Almost feels like my brain is broken or some shit.
I’m looking at the pricing of houses in my area and comparing it to my salary, and how the actual fuck is anyone affording a house these days? We’re talking almost half a million for a house that takes <2 days to build and is practically an irl copy and paste of some of the homes down the street. What the actual fuck. It seems like I’m the only one (though I know I’m not) who sees how this is completely at odds with everything I learned about the world.
Also, so salaries. How the fuck are they determined? Because it certainly isn’t the result of how much actual work you do, I’m making nearly six figures and I do jack shit yet I’m supposed to just be OK with how morally repugnant that is, as if I’m not also a piece upholding the same utterly corrupt system as well?
Fuck if I know, I try to say this shit to people irl and they just tell me that the world’s not fair blah blah blah. Yeah homie, “not fair” is quite possibly the biggest understatement ever.
I very much understand what people say when they say that money is not real. Feel free to grill my complete ignorance of Econ too if you wish, maybe it’s just something I’ll never understand
It is as little as he can get away with at the moment and he's hard at work to decrease that number by making it cheaper to buy the relevant labor commodity - the laborer with a particular skillset that porky needs for production. Hence the heavy-handed push for bootcamps and STEM education, for example, to decrease the price of labor for programming and data stuff. In reality, this is an attempt to increase the size of the relevant labor pool so he can pay them as little as he pays everyone else. This is also what capitalist media call a "labor shortage". In reality, it's that porky doesn't want to pay enough for labor so he wants to instead will try to increase the supply and have some propaganda to cover it. Offshore. Bring in new exploitable labor, ideally as some kind of vulnerable economic underclass. Crush unions. You know the drill. It's 200 years old.
This thinking underestimates the ideological role of treats. You need enough of the population of the imperial core to not question things too closely which you do by buying them off a little bit. OP is being paid 85k with the hopes they will be a right-wing Democrat and not a class-concious socialist.
Porky doesn't do that, generally. And almost never intentionally as its own goal. If he did, then SocDemery would work. Imperial core workers are bought off, but this is an effect of the system porky helped build under capitalism. Namely, imperialism premised on technological advantage in the core, unequal exchange to get cheap commodities into the core, and a war economy that placed industry in the core. These all built up relative wages for the non-marginalized groups in the core. At the time, this often meant unionized jobs, and as you mention, there were scraps thrown out to stimy socialist politics like the New Deal (though porky usually prefers cops and prisons over higher wages).
That's not the whole picture, of course. While unequal exchange initially looked like the previous eurocolonial scheme of extracting raw goods from superexploited labor in the global south, capitalist pressures started to offload more and more industrial production to the periphery (we can see China doing well at taking advantage of this). This is where treats come from. But it didn't happen because porky wanted to buy off imperial core workers that were threatening to be too socialist, it happened because the colonial strategy changed. Under that strategy, rather than having core workers produce and consume their own goods, they'd largely be imported. So then where do the relatively higher wages in the imperial core come from? Aside from cheaper consumer imports increasing the apparent size of one's paycheck, the answer is, more or less, finance capital and the government throwing around fictional investments to keep everything else running in the imperial core. Everyone works service jobs. The ones paid the most are those that maintain technological advantage and are heavily financialized, like tech. Financialized industries are just about establishing monopolies, so really they are non-productive in intent and usually outcome, e.g. Doordash just taking over the "delivery guy" job as a monopoly. Or Amazon. These strategies make an industry flush with cash relative to its ability to establish monopolies (or to promise monopolies while they fight with each other) and fighting over the limited workers that can build the tech, so they get higher wages. Porky wants them to be less limited, hence my previous comment's point.
In turn, finance capital is propped up by imperialism, and particularly the position of the dollar in trade. Government spending is premised on the same thing. And of course, imperial core workers were provided little pieces of the financial speculation game but not because porky wanted them to be bought off, but because porky wanted his own piece of the action and it ended up working as an incentive for the larger population. Things like skyrocketing housing values and tying retirement to the stock market. Porky maintains land speculation because it makes him money, often through monopoly, but (white) homeowners benefit from it. Porky wants to gamble with and/or take your money on the stock market but in tying workers' retirements to it has made it easier to convince them that "the economy" is stocks and they need to pump those values to do well personally.
There's also a lot to say about anticommunist economic planning but my comment is already too long lol.
Anyways, OP is paid $85k because that's what porky can get away with. Porky doesn't care about OP's politics so long as they're not unionizing the shop or creating other large costs. Porky wants to fire OP and replace them with a worker paid $50k but there's nobody easily available who can do OP's job in the imperial core for that little money. Porky isn't going to train someone from a lower wage because they (correctly) think they'll just leave for the $85k job of their competitor. They'd much rather see the wider supply increase as this doesn't provide their competitors with an advantage, so they offload to public education. This is also why bootcamps give preferential hiring access to their sponsors - they'd otherwise be subsidizing their competitors.
Anyways fuck porky communism will win.
wages have a function of instilling loyalty but desperation is much preferred. who gets the 'i hope you don't turn that education on us' wage is still decided by the labor market, not self interest. they'd of kept paying teachers well if they were thinking of anything besides bottom lines