Outcast_Searcher wrote:And here we are in early 2018. (Thanks for the hit on the wayback machine, Adam).
S&P 500 earnings solidly higher. No sign of zombie hordes. No (credibly) starving people in the US due to lack of funds and social programs.
The stock markets have been artificially propped up for more than a decade by now, due to a mixture of taxpayer dollars, federal reserve printing, toxic financial instruments/fraud, and practices such as stock buybacks. The U.S. is really a zombie economy, waiting for the Collateralized Debt Obligations and student loan bubble to blow up in everyone's face.
Have you seen the extent of homelessness in many U.S. cities lately?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Z3Rd0rD_IIt's way worse than 11 years ago. Many of today's homeless are degreed professionals making average-level incomes, but still priced out of a roof over their head in many U.S. cities such as Seattle or Los Angeles. Typhus and other medieval diseases are even making a comeback in L.A.
In fact, low unemployment rates, and economic acceleration forecast for both the US and globally for 2018.
I can't help but question whether those "low unemployment rates" are accurate. Once your unemployment aid has expired, whether you have a job or not, you are no longer counted as unemployed.
In fact, I'm an electrical engineer with 9 years of experience. I've been unemployed for more than a year, living off of my savings. Supposedly there's this huge shortage of engineers that is so pronounced that companies are petitioning the government to allow H1B visa applicants into the U.S. because they can't find engineers to do the work. I've applied to hundreds of engineering firms for jobs I'm more than qualified to perform, and I've only gotten 2 interviews thus far in more than a year.
The real issue is these companies don't want to pay U.S. wages. There are a shortage of people with my skillset. When I was still employed making $30/hr, I never got raises even when my productivity was at the top of the employees measured. When I got job offers over the phone, companies were insulting me by offering $12-15/hr, one of them telling me to "be reasonable" when I told them I was currently making $30/hr for the same type of work. EVERYTHING is being reduced to McJob wages.
Some of those I graduated with are currently homeless. They're qualified to do engineering work, but no one hires them, in spite of the shortage of those with their skills/talents. One of them works at a Starbucks and is homeless because he defaulted on his student loans after being unable to find work out of college, and his paycheck is garnished, pricing him out of shelter.
In fact, I can't even land a job flipping burgers or cleaning shitters, just to keep from draining what remains of my savings.
I have no criminal/arrest record of any sort, a credit score of around 800, nothing but good references from my former jobs as an electrical engineer, no debt, no medical problems, and I can't get anyone to hire me no matter how hard I try, no matter how many hundreds of applications I send out.
Supposedly this economy is "booming", but I'm not seeing any of it first hand, at all. Almost everyone I know is also out of work, and being that I'm the one with the engineering degree among my circle, they are freaking the fuck out because they know that if I can't get work with STEM degrees and 9 years experience and no criminal record and perfect credit, they sure as hell won't being high school dropouts with criminal records and ruined credit.
I'm beginning to think I should have dropped out of high school and sold dope instead of slogging my way through college and earning lots of scholarships to help pay for it(even then, I ended up having to pay enough student loan interest to have bought a house, without the house to show for it, and would only have done better were I high school Valedictorian).
Shadowstats.com tries to parse through the obfuscations inherent in the "official" numbers and finds that the real unemployment rate is closer to 23%, than it is to 3%. This would match what I've been seeing on the street. If unemployment were really so low, I should have been able to find work immediately after quitting my former job as an engineer to move home and help take care of my mother. But nope, I can't even find a job cleaning crappers, let alone another engineering job where my skillset is said to be in such short supply.
(Definitions matter. Just because everyone can't afford a luxury penthouse in downtown Manhattan or SF doesn't mean we are living at third world standards generally.
Living standards in the U.S. have declined in quite a pronounced manner from when my parents came of age.
Americans today are nowhere near as wealthy in a material sense as previous generations. Sources are cited at the end. I compare 1968 to 2018(2019 figures for the prices compared aren't available yet because the year isn't over).
In 1968, the minimum wage was $1.60/hr and the median wage was something around $2.75/hr($6,000/yr divided by an average of 42 hours a week worked back then). Currently, the minimum wage is $7.25/hr and has been unchanged for a decade, and the Social Security Administration reports that median wage for 2017 is $31,561/yr(most recent I could find), which at 34.2 hours a week per job average, is $17.74/hr.
Now, we are going to get the cost for some items, 1968, versus 2018:
New 1665 sq ft house price: $14,950 / $178,454
Average new car: $2,822 / $36,270
Average monthly rent: $130 / $1,419
Loaf of bread(would have been non GMO in 1968): $0.22 / $2.35
1,000 kWh electricity: $23 / $122.50
Gallon of gasoline: $0.34 / $2.72
Dozen of eggs(again would’ve been non-GMO in 1968): $0.53 / $2.27
Gallon milk(modern equivalent is lower quality loaded with rGBH): $1.07 / $3.11
Movie ticket: $1.50 / $12.00
1 year public college tuition: $295 / $10,230
Health Insurance cost per person per year: $146(1960) / $10,739(2017)
Lets take a look at how many hours of work it takes to buy the following items, in 1968 vs 2018, at both minimum wage($1.60/hr 1968 vs $7.25/hr today), and median wage($2.60/hr 1968 vs. $17.74/hr today):
Hours worked at minimum wage: Item: 1968 / 2018
New 1665 sq ft house price: 9344 / 24614
Average new car: 1764 / 5003
Average monthly rent: 81 / 196
Loaf of bread: 0.14 / 0.32
1,000 kWh electricity: 14.4 / 16.9
Gallon of gasoline: 0.21 / 0.38
Dozen of eggs: 0.33 / 0.31
Gallon milk: 0.67 / 0.43
Movie ticket: 0.94 / 1.65
1 year public college tuition: 184 / 1411
Health Insurance cost per person per year: 91 / 1481
As you can see, almost across the board, minimum wage buys far less per hour worked than what it used to. Minimum wage today has about one third the overall purchasing power per hour of work it used to have 50 years ago. For minimum wage to pay the same today as it did in 1968, in real terms, it would need to be more than $20/hr.
Now, lets look at the median wage, or how many hours an American worker making the 50th percentile wage has to work to afford various things.
Hours worked at median wage: Item: 1968 / 2018
Average new 1665 sq ft house price: 5436 / 10059
Average new car: 1026 / 2044
Average monthly rent: 47 / 80
Loaf of bread: 0.08 / 0.13
1,000 kWh electricity: 8.36 / 6.91
Gallon of gasoline: 0.12 / 0.15
Dozen of eggs: 0.19 / 0.13
Gallon milk: 0.39 / 0.18
Movie ticket: 0.54 / 0.68
1 year public college tuition: 107 / 577
Health Insurance cost per person per year: 53 / 605
At the median wage, the difference in purchasing power from 50 years ago isn’t as drastic as at minimum wage, but on big ticket items like homes, college education, and cars or paying rent or health insurance, purchasing power per hour of work has still decreased by a factor of two or more between then and now, while one can buy slightly cheaper foodstuffs per hour of work at degraded quality(the organic foods that would be more comparable to the 1960s equivalent will turn out to be similar or costlier per hour of work).
Now, lets compare the median income today to minimum wage in 1968 in terms of real(not CPI) purchasing power. Average new 1665 sq ft house price in 1968 took 9344 hours of minimum wage work to pay for, while today it takes 10059 hours of work at the median wage. The average new car in 1968 took 1764 hours at minimum wage to buy, while today it takes 2044 hours to buy at the median wage. The average month of rent at minimum wage in 1968 takes as many hours today at median wage to afford. A year of public college could be afforded by a part time minimum wage worker working 184 hours in 1968, or about 2 months at a little over 20 hours a week, whereas a median income earner today living a paycheck to paycheck existence working their 40 hours a week will need to work an extra 11 hours a week overtime all year long on the side to afford that year of school(and if overtime cannot be obtained, 17 hours a week working a second job!), which will leave them no time to study. Health insurance requires the median worker today to work roughly 6 times as many hours to afford it as a minimum wage worker would have required in 1968.
The median wage today, in REAL terms, pays LESS than the minimum wage of 50 years ago by a sizable margin. This is why a family that used to be supported with one income earner, with the household able to build wealth, now requires two income earners living paycheck to paycheck and unable to save anything, constantly mired in ever-growing debt. This has happened, WHILE productivity per worker in the U.S. has more than doubled since then.
The above explains why more than half of Americans cannot come up with $500 in an emergency, and why 3/4 of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. This doesn't just affect my generation, the millenials. Most Gen Xers and Boomers are broke due to life circumstances outside of their control that have parted them with their money in time as well. The wealthiest 1% have pocketed the difference and have grown immensely richer, the upper 10% have stayed about as well off as they were, and everyone else has seen a sharp drop in living standards with debt used to keep the illusion of prosperity alive.
Meanwhile, the consumer price index lies about the real inflation rate. The CPI often neglects to include cost increases for things like food and housing into its inflation calculations, uses tactics such as "substitution" of lower quality items for more expensive items to claim there's no price increase(lets say hamburger and steak cost $3/lb and $6/lb, respectively, and increase to $6/lb and $9/lb. The CPI will substitute hamburger for steak, and claim that since hamburger is now $6/lb, the same cost steak used to be, and that since they're both beef, no price increase for beef has occurred), and even allowing shrinkage in product amounts at the retail level for a given cost to claim no price increase(that 64 oz tub of ice cream shrinking to 59 oz retaining the same price, the CPI says there's no cost increase).
For the real inflation rate, check the Chapwood Index.
Sources:
https://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-066.pdfhttps://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-wo ... s-history/https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/central.htmlhttp://www.1960sflashback.com/1968/Economy.asphttp://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1968.htmlhttps://www.blogthings.com/whathappened ... esult=1968https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/an ... ?t=ptb0810 ($0.023/kWh electricty cost in 1968)
https://mediaroom.kbb.com/2018-02-01-Av ... -Blue-Bookhttps://www.thehomesdirect.com/blog/ave ... tured-home (New homes cost $107.18/ft^2 today)
https://247wallst.com/special-report/20 ... re-born/6/ (Average new home was 1665 sq ft in 1968)
https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-ma ... nt-report/ (average rent 2018 is $1,419)
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly ... epmt_5_6_a ($0.1225/kWh electricity in 2018)
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/c ... ted+States (cost of bread, gasoline, eggs, movie tickets, and milk today)
https://www.gobankingrates.com/saving-m ... re-born/#2 (cost of college in 2018 and 1968)
https://www.thebalance.com/causes-of-ri ... ts-4064878 (Health insurance costs)
The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the old growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder. ~Thomas Jefferson