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This is what crushing of the middle class looks like, the Tech Market is no longer the safe harbor it used to be. This is also what demand destruction looks lik

This is what crushing of the middle class looks like, the Tech Market is no longer the safe harbor it used to be. This is also what demand destruction looks like. Mathematically we will end up with some sort of wealth tax but that just means it’s in the government’s interest to continue exasperating wealth inequality. A wealth tax won’t save the middle class, it’s more likely to be another nail in the coffin. At least now I no longer have to argue with ‘inflation is good for us’ people.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago
In the end, the wealthy allow government to introduce just enough socialism to keep the masses from revolting. NOT, to level the playing field, or to re-distribute wealth, but to keep the in-equality in place.
jf22 2y ago
What? There are still millions of people with great high paying tech jobs.
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  Just to point out the obvious, something can be generally true even if it is not true for millions of people. Of those millions with great high paying jobs, how many feel they still exist within a safe harbor. From my experience not even FANG employees in general feel that and there are not millions of those - we're really only counting Engineers not Amazon Wearhouse workers who are clearly a part of the working poor. Also the middle class is not what it used to be, in relative terms Tech is great, but what you may consider great high paying job I might consider a middle class job in historical terms and what you consider middle class I might consider working poor. Things really are getting worse, it's not just a meme.
  - jf22 2y ago
    Let's clarify what you mean by FANG employee and safe harbor. If you're trying to say a FANG employee making 400k in the US doesn't feel safe we'd have to dig into that.
    - cjbgkagh 2y ago
      A single example does not make for a generalization. I don't know where you are getting $400K from. The median yearly total compensation reported at Netflix is $375,000 which is famous even within FANG for it's high comp. Microsoft Average total comp for Engineers is $177K from leaked data. That's the average, with the expected distribution I would expect median would be lower. Say ~$140K. And yeah, ~$140K total comp is a middle class to me. Upper class is when you don't have to work to live anymore. People remember higher numbers more because they covet them, but they tend to ignore a huge sea lower numbers that exists on average.
      - jf22 2y ago
        I was just using that Netflix comp as an example and not forming a generalization. It's hard to follow what you are trying to say.
        cjbgkagh 2y ago
        I stated with a generalization, if you intend to counter that you should probably pick an exemplar of a generalization yourself. Otherwise you're not even wrong - what you're doing makes zero logical sense. Even if I were to say that yes a person making $400K is reasonably well off and should feel secure in their finances that is still does not counter my generalization.
quasse 2y ago
> At least now I no longer have to argue with ‘inflation is good for us’ people. Who has been arguing this?
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  I know, hard to imagine now but a few years ago it really was a popular theory that wage inflation would exceed price inflation - the continuing rise in tech salaries being the case in point. A belief often held by those with unserviceable student loans that they would rather inflate away. Plus the whole MMT thing which was disturbingly close to becoming official policy is predicated on inflation being hard to start allowing for large amounts of consequence free debt monetization (money printing). My argument was that inflation only appears hard to start because when there is a speculative bubble reducing money velocity at the same time. Mathematically it is impossible to maintain such bubbles forever even if they can last for a very long time. BlackRock will just keep getting bigger until it implodes and disappears taking peoples pension funds with it. How long will that take, I don’t know could be decades, I may not even live long enough to see it. But there is a limit and it will be reached. The USSR lasted a rather long time despite how dysfunctional it was, and when it disappeared and defaulted on it's obligations the result was a mad scramble and mass poverty. But it also wasn't the end of the world as the prior dysfunctions meant that opportunities still existed. I wonder if the USSR had not collapsed when it did if they could have possibly afforded to pay old age pensions or the equivalent in lifestyle in the bargain that was made with communism. I.e. how much of Soviet wealth was from people paying in to the system for obligations that the same system could not possibly keep. And is the US Social Security system in a similar state. I think the communists had the idea that upon sufficient revolution money would no longer be needed so state care would effectively be 'free' and or paid for out of the new wealth from finally achieving a communistic utopia. I see this as equivalently fanciful to the US finding a spare $70+ trillion dollars to fund it's currently unfunded obligations.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kwere 2y ago

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

In the end, the wealthy allow government to introduce just enough socialism to keep the masses from revolting. NOT, to level the playing field, or to re-distribute wealth, but to keep the in-equality in place.

jf22 2y ago

What? There are still millions of people with great high paying tech jobs.

cjbgkagh 2y ago
Just to point out the obvious, something can be generally true even if it is not true for millions of people. Of those millions with great high paying jobs, how many feel they still exist within a safe harbor. From my experience not even FANG employees in general feel that and there are not millions of those - we're really only counting Engineers not Amazon Wearhouse workers who are clearly a part of the working poor. Also the middle class is not what it used to be, in relative terms Tech is great, but what you may consider great high paying job I might consider a middle class job in historical terms and what you consider middle class I might consider working poor. Things really are getting worse, it's not just a meme.
- jf22 2y ago
  Let's clarify what you mean by FANG employee and safe harbor. If you're trying to say a FANG employee making 400k in the US doesn't feel safe we'd have to dig into that.
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    A single example does not make for a generalization. I don't know where you are getting $400K from. The median yearly total compensation reported at Netflix is $375,000 which is famous even within FANG for it's high comp. Microsoft Average total comp for Engineers is $177K from leaked data. That's the average, with the expected distribution I would expect median would be lower. Say ~$140K. And yeah, ~$140K total comp is a middle class to me. Upper class is when you don't have to work to live anymore. People remember higher numbers more because they covet them, but they tend to ignore a huge sea lower numbers that exists on average.
    - jf22 2y ago
      I was just using that Netflix comp as an example and not forming a generalization. It's hard to follow what you are trying to say.
      - cjbgkagh 2y ago
        I stated with a generalization, if you intend to counter that you should probably pick an exemplar of a generalization yourself. Otherwise you're not even wrong - what you're doing makes zero logical sense. Even if I were to say that yes a person making $400K is reasonably well off and should feel secure in their finances that is still does not counter my generalization.

quasse 2y ago

> At least now I no longer have to argue with ‘inflation is good for us’ people. Who has been arguing this?

cjbgkagh 2y ago
I know, hard to imagine now but a few years ago it really was a popular theory that wage inflation would exceed price inflation - the continuing rise in tech salaries being the case in point. A belief often held by those with unserviceable student loans that they would rather inflate away. Plus the whole MMT thing which was disturbingly close to becoming official policy is predicated on inflation being hard to start allowing for large amounts of consequence free debt monetization (money printing). My argument was that inflation only appears hard to start because when there is a speculative bubble reducing money velocity at the same time. Mathematically it is impossible to maintain such bubbles forever even if they can last for a very long time. BlackRock will just keep getting bigger until it implodes and disappears taking peoples pension funds with it. How long will that take, I don’t know could be decades, I may not even live long enough to see it. But there is a limit and it will be reached. The USSR lasted a rather long time despite how dysfunctional it was, and when it disappeared and defaulted on it's obligations the result was a mad scramble and mass poverty. But it also wasn't the end of the world as the prior dysfunctions meant that opportunities still existed. I wonder if the USSR had not collapsed when it did if they could have possibly afforded to pay old age pensions or the equivalent in lifestyle in the bargain that was made with communism. I.e. how much of Soviet wealth was from people paying in to the system for obligations that the same system could not possibly keep. And is the US Social Security system in a similar state. I think the communists had the idea that upon sufficient revolution money would no longer be needed so state care would effectively be 'free' and or paid for out of the new wealth from finally achieving a communistic utopia. I see this as equivalently fanciful to the US finding a spare $70+ trillion dollars to fund it's currently unfunded obligations.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kwere 2y ago