Morning Ed: Politics {2017.07.13.Th}

DavidTC in reply to Saul Degraw says:

I entirely agree with it, although I think that what happened during the Great Recession was just, in a way, an addition to what had been happening since the 80s.

Employers got used to never, ever, under any circumstances, having to pay employees more. It’s just something that didn’t happen. Raises were always less than inflation, and an optional thing every year.

This has happened more since they lowered wages during the Great Recession, and then didn’t raise them back, but let’s not pretend that wages hadn’t been stagnate for decades before that.

…actually, thinking about it, the point is exactly correct, except it started at the end of the previous recession. In the 1970s, people got used to low wages, which were better than unemployment.

When the economy restarted from that, the wealth redirected all gains to themselves instead of the middle class. (And they made sure the middle class could get mortgages and credit cards and all sorts of monopoly money they had to pay back later instead of, you know, employers actually paying them.)

This continued until it happened again in 2007, and wages went down again because the American people would accept lower wages instead of no wages.

And, once again, the wealthy refused to actually raise wages when that was all over, redirecting any eventual gains to themselves.

Interesting fact: This time around, millennials aren’t falling for the easy credit bullshit, for the rather obvious reason they just saw their parents get badly burned by it. Nor are they falling for the ‘Start a shitty job with the hopes that you will move up and we will eventually pay you more’ trick, because they saw their parents fall for that also.

And on top of seeing their parents’ wages slowly decrease because of inflation, they are probably more financially numerate than any generation before.(1)

1) But, wait, herp derp, aren’t millennials supposed to be bad at managing their finances? Yes, in much the same way you can say literally anything at all about Snake People if the standard is ‘a millennial once did this’. In actual reality, the generation that is utter shit with money is Generation X, whereas just about the only debt that millennials are willing to take on is student loans, which are essentially ‘required’ of them. Millennials are refusing to borrow to buy houses, they are refusing to borrow to buy cars, they are just completely refusing to borrow if they can avoid it, so they tend to end up much better off financially. And when they do have to borrow, they pay off their debt as fast as they possibly can, because they understand how interest works.

And this is on top of better spending habits. Yes, they’re young, they spend a lot, but their ‘a lot’ is much less than previous generations. Some of that is ‘living through a recession at a formative age’, and some of it is ‘Millennials all have apps on their phone that connect to all their bank accounts and let them keep track of all their finances’, but whatever the cause, they are less stupid about money than other people were at their age.Report