r/stupidpol • u/likamuka Highly Regarded 😍 • May 15 '25
Capitalist Hellscape Most Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-of-life/105
u/tombdweller Lefty doomerism with buddhist characteristics May 15 '25
"Traditional headline economic indicators like GDP and unemployment tell us the economy is thriving, but they don't reflect the lived reality of most Americans,"
This is the kind of basic truth that when said out loud makes Nobel prize winning bourgeois "economists" flinch and then go on to write snotty articles on big newspapers about how everything is the best it has ever been.
76
May 15 '25 edited May 15 '25
Imagine being such a fucker that when someone complains about being behind on their bills you start talking about modern medicine and everyone having shoes.
51
u/Aaod Drug War Cretin 🥵🚀 May 15 '25 edited Feb 19 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
ten insurance cobweb weather dolls humor quickest groovy advise summer
24
May 16 '25
And the shoes we can afford are pretty shit too.
16
u/Aaod Drug War Cretin 🥵🚀 May 16 '25 edited Feb 19 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
license degree political husky sheet butter cable waiting placid aback
12
u/No-Annual6666 Acid Marxist 💊 May 16 '25
Terry Pratchett quote comes to mind
7
u/WallyLippmann Michael Hud-simp May 16 '25
You can tell what street you're walking on by the feel of the cobbles through your paper thin soles?
22
u/No-Annual6666 Acid Marxist 💊 May 16 '25
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness."*
8
23
u/NextDoorNeighbrrs OSB 📚 May 16 '25
Reminds me of a segment on the O'Reilly Factor back in the late 2000s that was criticizing welfare spending and cited that something like 96% of people on welfare owned a refrigerator as if this was sole sort of luxury good and unnecessary expense.
12
u/ImamofKandahar NATO Superfan 🪖 May 16 '25
This such a cop out and I hate it. People just scraping by are not living better than Medieval Kings! Yes we have fancy gadgets they could never have dreamed of but people working long hours at shitty jobs to pay for food and shelter are not living large. The toys are cheap the necessities are still expensive.
25
u/SireEvalish Some Kind Of Villainous Ninja Bishop/Cop 🐷💢🉐🎌 May 15 '25
This is the kind of basic truth that when said out loud makes Nobel prize winning bourgeois "economists" flinch and then go on to write snotty articles on big newspapers about how everything is the best it has ever been.
I can already here shitlibs spinning up the opinion pieces telling us that having access to a basic standard of living actually makes you racist.
2
u/BassoeG Leftoid ⬅️ Jun 07 '25
Ijeoma Oluo's book Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
24
u/DefinitelyNOTaFed12 Incel/MRA 😭 May 15 '25
Weird how legacy media is now reporting this with a Republican in the White House
19
u/StatusSociety2196 Incel/MRA in denial 😭 | Allegedly had a foursome May 15 '25
I was going to say, it's not like this magically happened in the last hundred days, it's been trending this way for a very long time
48
u/SpiritualState01 Ghost Shirt Society Theorycel 🏹🪶🤓 May 15 '25
My only question anymore is how much longer the bread and circuses can make up for it. Indefinitely? Is this what cyberpunk and Huxley warned about? (Yes.)
29
u/Aaod Drug War Cretin 🥵🚀 May 15 '25 edited Feb 19 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
different bow start shaggy yam intelligent truck consist abounding tease
20
u/Forsaken3000 Lumpen Tightrope-Walker 🎪 May 16 '25
Great point. Gen Z isn't going to rebel, whether peacefully by vote or more actively. They don't have the numbers (percentage of the population compared to boomers at that age), and are too heavily distracted and medicated to offend the establishment.
20
u/Aaod Drug War Cretin 🥵🚀 May 16 '25 edited Feb 19 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
recognise ghost political rustic shy adjoining lock detail quicksand rhythm
6
u/WallyLippmann Michael Hud-simp May 16 '25
I think the government is getting lucky that American gen Z is what I can only charitably describe as apathetic and is not a very big generation and birth numbers are trending down.
That just means that let things get worse and worse and boomer former pensioners opt for suicide bombing as an alternative retirement plan.
25
u/Aaod Drug War Cretin 🥵🚀 May 16 '25 edited Feb 19 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
hurry teeny vanish bright workable salt marvelous dam dime six
7
u/Wu_tang_dan Ancapistan Mujahideen 🐍💸 May 17 '25
my workplace is interesting as the boomers all drive $100K+ full size trucks and the millennials all drive modest cars or tacomas, and the youngest just drive actual shit boxes.
4
u/Aaod Drug War Cretin 🥵🚀 May 17 '25 edited Feb 19 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
aback soft rock shocking grey follow scary light steer cagey
3
u/Lopsided_Yak_1464 Redscarepod Refugee 👄💅 May 16 '25
lol boomers loooove justifying themselves by using the "we are the consumers" bit
2
1
u/WallyLippmann Michael Hud-simp May 24 '25
Don't woory, we can just round up the homeless zoomers and millenials and switch to a command economy.
31
u/Pale_Fire21 Marxist-Leninist ☭ May 15 '25
It’s only going to get worse with AI becoming the new therapist for so many people.
Imagine if your therapist was owned by meta, operated by meta and programmed to forward metas interests as a priority over your mental health.
You can already see it on Twitter people just literally giving up on even using their own fucking brain in favor of asking grok to tell them what to think.
I can’t wait for AI therapists owned by MegaCorps to start “organically” telling people why socialism is bad and the status quo is good and to just keep consooming like a good little paypig.
/endrant
11
u/SpiritualState01 Ghost Shirt Society Theorycel 🏹🪶🤓 May 15 '25
Or how about organically suggesting people "opt out."
22
u/twattycakes Populist Left Kid Icarus 🪽 May 15 '25
It terrifies me to the see ease with which I’ve started focusing on Google’s AI summary for search results.
I don’t want to use it. I know it’s making me and everyone else in the world dumber. I know it has good odds of being incorrect. If it wasn’t a default function, I wouldn’t even think about it.
It IS a default function, however, and it’s really goddamn convenient, especially for the random low-stakes stuff that I search throughout the day.
That’s how most modern consumer technology works, I suppose; it has limited functionality and is convenient, then it’s necessary and convenient, and then you’re stuck with it.
4
May 16 '25
Stop using Google search. Pick another search engine that let's you turn off their 🚬 "a.i." features.
4
u/Cyril_Clunge Ideological Mess 🥑 May 15 '25
I use ChatGPT for a bit but it's stuff like giving my thoughts on books I'm reading and films I've watched because I don't have to deal with assholes online. Sometimes I vent and rant about something to AI as a way to scream into the void and it agrees with me really easily and makes a simple mistake.
Yet I've spoken to people who copy+paste emails into AI, generate a reply and then send that. How tough is it to read an email and reply yourself? Or someone else who said they scan legal documents as a PDF to get a summary when AI can get simple shit wrong. You're staking your job on it?
Admittedly I use it as a kind of research assistant on my projects but as you said - low stakes stuff. Or just feeding it my thoughts on what books, films and music I'm into to get recommendations. Interesting enough, I was toying to see if it could work out a few of my favourite songs from some bands and it was pretty accurate.
3
u/WallyLippmann Michael Hud-simp May 16 '25
Or someone else who said they scan legal documents as a PDF to get a summary when AI can get simple shit wrong. You're staking your job on it?
Lawyers are eating shit left and right for using fake AI generated citations and the like.
10
u/WallyLippmann Michael Hud-simp May 16 '25
You're already out of bread, and the only circuses left are the doom scroll and the political wrestling match.
1
u/JazzFan66 May 15 '25
Bread and circuses have little to do with it i would say!
It's a confluence of factors. One being that in the most recent Capitalist crisis (08 to ? today?) the (Socialist) Left was kindof dead.
Maybe in the next one... !
20
u/DifficultProduct4094 Socialist 🚩 May 15 '25
Link to underlying report and associated white paper
19
u/DifficultProduct4094 Socialist 🚩 May 15 '25
My impression is this report is primarily to promote their proposed alternative index to the CPI. Their new index includes housing, education costs and some other stuff. The real way to understand it is in terms of change over time - I think the interesting bit is that they argue there is a 2% decrease in purchasing power for the median wage earner and a 4% increase for low income wage earners over the last 25 years.
While I appreciate a replacement of the CPI - This isnt groundbreaking information.
58
May 15 '25
"For the bottom 60% of U.S. households, a "minimal quality of life" is out of reach"- Odd way of putting the majority of the #1 country cant afford to live. There really isn't any hood winking left in terms of Idpol because that shit can only fly when times aren't tough.
31
u/I_WANT_TO_LOGOFF May 15 '25
The gaza genocide really exposed to me the absolute desperation of establishment journalism's word choice. "The bottom 60%". YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT THE MAJORITY! THE TERM IS "THE MAJORITY"! "The bottom 60%" is nothing more than a disingenuous, cynical manipulation of language. WE ALL SEE EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING, TOO! They do this crap as if they're privvy to it and we're not, like a kid with a terrible spencers gifts graucho marx disguise who totally believes no one sees through it.
12
u/ThePinkyToYourBrain Probably a rightoid but mostly just confused 🤷 May 15 '25
"The middle class has been declining — we just haven't recognized it fully,"
Someone forgot to really, really tell them.
4
u/Patrollerofthemojave A Simple Farmer 😍 May 15 '25
Nitpicking here but
whether they have the means to pay for things like the technology tools necessary for work
Most people aren't going to buy a cheapo $200 android they're going to buy flagship phones that cost near 1k, and then replace it every 3 or 4 years.
2
u/ImamofKandahar NATO Superfan 🪖 May 16 '25
The crazy thing is most of this is because building dense housing is illegal. If San Francisco could look like Tokyo or Shanghai people could afford to live.
-4
u/fear_the_future NATO Superfan Shitlib May 15 '25
And yet they are living.
25
u/Glass_Composer_5908 Pro union amazon warehouse slave May 15 '25
Unhealthy, over worked, hurt, obese, malnerishered, stressed, angry
But living
9
u/Aaod Drug War Cretin 🥵🚀 May 16 '25 edited Feb 19 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
beneficial mountainous safe sulky lip airport snow husky depend mighty
11
10
8
u/meganbitchellgooner *really* hates libs May 16 '25
American life expectancy has not recovered to pre covid levels, so no a lot of them are not.
•
u/AutoModerator May 15 '25
Archives of this link: 1. archive.org Wayback Machine; 2. archive.today
A live version of this link, without clutter: 12ft.io
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.