Yep. That’s the truth. I didn’t even feel like I was treading water until my late 40s and we were making decent money by any standard. A mortgage, a single car payment, all the insurances (family health, dental, home, car) you need to pay for, data connections (we don’t have cable tv), taxes (FSaLT), and skimming money off the top for a 401k and there’s very little left. Especially with the all the rising prices of groceries (our bill feels like it’s almost doubled) and being subscription-fee’d to death.
Inflation is hitting people hard. And it’s happening globally not just in the USA.
Last night I ordered some food and the delivery agent told me she is living in her car because people are not tipping well and she can’t afford rent anymore. Paid for her stay in a motel for now.
Honest work: You make just enough to live on until its not enough and then you’re homeless
Scams and grifting: You make possibly lots of money then maybe get sent to jail which is where the courts are gearing up to send homeless people anyway.
I dunno but my buddy just moved from his apartment in Brooklyn to Omaha and he was shocked the prices there were way too close to NYC prices for rent. He did go from a 1BD to 2BD but the cost difference per ft² was almost the same. Like $200 difference.
I’ve heard similar stories all across Canada as well, I think landlords have unchecked greed these days because people will end up paying no matter what they have to sacrifice you have a roof over their head.
When Covid hit and lockdowns started, it was reasonable to think that the world as we know it might be ending. I was scared for sure and had started making contingency plans to flee to the mountains in a U-Haul full of canned foods and water.
Things are manageable now despite people still dying from Covid. Big corporate has been milking us since, as if their profits today are the last dollars they will ever make, and so it goes that they squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.
It takes a special kind of ignorance to ignore the impacts of Covid which were made worse by the inaction of trump, the fucking idiot, and say something as blitheringly stupid as ‘well I had more money when trump was president ahardy har har’
I’m just going to say it absolutely was not reasonable to believe the world was ending. It was bad, made far worse by people who thought it was reasonable to cough and sneeze and spit on others, on food, and mass purchase hundreds of dollars of toilet paper. However, “world ending” is a bit sensationalist and only the easily fooled and unreasonable people justified such viewpoints.
Putting aside the tragic losses caused by Covid, both directly and indirectly, those three years might be argued as having been a chance to shift climate talks and the more negative cultural expectations experienced in developed nations, and especially the U.S. Hell, even the air itself was clearly up.
I recognize this is a hot take and am not in any way attempting to downplay how damaging Covid was to many families. It’s just such a damned shame a chance to change for the better ended up with where we are now. Further struggling, more homeless, greedflation, and an incessant need to argue amongst ourselves.
ended up with where we are now. Further struggling, more homeless, greedflation, and an incessant need to argue amongst ourselves.
Gotta hand it to the politicians, they played a master game of locking us against ourselves. Hard to meet the other side halfway when one of you is literally trying to strip the rights from… everybody??
Agreed that it is a shame the world hasn’t changed for the better, but completely unrelated is the fact that there were a few months there where absolutely nobody knew just how bad it was going to get.
Only easily fooled unreasonable people were convinced one way or another when there was no scientific consensus on if the virus was going to kill 1 million or 1 billion, or somewhere in between.
It’s easy to look back and say ‘well it wasn’t world ending so it was irrational to have that fear’, but when millions are dying, you aren’t allowed to leave your house, and experts are saying that they don’t know how bad this is going to get, I would say that it was reasonable to be worried.
That works the other way too. The second half of the Trump administration brought three separate events into my life that would each be financially devastating on their own. I went from debt free except mortgage and a proper emergency fund to now, even with a higher salary, I’m scraping by and have a bunch of debt to pay off.
But I’m one of those people that knows that the President doesn’t directly control my financial situation. Trump sure as shit didn’t improve anything he touched, and I could see things in my life being a bit different if he was remotely competent with Covid, sure. I had more money at the end of the Obama administration than the end of the Trump administration. But even if that were swapped I don’t see that as a compelling reason to vote for a corrupt narcissistic rapey wannabe dictator.
I mean technically he’s correct. There absolutely are jobs out there netting 150k+ a year. Even without any college education if you are not afraid to climb the corporate ladder.
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful - and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people and neither do we.
It was funnier when it wasn’t so blatant. A politician saying this today might mean it.
Same. I’m making more than I’ve ever made in my life and I can barely afford paying both my mortgage and my mistress’s rent, something has got to give.
To anyone struggling in the USA and wondering how to possibly get out, just live like Congress and become rich. Then, money problems are way easier to handle. If you have as much money as a Congressman, you will be equally as unconcerned with them as to the state of our union and you will be able to say things are great with a straight face.
I dunno. Congressional salary really is still in the rage of “Middle Class”, though definitely at the higher end of that. These people were wealthy or connected, for the most part, before getting into office. People who are barely getting by don’t quit their jobs for political campaigns.
Congress members don’t make enough to be rich without taking bribes. They make $174k/year in 2024, which is equivalent to $75k/year in 1990. The only wages that haven’t dropped due to inflation are CEO and other C-suites.
All you really need is wealthy parents. That way you never have to have any debt and get exploited by the credit system and can live your life glib and clueless and wondering why other people are so lazy and poor and didn’t work hard like you.
This is the important detail. Europe was destroyed and the USA was able to flourish. Opportunities existed that will likely never exist again. Capitalism has never been as great as it was in the USA post-WWII.
America was basically the only industrialized country that hadn’t been bombed to fuck. You had to be a clown to not succeed in that environment (or systemically oppressed, since opportunity in the US is always only for white people). Boomers took quality jobs making reliable products and moved those to low wage jobs making disposable products in China.
As much as you complain about the boomers, the current generation(s) are the ones you need to pay attention when it comes to who’s caused the house shortage because of unchecked capitalism. There’s more than enough houses that should house everyone for cheap.
You cannot blame boomers for the smouldering wreck that Airbnb left behind. That was the work of a millennial. Take some responsibility for yourselves and your own actions that have attributed to the current state of society that you live in.
LOL you really believe that “a millenial” created AirBNB and not some conglomerate of venture capitalists funneling billions at a team made up of people of all ages?
No shit. So you agree It’s not just boomers. Now go get mad at the OP for spawning this stupid nonsense argument in the first place. Go on and grow that attention span.
Wtf even does “the current generations” mean? Whenever people say “the newer generation” or “the young generation” or something they just sound so fucking incompetent.
As is blaming boomers when the world is not run by just that one generation. The most successful billionaires today are made up from genx and millennials.
So making it a generation war just when it’s pointed at boomers is just stupid and incompetent for an argument.
My guy, air bnb didn’t cause the shortage or even significantly make it worse. It’s the mega corps that literally own hundreds of thousands of homes across the US and just rent them out. I’m not even upset at boomers who own 3 or 4 rental properties and I work with a lot of them. It’s always mega corps fucking it up for the rest of us.
Housing was wildly expensive and rising incredibly fast before Airbnb was invented (company started in 2008, which you might recognize as an important year for the real estate market). After 2008, tons of investors came in to buy up the depressed value properties to either flip or rent out or just hold onto until the value returned. People buying houses with cash isn’t something Airbnb caused. Corporations buying up houses to rent isn’t something Airbnb caused. Foreign investors buying up houses to get their money out of their country isn’t something Airbnb caused.
Airbnb invented a way to make money off of housing by taking houses away from people. Entire blocks will be bought by a company just to use as an Airbnb hence why a lot of stipulations have been recently coming in to prevent a ‘housing shortage’ while there’s enough housing.
So yes, Airbnb did a lot of damage there when it comes to ‘who can we pin ideas on’ blame which we love to do so much to boomers.
Few people in that period had the information you have now. People were presented with this economic miracle in the 50s and there was little to no components other than conformity.
As more time has passed and I continually re-assess my Boomer parents, I am struck more and more that they truly were a propagandized generation who was never given the tools to properly think through what they were seeing. It was always just “here, more, buy this, this technology is new and amazing”. Everything was new year after year until the late 80s/early 90s, when technology evened out. Even then people had cell phones and such. Once met with the Internet, especially through Facebook, we could see all of their problems flourish.
Not to say that any generation is better than any other or not, but I do believe that each generation after Boomers is actually much better than the previous one at critical thinking–probably because society had no choice but to and the fact that more people have at least a bachelors degree now.
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