This is exactly what workers mean when they say the stock market isn’t the economy.
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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Yeah but their entire retirement is based on it!
Such an insidious way of keeping workers complicit in our capitalist hellscape.
Oof, somehow this escaped me, even though I participate, while hating it, and thinking at least a bit about that fact along the way. The thing doesn't have to even be deliberate if it's effective - accidentally-discovered techniques often work as well as planned/sought ones.
By which I mean, of course this situation is not some deliberate "super-rich cabal" silly scenario, but damn if the levers don't work exactly that way. My and my family's future well-being, as a strictly mandatory goal to pursue, is turned into fuel for a machine I hate (contributing to 401k), and the hope I've been soft-coerced into is a hope that the hateful thing spits out enough at the end for me to keep:
- a roof over our heads, not otherwise guaranteed nor likely
- continued medical care through life post-employability, not otherwise guaranteed, only somewhat likely (Medicare)
- the limited dignity of dying with some care, but true misery along the way, as it is for almost anyone who doesn't "luck into" a sudden end...again, not otherwise guaranteed, nor fucking likely (end of life care is an absolute disaster in this country)
The folks with the resources and "character" to enjoy, exploit, and move stocks love this. The new yachts we buy them, ridiculous "homes", and the unbelievably fresh new whatever's on their idiot status comparison instruments are never-before-seen and even more egregiously wasteful than their awful rivals'.
The folks doing less well than me? I mean we don't even hear their misery, except in limited outbursts at strange times in retail and food industry settings or other such. The folks actually working themselves to death, SO many of us, are too fucking busy to even properly cry out.
Their entire retirement is held hostage by it. Fixed it for ya.
Lol, you think we'll be able to retire 😂
I've lucked out and tracking to retire at 60 but my grandfather has been retired about as long as I've been alive (55).
I'm 30 next month, I joined the military right out of high school, and I specifically remember them teaching us a bit about 401k's because of our ability to participate in TSP.
The instructor very clearly told us, the average American needs $1 million in their retirement account when they to to retire to live comfortably. Not extravagantly, comfortably.
Just a couple weeks ago I saw an article saying the average American now needs $2 million in their retirement account to be to retire comfortably, and this is assuming they don't have a mortgage payment, etc.
So in 11 years, the amount needed to retire comfortably has doubled, and yet my wages haven't doubled... Minimum wage hasn't increased in decades, sure they're talking about $15/hr now, but that should've been 10 years ago. With inflation, minimum wage should be around $26/hr, yet even in my blue state, it's like $15.60/hr or something, it's barely over $15.
Throw in the recent news about the inevitable and quickly approaching AMOC collapse and the climate hellscape that's going to come with it... Our futures were robbed from us for profit, and even if I started making triple what I make now, I'll never be able to retire, nor do I even have a retirement account anymore (I cashed mine out to help me during some really rough financial times right after the pandemic, y'know, when the government told the average American to go fuck themselves). And I was one of the few among my friends who even had one.
So, like many people around my age, my retirement will either be societal collapse in the next couple decades, or a bullet to the head (if I could even afford the bullet) as I die in old age, homeless, while we probably have six trillionaires at that point.
Not essentially, we are. Soon we will have great depression 2.0
That is an impressive typo
Tax.
Tax them like there is no tomorrow.
Billionaires should simply not exist. Put a cap on total net worth and if you pass that, income tax goes to 100. If your networth goes up anyway because of stocks or whatever, tax that too. Tax stocks, homes, boats, etc.
Enormous wealth should be like the speed of light. The closer you get there, the heavier it becomes to stay there, you need to spend more and more energy to get less and less higher.
This should not be a crazy idea.
Billionaires have such a heavy say in our government that it will never go that way unless it's forced.
gilded age
Reforming capitalism will only delay end stage, not prevent it.
Imagine getting something like the early 20th century labor movement going these days. Seems impossible right? We we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started? We wasted those lives lost and ruined because we thought capitalism could be salvaged. It is not salvageable.
Profits shouldn't exist. They should be required to put that money back into the company and take a salary for themselves. Idk how this works with shareholders but they can get fucked for all I care at this point.
We used to have progressive income taxes that did this.
Reagan, Thatcher and their ilk pulled them because "trickle down, a rising tide lifts all boats, thousand points of light, blah blah blah"
A rising tide lifts all boats has always struck me as a strange metaphor for them to use. To me that conjures up thoughts of welfare, UBI, irreducible minimums, safety nets, etc. It seems like a great metaphor for the opposite of what they're using it for.
Companies need shareholders to get off the ground, and you don't have to be rich to be a shareholder. That's the whole idea... otherwise only the mega rich have the capital to start businesses.
Paying C-suites this much is just idiotic though. I own a few stocks, and seeing some of the companies pay executives and upper management so much to feud and slowly destroy companies makes me sick. It is not what anyone sane wants unless they're parasitic daytraders or drinking the corporate kool-aid.
Greedy capitalism is the problem, but it's also a culture problem, I think.
The way you fix this is with higher, and enforced, corporate taxes. If the corporation doesn't keep the money anyways, they flow it back in.
Hence the rising fascism. The corporate class knows the only way to get the common people to continue to support them is through scaremongering about imagined threats.
Very simply. Raise their taxes.
Less simply. Remove the cap on social security tax. Tax long term capital gains beyond a certain amount as regular income. Put the top rate income tax closer to 90%. Fix the god damn estate tax situation. Why on god's green earth do the children of Sam Walton occupy so much space on the Forbes 400.
France will review your company's ledger if you want to fire people en masse. If you can afford to keep them you can't fire them
I mean, I guess, but why complicate this stuff. We already have the systems and administration to do taxes. We could break up monopolies and enforce the laws we already have.
I'd keep it real real simple for folks. We should stop letting corporations and their owner class privatize the gains and stick the rest of society with the losses. Take the 2008 fiasco, if we are bailing out a bunch of companies we should be bailing out a bunch of home owners.
Or we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people's labor
We have been in a new gilded age since the end of the 90s...
There's like 600k people dying of cancer at any given time, and seperately theres only like 800 billionaires who are probably somewhat directly responsible for their cancer and lack of access to medical care. If I had a bucket list bc I was dying of cancer, I know what would be on it.
Terms of enrampagement
We have to scare the rich. Organize, agitate, break shit, etc. They have been too successful at dividing us along arbitrary lines. No war but class war. Fight back.
Can we continue with the trend and start having unions "talk" to the CEOs? 👀
We’re also in the Business Plot 2
I'm ready to eat the rich and sacrifice myself for the next generation, but I'm not a leader, I'm good at building scaffolds though. I wish we had a François Hanriot or a John Brown
Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.
So we've got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.
An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege
An ever growing number of working poor who need two paychecks to live
Sounds like Tsarist Russia, with no single royal family to execute.
Anyone? There are lots of houses worth less than $1,000,000. Sure, by the time a mortgage is paid off and you fully own the house yourself a person should also have some savings, but I certainly wouldn't expect that to be universal.
My house is now worth a bit over $350,000. And although that is less then $1,000,000 I bought it at $185,000 (and had to use every penny saved to get a down payment) just a decade ago. Even in my small rural town I currently could not afford to buy the house I live in, I doubt this will improve in time.
I might not be a millionaire, but I would guess I am now in a smaller class of people that owns where they sleep. And if the market keeps doing whats its doing I might be a millionaire in time (this is not overall a good thing).
Yeah, well, what are YOU going to do about it?!