Looting.

[demmiblue]

Link to tweet

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Violence and trauma.

[dalton99a]

2. Kick

[empedocles]

3. Adjust the hourly compensation for effective inflation, and

what many of here see - what's happened to the middle classes these last 50 years.

[Hoyt]

5. The median household income in 1970 was roughly $9,900. In 2019, it was somewhere around $60K.

That pretty much tracks inflation over the period.

Where the real problem resides, is those in the lower 20 percentile or so. That's where our focus ought to be.

[empedocles]

8. In the 1950's-'60's, a union factory worker, teamsters, many construction workers,

teachers, skilled workers, etc., could afford a house for an at home wife and kids, and a car.

Compare that with recent years.

[Note the word 'effective'. Times have changed. Some ways for the better]

[Hoyt]

4. Don't think you can look at the situation just in terms of "productivity." In the past few decades,

increases in productivity have largely been the result of investment in technology.

That's not to say workers shouldn't benefit.

[Newest Reality]

6. Today's America...

All things considered, many of today's economic and social problems, (or should I say crises now?) rest on the implications of that graph.

Many social ills are predicted by the rate of poverty in the environment and context is equally as important as individual responsibility. The structure and process is the container for the individual contents.

Overall, a social system serves to maintain and improve public health. Public health is an umbrella idea that embraces many factors and outcomes. As a broad measure, the quality of overall public health in a society ultimately reflects the quality of its social system. If it happens to be that a system is allowing or even facilitating unnecessary disease epidemics, pollution, starvation, violence, crime, deprivation, social oppression, bigotry, and other harmful features, then the integrity of that social system is brought into question.

- Peter Joseph, The New Human Rights Movement

[Coleman]

7. Foreign companies loot us as well

I live in Orlando, my wife work for the US branch of a French company. European companies love salaried (exempt) US employees. They get to work them to death at no extra labor costs. My wife puts in 60 to 70 hours a week. They also don't care about holidays, she is working today. They love the labor laws for exempt employees in the US. She does get 3 weeks leave. So far each year she uses from 3 to 5 days, she can only accrue 4 weeks total, thus she loses about 2 weeks of leave a year.

[SpankMe]

9. The federal minimum wage when I was 16 was just under $3/hr

That's close to $11/hr today when adjusted for inflation. But, the federal minimum wage is currently only $7.25.

Accounting for the productivity gains described in this chart to proper inflation adjusted wages it's clear that most people are underpaid.

This can easily be framed as wage theft.

Conservatives are fond of characterizing a progressive tax algorithm as "wealth redistribution" from the rich to the poor (or to the government). But the current wage structures in this country are redistributions of wealth from the poor to the rich in the form of undercompensated labor.

[crickets]

10. +1