Wow the line that goes up doesn't mean anything for regular folks :surprised-pika:
That "rising tide lifts all boats" metaphor is really stupid. Let's compare economic inequality with the relative altitude of boats on water with bodies of water famously known for keeping all boats at pretty much the same altitude.
When you put it that way, it does seem like the idiom was reverse engineered from "something that lifts things equally."
No no the metaphor is perfect. It's just most people don't have boats and the tide is drowning them
Also everyone stays at mean sea level, effectively going nowhere
I remember a girl I went to high school with posting on FB in like 2017 about how great the NASDAQ and DOW were doing under the big wet boy and I could only think about how she had been asking around if anyone had a car for sale for 1k a couple weeks before.
Aren't the middle class the strongest bulwark against socialism. Why are they unhappy. This is what they signed up for or did they overestimate their importance for capitalism
The threat of socialism has diminished significantly since the destruction of the USSR, allowing the bourgeoisie to let their bulwark decay.
yeah and now they're finding out they are expendable. which was inevitable. I mean Marx predicted this like almost 200 years ago but propaganda is a hell of a drug
"insurance for herself and her 7-year-old daughter through her employer cost $1,400 a month"
🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢🧢
Unless you're rich, you can get a marketplace plan via Obamacare for less than that, so there's literally no reason to pay that.
Why would they pay more then? Are you saying that they're lying or that they're unwittingly paying more than they need to?
I'm saying the author of the article is lying by omission to set an agenda - in this case there's something very weird going on because a "middle class" person would be able to get a subsidy and pay way less with Obamacare, as shitty as Obamacare is. One possibility is that this "struggling middle class" person makes like $150k. Or they do shady tax shit and that's why they won't get an ACA plan.
If they use little white lies like that, there's probably other cap going on.
Most public policy already overwhelmingly benefits the middle class rather than the people who actually need it.
It's a consequence of them being rich enough to have money but poor enough to pay tax. They have to spend a lot of resources keeping them placated as they tax the shit out of them to fund their forever wars.
Yea. I've climbed the income ladder rapidly but housing prices have climbed just as hard.
and if you keep on climbing maybe one day you'll get me a 4th vacation home.
So how to deal with people who tell me that Marx failed to account for the middle class and their glorious life in the US now?
The middle class in the US has the life they do because of the exploitation of workers and resources in the global south. If the US was prevented from doing that the comfortable middle classes would see their living standards drop like a stone balloon. And in Marx's day, this was just as true only it was more from exploitation of domestic workers.
If there IS something Marx failed to consider, it's how much the wealth generated by capitalism comes from stealing from the future i.e. environmental destruction and climate change. So much of our economic growth the last 200+ years comes from burning fossil fuels, which is really just making current and past generations wealthy at the expense of future ones. Literally just stealing wealth from our descendants.
:doomjak: I really do hate it here. I see the maw of the machine grinding humanity to pieces. It's so much worse to look down and see it coming.
On one hand. Americans are stupid for getting suckered by their blind trust in the private sector, yet on another, I am stuck in this shithole too.
