In decades past, employees would get both a cost of living raise and performance raise, but the cost of living raise has all but gone away. One way to fix this is to tie the minimum wage to inflation. It’ll have tje side benefit of making companies try to reduce inflation rather profiteering.
Republicans are really determined to make life as awful as possible, and the democrats in power are fine with it.
Republicans will buy stock in airlines then sink the Titanic, but first make sure their donors’ rooms are located right next to the life boats. Democrats will make arrangements so that the band plays your favorite song while it sinks.
They play your favorite song, but the tuba is right in your face and the band is off key.
Headed? I would say that we are a looney toon several meters in the air beyond the cliff border after traverse a mountaing through a tunnel painted in the wall with an ACME parachute… and I think that I fell short in the hyperbole
Over-population: Sole reason for everything
Yes, it’s gonna get bad. Jobs in both the private sector, and public sector, universities, etc, we are all feeling the heat right now.
Why are universities suffering?
research grants, and funding grants are being cut. so scientists are fleeing the states, some of them. this only works if you have phd or MD in a specialty that europe wants.
What kind of specialities do they want?
I read they are rising taxes to Universities’ donations. In the political side, professors are… receiving too much attention from the government, to put it mildly.
Because enrollment is in structural decline due to demographic shift.
Bad reputation among working people due to cost and dubious results for about half of graduates.
Student loans reform is gonna hurt them the most though.
my former state uni was suffering enrollment so bad that they reached out to HS students(not yet graduated) to give them a guaranteed enrollment if they do these kinds of requirements, when it was the usual : sat scores, 3.0etc.
before that happened they wre slashing classes, instructors(non tenured) raising tuition to cover the loss of thier cash cow, freshmans. the reason is combination of lack career help, and job prospect out of earning said degree.
I’m assuming international students are staying far away from American universities at the current enrollment periods as well
To some degree sure but Foreign Nepo babies going to haaavard and other elites schools ain’t changing.
At best state and mid grade private schools targeting the foreign “Middle” class will take a hit as these people go to other Anglo countries
As with everything, there is a club
Yep degrees aren’t worth what they used to be. I regret mine really not worth it
biotech is pretty bad back 2016-present, i can imagine it worst for other stem degrees, Tech was flourishing around that time before covid. our school strangely hid "lab experience, under an obscure category so people wouldnt notice, and try to badger the PIs for seats in thier labs, apparent it was the most important part of your DEGREE before graduation.
and employers in the industry dont want to train a person at all, so they expect years of experience under your belt already.
i think cs majors have one of the highest unemployment amongst stem. biology/bio seems halfway, but i suspect its heavily skewed because people go into nurisng or another healthcare field.
NSF funding cuts, declining enrollment bcz of the ICE crap (people are afraid to come to the U.S.), covid funding issues still being felt, lots of government employees vying for university positions, attacks on science across the board forcing experts to leave the U.S., or go to the private sector. Its bad, and it’ll probably get worse.
Somebody drinking too much koolaid
Ya am I? Guess all that first hand experience with it must be a lie…
Clearly this first hand experience clouding your judgement about what universities has been doing for the last 20 years…
The attack on science schtik does resonate with people balls deep on student loans. But I do understand how proffesors and admin staff would shill it lol
Please, enlighten me on how 50% funding cuts to NASA science budget, and cutting NSF grant funding isn’t an attack on science? I’d also like you to further explain to me with your clearly superior big brain how banning all things considered DEI or climate change related, isn’t an attack on science…
Clearly, you know more about all the interworkings of this stuff than someone who is involved in this shit.
We are literally in the middle of one of the largest wealth transfers in history right now, driven by dipstick billionaires who are frothing and foaming at the mouth at the prospect of screwing this nation out of all scientific progress we’ve made, and you wanna tell me im a fucking sucker.
GTFO with your weak sauce arguments.
The wealth transfer started in 1980s…
Universities were happy to fleece the students for decades… By jacking up tuition, over hiring parasitic admins and charging wildly fees for everything they could.
Now the universities have no good will left among the peasants.
Sure sucks NASA got defunded, gutted and transferred out to private sector.
But in the country where health insurance exists int he current form… Kinda hard to give a fuck about “the science”
People got to eat first ;)
I heard universities have been closing entire staff departments because of the DEI cuts. Business schools all over the country do DEI research with government grants. That money is gone now.
It’s already been going on for 30+ years so whatever you call this is pretty much it.
Correct… This set up was made a generation ago. Normie just finally woke up after a decade of jerking Indentity politics and wars a decade prior. Now they ate shocked by country is gutted from within
I already know that you are from the US because of the implicit defaultism of your question. Yes, it doesn’t look good at all.
I’m in the UK
Sure.
Grocery value didn’t go up. Real wages went down. We should measure inflation based on cost-of-living.
Groceries don’t really get more expensive, because the methods for producing food don’t really get less efficient over time; if anything, it’s more efficient. So there’s no real reason for them to become more expensive.
Instead, wages declined. I’ve already commented many times that the labor market is a free market, that means it’s regulated by Supply and Demand. I.e., if prices for labor go down, as we can observe, then that can be interpreted such that supply of labor went up (women go to work too, offshoring labor to other countries, immigrants, …) or that demand for labor went down (automation, end of growth, …).
I honestly think that both cases are difficult, where the supply of labor could be a bit reduced by kicking out immigrants and home-shoring labor (and also, to a lesser extent, making it more difficult for women to work), which btw some advisers to trump are seemingly trying to do, but my honest opinion is that it won’t bring wages up to how they were in the 1960s. Demand for labor is shrinking too, due to the end of growth and now AI and other automation techniques. I guess we’ll have to face that.
edit: just to offer an optimistic outlook, i think that consumerism and therefore demand for consumer products could be stimulated by simply giving handouts to people. most people will spend most of the handouts immediately, and that stimulates consumerism. and that in turn stimulates the economy.
We’re already there. The only reason we aren’t calling this a depression is that the stock market hasn’t been affected much.
But when 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed, it’s hard to argue we aren’t already largely ‘crashed’.
If the economy doesn’t need 25% of the populace to keep functioning…what happens?
From your own source on “true” unemployment, it’s the lowest it has been since they started calculating it. It peaked in 09 at 35% and again in COVID, but all through the early 00s it was between 28% and 30%.
You can’t use that number as evidence we “already crashed”, because as we’ve seen in other actual crashes it spikes up to 35%.
When the definition of unemployed is changed to exclude the majority of working age people without jobs then it is no longer a helpful statistic.
That’s why we see people calculating real unemployment with other variables.
When the definition of unemployed is changed to exclude the majority of working age people without jobs then it is no longer a helpful statistic.
U-3 has used the same definition of unemployed since 1940.
Whatever metric you want to use, you should look at that number and how it changes over time, to get a sense of trend lines. LISEP says the “true” unemployment rate is currently 24.3% in May 2025, which is basically the lowest it’s ever been.
Since the metric was created in 1994, the first time that it dipped below 25% was briefly in the late 2010’s, right before COVID, and then has been under 25% since September 2021.
Under this alternative metric of unemployment, the unemployment rate is currently one of the lowest in history.
I don’t know how to make you engage with reality.
Slaves arguing for their continued enslavement is just something i will never understand.
You can’t understand because you can’t even read the numbers in your own sources haha
I didn’t post any numbers.
“Indignant slave mocks another slave to make themselves feel better.”
Haha
The comments you’re responding to are not making that kind of general argument though, they are only talking about whether a specific claim makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t necessarily mean our economic system is working for us, maybe it means that whatever problems exist would be better quantified in a different way.
Unemployment statistics do not show an accurate picture of the people who are unemployed based on the definition of unemployed that is used by regular human beings.
I understand the stat looks good, because the definition of the stat excludes growing groups of people who we would consider unemployed.
Well what I’m seeing in this thread is two metrics, BLS and LISEP, with the argument being that the distinction between them doesn’t matter because unemployment is right now historically low by both measures (I don’t really know the difference between them myself, or whether these are the only meaningful ways to measure it). And you’re reiterating that there exists some measure where it is high, but I think for that to be a convincing counterargument you would need to say more about what that measure is, show that unemployment is high by that measure, and make an argument why that specific way of measuring things is more relevant than the other ones.
You’re the one saying we shouldn’t be cross comparing different numbers with different meanings… While literally comparing different numbers with different meanings to support your point
So many jobs 🫲🍊🫱
Can you ELI5 why the stock market isn’t affected much?
If we look at historic crashes, they had major catalysts causing mass sell orders. Right now markets have had time to adjust because the speed of decline has been very slow.
Markets are also largely speculative, many stocks are traded way above their fundamental value (think Microsoft, tesla, or coca-cola). These will probably be hit the hard, algorithms will default to what a stock should be and drop hard. But these companies might have the strongest chance to bounce back as well.
Companies with the strongest books will be safer, but many more risk taking companies won’t be as lucky. This is part of what due diligence of a stock will tell you, but also probably one of the hardest parts of investing.
As long as decline is slow, stability can be found. But when uncertainty rises fast, so does the unstability of the stock market. Catalysts such as the public losing confidence in banks causing a bank run, companies downsizing at unseen scales to cut costs, or global political instability are possible.
TLDR: it needs to get way worse, very quickly for the market to crash
Yeah, I don’t know if OP is in the USA, but having someone like Donald Trump elected to high office is 100% part of a crash already in progress. Inequality got so bad that democracy is not functioning. In a healthy society, Trump would be an unelectable laughing stock.
24/7 propaganda, plus MSM helping all along the well, plus adding a little culture war(racisms, sexism, anti-immigration,evangelicalism) helped alot.
Yeah. I consider Trump the “blow everything up” candidate, he got a lot of support from people who were just so generically desperate that they wanted to vote for whoever seemed like they were going to majorly change something, somehow. It almost didn’t matter what Trump did as long as he smashed the existing order while doing it.
Agreed. People were angry - many with good cause. Unfortunately, people often make bad decisions when they are angry.
Also, not so fun fact, but this got me curious so I looked up the unemployment rate during The Great Depression: apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well, so I feel like that reinforces the point I’m making a bit.
apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well
No, the unemployment rate was around 20-25% under the traditional definition. It’s currently 4.2% under that definition.
If you want to use this LISEP definition, fine, but recognize that it’s been above 30% for most of its existence, and has only been under 25% since COVID. Basically, if you go by the LISEP definition then you’re saying that the job market after COVID has been better than it has ever been before.
The stock market is not the same thing as it was at the start, different players, different motives, and lots of failsafes. That time it was a signal that things were bad, this time we could continue to get worse and you’d never know it looking at the DOW.
The 1% own even more stock than they own outright money. You could replace “the economy” in every article with “rich people’s yacht money”. The stock market is 100% dissociated from reality and shouldn’t be used as a measure of general wealth by any means.
most of billionaires money is in investment schemes, not actual cash as people think.
The biggest issue is the need for families to have two incomes to support a houshold. Unemployment would plummet if single incomes for the working class were feasible again,since unemployment is based on looking for employment.
Basically if jobs had living wages and we had universal healthcare we wouldn’t be in this mess.
if jobs had living wages
But but billionaires would be slightly less obscenely rich then, oh no!
This is part of my problem. My wife has medical issues and can’t work which is exaserbated by our higher than typical medical costs. It sucked before but we managed and now it seems like the end.
That ship sailed under Reagan, and it’s never getting back to port, sadly. Thanks to him, families now needed two incomes.
Then, Bush and Clinton came along, and you needed not only two incomes, but two college degrees. Now, with Dubya, Obama, and Trump, not even that’s enough, and they’re capping student loans instead of regulating student loan interest, so your only real shot at being a doctor now is being born in the right zip code.
America, baby. Dig it.
ReaGaNoMiCS!!!
You can blame Reagan for a lot of things but not this and frankly even if it somehow was all his fault the Clinton Administration could have undone it.
The economy was already in trouble by the end of Lyndon Johnson’s final term in 1969. The Nixon Administration implemented some large changes trying to fix it but was unsuccessful. The Carter Administration also tried with very limited success. It wasn’t until the 1st Rise of Tech in the 80s during the Reagan Administration that things managed to get moving again. The Clinton Administration caught a lucky break with the 2nd Rise of Tech in the 90s so the streak got extended to right about 2001.
The amusing part is that Johnson, Nixon, and Carter bear no blame for the economic woes while Reagan and Clinton deserve no credit for the economic successes. They just happened to be the guy in the Oval when things happened.
Its a good chunk of the reason that everyone from Wall Street to the US Federal Government is trying so damn hard to make AI happen. They want a 3rd Rise of Tech, or something like it, in order to re-float the economy.
Bla-bla-blame? I don’t think this is about blaming the right or the left wing of politics. It’s about what the State is supposed to do for (as in favor of) the people. They renounced to the idea of working for the people and leave them in the hands of the oligarchy. It worked as long as the illusion and promises lasted.
it’s never getting back to port
In the event of an actual crash, a lot of these “nevers” will get re-evaluated. The New Deal consisted of a lot of “nevers” that all got passed because people didn’t want a repeat of the first Great Depression; I’d expect a similar snap-back after the second Gilded Age finally burns itself out.
The new deal though is not a good deal lmao. It will literally make the rich gen richer and poor get poorer. Like I’m middle class American but still rely on summer and after school programs for my kids. What am I supposed to do when that goes away? Magically afford a daycare? Or is my 10yr or 6yr old supposed to get a job?
They’re not talking about a new deal as in a new status quo after this whole mess; they’re talking about the New Deal and are hoping for more of that.
Indeed. Yikes, our history education is in rough shape.
I mean something tells me that’s one topic that wouldn’t be appropriately covered in schools, but that’s just my guess.
Why would a new deal get rid of after school programs? If would expand on them.
Or is my 10yr or 6yr old supposed to get a job?
Yeah man they have started rolling back those regulations for child labor.
Trump just passed a huge cut it he 21s CCLC down to $0… This stops all funding to after school and summer learning programs. I just got an email from. The center my kids go to saying they might have to close because they didn’t get their July 1st budget payments…
… You don’t know what the New Deal was, do you?
You misunderstand me, as the other comment notes. I’m talking about actual change: “The New Deal,” capitalized: the relief, reform, and recovery of the 1930s, not “the new deal,” lowercase, that they just passed.
I hope you’re right.
Well, it’s either that or American Revolution II: Electric Boogaloo, so I hope so too.
I mean that’s hopeful, but remember that the New Deal also came against the backdrop of the height of socialism in the West and the labor right movement. Modern Americans don’t have the organizational strength to make such a compromise attractive in the eye of the ruling class, and they don’t seem intent on ever having it.
Historically, humans don’t just suffer in silence for more than a couple of generations.
People in big wealthy countries underestimate how far those nations can fall.
Argentina was the 5th richest country in the World at one point, and look at them now.
The higher you are, the more you can fall before hitting a new stable state: just look at those places which were once great imperial nations like Greece, Iran, Turkey or Egypt. I mean, most of the Middle East was once the seat of some great nation or other and look at them now.
The US going all the way down to the level of wealth per capita of, say, Russia, is a distinct possibility, if the structural elements which supported its high economic output start breaking (so, things like Education, the productivity of its companies and the belief of outsiders that investing in America is safe and has a good ROI, all things getting worse) and the higher a nation is in that scale the more such structural supports are required to keep it there (for example, not other developed nations don’t relly on their currency being the World’s Reserve Currency to prop-up its public finances), so the harder it is to stay there.
You’re not wrong, though the US has gone through this sort of thing before in the past. Once the Great Depression wiped away the excesses that came from the post-WWI economic boom, it led directly to Roosevelt’s New Deal; “perhaps the greatest achievement [of which] was to restore faith in American democracy at a time when many people believed that the only choice left was between communism and fascism.”
Sound familiar?
That’s the most visible example of our previous experience with this, but it’s far from the only one: Rapidly increasing economic inequalities, coupled with the fight over slavery, led to the election of Lincoln; he of course issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but he also signed into law social programs such as the Homestead Act and a land grant program which resulted in the establishment of many lower-income colleges and universities around the country, including several HBCUs. When the extreme disparities of the Gilded Age reached a tipping point in the late 1800s, the Progressive Era began, bringing things like women’s suffrage, environmental protections, and “muckraking” journalism that rooted out corruption. The attempts at state-level fascism in the midst of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s led to the election of Kennedy and to Johnson’s “Great Society,” which brought with it food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, and consumer protections, among many other things.
Buchanan led to Lincoln. Hoover led to Roosevelt. Nixon led to Carter. Bush led to Obama. It’s a pendulum of extremes: rapid progressive change is birthed from times of economic inequality, there’s a steady-state era in which progressive policies lead to rapid growth, but then the rich start to get frustrated with regulation and taxation, and corruption begins to increase once more, leading to increasing inequality; the people get mad, control of the government is wrested back, and the cycle begins anew. The pendulum has been swinging since before the Magna Carta even.
Still, you are right about the big question here: whether or not the country will survive the next swing of the pendulum in its current form, or if a different society will have to be birthed from its ashes.
now even degrees arnt guaranteed in jobs, alot of these need grad degrees/graduate level certification to have even a chance.
Meh, please don’t quote unusual statistics without giving any context for how to interpet them.
For this value, it is calculated by:
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
24.3% is not that out of the ordinary - you can see historical data back to like, 1995 here.
Not saying this stat is useless, but the way you’ve chosen to use it is intentionally and inaccurately inflammatory.
Maybe in 1995 you could actually afford things while functionally unemployed? I mean, while the relative number is stable, the absolute numbers keep growing, and their situation keeps worsening. Here lies the inflammatory part.
The fact that it’s pegged to 25k means that the number is much much higher. It’s not 24.3%. its 24.3% plus everyone who can’t afford to live at today’s prices.
That’s terrifying.
I dunno, H.
I may be wrong in saying it’s indicative of a crash, and I’m okay with being corrected.
As to inaccurate or inflammatory, maybe it feels that way if you’re on the winning side of the equation.
I think we should be inflamed about this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that thirty years of high functional unemployment being ordinary is an objectively bad thing, but when you couple it with the increasingly supercharged price gouging and inflation the US has experienced over the last several decades, things that seemed improbable before suddenly become feasible. (Like making fascists electable.)
And the stock market is just another way for the top percent to continue to siphon wealth.
I stopped working a year ago. Burnt out, broken down, and various physical ailments just broke and depressed me. Moved back in with family to help support my useless ass. Shit sucks and it ain’t going to get any better. But I’ll turn up to every local protest I can cuz this GOP shit is bullshit.
Im at 42 weeks. My life plane is heading straight down and the rudder is not responding.
Best way to recover from a spin is push the yoke to straight down and rudder opposite the spin.
brought on by the dismal job prospects of many degree/fields too, even before trump 2nd term.
Yes degrees are ridiculous nowadays. Graduates are ten a penny and debts are awful
before covid hit i was visiting indeed forums and glassdoors quite alot. and found out so many people are like struggling with thier employment. Indeed and glassdoor shut them down, because the employers/companies were threatening the site owners with lawsuits because it made them look bad, because people were reporting how terrible the employers were, unethical business practices,etc.
i was looking at CLS program(which requires graduate schooling) in cali, and found out everyone wants to come to cali for the program(apparently very few schools actually have these programs , so naturali california was a state they would go to for a better chance in the field.)
You’re in a situation where you have to cut spending and raise taxes while the left promises to not cut spending and the right promises to not raise taxes. It’s an issue the last handful of administrations have not been able to deal with…
It’s going to be painful. Hopefully not a drawn out depression like the 1930s.
Hopefully not a drawn out depression like the 1930s.
Much worse. This time it’s going to be permanent.
Virtually nothing in politics or economics is ever permanent.
Or species.
Well from a perspective of a slave with a few decsdes of life expectacy left… 20-30 years of hardship is permanent lol
Austerity doesn’t work
Except when it does (1)
cato institute
Lol
I mean it can work, at least in theory. I’d have to take a more comprehensive look at Estonia’s case. I will not take that source at face value though.
But recently I’ve seen analyses of both the UK and the southern EU countries’ austerity policies being failures. And that’s multiple countries with very different economies.
A crash? I’d say we’re in a plane from which the pilot decided to press the “eject wings” button.
Why do we even have that lever?
We are heading into a feudal system of a sort. The wealth gap is absolutly massive and the only way to end up in the upper class is to inherit. As per usual the population feels that the system is unfair, but is unable to see the real problem. Media is really pushing far right talking points, as the upper class realizes that the system is broken and a real revolution is a problem. Thats how the US ended up with a de facto monarchy. The UK is moving towards that pretty quickly too.
The good news is that Labour might make some really usefull changes. Mainly end first past the post to prevent Reform from taking over. That might very well allow left wing parties like the LibDems and Greens to win more seats and change the narrative.
What makes you think Labour are looking to change that?
Labour had a bit more then a third of the votes, which is pretty close to were Reform is polling today. However Labour won a massive majority with those votes. If Labour wants to prevent a Reform victory they need to change the election system. It is even worse for the Tories. So long term Tory supporters will cheer them on.
I know that makes sense to do, but that’s different from them making plans to do it
The first change doesn’t seem to be related, but that second link is promising.
We’re headed for a revolution, of the French variety.
Bonjour
