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[MrRoboto75]

From what I heard in the radio from an interview with one of the plans writers its basically trickle down 2.0

To be expected from a business man

[nenjin]

What a shock. Same shit they've been peddling for 40 years, now with a new toupee.

[EnigmaticHat]

From what I heard in the radio from an interview with one of the plans wrighters its basicly trickle down 2.0

Excellent

One of the things I truly believe about the American economy is that we're getting to the point where the rich won't get their cut because everyone else will have nothing else to give.  We've already had value drained out of the student loan market because an entire generation of doctors went bankrupt after graduating.  Then we had a bunch of value drained out of the real estate market because bankers mortgaged homes and not only didn't sell but didn't rent.  And now everyone is going on about the differing buying habits of millennials; about how we like to "live simply" and "maintain mobility," while dancing around the fact that we're all poor and its not realistic for us to hold down longterm employment in a single job because most jobs are downwardly mobile*.  Whole industries are going to be reshaped or destroyed simply because my generation can't afford luxuries, even simple things like fabric softener that do serve practical use.  And of course the elderly right now are frequently leaving no inheritance, sometimes even giving to charity rather than us.  So even when the current crop of middle/lower class people that are and were far better off than us economically dies, we still won't get our cut.  And then people wonder why most of us aren't living independently...  in the 50s people could raise a family on 30 total work hours for the entire household.  Now households can go up to 100 hours easy, even 140+ if you count kids working, while vacation time and paid sick leave are with each year less and less common.  Since the 80s the price of everything has increased something like fourfold while the minimum wage and average wage if you exclude the upper class has remained basically stagnant.

Also why unpaid internships are dying.  People have realized that they can't afford that and it doesn't help them at all.  Its like we're getting to the point where people are too poor to be properly exploited.  There'll only be Walmart to take people's money and after that there won't be any money left to take.

*As in, no significant raises, no avenue for promotion, but the workload and managerial abuses you face will go up over time

[MrRoboto75]

That's wonderful and all but its not the rich that will suffer in that scenario.

[Egan_BW]

Maybe the way that we get rid of money as a concept is by giving it all to the rich and then stop accepting it because it's useless now.

[WealthyRadish]

With the current established sentiments of both parties, a contraction of living standards is typically blamed on there not being enough jobs, jobs not paying enough, not enough support for "job creators" and small/all business, etc. At this point, people practically conceive of heaven itself as wages in employment of God.

I'm not sure what sort of a meaningful backlash you can expect when the popular outrage under such a conception of economics is so easily misdirected and wasted away on bandaids and symbolic policy, even assuming that the government is functional and accountable enough to respond to such outrage.

[EnigmaticHat]

Define rich.  If the economy collapses, anyone who's finances involve the words "offshore tax haven" will be fine.  The 20% or so that's the wealthy upper class simply because that's the replacement to the middle class?  Not so much.  We're already getting to the point where job positions are being left open because the job requirements of some positions make no sense and employers would rather leave the position unfilled (or in a constant flux of people quitting on the second week) than budge on their requirements.  That's going to hurt the whole economy, all the way up to shareholders.  But yeah, the CEO and his buddies will be fine.

Its like everyone is so busy trying to achieve short term growth, they forget that *someone* who's taking has to give back or there will be nothing left to take.  The US economy already has most of the private money as either stagnant or flowing one-way upwards.  Like we're at the point where Walmart's primary source of incoming money is basically welfare checks, yet a huge section of our political elite is intentionally denying increases to that even tho the money wouldn't come from them and it would go into businesses' pockets immediately.  On the grounds that "they'll just spend it on drugs lol," because of course you care about the ONE form of spending in the US that doesn't flow straight back up.

[Trekkin]

I'm not sure what sort of a meaningful backlash you can expect when the popular outrage under such a conception of economics is so easily misdirected and wasted away on bandaids and symbolic policy, even assuming that the government is functional and accountable enough to respond to such outrage.

Well, for one thing, we're going to run critically short of expertise. We've been band-aiding over it with the H1B visa, but even that's failing now as people just go back to their country of origin. We're running out of home-grown millennials that can afford hard science PhDs, because even if the dollar amount of the tuition isn't prohibitive (and in some fields it's free), the lost wages easily can be. There isn't a fast way to restart that pipeline once everyone's leaked out of it, either, because the whole education process takes about a decade between entry into college and the end of the (effectively requisite) postdoctoral fellowship.

There will come a day when the rich finally hit a problem they can't solve economically, a disease they cannot buy their way out of not because the money is lacking but simply because there's no one left with the means to learn to research a cure for it who wouldn't be better served by going into finance instead.

[Baffler]

That's wonderful and all but its not the rich that will suffer in that scenario.

I work so hard in arranging the blocks,
but the landlord and taxman bleed me dry.
But the workers will rise! We will not compromise,
for we know that the old regime must die!

-snip-

Communism is not the way, but we definitely need some kind of shakeup. As-is both parties, or at least both party establishments, agree on the policies that do the most to screw over the American worker and average Americans in general, or are at least willing to stay silent on one party's doing it as long as they do the same. Outsourcing, inshoring foreign workers, fellating multinational corporations with favorable tax deals and even outright subsidies, killing unions, imbalanced trade, and creeping privatization have all contributed to what you're talking about; and a carrot and stick in the form of welfare and a burgeoning police state is developing organically in response to it.

Accelerationism isn't the shakeup we need either though. Deliberately cultivating an even more rapacious capitalist class just leads to bigger carrots and bigger sticks without actually solving the problems underlying the trend.

[redwallzyl]

The true structure of power becomes clear in a crises. It's become fairly obvious at this point who holds the power in the world system as currently set up.

[Lord Shonus]

Communism is not the way, but we definitely need some kind of shakeup. As-is both parties, or at least both party establishments, agree on the policies that do the most to screw over the American worker and average Americans in general, or are at least willing to stay silent on one party's doing it as long as they do the same. Outsourcing, inshoring foreign workers, fellating multinational corporations with favorable tax deals and even outright subsidies, killing unions, imbalanced trade, and creeping privatization have all contributed to what you're talking about; and a carrot and stick in the form of welfare and a burgeoning police state is developing organically in response to it.

Those are primarily Republican policies, and the Democrats have been screaming bloody murder over them for literally decades.

[WealthyRadish]

I'm not sure what sort of a meaningful backlash you can expect when the popular outrage under such a conception of economics is so easily misdirected and wasted away on bandaids and symbolic policy, even assuming that the government is functional and accountable enough to respond to such outrage.

Well, for one thing, we're going to run critically short of expertise. We've been band-aiding over it with the H1B visa, but even that's failing now as people just go back to their country of origin. We're running out of home-grown millennials that can afford hard science PhDs, because even if the dollar amount of the tuition isn't prohibitive (and in some fields it's free), the lost wages easily can be. There isn't a fast way to restart that pipeline once everyone's leaked out of it, either, because the whole education process takes about a decade between entry into college and the end of the (effectively requisite) postdoctoral fellowship.

There will come a day when the rich finally hit a problem they can't solve economically, a disease they cannot buy their way out of not because the money is lacking but simply because there's no one left with the means to learn to research a cure for it who wouldn't be better served by going into finance instead.

I don't think this is an outcome we can necessarily expect just from a descent into Trumpish hyperplutocracy. At some point in the future business-owners may decide that the workforce is inadequate and that it is once again in their interest to politically support higher education (mostly funded by taxdollars that they didn't pay), and that policy position is politically easy to implement since it aligns with a constant pressure from the public who desire access to education as a real or imaginary means of personally higher wages.

If higher education does decline in the US in the manner you described I think it'll be more due to globalization, as employers will no longer see any need to subsidize education in their home country (the one they pay taxes to) if they can find some other country that will subsidize education and supply the necessary workers at no cost to them.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I say again: Post-Carter, there ceased to be any form of genuine economic debate in this country. The Republicans took Reaganomics and evolved it into an all consuming-monster, the Democrats panicked and stood on the original form of Reaganomics, and there we've stayed ever since. Mostly with the Republicans getting more and more neurotic every year under the stress of having nowhere to go but the an-cap hellscape or communism to escape being comparable to the Democrats.

The Democrats need to shrug off the legacy of triangulation and reignite the existence of an economic left in America. There are plenty of people who would be interested in that, but most of them can't even articulate it because they have no public reference points. Right now, the economic left in the US consists of people copying existing socialist movements or trying to construct an economic theory for themselves piecemeal, which almost nobody will go to the trouble of doing. There are nascent social democratic and libertarian socialist streaks among younger people which might be viable for development into a genuine movement, but as long as Washington Consensus rules, we go nowhere fast and the pressure of financial malaise will keep growing until it crushes the whole world.

[Trekkin]

I don't think this is an outcome we can necessarily expect just from a descent into Trumpish hyperplutocracy. At some point in the future business-owners may decide that the workforce is inadequate and that it is once again in their interest to politically support higher education (mostly funded by taxdollars that they didn't pay), and that policy position is politically easy to implement since it aligns with a constant pressure from the public who desire access to education as a real or imaginary means of personally higher wages.

That was part of my point, though: the decision to support higher education is going to take decade, at minimum, to have a positive outcome, and that's not a feasible sell to plutocrats. Globalization is effectively mandatory at that point, sure, but eventually they run out of places with infrastructure to run down and people to enslave. Remember: these people passionately hate the idea of building anything for anyone's benefit but their own almost as much as they hate the idea of paying for anything. They will just run out of employees before they run out of consumers.

The STEM-skilled workforce is already inadequate; we have a finite time before it is effectively nonexistent.

[EnigmaticHat]

I'd honestly say STEM jobs are safe.  The death of US STEM jobs will be when other countries reach a similar level of education.  Right now you can outsource high-education jobs, but it doesn't matter, because those people will still want industry rates or close enough.  But STEM jobs aren't very extendable.  You only need one team to discover the cure for cancer, you only need one team to design the next generation fighter jet.  So if people across the world actually take the advice of "if you wanted to not be miserable, you should have got a ____ degree", then you have an ever growing amount of people competing to be in fields that don't grow quickly*, and... yeah.  It'll be dial-a-lawyer all over again.

That's pretty far off in my opinion, like I wouldn't worry about it in our lifetimes.  And even if STEM jobs spread out throughout the world, they're still going to exist in about the same numbers, and there's only so low most people would be willing to pay a worker like that.  For me, the real danger is everyone else.  Within 50 years (probably a LOT sooner tho, like get worried in 10), our entire logistics network could be functionally automated.  Amazon has cut out the middleman for retail and walmart is moving to do exactly the same.  Self-driving cars are virtually guaranteed to result in self-driving industries.  A self-driving car version of Uber (presumably with internal cameras and frequent checkups to make sure no one trashes the car), could not only replace the taxi/Uber industry, it could totally revolutionize car ownership and restructure our society to buy far less cars.  But that's not the biggest change, the biggest change is self driving trucks and self operating warehouses.  The point is, all of the technology exists in some stage, for you to buy and recieve something off Amazon and no human is involved at any point except you.  The only thing we don't have a technological solution for, oddly, is how to give the product to the customer without someone else stealing it.  But even then you could have an unskilled worker sitting in the front of the truck ringing doorbells but requiring no special licenses.  And the thing is, you cut out transportation and retail from our job market, and every other form of unskilled work will have such a supply of workers that you'll have low-level management working for two bucks over minimum wage.  Or just minimum wage and 40 hours...

Anyway, all of that stuff might as well be a hurricane for all you and me can control it.  Besides, cutting laborers out is arguably a good thing because we can all spend our time doing fun but existentially meaningless things like cutting each other's hair and playing esports.  The rot that we can control (at least within ourselves and anyone that will listen to us), is the idea that having something = deserving it.  Furthermore we need to adjust our idea of the economy.  Americans view the economy as a system of just redistribution (redistributing money from the bad workers to the good).  We need to shift our perspective to viewing the economy as a living engine that needs to be fed.  Basically, in a healthy economy, we don't want people to have money.  We want them to spend it.  That way people are constantly motivated to work** AND people are constantly receiving the benefits of other people's work.  And we want individuals to have only short term debt, even if its constantly paid off and then replaced by more short term debt.

There's only two things we actually need from the economy:

1.  Money must continue to move.
2.  Everyone must get what they need, and some of what they want.

We don't have 1, the economy will weaken and die.  We don't have 2, the economy has failed its function.  Right now in America, we have a serious deficit of both for reasons that are as cultural as they are financial.  We cannot control the financial but we can shift the culture.  That's why I think Bernie is so important as a milestone, because people (especially the young), supported him much more than past trends would suggest they should have.  That would seem to imply that things are shifting away from the Republican mindset, hence why I think they'll have difficult with tax reform.

*no seriously, STEM fields don't.  Americans call fields like engineering and computer science "fast growing" because the supply of workers is expanding so much more slowly than the demand for them.  In raw numbers, the demand is still tiny and its not growing fast enough to change that.

**or... do whatever it is that makes money if we truly are automated out of the economy.