9 ms·

Poorest workers are hit hardest by pretty much anything related to money.

• cowcity 1y ago
  Or related to capital, politics, etc.
• kennyloginz 1y ago
  Thank you for saying this.
• monero-xmr 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • reliabilityguy 1y ago
    Wouldn’t the deportations increase the demand for low-paying jobs resulting in increasing salaries?
    • monero-xmr 1y ago
      Uhhh yes precisely. That helps the poor and hurts Wall Street
      • hvb2 1y ago
        I genuinely wonder what you've done over the last few years. Rising salaries will lead to inflation. Expecting anything else is fantasy
        • reliabilityguy 1y ago
          > Rising salaries will lead to inflation. Expecting anything else is fantasy No. Riding salaries do not lead to inflation by themselves. What leads to inflation is the increase in money circulating on the market. In other words: printing money leads to inflation.
          • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
            > Riding salaries do not lead to inflation by themselves. What leads to inflation is the increase in money circulating on the market This is nonsense. If an economy doubles and the money supply grows 10%, you get deflation. If the money supply is stable and half the country gets bombed, you get inflation. Price levels are a function of both money demand and money supply. Ignoring the demand side of the equation doesn’t work.
            • reliabilityguy 1y ago
              > This is nonsense. Nope. This is one of the reasons we had insane inflation after Covid: we printed too much. For example, here: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042015/how-does-money-supply-affect-inflation.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042015/how-does-mon...
              • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
                Nobody said printing money can’t cause inflation. Just that it’s not the only factor at play. You can have an economy with zero money printing that experiences inflation or deflation.
                • reliabilityguy 1y ago
                  > Nobody said printing money can’t cause inflation. You said in the comment above.
                  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
                    > You said in the comment above How do you read “price levels are a function of both money demand and money supply” and get that? Going back to the top, you claimed “riding [sic] salaries do not lead to inflation.” That is nonsense. Even if we ignore that rising salaries cause the money supply to increase through increased velocity, wealth effect and credit creation. (This is why when the economy is strong central banks raise rates to keep price levels stable. You have to destroy money to make up for the money being created by the private sector.)
    • hvb2 1y ago
      Which would mean food gets more expensive, right? Regardless of the fact that a lot of poor people don't live in the areas where most of those jobs are but they do get their produce from there.. The top 4 counties in the US for agriculture production are all in the central valley in California.
      • reliabilityguy 1y ago
        > Which would mean food gets more expensive, right? Which in turn will create more pressure to increase the salaries until it reaches the equilibrium that satisfies everyone. The alternative is to use de-facto slave labor just for the sake of cheap food?
        • hvb2 1y ago
          You're missing an important piece here. The lower your income is, the bigger the % you spend on necessities like food. So when those go up, the lower incomes are again hit the hardest as they spend a higher percentage of their total income on it. And these are necessities not nice to haves
          • reliabilityguy 1y ago
            > You're missing an important piece here. I am not. You are confusing transient effects with the equilibrium state. Btw, for low wage employees everything is a significant % of their wage. The only meaningful way to increase their wages is to decrease the supply of cheap labor. This is exactly what happened during Covid where no one was willing to work for $8/hr and the wages went up. When people realize that their wage doesn’t guarantee good living they will look for a better job or demand a raise.
            • hvb2 1y ago
              Supply and demand aren't always in the same place... If a lot of the farm workers in California are gone how does that help the people in Nevada or Michigan that are unemployed... You think they're going to fill those positions? > When people realize that their wage doesn’t guarantee good living they will look for a better job or demand a raise Wow... When your job requires no education or training? I guess everyone who works 2 or more jobs in the us needs to talk to you. They're all missing this obvious point.
    • fzeroracer 1y ago
      No, for two reasons. The first is that Americans often refuse to work those jobs (and for good reason, they pay incredibly poorly, have no benefits etc. It is generally a financial loss to do said jobs). We've tried multiple times to try and get Americans to work in the fields: it never works [1]. The second is that a large amount of our economy is heavily subsidized by said cheap immigrant labor and if you just straight up remove that labor, then the costs of everything goes up as many farms go out of business and die. That's just assuming that you somehow got Americans to go out and replace said jobs; suddenly removing 1+ million people from any labor pool would have drastic effects on the rest of the economy. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/when-the-u-s-government-tried-to-replace-migrant-farmworkers-with-high-schoolers https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/wh...
      • reliabilityguy 1y ago
        > The first is that Americans often refuse to work those jobs (and for good reason, they pay incredibly poorly, have no benefits etc. It is generally a financial loss to do said jobs). Would Americans work those jobs if those jobs paid well?
        • PicassoCTs 1y ago
          Those jobs can not pay well, because the basic living goods have to be artificially price dumped to remain affordable for the working poor. Otherwise all prices would have to be raised to include this, which will never happen.
          • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
            That seems to be inconsistent with the continued negligence with respect to housing prices. Maybe it would be fine if food cost more because agricultural workers got paid better but housing cost less because we stopped artificially constraining supply.
        • fzeroracer 1y ago
          You should define what 'paid well' means if you're going to ask that question, and then compare it to the current cost of labor.
    • guywithahat 1y ago
      Yes, countries that go through population declines without new immigration have often seen strong wage growth. Famously after the Irish great famine agricultural wages rose ~30%, and lower-skill jobs saw strong wage growth
      • Hikikomori 1y ago
        Serfs got slightly more after the Brits killed most of them? Sounds great.
        • guywithahat 1y ago
          Technically most of the Irish population emigrated Ireland, and I'm not sure I'd blame the brits for a famine but ok. Really what I'm looking at is the economic effect of decreasing population when it's not replaced by immigrants
          • Hikikomori 1y ago
            Still killed a million. It is clearly the fault of Britain as Ireland produced much more food than it needed itself but peasants mostly only got to eat potatoes as most of all good food was exported because Brits owned most of the land so peasants didn't own what they produced. When they didn't have acces to potatoes anymore they had no food, and free market advocates in Britain argued that they shouldn't even try to help them.
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > hard for me to imagine how deporting a million illegal immigrants working under the table, or stealing a social security number, would hurt the minimum wage workers Immigration is a distraction. Trump is deporting fewer folks than Obama did [1], he’s just doing it while pumping tens of billions to his buddies via ICE contracts. Tariffs are a regressive tax. If food and metal is more expensive, service and manufacturing workers will be pinches. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-deportations-trump-six-months/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-deportations-trump-six-mont...
    • monero-xmr 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > love the argument that deporting illegals is meaningless Red herring. Nobody said this. My point is Trump isn’t deporting that many people. His numbers are not economically meaningful compared to tariffs. To the extent there are labour pools that would benefit from deportation, they’re geographically concentrated along the border. If Trump wanted to remove illegals from the American labour pool, he’d target employers. He can’t [1]. [1] https://www.npr.org/2025/06/16/nx-s1-5430846/farming-industry-immigration-ice-worksite-enforcement-trump https://www.npr.org/2025/06/16/nx-s1-5430846/farming-industr...
        • monero-xmr 1y ago
          It sounds like you support deporting illegals, as long as we also eliminate tariffs (?)
          • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
            > sounds like you support deporting illegals, as long as we also eliminate tariffs I’m saying irrespective of what you and I believe, the current administration isn’t meaningfully deporting anyone. (To the extent I have policy views on this, it’s for coherence. You can’t do disruptive deportations while ignoring criminals all while launching on again off again tariffs which preclude both long-term domestic investment and trade-barrier reductions.)
  • kyralis 1y ago
    Even in the most facile analysis: Reduced labor availability either (a) decreases supply due to failure to harvest or (b) increases prices due to increased labor costs and therefore drives inflation higher faster than bottom-tier wages can accommodate.
    • monero-xmr 1y ago
      It increases automation and therefore productivity. It increases the demand for legal unskilled labor. Money earned is spent in America rather than sent to foreign countries as remittances
      • ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
        Reduced labor by executive power doesn't increase automation, it introduces a labor shortage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortage Increased capacity utilizing automation would introduce automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_capacity Increasing demand doesn't magically necessitate that technological resources sprout from nothing to replace human resources. An introductory macroeconomics source instructs one on this https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/macroeconomics https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...
      • hvb2 1y ago
        Not every job can be automated. Picking crops for example or cleaning hotel rooms. The US will find out the hard way how much of their undesirable work is done by people that "steal their jobs". Jobs that no American wants to do. The UK already has seen this with Brexit https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44230865 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44230865
        • nine_zeros 1y ago
          Brexit is so funny because it is literally a real world example of how isolation reduces economic growth and causes poverty - and yet, America goes ahead with similar isolation.
  • anigbrowl 1y ago
    Ah yes, blame a different group of poorly-paid workers - that always works so well!
    • reliabilityguy 1y ago
      No one blames anyone. The more low skilled workers you have, the lower wage they get. the only group that benefits from illegal immigrants is the employers: they can get away with paying less. (Consumers benefit too, ofc).
  • niels8472 1y ago
    Tfa mentions immigrant deportation as a reason exactly zero times.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• thenthenthen 1y ago
  And climate change…
  • fuckyah 1y ago
    [dead]
  • jalapenos 1y ago
    True, since they own all the beachfront property
    • throw0101d 1y ago
      > True, since they own all the beachfront property Climate change does not mean just rising sea levels, but more extreme weather as well, which can include more flooding: warmer air holds more moisture, so when it eventually gets released it can be in downpours. See recent flooding in Texas. Poor people tend to live in the highest risk areas because the safer areas are desired most and so the people with money bid up prices there. When you hear headlines like "Trailer Park Destroyed by Tornado", and people ask "Who would live in 'Tornado Alley'?", the answer is "Poor people.".
      • bko 1y ago
        Regarding people living in Tornado Alley because they can't afford to live anywhere else, insurance costs are much higher there, so not exactly a bargain. And plenty of wealthy people love high risk areas. Pretty much anything by a sea is high risk. And again, they pay for it with higher insurance rates. It's hard to get a good measure of damage caused by climate change. There are much touted statistics that say billion dollar weather events are more common than ever, but that's mainly due to things being more expensive and increased development (i.e. beach front properties) A more objective measure, although no perfect, is deaths caused by climate events. If climate events were more catastrophic over time, you would expect deaths to go up somewhat proportionally. To my knowledge, there haven't been major advances in rescue technology in the last 50 years or so. But we see this number has come down pretty drastically over the last 150 years. In the US it has also come down or stayed about the same https://www.statista.com/statistics/1269715/global-reported-deaths-from-climate-disaster-since-1970/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1269715/global-reported-... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatality-rates-in-the-us-due-to-weather-events https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatality-rates-in-the-us-...
• actionfromafar 1y ago
  Including tariffs. (Blanket) tariffs are almost like a special tax on poor people. Explanation: to a well off person, 25% higher gas or food prices is just an annoyance. Nothing in their day to day life will change because of that. To a poor person it's brutal.
  • Tadpole9181 1y ago
    And, importantly, tariffs are payed by the importing party. This means they affect the base price of the product and cannot be made progressive. You could set up a deduction system... But that's retroactive (poor people still don't have that money for a whole year) and dramatically complicates their tax filing burden and financial record keeping requirements. The rich can afford lawyers and accountants, so the IRS has been going after lower and lower income folk for their slip-ups more often. So yet more punishing the poor.
    • chiefalchemist 1y ago
      And, importantly, tariffs are payed by the importing party. This means they affect the base price of the product and cannot be made progressive Yes. But that cost can be absorbed across the board. The manufacturer can lower their margins. The importer / distributor / wholesaler can do the same. The B2B / B2C seller can do the same. It doesn’t all necessarily get directly passed to the buyer. Another question that few are asking is: what has the off shoring of so much manufacturing cost the USA? Looking at the resident of the WH, it appears to be quite a bit.
      • westmeal 1y ago
        But why would the manufacturer or distributor lower their margins? Charity?
        • Joeri 1y ago
          In the short term: fear of reprisals from Trump, as he clearly warned them not to raise prices. In the long term markets find a new equilibrium, as they always do when a new tax is imposed, and that is probably going to be a combination of lower margins, higher prices for the consumer and lower prices for foreign suppliers.
• jordanb 1y ago
  In the middle of last century you saw the opposite where the lower you went on the income distribution the faster your income was increasing, relativy speaking.
  • snapplebobapple 1y ago
    The middle of last century saw a labour shortage and much weaker monopsony labor makret ibfluence so that makes sense. The title of this article should be "in a surprise to noone, jobs that can be done by the widest percentage of the population are highly competitive and least responsive to wage pressure"
  • slater 1y ago
    Yup. And then: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/