adulthood? the horror.
People who have to support their children are usually not the same people who hoarded all the wealth.
I'm not sure I'd agree, but it hurts more for the people who didn't have any wealth to begin with. The wealthy don't seem to mind helping their children as much since they have so much wealth at their disposal anyway.
Anecdotally, the rich people I know have gone above and beyond to support their kids into adulthood no matter how poorly those kids managed their finances.
Avg. Americans see this headline
"What are we, a bunch of Asians?!"
Insert neo-orientalism and projection. (Eg. both-sideism with Classic Stakhanovism under socialism vs neo-Stakhanovism under capitalism)
swing watch back and forth, hypnotically Say: "The economy is grrrrr-eat!"
All of history is the history of the struggle between two classes: those whose parents can afford to take care of them as adults, and those whose parents cannot.
The economy is doing great, it is just the people who are not.