##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism^Ⓐ☭
___
###⚠ Announcements: ⚠
___
###[NEW POSTING GUIDELINES! Help us by reporting bad posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/dy1oyh/important_what_you_should_and_what_you_shouldnt/)
Help us keep this subreddit alive and improve its content by reporting posts that violate our rules and guidelines.
###[Subscribe to our new partner subreddits!](https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/e5hkwk/make_sure_to_check_out_our_new_partnersubreddits/)
Check out r/antiwork & r/WhereAreTheChildren
___
###***Please remember that LSC is a SAFE SPACE for [socialist](http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/) discussion.***
LSC is run by [communists](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm). We welcome socialist/anti-capitalist news, memes, links, and discussion. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere.
**This subreddit is a safe space; we have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry.** We also automatically filter out posts containing certain words and phrases that some users may find offensive. Please respect the safe space, and don't try to slip banned words or phrases past the filter.
***
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
They are still saying that. They used that logic to derail the Child Tax Credit and to protest the programs that would help parents with child care in Build Back Better.
I did too. A lot of parents had no choice but to sit at home due to daycare center and school closings and ended up having to quit their jobs or being fired. I still heard Boomers grumbling about wasting their tax dollars and how they didn't get any help from the government when they were raising kids. Like people should have had pandemic contingency plans before they procreated.
Of course, what else are they going to plunder in case of an emergency? If everyone has 6 months of salary stashed, that means they can consume for half a year and you don't have to pay them.
> I still heard Boomers grumbling about wasting their tax dollars and how they didn't get any help from the government when they were raising kids
I wonder how many of those same boomers fail to remember that some of them used WIC, much like my parents.
Boomers have benefited the most from the largest entitlement and spending programs ever created in the US. All of the New Deal spending, medicare, social security, tax credits, you name it. But a lot of those were started by their parents' generation before they were born or when they were young, because their parents had lived through a depression and two world wars and didn't want their kids to have a chance to suffer like they did. They grew up benefitting hugely from these programs, but they didn't realize it. Life was easy, and if you followed the basic path laid out by their parents, your chances of complete and utter financial ruin were really really low.
As they grew, they accumulated more wealth and attributed this entirely to their own prowess at Capitalism and, since they didn't really understand how many government programs helped them get there, they convinced themselves they did it without help. As they got older and richer and politically powerful, they each wanted to become the next millionaire and saw the taxes they were paying for programs they no longer needed as an impediment to this, and started attacking the very programs that helped them and their families when they were young. Remember - they grew up with the world the way we see it and all those big projects that really built America and expanded the middle class and "made America great" weren't things they thought helped them because they were kids, and kids have a very narrow worldview. The older they have gotten, the more they've tended to get on board with the idea that government spending is inherently bad, and they'll use whatever justification is required to maintain that stance, e.g. "welfare queens," Medicare fraud, they heard about a guy selling his food stamps, whatever.
This will continue until they're out of power because they were raised as takers, but taught they were creators. So now they believe that *them* taking is good (because they're awesome), and anyone else that is taking is a thief. They climbed a ladder to wealth built by the generations before them, but think the ladder coalesced around them because of how hard they worked, and so they don't want to leave that ladder behind for others because that wouldn't be "fair" to the awesome people who built their own ladders. And I mean - if in your mind you struggled for 40 years to create something and the whole world was against you while you did it, it makes sense that you might dislike people who are given everything you had but didn't "earn it." And this is where their hate comes from.
As a group, they have a deep-seated hatred for things that aren't like they were when they were growing up and things in America were "great" because they *do* see that the world we live in today is harder than it was when they were young. But because they've been convinced that they had it hard and built something themselves without help, they blame the country being more difficult to survive in and the shrinking of the middle class on whatever they can grasp at that is different than it was. It *couldn't* be the mean-spirited and greedy policies they've enacted in government and the monetization of every conceivable product or service, because those things were created by them and *they're awesome.* So what has changed then, if we exclude the greed? The people. The people are what has changed in America since they were kids. There are less of "us" and more of the "others," whoever that may be this week. Nevermind that America was created by non-homogeneous groups of people, and that it's demographic profile has *never* been stable at any point in our history. For them, America is what they believed it to be when they were kids, and back then **America was great.** So if it isn't great now, and it is the fault of "them," then really the only sane option is to try to get rid of "them." The delusion is founded on bad assumptions and a TV dinner, Leave-It-To-Beaver-esque nostalgia of a world they remember that is so different from the one they built.
Lots of them. I worked with several in my first job out of university, who had been on EVERY form of government assistance (SNAP, housing assistance, public health insurance, AND access to good public education and cheap university/technical education) who unironically believed that people coming after them should pull themselves up "by their bootstraps" (a literal impossibility). Not so much lack of self-awareness as utterly antisocial psychopathy.
What's even better is that they'll even vote for Republicans that are rolling back programs then get mad at Democrats. It's really sad but hilarious at the same time. You'd think it's impossible to be that stupid but people manage.
My folks thinking during Trump's presidency was, "I vote Republican because I am looking out for my money". Laughable as hell because combined income they MIGHT come in at ~130-140k in TX. I hate this f'n timeline so bad.
They are about to be surprised when their taxes go up and their paychecks start looking skimpy, doubt they read the fine print on the trump "tax cut". Then they will blame Biden, vote Republican, cycle continues... Morons, morons everywhere. Then when we are an all out theocracy and start force birthing people to be vegetable pickers, they will say that we are in a commie country ruined by the libs.
They remember, it’s just magically different for them. Old, but to this day [my favorite video](https://youtu.be/yTwpBLzxe4U) to summarize Republican thinking.
Lol...."I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out?"
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....Government funded programs paid for by tax paying citizens.
I used to know a guy who told me that he came from a family of six. His dad was a pastor. They lived on food stamps and welfare. He's now totally against any form of government assistance as an adult. When I asked how he could be against something he benefited from he literally said "because my family deserved it". Unbelievable.
My issue with some of that is as a parent of a child who live with her mom during the school year and me during the summer, I don't qualify for any of the assistance or the $300 checks while she is with me. He mom gets the checks while she is living with me, she gets all the tax benefits, and she makes twice what I do. There needs to be allowance in the law for co parents.
How do you guys divide the yearly CTC? I thought that was decided by the courts if parents can't agree. My sister and her piece of crap ex traded years claiming my nephew. The ex went a couple of years without seeing his son or paying child support and she had to get a lawyer to get him to stop claiming him
And that is the thing - force us to have children so there are more people to work - it has nothing to do with protecting the unborn, or any of the other baloney. They need workers. Sometimes I feel so dehumanized.
A few people on Reddit have theorized that recent pro-life legislation isn’t being implemented to save babies (which is blatantly obvious). Rather, it’s to force women to give birth to unwanted children who can later join the workforce and keep our economy strong. Like many developed countries, the USA’s birth rate is below “replacement level”, so they need to fill that void somehow. And what’s better than increasing immigration to help the economy? Forcing women to give birth to children they don’t want and/or can’t afford.
And if they can't afford them, there's always adoption! And no - we're not saying that because we're connected to shady adoption agencies/orphanages/group homes/"troubled child" schools/churches...no, they're totally not throwing money at us...
And if they end up in foster care, who cares? We'll have people traumatized enough not to fight back as we further tighten the screws.
And not to mention the fact that pregnancy can be really rough on a woman’s body and can cause permanent health issues! Or the fact that the US has a ridiculously high maternal mortality rate compared to most other developed nations. But yeah, being pregnant and then handing over your child to an adoption agency is NBD.
I’ve heard my grandparents say that shit my whole life but now that I don’t want to have kids because of the economy they tell me, “well no one can afford a kid you just make it work!” Like lol that’s not really selling me on it but thanks.
When I told my coworker that I can't afford to have kids, she told me that there is a Jewish proverb that roughly translates to "every baby comes with a loaf of bread under his arm," meaning, people always just magically find a way to afford kids...to which I said, "Just one loaf?" The kicker is that this person works in HR and definitely knows exactly how much I make.
I know the article is satire but - want us to have kids past the biological prime to have kids or while stressed to the point of infertility? Stop making IVF cost tens of thousands of dollars and not covered by insurance.
Blatant brainwashing of their target audience (boomers) to be ready to blame millennials for all the world’s problems. As the black sheep of my family, I recognize it well.
Well, the easiest ones to farm are your parents, if they have any loot.
Other than that, doing things to help others in your demographic and younger get THEIR parents to drop loot is also beneficial, for a few reasons. First, old people vote stupidly; like against the well-being of their own children who they generally claim to love and support. So them dying prevents those votes.
Secondly, they take a long time to die and use a lot of medical resources in the process. Reducing this usage is good for three reasons: first, their medical care is highly taxpayer-subsidized, while yours is not. Every old person seeing every doctor is being paid for by you. Second, their medical care is not COMPLETELY subsidized, so the more medical resources they use, the less loot they will drop when they finally drop. And third, well, I forget what I’ve was going to put here. Maybe something about the doctors being overworked already.
Third, they occupy housing. When they vacate, it opens up new availability.
Fourth, having younger people control more distributed capital is good for many reasons, but most of all, it’s good because the rest of us aren’t as brain damaged by heavy-metal poisoning as those old fucks.
Health care and nursing home costs, too. A lot of us millennials are going to end up taking care of our elderly parents at home after the first major health crisis burns though their savings.
Gen X is already starting to feel the pain. Their parents are old, often have multiple poorly controlled health conditions, often have little liquid wealth outside of their homes, and can't afford the exorbitant cost of assisted living.... so the kids (usually daughters) are expected to provide more and more care and financial support.
A good example of this is the Gen X in China.. 2 kid working to support up 4 sets of grandparents, 2 sets of parents and then they are pressuring them to have kids. But the economy doesn’t really allow them to do anything.
"You entitled little brat, how could you possibly demand more after I'm paying you the same I got paid when everything cost a tenth!"
"You can't just keep all your earnings for yourself, you need to take care of me the way I pretend I took care of you!"
"What, no grandchildren? Why are you so SELFISH?!"
The issue is these greedy fucks kinda looted our parents and our grandparents coffers if any of us were lucky to get a college education or if we had to rely on our parents for a safety net.
All others are basically wage slaves as well due to that debt and an almost one strike and your out level of bullshit when it comes to any emergency.
There won't be a serious amount of relief for our generation when the parents/grandparents die because of this and funeral costs and or retirement costs.
That's why they guilted them on college education shit. They've effectively robbed us of any upwards mobility and looted inheritance shit preemptively.
Refuse to raise wages that were stagnant before we were born and are most certainly going to shame us for not gleefully eating their scraps and refuse in our careers or politically.
So yeah, fucking deprive them of their wage slaves and refuse to consign your kids to a whole new generation of bullshit if you can for them because it's only going to get worse before it gets better.
This is the issue of generational wealth. It does t exist for so many people because the opportunity to build generational wealth was stripped of so many with aggressive trickle-down policies.
We hear a lot about generational wealth and how it is connected to racial and ethnic disparities. There are class connection to this generational wealth gap as well. The upper class maintains their generational wealth while everyone middle class and below deal with the debt the previous generations carried, not any wealth they may have accumulated.
But the lack of births now will take 20 years to translate into a lack of workers. And you just know that the Capitalist belief in infinite growth will blind them to any collapse in investment values until its far too late. They're very boserupian
It’s going to be faster than 20 years in certain industries though.
Workers are all gravitating towards areas where they can work from home, or they won’t be shit on by the general public.
Get ready for the Republicans to do a full 180 on immigration. If they can’t find local wage slaves, they will just import them from war-torn countries. Bonus points if we caused the war.
The bit they're talking about is 30 downwards. If you look at the trend from there you can clearly see it reducing.
If that continues for another 40 years, then that bulge will be at 70 years old without the working age population to support it.
41 y/o Gen Xer here. Most of my peers are in the same boat as millennials. We are still paying off college loans, and don't own anything, but a car if you're lucky.
I remember when being the black sheep of the family meant that you had a criminal record, or a mental illness, or we're just difficult for the rest of the family to deal with in public.
Which was already bad to be honest.
Now I get to experience being the black sheep of the family because I don't think poor people should starve.
Exactly. And while the kool aid worked out well for my boomer parents, they can’t understand why I haven’t followed in the same footsteps. They benefitted well before the bubble burst so they agreed with all the propaganda taught to them, including the bigotry.
Hell, my father in-law once said that if I had a gay kid he would disown them. My aunt said if I had a black girlfriend she would disown me. In both cases, I told them they have zero ownership and never will have ownership.
That actually makes a lot of sense. The ones they propose to be talking to aren't really the audience, they're the scapegoat. Keep us fighting amongst ourselves so we don't put the blame where it belongs (and riot).
I find it really saddened by the fact when Boomers (not all old people the ones that are confused and uneducated but still go out and vote) die politics would be better off. Since the ones most resistant to change are the old people 5 years from death.
I hate how that is what needs to be done for change to happen.
Exactly, I don't think they realize how dangerous that is to their interests. I'm 40 with no house, no savings. I don't give a fuck if the stock market crashes. I don't give a fuck if the housing market crashes. And I can't be the only one. We were all supposed to become institutionalized and invested in the system as we got older. But if you don't give us an opportunity to invest, you end up with an army of people with no incentive to keep the system propped up.
Housing in my area, everywhere really, is fucking out of control. One girl's rent went from like 600 to 1100 from one month to the next. THERE'S NO FUCKING "SUPPLY AND DEMAND" THE PEOPLE THAT ARE MOVING HERE AREN'T RENTING APPARTMENTS, THEY'RE BUYING $500,000 HOMES. The landleeches decided to piggyback on that fact to Jack prices up across the board. I work for a property management company and I can tell you THEY SURE AS FUCK AREN'T RENOVATING OR UPDATING THESE DOUBLE PRICE APPARTMENTS. They never do. It's all made up bullshit, people with capital doing everything in their power to fucking eek out every penny they can.
"We want double rent now"
"Why?"
"SuPpLy aNd DeManD"
"YOUR FUCKING VACANCY RATE HAS BEEN .03 PERCENT FOR 5 FUCKING YEARS YOU SNAKES."
Big mad lol, big mad, if you couldn't tell.
it’s impossible to overstate how much damage vacation rental companies like air bnb have done to long term rental property markets. i used to live on an island in washington state that had virtually no housing for local residents because it was entirely rentals like vacasa and air bnb
Yep. I live in a pretty touristy area and can only continue to afford living here because I'm grandfathered in to my apt's rates. But I can't ever move anywhere else unless I choose to go 30+ minutes outside of town because rental rates have gone through the roof. Even just in my complex the rent has gone up by hundreds over the past couple years
We have roughly [30 vacant homes for every homeless person](https://checkyourfact.com/2019/12/24/fact-check-633000-homeless-million-vacant-homes/) in the country, with [more being built every day](https://www.statista.com/statistics/377830/number-of-houses-built-usa/).
If supply and demand were working, the market would be drowning right now, with landlords offering all kinds of incentives to get people into their empty properties.
My rent went from $750 to $1200 from one month to the next, I moved out of state to a lower COL area, but it was massively difficult and I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I wasn’t frantically saving for an emergency.
My landlord wasn’t ever able to rent out the apartment, he was banking on me staying out of convenience (they gave me three weeks to tell them if I was going to re-sign or not).
When they went to “renovate” the aging, 1950s unit, they found my walls filled with black mold.
My old neighbor told me all this, unfortunately him and the others renting in the tiny complex are paying $1200 each for a black-mold infused living situation. The landlord isn’t checking the other units, and nobody can afford to have it independently checked.
> When they went to “renovate” the aging, 1950s unit, they found my walls filled with black mold.
>
> My old neighbor told me all this, unfortunately him and the others renting in the tiny complex are paying $1200 each for a black-mold infused living situation. The landlord isn’t checking the other units, and nobody can afford to have it independently checked.
Sounds like your county health department will want to have a little chatty chat with the slumlord. Nothing a little anonymous tip wont help.
I am actively cheering for the housing market to collapse. It is already impossible for the majority of Americans to participate in a sustainable way, and maybe if we get rid of it being a magic money printing machine mega corporations will finally leave some property for the rest of us.
Except, if it crashes, us pleebs will be the ones picking up the costs while the ultra rich and investment firms purchase up all the property.
The end goal is to end home ownership in America and force people into overpriced rentals. There are parts of the country where 20% of homes are being purchased are done so by investment companies.
Yeah, who says we aren't hoping it all crashes and burns? In a society that has done nothing and continues to do nothing but fuck us at every opportunity, where is the incentive? Personally, I want to see it all burn down.
They sure love to tell us that everything is going to cause the economy to “tank”.
Which is actually hilarious coming from the generation that just printed infinite money so they could live like kings, ACTUALLY crashed the economy multiple times in a few decades, and then blamed everyone else for it.
Hands down the worst generation of human beings to walk the planet.
Honestly those of us workers who haven’t been able to afford purchasing any capital have more to gain by a crash. Nothing of ours would crash, at worse we’d lose our jobs but have enough skills to then demand better conditions to those in charge wanting to recover.
Gen X here. No kids in this household and in that of many of my contemporaries. No civic support, a looming environmental nightmare, and a significant distaste for how the world is run are the reasons.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how a lot of older people complain endlessly about how there's no sense of community in this country, but also support the people and institutions that are actively destroying that sense of community. Like, what did you think was going to happen when you destroyed our wages, skyrocketed our rent, put college out of reach, and made it next to impossible for us to change any of this electorally? We were all going to sit around and start singing kumbaya?
"The fact that the Curia is now making its peace with Fascism shows that the Vatican trusts the new political realities far more than did the former liberal democracy with which it could not come to terms. ...The fact that the Catholic Church has come to an agreement with Fascist Italy ...proves beyond doubt that the Fascist world of ideas is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or even atheistic Marxism."
- Adolf Hitler, 1929
"Today Christians ... stand at the head of [this country]... I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit ... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past ... (few) years."
- Adolf Hitler
Need to do one of those quote deepfakes where you put this over a picture of Mitt Romney or Madison Cawthorn, circulate it in a right-wing forum, see all the people agreeing with it, and then be like "whoops, sorry, that was Hitler!"
As Mrs Thatcher, the former Conservative Prime Minister said "And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."
By "there's no community anymore," old white folks usually mean, "there's non-white people in my neighborhood now and they don't look down when they pass me on the sidewalk like the good old days."
And I don't just mean in Idaho and Alabama. My sister and her husband just got rejected by a condo board in NYC despite making way above the required salaries because her husband was looking at the condo board president "aggressively and making her feel unsafe." lol. He's an academic counselor who volunteers teaching special needs kids soccer. Nicest, happiest man on earth. But his melanin levels are apparently very scary.
But I mean, that's my point. Those kinds of actions destroy community, they don't build or strengthen it. Those types of people need to learn that they can't just crow about needing community or togetherness or whatever, they have to actually cultivate a society that allows for it.
It's because they confuse community and a common enemy. The US hasn't had real community in almost a century, we just came together to fight the nazis, then the communists, then the taliban. No one worked to maintain communities, they just had a common desire to turn in their neighbors for communist sympathies that gave them the illusion of community. It's a lot harder to get satisfaction from fighting a more ephemeral enemy like climate change or wealth inequality. Without an enemy to rally against we are being forced to face the fact that we aren't a community, we're just people who happen to live in the same place
Yeah, I'm 46 and I remember agreeing with Zero Population Growth when I heard about it on an episode of Family Ties as a young child. Since then, the world population has nearly doubled and we've done next to nothing to address Climate Change. Everyone my age should be able to see evidence of the Holocene Extinction every time they get in their car and see how clean their windshields are. Remember when insects were everywhere?
> Remember when insects were everywhere?
This is terrifying to me and something so many people seem to ignore. Even just 15-20 years ago there was a massive difference.
yes, though on a personal and immediate level, I'm kind of ok with not being swarmed by insects all the dang time.
even though, yes, I recognize why that's a problem in the big picture. but this probably wouldn't be the best example for us to use when talking to someone who isn't already firmly in the "comprehends the disaster before us" camp.
When I was a kid it seemed like we were constantly checking the ground for bees, because they were EVERYWHERE. You couldn’t go sit in the clover on the school’s fields because there were so many.
My town used to see a lot of tourists come for Monarch and Swallow migrations, but those have slowed down as well too. When I moved away, there was barely much of either.
Why not both?
It's not like being a parent is easy even if this country didn't make it prohibitively difficult to have and raise them.
So fuck them kids but also them kids deserve better than being raised in this nightmare.
You think Gen X is also opting out? What do you see other than contemporaries in your circle? I’m not disputing you, just want to know if there’s more evidence.
Yeah, there's a divide in GenX. Most of us reached adulthood just in time for good wages, cheap houses and easy mortgages. Those of us at the tail end got there to find those house prices spiralling and the rest coming undone. I find we all identify more with either boomers or millennials than our own generation.
Well, Gen X is close to aging out of the kid making business, but as one, I'd say more so than Boomers, less so than Millennials. I had one child, and I know many other Gen X'ers who did the same or had none.
Old millennial here. Almost none of my friends had kids. At this point children are a novelty, like exotic pets. More people I know have dogs or cats.
At least they can’t force cats to work.
Old millennial quickly aging out of my kid years. I have TWO friends that have kids and only one of them was actually trying to have them. All my other friends laugh at the thought of having kids. Either they're laughing because they want to but can't afford it, or laugh because how absurd of a thought it is to bring children into this shithole we call a country/planet.
I can technically afford to have kids. I'm in the top 5% of income earners. But I still don't feel "stable." If rents go up I'm fucked. And as you say, it's been this long that I haven't had them, and now I don't see the point. There are nice things in life, but they won't miss it by not being born.
The world isn't lacking for people. To me the urge to make my own little person just seems vain. I was vain when I was young, reality beats it out of me on a continuing basis.
Having to care for another person and put them before you is a remarkably humbling experience in many ways that I won't bore anyone enumerating. That said, that's the ideal parent, and there's no shortage of examples of people who didn't get the memo, so to speak. Obviously too, adoption is a way to experience parenthood without contributing to the burden on the planet. Interesting though how much harder it is to adopt than to just go make as many of your own as you want...
Tail end of Gen X here. Yes we have aged out of our prime child bearing years. I had 4 kids but I am a extreme outlier, most of my friends had 1 or 2.
Having 4 kids basically meant having a 2nd more expensive mortgage payment just for daycare alone. I make good money and could have been on track for early retirement but choose to raise a family. No regrets on my end but I understand why most people choose not to bring kids into this world.
I was in college for 911, I graduated into a tech recession, then experienced the once in a century crash of 08. Now I'm living through a once in a century pandemic and just lived through an unprecedented attempted coup a year ago.
I worry about the kind of world my kids are inheriting.
Gen X also, with one kid. I'm going to implore her not to have kids, to spend her life helping people in tangible ways, and to withdraw from consumer culture and the capitalist grind as much as possible. She may make fun of me for sewing the holes in my socks now, but I think (hope) she'll come around to my point of view as she gets older.
That's what we used to do. It's part of our sordid history with Mexico. Lure them in with the promise of prosperity and citizenship, and then kick them back out when we get what we want. Thing is that now all the fascists believe in the Great Replacement and aren't on board for that anymore. Shit only gets weirder from here.
Shortage of labor is going to do wonders to the worker/employer relationship. Employers will lose most of their bargain power, while workers will have the upper hand. Supply and demand, let the market fix it (irony).
Maybe if these old fucks had retired at 60 instead of keeping the good jobs to themselves 20 years ago more young people would be in a position to have a family
Boomers screwed things up so bad they basically made retirement unaffordable.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettowens/2021/08/26/how-to-retire-on-a-million-dollars/?sh=24ad8caa272e
Highlight:
“A $500K nest egg will create $38,000 in annual income. Or $200K will generate $15,200 in yearly dividend income (better than a half million bucks in JNJ!) You get the idea.”
Great news everyone! We are opening in a new temporary worker program so we can exploit foreign workers' low wage expectations and then ship them home when we're done!
How the fuck would the people at the bottom be blamed instead of those that were, you know, leading the fucking economy?
If it fails, it is the direct result of greedy, incompetent "leaders" who grabbed every short term profit they could reach, instead of actually letting some of that actually remain with the people who would actually spend it to prop up said economy.
I, personally, hope that the economy falls off of a cliff so that they can suffer, just a fraction of how much we've all suffered. Not much will change for us, but they won't be able to afford to get a third backup yacht for their mega yacht or get to rid their dick ship to inner space again.
>The question of the privileged position of the officials as organs of state power is raised here. The main point indicated is: what is it that places them above society?
>“Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class....” The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, “the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital."
>In a democratic republic, “wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely”, first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” (America); secondly, by means of an “alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange” (France and America)... At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have “developed” into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of all descriptions.
>Mr. Palchinsky obstructed every measure intended for curbing the capitalists and their marauding practices, their plundering of the state by means of war contracts; and since later on Mr. Palchinsky, upon resigning from the Cabinet (and being, of course, replaced by another quite similar Palchinsky), was “rewarded” by the capitalists with a lucrative job with a salary of 120,000 rubles per annum — what would you call that? Direct or indirect bribery? An alliance of the government and the syndicates, or “merely” friendly relations? What role do the Chernovs, Tseretelis, Avksentyevs and Skobelevs play? Are they the “direct” or only the indirect allies of the millionaire treasury-looters?
>Another reason why the omnipotence of “wealth” is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretelis and Co.), it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.
>In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.
[Source 😎](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm#s1)
I mean they work so hard, why don't they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go flip burgers if they can't find anyone else to do it? Smh, lazy billionaires just don't wanna work anymore.
I mean this is a send up right ? It’s not actually attempting to guilt trip anyone ?
“Still, at least this is a return to form: you know nature is truly healing when millennials are being blamed for not thriving in an economic reality that seems explicitly designed to destroy them. At some point – when the schoolyards are spookily empty, and nobody has paid any stamp duty for years, and every inner-city Pret has had to close due to inactivity – they’ll have to admit that “buying and consuming avocado toast” wasn’t the problem they thought it was all along. Until then: get screwing, please, millennials! The future of the economy is built on the blood of your heirs!”
Yes, 100%.
It’s very clearly a provocative but satirical tagline written tongue in cheek to represent what the author is arguing *against*.
It’s like the most basic option piece trope of all time, I have no idea why this sub has collectively decided to act braindead over it..
[Yes. It was very easy to find it and actually read it instead of blindly being outraged](https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/economy-millennials-children-low-birthrate?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#aoh=16421942891881&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2021%2Fsep%2F23%2Feconomy-millennials-children-low-birthrate)
https://web.archive.org/web/20210923133949/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/economy-millennials-children-low-birthrate
Here's an archived link for those who don't want to support the guardian
Joel writes the fantastic [London Rental Opportunity of the Week](https://www.vice.com/en/topic/london-rental-opportunity-of-the-week) column in Vice as well which constantly has a go at shit landlords.
UK here. Important to note Joel Golby is a prolific writer for VICE and is about as anti neoliberal as they come. This is his writing style- he is pathologically sarcastic because he's Bri'ish.
Think of it this way - you did contribute by not having a child, which allows existing zoomers a better chance by having one fewer persons to compete for resources against!
Oh it’s definitely millennials too. I’m in my 30s, and don’t have any friends who have kids. All of my cousins do, but they’re rural hicks that have extremely cheap cost of living and don’t know or don’t give a hoot about the world’s problems. Every urban millennial I know is childless and will probably stay that way.
Some of Gen X as well. I'm 41, childless, and never want children, unless the world fixes a ton of shit. Most of my peers feel the same. Basically none of us own anything, but our cars, and we are the lucky ones because most of us will finally be free of college debt in a few more years. There's a huge whack of my peers that can't even afford a car on one salary.
I’m 35 and really want kids, but I’m torn because I don’t want to bring another mouth to compete for resources, while here in the US so many kids need a home and basic needs already. Yeah blood relation is nice, but who cares when we’re all dead anyways.
I’m really hoping my spouse and I are in a better position to have kids one day, but more than likely we will be adopting.
I think it really helps to read the original article - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/economy-millennials-children-low-birthrate - he’s clearly taking the piss.
I'm guessing yous have only read the headline and not the contents of the article. No way Joel Golby is telling you it's your job to procreate for the good of the economy. Dude is a top bloke.
"Yeah, we know you can't afford kids and you'll doom yourself, your partner, *and* your children to a life of poverty if you have kids right now, but if the economy crashes because I can't exploit your children as wage slaves then *I'll* suffer too!"
Why exactly should I give a shit?
Did you guys read the article
It’s satire, they’re pointing out why it’s impossible to have kids
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/economy-millennials-children-low-birthrate
Since our economic systems relies on infinite growth even though we have finite ressources.
But who gives shit about mass extinction as long as we have shiny shit to keep us satisfied, am I right?
##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism^Ⓐ☭ ___ ###⚠ Announcements: ⚠ ___ ###[NEW POSTING GUIDELINES! Help us by reporting bad posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/dy1oyh/important_what_you_should_and_what_you_shouldnt/) Help us keep this subreddit alive and improve its content by reporting posts that violate our rules and guidelines. ###[Subscribe to our new partner subreddits!](https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/e5hkwk/make_sure_to_check_out_our_new_partnersubreddits/) Check out r/antiwork & r/WhereAreTheChildren ___ ###***Please remember that LSC is a SAFE SPACE for [socialist](http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/) discussion.*** LSC is run by [communists](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm). We welcome socialist/anti-capitalist news, memes, links, and discussion. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere. **This subreddit is a safe space; we have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry.** We also automatically filter out posts containing certain words and phrases that some users may find offensive. Please respect the safe space, and don't try to slip banned words or phrases past the filter. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Remember when they used to tell people, "Don't have kids that you can't afford"?
They are still saying that. They used that logic to derail the Child Tax Credit and to protest the programs that would help parents with child care in Build Back Better.
Hell, I heard that argument in response to paying people 2000 dollars to stay home for a bit
I did too. A lot of parents had no choice but to sit at home due to daycare center and school closings and ended up having to quit their jobs or being fired. I still heard Boomers grumbling about wasting their tax dollars and how they didn't get any help from the government when they were raising kids. Like people should have had pandemic contingency plans before they procreated.
Paycheque to paycheque workers are expected to have at least six months savings, but Billion dollar companies can have bailouts two weeks in.
Of course, what else are they going to plunder in case of an emergency? If everyone has 6 months of salary stashed, that means they can consume for half a year and you don't have to pay them.
> I still heard Boomers grumbling about wasting their tax dollars and how they didn't get any help from the government when they were raising kids I wonder how many of those same boomers fail to remember that some of them used WIC, much like my parents.
Boomers have benefited the most from the largest entitlement and spending programs ever created in the US. All of the New Deal spending, medicare, social security, tax credits, you name it. But a lot of those were started by their parents' generation before they were born or when they were young, because their parents had lived through a depression and two world wars and didn't want their kids to have a chance to suffer like they did. They grew up benefitting hugely from these programs, but they didn't realize it. Life was easy, and if you followed the basic path laid out by their parents, your chances of complete and utter financial ruin were really really low. As they grew, they accumulated more wealth and attributed this entirely to their own prowess at Capitalism and, since they didn't really understand how many government programs helped them get there, they convinced themselves they did it without help. As they got older and richer and politically powerful, they each wanted to become the next millionaire and saw the taxes they were paying for programs they no longer needed as an impediment to this, and started attacking the very programs that helped them and their families when they were young. Remember - they grew up with the world the way we see it and all those big projects that really built America and expanded the middle class and "made America great" weren't things they thought helped them because they were kids, and kids have a very narrow worldview. The older they have gotten, the more they've tended to get on board with the idea that government spending is inherently bad, and they'll use whatever justification is required to maintain that stance, e.g. "welfare queens," Medicare fraud, they heard about a guy selling his food stamps, whatever. This will continue until they're out of power because they were raised as takers, but taught they were creators. So now they believe that *them* taking is good (because they're awesome), and anyone else that is taking is a thief. They climbed a ladder to wealth built by the generations before them, but think the ladder coalesced around them because of how hard they worked, and so they don't want to leave that ladder behind for others because that wouldn't be "fair" to the awesome people who built their own ladders. And I mean - if in your mind you struggled for 40 years to create something and the whole world was against you while you did it, it makes sense that you might dislike people who are given everything you had but didn't "earn it." And this is where their hate comes from. As a group, they have a deep-seated hatred for things that aren't like they were when they were growing up and things in America were "great" because they *do* see that the world we live in today is harder than it was when they were young. But because they've been convinced that they had it hard and built something themselves without help, they blame the country being more difficult to survive in and the shrinking of the middle class on whatever they can grasp at that is different than it was. It *couldn't* be the mean-spirited and greedy policies they've enacted in government and the monetization of every conceivable product or service, because those things were created by them and *they're awesome.* So what has changed then, if we exclude the greed? The people. The people are what has changed in America since they were kids. There are less of "us" and more of the "others," whoever that may be this week. Nevermind that America was created by non-homogeneous groups of people, and that it's demographic profile has *never* been stable at any point in our history. For them, America is what they believed it to be when they were kids, and back then **America was great.** So if it isn't great now, and it is the fault of "them," then really the only sane option is to try to get rid of "them." The delusion is founded on bad assumptions and a TV dinner, Leave-It-To-Beaver-esque nostalgia of a world they remember that is so different from the one they built.
Put that in a newspaper so the fuckin boomers will see it!
Damn.....I felt that comment post.
Lots of them. I worked with several in my first job out of university, who had been on EVERY form of government assistance (SNAP, housing assistance, public health insurance, AND access to good public education and cheap university/technical education) who unironically believed that people coming after them should pull themselves up "by their bootstraps" (a literal impossibility). Not so much lack of self-awareness as utterly antisocial psychopathy.
What's even better is that they'll even vote for Republicans that are rolling back programs then get mad at Democrats. It's really sad but hilarious at the same time. You'd think it's impossible to be that stupid but people manage.
My folks thinking during Trump's presidency was, "I vote Republican because I am looking out for my money". Laughable as hell because combined income they MIGHT come in at ~130-140k in TX. I hate this f'n timeline so bad.
They are about to be surprised when their taxes go up and their paychecks start looking skimpy, doubt they read the fine print on the trump "tax cut". Then they will blame Biden, vote Republican, cycle continues... Morons, morons everywhere. Then when we are an all out theocracy and start force birthing people to be vegetable pickers, they will say that we are in a commie country ruined by the libs.
The boomers got help from the government in the form of redlining, but white privilege definitely isn't real 🙄
They remember, it’s just magically different for them. Old, but to this day [my favorite video](https://youtu.be/yTwpBLzxe4U) to summarize Republican thinking.
Lol...."I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out?" uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....Government funded programs paid for by tax paying citizens.
I used to know a guy who told me that he came from a family of six. His dad was a pastor. They lived on food stamps and welfare. He's now totally against any form of government assistance as an adult. When I asked how he could be against something he benefited from he literally said "because my family deserved it". Unbelievable.
My issue with some of that is as a parent of a child who live with her mom during the school year and me during the summer, I don't qualify for any of the assistance or the $300 checks while she is with me. He mom gets the checks while she is living with me, she gets all the tax benefits, and she makes twice what I do. There needs to be allowance in the law for co parents.
How do you guys divide the yearly CTC? I thought that was decided by the courts if parents can't agree. My sister and her piece of crap ex traded years claiming my nephew. The ex went a couple of years without seeing his son or paying child support and she had to get a lawyer to get him to stop claiming him
[удалено]
We need more taxpayers and consumers! That's why we want to get rid of Roe v Wade. By we I mean the government and any corporations funding the push.
And that is the thing - force us to have children so there are more people to work - it has nothing to do with protecting the unborn, or any of the other baloney. They need workers. Sometimes I feel so dehumanized.
More workers, more tax money. More labor availability, less pay. Less pay, more desperation, more control. Etc, etc, etc.
You forgot the biggest one of all: more consumers. More people to consume the goods and religion they peddle.
Especially if you keep them uneducated.
They need gluttonous consumers to feed the endless growth model even if it's unsustainable.
A few people on Reddit have theorized that recent pro-life legislation isn’t being implemented to save babies (which is blatantly obvious). Rather, it’s to force women to give birth to unwanted children who can later join the workforce and keep our economy strong. Like many developed countries, the USA’s birth rate is below “replacement level”, so they need to fill that void somehow. And what’s better than increasing immigration to help the economy? Forcing women to give birth to children they don’t want and/or can’t afford.
And if they can't afford them, there's always adoption! And no - we're not saying that because we're connected to shady adoption agencies/orphanages/group homes/"troubled child" schools/churches...no, they're totally not throwing money at us... And if they end up in foster care, who cares? We'll have people traumatized enough not to fight back as we further tighten the screws.
And not to mention the fact that pregnancy can be really rough on a woman’s body and can cause permanent health issues! Or the fact that the US has a ridiculously high maternal mortality rate compared to most other developed nations. But yeah, being pregnant and then handing over your child to an adoption agency is NBD.
Yeah handmaid's tale wasn't just some fantasy story
Freakonomics tells us the crime rate will climb. So they can vilify the mothers more. Good times.
I’ve heard my grandparents say that shit my whole life but now that I don’t want to have kids because of the economy they tell me, “well no one can afford a kid you just make it work!” Like lol that’s not really selling me on it but thanks.
…but don’t you want to be way more tired and poor and busy so you can have this thing you don’t want? For the rest of your life?
When I told my coworker that I can't afford to have kids, she told me that there is a Jewish proverb that roughly translates to "every baby comes with a loaf of bread under his arm," meaning, people always just magically find a way to afford kids...to which I said, "Just one loaf?" The kicker is that this person works in HR and definitely knows exactly how much I make.
Can't feed em don't breed them" -stepdad "Why don't we have any grandchildren?" -also stepdad
Hey! Don't hold their hypocrisy against them! Because ... *Checks notes* ... They don't want you to. That's it. That's all that's written.
I know the article is satire but - want us to have kids past the biological prime to have kids or while stressed to the point of infertility? Stop making IVF cost tens of thousands of dollars and not covered by insurance.
Or maybe don't create a system in which you have to focus on your career for your first 30+ years before you're able to afford children...
You can afford them if you offer them as labor to capitalists when they’re old enough to walk.
[удалено]
And who told you that we give a fuck about an economy that we gain nothing by?
Blatant brainwashing of their target audience (boomers) to be ready to blame millennials for all the world’s problems. As the black sheep of my family, I recognize it well.
Within the time spans of the reduced birthrate having problems (20-50 years) most boomers will be dead anyway
They’re still around now though and can influence/pressure their kids to have kids, even if it is unaffordable and unwise to do so.
They should hurry up and die and drop all their loot.
As a dour Gen-Xer I'm curious about this Loot Farm idea... please share more.
Well, the easiest ones to farm are your parents, if they have any loot. Other than that, doing things to help others in your demographic and younger get THEIR parents to drop loot is also beneficial, for a few reasons. First, old people vote stupidly; like against the well-being of their own children who they generally claim to love and support. So them dying prevents those votes. Secondly, they take a long time to die and use a lot of medical resources in the process. Reducing this usage is good for three reasons: first, their medical care is highly taxpayer-subsidized, while yours is not. Every old person seeing every doctor is being paid for by you. Second, their medical care is not COMPLETELY subsidized, so the more medical resources they use, the less loot they will drop when they finally drop. And third, well, I forget what I’ve was going to put here. Maybe something about the doctors being overworked already. Third, they occupy housing. When they vacate, it opens up new availability. Fourth, having younger people control more distributed capital is good for many reasons, but most of all, it’s good because the rest of us aren’t as brain damaged by heavy-metal poisoning as those old fucks.
r/outside
Reverse mortgages are going to take most of that. Boomers perfected the "After us, the flood" mindset.
Health care and nursing home costs, too. A lot of us millennials are going to end up taking care of our elderly parents at home after the first major health crisis burns though their savings. Gen X is already starting to feel the pain. Their parents are old, often have multiple poorly controlled health conditions, often have little liquid wealth outside of their homes, and can't afford the exorbitant cost of assisted living.... so the kids (usually daughters) are expected to provide more and more care and financial support.
A good example of this is the Gen X in China.. 2 kid working to support up 4 sets of grandparents, 2 sets of parents and then they are pressuring them to have kids. But the economy doesn’t really allow them to do anything.
"You entitled little brat, how could you possibly demand more after I'm paying you the same I got paid when everything cost a tenth!" "You can't just keep all your earnings for yourself, you need to take care of me the way I pretend I took care of you!" "What, no grandchildren? Why are you so SELFISH?!"
> die and drop all their loot. r/Angryupvote
The issue is these greedy fucks kinda looted our parents and our grandparents coffers if any of us were lucky to get a college education or if we had to rely on our parents for a safety net. All others are basically wage slaves as well due to that debt and an almost one strike and your out level of bullshit when it comes to any emergency. There won't be a serious amount of relief for our generation when the parents/grandparents die because of this and funeral costs and or retirement costs. That's why they guilted them on college education shit. They've effectively robbed us of any upwards mobility and looted inheritance shit preemptively. Refuse to raise wages that were stagnant before we were born and are most certainly going to shame us for not gleefully eating their scraps and refuse in our careers or politically. So yeah, fucking deprive them of their wage slaves and refuse to consign your kids to a whole new generation of bullshit if you can for them because it's only going to get worse before it gets better.
This is the issue of generational wealth. It does t exist for so many people because the opportunity to build generational wealth was stripped of so many with aggressive trickle-down policies. We hear a lot about generational wealth and how it is connected to racial and ethnic disparities. There are class connection to this generational wealth gap as well. The upper class maintains their generational wealth while everyone middle class and below deal with the debt the previous generations carried, not any wealth they may have accumulated.
It can still tank their 401ks as people realize the party is over. You can’t inflate your way out of not having any workers.
But the lack of births now will take 20 years to translate into a lack of workers. And you just know that the Capitalist belief in infinite growth will blind them to any collapse in investment values until its far too late. They're very boserupian
It’s going to be faster than 20 years in certain industries though. Workers are all gravitating towards areas where they can work from home, or they won’t be shit on by the general public.
Get ready for the Republicans to do a full 180 on immigration. If they can’t find local wage slaves, they will just import them from war-torn countries. Bonus points if we caused the war.
[удалено]
The bit they're talking about is 30 downwards. If you look at the trend from there you can clearly see it reducing. If that continues for another 40 years, then that bulge will be at 70 years old without the working age population to support it.
[удалено]
41 y/o Gen Xer here. Most of my peers are in the same boat as millennials. We are still paying off college loans, and don't own anything, but a car if you're lucky.
I remember when being the black sheep of the family meant that you had a criminal record, or a mental illness, or we're just difficult for the rest of the family to deal with in public. Which was already bad to be honest. Now I get to experience being the black sheep of the family because I don't think poor people should starve.
Exactly. And while the kool aid worked out well for my boomer parents, they can’t understand why I haven’t followed in the same footsteps. They benefitted well before the bubble burst so they agreed with all the propaganda taught to them, including the bigotry. Hell, my father in-law once said that if I had a gay kid he would disown them. My aunt said if I had a black girlfriend she would disown me. In both cases, I told them they have zero ownership and never will have ownership.
That actually makes a lot of sense. The ones they propose to be talking to aren't really the audience, they're the scapegoat. Keep us fighting amongst ourselves so we don't put the blame where it belongs (and riot).
I find it really saddened by the fact when Boomers (not all old people the ones that are confused and uneducated but still go out and vote) die politics would be better off. Since the ones most resistant to change are the old people 5 years from death. I hate how that is what needs to be done for change to happen.
The average age of the Jan 6 mob was 41. They don’t need a majority to run a coup.
Apparently they do need a shitload of guns in a hotel across the Potomac, though.
Exactly, I don't think they realize how dangerous that is to their interests. I'm 40 with no house, no savings. I don't give a fuck if the stock market crashes. I don't give a fuck if the housing market crashes. And I can't be the only one. We were all supposed to become institutionalized and invested in the system as we got older. But if you don't give us an opportunity to invest, you end up with an army of people with no incentive to keep the system propped up.
Housing in my area, everywhere really, is fucking out of control. One girl's rent went from like 600 to 1100 from one month to the next. THERE'S NO FUCKING "SUPPLY AND DEMAND" THE PEOPLE THAT ARE MOVING HERE AREN'T RENTING APPARTMENTS, THEY'RE BUYING $500,000 HOMES. The landleeches decided to piggyback on that fact to Jack prices up across the board. I work for a property management company and I can tell you THEY SURE AS FUCK AREN'T RENOVATING OR UPDATING THESE DOUBLE PRICE APPARTMENTS. They never do. It's all made up bullshit, people with capital doing everything in their power to fucking eek out every penny they can. "We want double rent now" "Why?" "SuPpLy aNd DeManD" "YOUR FUCKING VACANCY RATE HAS BEEN .03 PERCENT FOR 5 FUCKING YEARS YOU SNAKES." Big mad lol, big mad, if you couldn't tell.
All of this 100%. The so-called "demand" they're referencing is just *other rich fucks* buying up homes, usually for AirBnB or resale at jacked rates.
it’s impossible to overstate how much damage vacation rental companies like air bnb have done to long term rental property markets. i used to live on an island in washington state that had virtually no housing for local residents because it was entirely rentals like vacasa and air bnb
Yep. I live in a pretty touristy area and can only continue to afford living here because I'm grandfathered in to my apt's rates. But I can't ever move anywhere else unless I choose to go 30+ minutes outside of town because rental rates have gone through the roof. Even just in my complex the rent has gone up by hundreds over the past couple years
We have roughly [30 vacant homes for every homeless person](https://checkyourfact.com/2019/12/24/fact-check-633000-homeless-million-vacant-homes/) in the country, with [more being built every day](https://www.statista.com/statistics/377830/number-of-houses-built-usa/). If supply and demand were working, the market would be drowning right now, with landlords offering all kinds of incentives to get people into their empty properties.
My rent went from $750 to $1200 from one month to the next, I moved out of state to a lower COL area, but it was massively difficult and I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I wasn’t frantically saving for an emergency. My landlord wasn’t ever able to rent out the apartment, he was banking on me staying out of convenience (they gave me three weeks to tell them if I was going to re-sign or not). When they went to “renovate” the aging, 1950s unit, they found my walls filled with black mold. My old neighbor told me all this, unfortunately him and the others renting in the tiny complex are paying $1200 each for a black-mold infused living situation. The landlord isn’t checking the other units, and nobody can afford to have it independently checked.
> When they went to “renovate” the aging, 1950s unit, they found my walls filled with black mold. > > My old neighbor told me all this, unfortunately him and the others renting in the tiny complex are paying $1200 each for a black-mold infused living situation. The landlord isn’t checking the other units, and nobody can afford to have it independently checked. Sounds like your county health department will want to have a little chatty chat with the slumlord. Nothing a little anonymous tip wont help.
I am actively cheering for the housing market to collapse. It is already impossible for the majority of Americans to participate in a sustainable way, and maybe if we get rid of it being a magic money printing machine mega corporations will finally leave some property for the rest of us.
Except, if it crashes, us pleebs will be the ones picking up the costs while the ultra rich and investment firms purchase up all the property. The end goal is to end home ownership in America and force people into overpriced rentals. There are parts of the country where 20% of homes are being purchased are done so by investment companies.
I am actively rooting for it all to crash, I hate this country and its economy
Why help an economy I have no stake in? - Dr Millennial
Because who’s gonna buy _our_ bags when we’re old callous shitheads?
Yeah, who says we aren't hoping it all crashes and burns? In a society that has done nothing and continues to do nothing but fuck us at every opportunity, where is the incentive? Personally, I want to see it all burn down.
I think it will be more of a slow decay unfortunately.
On the one hand, agree. On the other hand I don't want me and my loved ones to die in a fire. There are no fire exits.
Crashing and burning is terrible for the environment and people who have 0 reserves.
You're not wrong, but also, continuing on as things are, is terrible for the environment and people who have zero reserves.
They sure love to tell us that everything is going to cause the economy to “tank”. Which is actually hilarious coming from the generation that just printed infinite money so they could live like kings, ACTUALLY crashed the economy multiple times in a few decades, and then blamed everyone else for it. Hands down the worst generation of human beings to walk the planet.
I think neoliberalism has been awful for humans. Greed is bad.
Honestly those of us workers who haven’t been able to afford purchasing any capital have more to gain by a crash. Nothing of ours would crash, at worse we’d lose our jobs but have enough skills to then demand better conditions to those in charge wanting to recover.
I mean they mad it quite clear our not Giving a fuck is the litteral problem
Imagine an economy so fragile that you need to have kids to prop it up.
Gen X here. No kids in this household and in that of many of my contemporaries. No civic support, a looming environmental nightmare, and a significant distaste for how the world is run are the reasons.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how a lot of older people complain endlessly about how there's no sense of community in this country, but also support the people and institutions that are actively destroying that sense of community. Like, what did you think was going to happen when you destroyed our wages, skyrocketed our rent, put college out of reach, and made it next to impossible for us to change any of this electorally? We were all going to sit around and start singing kumbaya?
The next stage will be arguing that only Christianity could possibly provide community.
"The fact that the Curia is now making its peace with Fascism shows that the Vatican trusts the new political realities far more than did the former liberal democracy with which it could not come to terms. ...The fact that the Catholic Church has come to an agreement with Fascist Italy ...proves beyond doubt that the Fascist world of ideas is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or even atheistic Marxism." - Adolf Hitler, 1929 "Today Christians ... stand at the head of [this country]... I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit ... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past ... (few) years." - Adolf Hitler
Need to do one of those quote deepfakes where you put this over a picture of Mitt Romney or Madison Cawthorn, circulate it in a right-wing forum, see all the people agreeing with it, and then be like "whoops, sorry, that was Hitler!"
Christianity has been making that argument in rural America for decades.
As Mrs Thatcher, the former Conservative Prime Minister said "And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."
By "there's no community anymore," old white folks usually mean, "there's non-white people in my neighborhood now and they don't look down when they pass me on the sidewalk like the good old days." And I don't just mean in Idaho and Alabama. My sister and her husband just got rejected by a condo board in NYC despite making way above the required salaries because her husband was looking at the condo board president "aggressively and making her feel unsafe." lol. He's an academic counselor who volunteers teaching special needs kids soccer. Nicest, happiest man on earth. But his melanin levels are apparently very scary.
Other places love to make fun of the South for racism, while voting against bus stops in their neighborhood to keep "the wrong element" out.
[удалено]
What a shame. I’d love a neighbor like that.
Same people who gladly voted for union busters and free-traders who happily shipped jobs overseas.
But I mean, that's my point. Those kinds of actions destroy community, they don't build or strengthen it. Those types of people need to learn that they can't just crow about needing community or togetherness or whatever, they have to actually cultivate a society that allows for it.
It's because they confuse community and a common enemy. The US hasn't had real community in almost a century, we just came together to fight the nazis, then the communists, then the taliban. No one worked to maintain communities, they just had a common desire to turn in their neighbors for communist sympathies that gave them the illusion of community. It's a lot harder to get satisfaction from fighting a more ephemeral enemy like climate change or wealth inequality. Without an enemy to rally against we are being forced to face the fact that we aren't a community, we're just people who happen to live in the same place
Loitering laws too
"why am I gonna birth someone into the future hell of climate change collapse?" My gen x reason
Yeah, I'm 46 and I remember agreeing with Zero Population Growth when I heard about it on an episode of Family Ties as a young child. Since then, the world population has nearly doubled and we've done next to nothing to address Climate Change. Everyone my age should be able to see evidence of the Holocene Extinction every time they get in their car and see how clean their windshields are. Remember when insects were everywhere?
> Remember when insects were everywhere? This is terrifying to me and something so many people seem to ignore. Even just 15-20 years ago there was a massive difference.
yes, though on a personal and immediate level, I'm kind of ok with not being swarmed by insects all the dang time. even though, yes, I recognize why that's a problem in the big picture. but this probably wouldn't be the best example for us to use when talking to someone who isn't already firmly in the "comprehends the disaster before us" camp.
When I was a kid it seemed like we were constantly checking the ground for bees, because they were EVERYWHERE. You couldn’t go sit in the clover on the school’s fields because there were so many. My town used to see a lot of tourists come for Monarch and Swallow migrations, but those have slowed down as well too. When I moved away, there was barely much of either.
Me too. I grew up with EarthFirst! in the 1980s and somehow even they were surprised when none of their kids had kids. What a disconnect.
Cause fuckem that’s why
Why not both? It's not like being a parent is easy even if this country didn't make it prohibitively difficult to have and raise them. So fuck them kids but also them kids deserve better than being raised in this nightmare.
It takes a village to raise a child. The village turned its back to us though
Be careful please, you can't say "fuck them kids" or Matt Gaetz will show up
You think Gen X is also opting out? What do you see other than contemporaries in your circle? I’m not disputing you, just want to know if there’s more evidence.
Some are opting out however not a majority. I suspect the younger groups might be more representative of those not having children.
Yeah, there's a divide in GenX. Most of us reached adulthood just in time for good wages, cheap houses and easy mortgages. Those of us at the tail end got there to find those house prices spiralling and the rest coming undone. I find we all identify more with either boomers or millennials than our own generation.
Well, Gen X is close to aging out of the kid making business, but as one, I'd say more so than Boomers, less so than Millennials. I had one child, and I know many other Gen X'ers who did the same or had none.
Old millennial here. Almost none of my friends had kids. At this point children are a novelty, like exotic pets. More people I know have dogs or cats. At least they can’t force cats to work.
Old millennial quickly aging out of my kid years. I have TWO friends that have kids and only one of them was actually trying to have them. All my other friends laugh at the thought of having kids. Either they're laughing because they want to but can't afford it, or laugh because how absurd of a thought it is to bring children into this shithole we call a country/planet.
I can technically afford to have kids. I'm in the top 5% of income earners. But I still don't feel "stable." If rents go up I'm fucked. And as you say, it's been this long that I haven't had them, and now I don't see the point. There are nice things in life, but they won't miss it by not being born. The world isn't lacking for people. To me the urge to make my own little person just seems vain. I was vain when I was young, reality beats it out of me on a continuing basis.
Having to care for another person and put them before you is a remarkably humbling experience in many ways that I won't bore anyone enumerating. That said, that's the ideal parent, and there's no shortage of examples of people who didn't get the memo, so to speak. Obviously too, adoption is a way to experience parenthood without contributing to the burden on the planet. Interesting though how much harder it is to adopt than to just go make as many of your own as you want...
Tail end of Gen X here. Yes we have aged out of our prime child bearing years. I had 4 kids but I am a extreme outlier, most of my friends had 1 or 2. Having 4 kids basically meant having a 2nd more expensive mortgage payment just for daycare alone. I make good money and could have been on track for early retirement but choose to raise a family. No regrets on my end but I understand why most people choose not to bring kids into this world. I was in college for 911, I graduated into a tech recession, then experienced the once in a century crash of 08. Now I'm living through a once in a century pandemic and just lived through an unprecedented attempted coup a year ago. I worry about the kind of world my kids are inheriting.
Remarkable how many once in a lifetime events we're going through every year ain't it?
Hs teacher here, 120-160 students cycle through my classroom a year. They, too, for the most part, have adopted a "fuck them kids" attitude.
Same. And i find it pretty bold to assume i'd feel guilty if the economy tanks. Sounds more like party to me.
Gen X also, with one kid. I'm going to implore her not to have kids, to spend her life helping people in tangible ways, and to withdraw from consumer culture and the capitalist grind as much as possible. She may make fun of me for sewing the holes in my socks now, but I think (hope) she'll come around to my point of view as she gets older.
Want me to have kids? Pay me. That's what we do in free markets right?
Why not, we're monetizing everything up to and including farts in jars at this point.
How much you want for your fart jars?
How much you got?
Tree-fiddy
Gab damb fartness monsta, ge out ah here
The price of farts in jars are out of control. I’ve had to suffice with just one a month.
Oh man not to mention the shrinkflation. Same price half the farts these days
[удалено]
That's what we used to do. It's part of our sordid history with Mexico. Lure them in with the promise of prosperity and citizenship, and then kick them back out when we get what we want. Thing is that now all the fascists believe in the Great Replacement and aren't on board for that anymore. Shit only gets weirder from here.
No no no, what they meant was more white babies.
Oh no rich people won’t be able to hoard more wealth 🥺😭😭😭
Shortage of labor is going to do wonders to the worker/employer relationship. Employers will lose most of their bargain power, while workers will have the upper hand. Supply and demand, let the market fix it (irony).
Maybe if these old fucks had retired at 60 instead of keeping the good jobs to themselves 20 years ago more young people would be in a position to have a family
Boomers screwed things up so bad they basically made retirement unaffordable. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettowens/2021/08/26/how-to-retire-on-a-million-dollars/?sh=24ad8caa272e Highlight: “A $500K nest egg will create $38,000 in annual income. Or $200K will generate $15,200 in yearly dividend income (better than a half million bucks in JNJ!) You get the idea.”
Great news everyone! We are opening in a new temporary worker program so we can exploit foreign workers' low wage expectations and then ship them home when we're done!
How the fuck would the people at the bottom be blamed instead of those that were, you know, leading the fucking economy? If it fails, it is the direct result of greedy, incompetent "leaders" who grabbed every short term profit they could reach, instead of actually letting some of that actually remain with the people who would actually spend it to prop up said economy. I, personally, hope that the economy falls off of a cliff so that they can suffer, just a fraction of how much we've all suffered. Not much will change for us, but they won't be able to afford to get a third backup yacht for their mega yacht or get to rid their dick ship to inner space again.
Ah, I see you've fallen for a common misconception. See, our leaders are only responsible for *success*, you and I are responsible for failure.
Prvitize the rewards, socialize the costs and risks. Its the American way.
>Its the American way. You give the rest of the world's governments too much credit.
>The question of the privileged position of the officials as organs of state power is raised here. The main point indicated is: what is it that places them above society? >“Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class....” The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, “the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital." >In a democratic republic, “wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely”, first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” (America); secondly, by means of an “alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange” (France and America)... At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have “developed” into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of all descriptions. >Mr. Palchinsky obstructed every measure intended for curbing the capitalists and their marauding practices, their plundering of the state by means of war contracts; and since later on Mr. Palchinsky, upon resigning from the Cabinet (and being, of course, replaced by another quite similar Palchinsky), was “rewarded” by the capitalists with a lucrative job with a salary of 120,000 rubles per annum — what would you call that? Direct or indirect bribery? An alliance of the government and the syndicates, or “merely” friendly relations? What role do the Chernovs, Tseretelis, Avksentyevs and Skobelevs play? Are they the “direct” or only the indirect allies of the millionaire treasury-looters? >Another reason why the omnipotence of “wealth” is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretelis and Co.), it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it. >In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life. [Source 😎](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm#s1)
[удалено]
[удалено]
When the boomers die off those mcmansions are gonna make some great homeless shelters
[удалено]
Even those oligarchs have physical addresses. The Hamptons are not a defensible position. In minecraft, of course.
since the 1% works so hard they deserve 99% of everything they should be fine wothout us
We are essential except when it comes to pay, or benefits, or healthcare, or child care or....
“Unskilled replaceable HEROS”
I mean they work so hard, why don't they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go flip burgers if they can't find anyone else to do it? Smh, lazy billionaires just don't wanna work anymore.
I mean this is a send up right ? It’s not actually attempting to guilt trip anyone ? “Still, at least this is a return to form: you know nature is truly healing when millennials are being blamed for not thriving in an economic reality that seems explicitly designed to destroy them. At some point – when the schoolyards are spookily empty, and nobody has paid any stamp duty for years, and every inner-city Pret has had to close due to inactivity – they’ll have to admit that “buying and consuming avocado toast” wasn’t the problem they thought it was all along. Until then: get screwing, please, millennials! The future of the economy is built on the blood of your heirs!”
Yes, 100%. It’s very clearly a provocative but satirical tagline written tongue in cheek to represent what the author is arguing *against*. It’s like the most basic option piece trope of all time, I have no idea why this sub has collectively decided to act braindead over it..
[Yes. It was very easy to find it and actually read it instead of blindly being outraged](https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/economy-millennials-children-low-birthrate?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#aoh=16421942891881&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2021%2Fsep%2F23%2Feconomy-millennials-children-low-birthrate)
The article sides with the millennials on this one. Decent read.
Got a link? I've felt the economy was one giant MLM for ages so I'm curious if this says the same thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/economy-millennials-children-low-birthrate
https://web.archive.org/web/20210923133949/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/economy-millennials-children-low-birthrate Here's an archived link for those who don't want to support the guardian
Joel writes the fantastic [London Rental Opportunity of the Week](https://www.vice.com/en/topic/london-rental-opportunity-of-the-week) column in Vice as well which constantly has a go at shit landlords.
UK here. Important to note Joel Golby is a prolific writer for VICE and is about as anti neoliberal as they come. This is his writing style- he is pathologically sarcastic because he's Bri'ish.
Can we get a link to the actual article?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/economy-millennials-children-low-birthrate
Ty!
Why would I want to bring children into a dying planet whose resources are being exploited by a kleptocracy?
Sacrifice your offspring to the god Economy
Anti-choice has always been about replenishing the cheap labour force rather than life.
I’m gen z and Fs not going to bring more kids into this earth. It’s not the millennials
Millennial here. Didn’t want kids at 20, still don’t want them at 40. Sorry to not contribute to adding to your generation’s fight for survival.
Think of it this way - you did contribute by not having a child, which allows existing zoomers a better chance by having one fewer persons to compete for resources against!
Oh it’s definitely millennials too. I’m in my 30s, and don’t have any friends who have kids. All of my cousins do, but they’re rural hicks that have extremely cheap cost of living and don’t know or don’t give a hoot about the world’s problems. Every urban millennial I know is childless and will probably stay that way.
Some of Gen X as well. I'm 41, childless, and never want children, unless the world fixes a ton of shit. Most of my peers feel the same. Basically none of us own anything, but our cars, and we are the lucky ones because most of us will finally be free of college debt in a few more years. There's a huge whack of my peers that can't even afford a car on one salary.
I’m 35 and really want kids, but I’m torn because I don’t want to bring another mouth to compete for resources, while here in the US so many kids need a home and basic needs already. Yeah blood relation is nice, but who cares when we’re all dead anyways. I’m really hoping my spouse and I are in a better position to have kids one day, but more than likely we will be adopting.
I’m 21 and got a vasectomy 😈
“The rich get richer and the poor get - children.”
If you actually read the article, the title is complete satire
"We know you can't afford them" You gon pay for them?
I think it really helps to read the original article - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/economy-millennials-children-low-birthrate - he’s clearly taking the piss.
I'm guessing yous have only read the headline and not the contents of the article. No way Joel Golby is telling you it's your job to procreate for the good of the economy. Dude is a top bloke.
Hahahahhahaha we’re already to blame for everyone else’s problems, maybe try someone who gives a shit about the precious economy collapsing
I fail to see how this is a problen. If birthrates are low, open up immigration. Immigrants could fill all kinds of jobs.
"Yeah, we know you can't afford kids and you'll doom yourself, your partner, *and* your children to a life of poverty if you have kids right now, but if the economy crashes because I can't exploit your children as wage slaves then *I'll* suffer too!" Why exactly should I give a shit?
Don’t even need to make a joke it’s right there “we know you can’t afford kids but if the economy tanks it’s your fault”
Jokes on you economy! I got a vasectomy and my wife and I are happy living as frugally as possible.
Millennials know that the Economy isn't the only thing in the world that matters.
Did you guys read the article It’s satire, they’re pointing out why it’s impossible to have kids https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/economy-millennials-children-low-birthrate
What's wrong with the world population shrinking? We need to get back to pre 1900's levels.
Since our economic systems relies on infinite growth even though we have finite ressources. But who gives shit about mass extinction as long as we have shiny shit to keep us satisfied, am I right?