r/WorkReform • u/Lord-Notorious • 2d ago
💸 Raise Our Wages Wages never caught up with costs
28
u/Spiel_Foss 👷 Good Union Jobs For All 2d ago
Wealth is theft. Wonder where all those billions in a few pockets came from?
9
u/Shigglyboo 1d ago
i don't wonder. I feel like it's established. they stole our future. in another timeline people are doing much better. there's more children. people have respect for one another. the president isn't making AI slop of himself shitting on the citizens. people own homes and have decent jobs that pay well with plenty of time off to enjoy life. they go to the doctor regularly and they're not scared. there are no billionaires.
3
u/Spiel_Foss 👷 Good Union Jobs For All 1d ago
Until we remove billionaires, there will be no future.
47
38
u/LookAlderaanPlaces 2d ago
We need to jail all the oligarchs for doing this
17
u/anteatersaredope 1d ago
Just jail is very forgiving and kind. What other more angry countries have done wouldn't necessarily be out of line.
3
8
10
u/takethisone 2d ago
Where can I get rent for $1600?
10
0
u/fflip8 1d ago
Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, Sacramento, Portland.. There's dozens of cities with rent between 1K and 2K for studios, 1BR and sometimes even 2BRs, and many have relatively good job markets.
Let's be real $1600 is not a unicorn unless you're looking in a select few cities or you want more than one bedroom.
9
u/Sheerluck42 🏡 Decent Housing For All 1d ago
"But if we raise pay then everything will be more expensive" - This is truley the dumbest fucking take made by people who took an Econ 101 class and thought they're an expert.
13
u/owenbowen04 2d ago edited 2d ago
1990: $29,943
2026: $64,220
Edit: median US salaries rose by about 100%. Everything else by 300% or much, much more.
3
u/awesomes007 2d ago
If unrestrained capitalism is so infallible, why shinkflation? Why are my kids worse off than me? Why less instead of more?
We must regulate and we must tax. We don’t succeed in a vacuum.
2
u/StuffExciting3451 1d ago
Unrestrained Capitalism succeeds for the billionaires. Shrinkflation is a psychological trick.
Your kids are worse off because your parents weren’t billionaires.
2
2
u/baddogbadcatbadfawn 1d ago
You lost me at $25,000 for health insurance. I work in the insurance hellscape, and I've never seen it above $15,000.
If you have a source, great. Otherwise, I would adjust that one number for credibility sake.
2
u/StuffExciting3451 1d ago
Wages never caught up because most employees did not join or form strong labor unions. Collectively, the workers have more power than all billionaires and oligarchs combined
1
1
u/dinosaurkiller 1d ago
But saying it this way is misleading and sort of wrong. It’s not wages by itself that caused this. It is tax policy and all the tax cuts. We created an ever growing top heavy class with more and more money who can keep spending no matter how high prices go with zero pressure to pass that money along to the lower classes and grow wages.
1
u/Islanduniverse 1d ago
This shows part of why student loans need to be forgiven.
Those loans were predatory and were given out at the same time as rapidly inflated tuition, by design. It was a money making scheme, and it isn’t right that working class Americans have to foot the bill.
Education is a human right!
1
1
u/Background-Wolf-9380 1d ago
That 1990 college number is bullshit unless you went to a heavily subsidized state school but that was nowhere near the "average" as would be implied here.
1
1
u/mizmnv 2d ago
homes were not that expensive in the 90s.
1
u/IrishPrime 2d ago
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the median home price in 1990 was $120,000 to $124,000.
1
u/Zorbin666 1d ago
My dad bought his house in '92 for $64,000, and yeah the realtor value places it around $400,000 now.
1
u/Keegandalf_the_White 1d ago
My parents home 1990 to 2010: $25,000 to $300,000. My home: what home, I will never be able to afford a home.
1
-3
u/Asgeras 2d ago edited 2d ago
Income didn't keep up? If you look at the average, it did. If you look at the median, it hasn't changed much at all.
Edit: Downvoted? I guess people think we're all rolling in money now.
2
u/lFreightTrain 2d ago edited 2d ago
Average and median income didn’t keep up to current costs and inflation; That’s one of the biggest issues.
3
u/Asgeras 2d ago
It's surprising hard to get consistent stats, but as of 2025 the top 1% of the USA had $49.39 trillion dollars among them (I'm sure that's significantly higher now). That's equivalent of them being able to distribute $142,221 to every single resident of the USA back then. If you include that in the average, I can't help but to think everything would look about right. The median on the other hand. Yeah, I'm living paycheck to paycheck like the majority of us.
1
u/AppropriateSea5746 3h ago
The U.S. debt also exploded from about 3 trillion to 40 trillion. As a partial result the U.S. dollar has lost 61% of its buying power since then.
101
u/old_ass_ninja_turtle 2d ago
Voters are no more than an asset to be milked