Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds (wsj.com)
- Reference: 0178977936
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/02/164215/americans-lose-faith-that-hard-work-leads-to-economic-gains-wsj-norc-poll-finds
- Source link: https://www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-norc-economic-poll-73bce003
> A new Wall Street Journal-NORC [2]poll [PDF] finds that the share of people who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987. More than three-quarters said they lack confidence that life for the next generation will be better than their own, the poll found.
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> Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream -- that if you work hard, you will get ahead -- no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys. Republicans in the survey were less pessimistic than Democrats, reflecting the longstanding trend that the party holding the White House has a rosier view of the economy. An index that combined six poll questions found that 55% of Republicans, as well as 90% of Democrats, held a negative view of prospects for themselves and their children.
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> The discontent reaches across demographic lines. By large majorities, both women and men held a pessimistic view in the combined questions. So did both younger and older adults, those with and without a college degree and respondents with more than $100,000 in household income, as well as those with less.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-norc-economic-poll-73bce003
[2] https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNORCJuly2025.pdf
Welcome to America... (Score:3)
It was fun while it lasted!
Corporate America has found a way to undo 130 years of progress! From the end of the robber baron era in the late 1800s to probably 10 years ago, it was hard to stop workers from believing hard work would produce desired advancement and often did. The business class/corporate America has been fighting their entire existence against anything that requires safe, living wage jobs.
Exporting labor that could not be automated away to foreign countries with lower standards of living and cost has been the game plan for 50 years. More recently, it's been hitting middle-class, white collared jobs.
How many C-suite jobs get off-shored or out sourced to India, China, Brazil etc.?
Who is going to have all the disposable income to buy all the stuff that feeds the fat cats' wallets?
Re: (Score:2)
> Who is going to have all the disposable income to buy all the stuff that feeds the fat cats' wallets?
Exactly this - one example is Apple: its [1]greed [youtube.com] has pushed iPhone prices well above $1000 - and while they do offer older/cheaper alternatives, it's nonetheless become the new "normal" to have such high prices; Cook thinks that rich people will only ever want its luxury products (justifying its high price), but doesn't seem to understand that rich people don't each need 6-7 iPhones, which would be needed to keep his pockets lined with profits at current levels.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUG1PlqAUJk
Re: (Score:2)
> Apple is a tired example.
So substitute whatever name you want then (unless you're too lazy). It all applies the exact same.
Re: Welcome to America... (Score:2)
He said Apple was one example, he didn't say they were the *only* example. Samsung are also greedy assholes who try to lock you into their ecosystem.
Re:Welcome to America... (Score:5, Insightful)
It started in the Reagan era with "trickle down" economics. The only thing that trickles down is piss. Wages have been stagnating for decades.
Automation killed the middle class (Score:2)
We don't talk about it but about 70% of the middle class jobs were automated away over the last 45 years. All those factory jobs that were unionized and good paying jobs but also a ton of other good-paying work.
Good paying union jobs have been shown repeatedly to raise wages and standards of living for everyone Union and non-union.
We broke that with automation and in terms of raw numbers in theory it wasn't that big but what ends up happening is you're pulling the rug out from under the entire syste
Re: (Score:2)
It started long before that. Wealth has never been very strongly correlated with how hard you work. It's much more strongly correlated with how wealthy your parents were. That's been true for a very long time.
The concept of the "self made man" was invented in the early 1800s. Before that, what mattered was breeding and class. It was accepted that if you were born into an aristocratic family, you would spend your life in luxury, and if you were born into a poor family you would spend your life among the
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> Wages have been stagnating for decades.
They really haven't. There was a period of stagnation from the mid-70s to the mid-90s, but after that real wages resumed their growth, climbing almost as fast as they did post-WWII. Of course we had another dip during COVID, but have recovered and caught back up with the pre-COVID trajectory.
Lots of detailed charts and analysis here: [1]https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/... [noahpinion.blog]
[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/so-why-did-us-wages-stagnate-for
But if I throw brown people in jail... (Score:3)
....I can get that $50k bonus from ICE. Take that liberal media.
Even the dumbest of the dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Know that working for ice is a dead end.
If you fail then you're funding is going to get cut and you're going to lose your job.
If you succeed people are going to stop coming here and well, your funding is going to get cut and you're going to lose your job.
It is a self-defeating cycle.
For a long time I wondered what all those Farmers thought they were going to deal when they kicked all of their labor out of the country.
It turns out that they thought black people would just come back to the plantations and work. As usual if you see something that doesn't make sense in America the answer is racism. Like how the reason we have a tipping culture is because tipping was a way to avoid paying black people minimum wage...
But even as stupid as Americans can be to believe that black people would come back to the farms to work for $15 an hour for 3 months out of the year and before moving on another location and never having a fixed address they aren't stupid enough to think that working for immigration enforcement is a good long-term career plan.
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> I wondered what all those Farmers thought they were going to deal when they kicked all of their labor out of the country.
> It turns out that they thought black people would just come back to the plantations and work.
Or Medicaid recipients... [1]US agriculture secretary says Medicaid recipients can replace deported farm workers [theguardian.com]
> The US agriculture secretary has suggested that increased automation and forcing Medicaid recipients to work could replace the migrant farm workers being swept up in Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, despite years of evidence and policy failures that those kinds of measures are not substitutes for the immigrant labor force underpinning American agriculture.
> Brooke Rollins ... pointed to “34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program” as potential workers.
And... I guess she thinks they all live near farms? Also, there's able-bodied then there's able-bodied farm-worker, they're not necessarily the same.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/09/trump-agriculture-medicaid-migrant-farm-workers
That's a dog whistle (Score:2)
She's talking about black people at that point. Medicaid recipient has become the new welfare Queen in the right wing circles.
And yes a lot of the people who hear that and think about black people on Medicaid are also themselves on Medicaid and very much white.
The fact that those people exist is why we are heading into a massive recession....
Re:Even the dumbest of the dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
> For a long time I wondered what all those Farmers thought they were going to deal when they kicked all of their labor out of the country.
I think most of Rep-voting farmer just did not make the connection between Trump promising to deport all those people and them losing all their field-workers. Yes, this connection is obvious. But I have by now seen several interviews with farmers that only understood this after the ICE-GeStaPo took away all their workers in a raid. These people are really this extremely mentally incapable. Sure, there is some selective blindness involved as well, but you have to be on another level to not see something like this.
Reminds me of a British mussel farmer that voted for Brexit and was ecstatic when it happened, completely forgetting that 90% of his products got sold to the EU. Apparently, if properly indoctrinated and manipulated with propaganda, these people can get completely disconnected from reality and become unable to understand the most glaringly obvious causal relationships.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Many really believed we are being overrun with "bad hombres". They didn't think their workers would be deported, they thought the millions and millions (in their mind) of gang members would be.
They didn't even consider that every Hispanic person they interacted was decent, therefore there probably aren't millions of hardened criminals to deport.
Re: (Score:2)
Probably. To get this disconnected, you need to believe some absurd fairy-tales.
Re: Even the dumbest of the dumb (Score:2)
> If you succeed people are going to stop coming here and well, your funding is going to get cut and you're going to lose your job.
I don't think that's true. If they succeed, they will find new people to bully. Bullies can only exist in relation to their victims, and I believe ICE are bullies. They want to keep existing as such, so they'll always find something to bully. They are the "they" in "first they came".
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> ....I can get that $50k bonus from ICE. Take that liberal media.
Be sure to bring the Official [1]ICE Suspect Sketch Kit [dailykos.com] ...
[1] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/8/25/2339549/-Cartoon-ICE-s-suspect-sketch-kit
Huh maybe this Marx guy was onto something (Score:2)
It seems like the people who have seen economic gains are also the ones that own the means to production.
I believe that hard work and a little luck can lead to an individual's economic gains. Assuming they can avoid excessive exploitation of their labor by the ones who own nearly everything. But you really are at the mercy of those above you, no matter how much hard work you put in.
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Also assuming absolutely nothing out of your control goes wrong especially in America.
In America you are one major health problem away from complete economic disaster.
All it takes is one family member who gets a long-term illness and doesn't die and you are fucked eight ways from Sunday.
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> All it takes is one family member who gets a long-term illness and doesn't die and you are fucked eight ways from Sunday.
I have a long-term illness, have not died yet, and my family isn't even fucked one way from Sunday, let alone eight.
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Of course owning the means of production allows you to get wealthy. That's the point. But that's a simplistic statement. The government allows people to have personal ownership of the means of production because the government knows governments aren't good at managing those resources, so they're outsourcing it. A person who owns a plot of farmland or a manufacturing machine depends on those bits of capital for their livelihood, so they take care of it. They put effort into discovering how to use it mo
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> because the government knows governments aren't good at managing those resources,
I'm not sure that there is some inherent deficiency of governments organizations, or if we just haven't really applied our selves to the problem. I mean if a government can run a military, with very complex logistics and constantly shifting goals, then surely running a nationalized production is a skill that can be learned rather than an implicit trait.
The problem with out sourcing is end up having to regulate how much profit can be made or things go off the rails. Like if I want to farm cotton, tobacco, or
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> The government allows people to have personal ownership of the means of production because the government knows governments aren't good at managing those resources, so they're outsourcing it.
It doesn't have to be either the government or a couple of rich bastards. How about the workers control the capital? There is no constitutional protected right to sell stock in a C crop from behind the protection of a liability shield and such a thing doesn't just spring forth naturally from a market. It's an artificial construct some bankers and capitalists came up with that we codified into law. We can make up different laws.
Make any company that goes public hold back 51% of its stock in a trust contr
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Ok, but think about what you're suggesting. I, for instance, am a typical guy in the middle of my career so I hold significant amounts of stock through mutual and index funds in my retirement savings accounts. Like most people, I do very, very limited amounts of active management. I buy the index, or perhaps I split between asset categories by trying to balance the amount in growth, income, and so on. If I do that, then the best long term return I can expect is the market return, which is somewhere arou
"Elegant"? (Score:2)
> It's elegant in a way. The system automatically flows capital to the people who use it most efficiently. The rich get richer isn't a flaw... it's a fundamental feature of the system
I'm not sure I would describe a system where the rich continually game the system to their own advantage, while at the same time helping ensuring they crush the poor by making them poorer as "elegant", but I guess it depends on where you stand on the ladder.
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" Assuming they can avoid excessive exploitation of their labor by the ones who own nearly everything"
I keep seeing this -- but I don't really see anyone mentioning how many of those "exploited" have new cars, school debt and/or $1000 phones -- which strongly suggests they aren't very smart with excessive spending.
I own a home. My phone is over 5 years old and works flawlessly. I own a 1988 Toyota pickup and a 2011 Honda CRV (both paid for long, long ago). With the exception of some "luxuries" I allow my
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That's all silly talk.
Now, if you please, let's get back to the doom and gloom.
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It's easy to save when you're in the top quarter or maybe even too half. But as you go down the pay distribution it becomes nearly impossible.
There are definitely people that spend well beyond their means, and even more beyond what's necessary, but the average car isn't new (I think median is 11 years old now).
There are just as many people making under median income as there are making over it, and with general assumptions about luck, skill, and age impacting income one can assume there is a significant per
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"It's much easier to lifestyle adjust your way into feeling comfortable on $70k (median household) vs $40k (30th percentile)."
I came from nothing. Almost literally. I was raised in a family full of substance abusers. I got high for the first time when I was 7 because my sister (13 years older than me) thought it would be funny. Nobody cared about school in my family.
I am the first in my family to finish high school, never mind go to collage (did that, too). I rejected that life entirely and the moment
Hard work helps you get off the ground, but... (Score:3)
The most wealth, particularly among the super-wealthy, comes from business ownership and related investments in industries like Finance & Investments, Technology, and Manufacturing. For America's richest, wealth is primarily tied to their company's stock, representing an expected future income stream rather than physical assets. [1]https://economics.princeton.ed... [princeton.edu] [2]https://www.heritage.org/taxes... [heritage.org].
[1] https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/top-wealth-in-america-new-estimates-under-heterogenous-returns/
[2] https://www.heritage.org/taxes/report/the-wealth-billionaires-where-it-came-where-it-and-why-it-matters#:~:text=America's%20richest%20people%20are%20mostly,business%20operations%20and%20private%20lending
Work hard, get the same (Score:2)
I know a lot of people in my industry who don't expect annual raises or get any kind of bonus based on performance, merit, company performance, etc.
That used to be the norm. We would get cash bonuses allocated based on how well the company did, and some of that allocation was based on merit. I'm not saying that's a good system, and it wasn't like A LOT of cash, but it was a good amount and reliable as long as you look like you give a fuck. That's been gone for ~8 years or so. The SLT acts like their hands a
ho hum (Score:2)
How old is the term "rat race"?
The world operates on the perception of reality (Score:2)
Once again, a poll misses the opportunity to drill down into the bedrock of the question. It's a pretty safe bet that while most people think Congress is doing a shitty job (currently 69%), they probably think that their representative is great but it's the others that are total crap. As such, I'll bet that most people's perception of working hard is wrong. Showing up to work is not working hard. Coming in early and staying late isn't either. I once watched an employee spend an entire day updating her
Re: (Score:2)
> Yea, verily, thou art not paid for thy methods but for thy results.
This negates most of what I think you are arguing. If it's results based, effort does not matter. If my employer is paying for a result, and I produce in a day what they expect takes a week, then we're square. What I do with the remaining 4 days shouldn't matter.
You can argue there is a misalignment in the result to effort ratio, but that's entirely different.
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All I say to that is, if my company is going to throw 10,000 emails and 10 meetings a day at me and not attempt to do anything about the workload, they had better expect me to be spending hours working on a planner trying to make sense of it all.
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> Once again, a poll misses the opportunity to drill down into the bedrock of the question
I agree but what I think the interesting thing to look at here would be how this compares to other first world countries. If there are countries where this is less of a problem then what policies are encouraging this positivity? By looking at this problem at a global level we might get an idea on how best to address it.
I did a quick google search to see if I could post something here with minimal effort but I didn't see what I was looking for in a reasonable amount of time. I'd still curious though.
Okay, but... (Score:2)
If the odds are stacked 80% against you, that sucks. But it's still better than the 100% guarantee that not trying gives you.
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> But it's still better than the 100% guarantee that not trying gives you.
"It's most likely is a fruitless endeavor (for you) to spend so much of your life toiling away. But you know what? There is a slim possibility it might not work out that way. Let's not lose (false) hope, and go churn out some shareholder value now!"
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I threw 80% out as an extreme to make the point that even really shitty odds are still better than complete failure. If your expectations of success are reasonable, the odds are not that bad. But whole generations have lost the idea that you have to work to live.
The glory of today is you can half ass it in the corporate world and eke out a minimalistic life that is extravagantly easy by nearly any historical comparison. Instead of working in a coal mine, You can "grind out" your desk job and go home to play
Global Socio-Economic Collapse (Score:2)
... is already in progress , theres a 5% chance of getting off this trajectory and into one that does not lead to total collapse, climate collapse and ultimately our extinction and much of life except extremophiles ( if they are lucky ) .
That Americans are realising chasing rainbows is a futile existence , what matters is protecting oneself from social collapse, food shortage and possible displacement due to extreme weather.
Work smart, not hard. (Score:2)
That's what my grandad always told me. I respected the man a lot.
It's always been about inventing something new, something exciting, something that solved a particular problem. It's just that it was easier to invent new things back then, decades ago, because all the things that actually enhance our life didn't exist back then yet.
These days, we mostly have all the things we need to exist smoothly. The innovation pool has shrunk to near zero. That's why we get all the forced updates that no one wants. Compan
Hustle culture (Score:2)
The shine has come off hustle culture - many have realized that far from being a flexible way to work, hustle culture is becoming a way to spend all your waking hours thinking about and doing crappy service jobs and shady enterprises. Even the coding bootcamps are living with things like AI and lack of demand / oversaturation in the market. The reliable way to get rich is to go to a university with smart people and be extremely popular it seems!
We're no fools (Score:2)
Hard work leads to economical gain... Tell that to people who have more than one full time job. I guess it is their own fault because they are inefficient workers? Pull the other one.
Re: (Score:2)
Hard work leads to nothing in many all cases and will almost never make you rich. The only reliable way to get rich is to inherit and then be just criminal enough to not get arrested and sent to prison. Even if some dumber rich people have to run for president to get immunity in order to complete the second step.
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Meh... my previous boss was completely a self made man. He deserved every penny he earned. He took the risk, founded a company and made it work. Respect. Same for my first boss. They do exist. But if you work hard in a low level job? It does not deliver much.
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Sure. But were they rich?
The real problem (Score:2)
The real problem is ownership. The objects normal working class people own are now made to be disposable not generational... so instead of accumulating the stuff you need and then later filling the stuff you'd like with net accumulation over time you are constantly resetting and having to spend over and over again on things you'd already bought. Where possible businesses have converted to subscription models where you pay in perpetuity without EVER owning anything. The average age for first time home owners
Re: The real problem (Score:2)
It's easier and cheaper than ever for people to invest. Nothing needs to change except people's behavior. Stop subscribing to everything and start buying stocks.
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This is like the people who find the notion of a pill that gives the benefits of eating well and working out offensive. This irrational and puritanical opposition to benefit without suffering.
What is it you imagine them all to be investing? How do you stop subscribing to things when everything is now a subscription? When you have to keep saving for and buying the same goods over and over instead of being able to save for something else after buying something. It's all well and good to suggest that everyone
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"How do you stop subscribing to things when everything is now a subscription?"
Lower your standards. Pluto TV is free and has a wealth of programming.
" When you have to keep saving for and buying the same goods over and over instead of being able to save for something else after buying something."
Stop treating buying something as permanent. If you buy a $1000 phone that you KNOW will be obsolete in 5 years -- the BEST you are doing is you are "renting" the phone for a bit more than $16/mo unless it breaks
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Start buying total market index funds. Stocks are bets that the common man has neither the time, insight, nor ability to be successful in picking outside of random chance. Ask any active fund manager how they perform against a total market index fund.
Happiness (Score:2)
This cartoon by Steve Cutts wraps it up nicely [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] "The story of a rodent's unrelenting quest for happiness and fulfillment." Add in that the declining value of the dollar, its getting harder and harder to achieve the American dream. Trump has been a breath of fresh air but that black hole that is the national debt is more and more devouring our resources and wealth.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDk
If hard work is all it takes to get ahead... (Score:2)
Then if I work twice as hard as my boss, I should earn twice as much, right?
And a person born to a poor family has an equal chance of success as a person born to a rich family, right?
And a smart person has no better chance of success than a mentally challenged person.
And a short, homely person and a tall, attractive person have equal chances, and a man and a woman, and a black person and a white person, and so on.
When all of the above are true, then hard work really will be all it takes to get ahead, and th
working hard (Score:2)
Working hard means working hard starting at age 6. You don't just go to school to have fun and be popular and make fun of nerds. If you cheat your way through school or barely graduate you'll likely suffer in the age of AI. There's still hope though. Get into trade. Get 2 jobs. Learn personal finances. Start a business. If immigrants with no education can achieve American dreams there's no reason people born here can't.
Capitalism (Score:2)
If you're struggling to improve your wealth, it's probably because you haven't invested enough of the money from your labor into capital.
Labor is for communists. I love that there are communists to do all the cheap labor, though. We live in a capitalist system. When people fail to learn that, they keep prices down for the capitalists.
Typo in the article (Score:2)
The first sentence should read;
America is becoming a nation of economic realists . WSJ reports:
Big Surprise (Score:2)
You mean the people who CREATE the lies are most likely to BELIEVE the lies - color me shocked.
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There are always people on both ends of the spectrum.
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While that's true in every era, the entitlement only escalated in recent history. I can't figure out how it became, just shocked that people think they have the right to things that they don't work for.
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I think there are far more people who work their fingers to the bone without even making a living wage. I know a person who is a retail manager. They work 50 hours a week and are also expected to go in for anyone who calls in sick or doesn't show for their shift on top of that. They can't afford an apartment on what they make.
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And yet people in GenX that want to work hard find that they often do not even get that chance. You seem to be oblivious as to how much has changed.
Incidentally, your critique of the youth is as old as it is without insight. The first documented instance of it is about 2000 years old.
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> You seem to be oblivious as to how much has changed
I think you're right. While I work hard to get what I want/need, I didn't pay much attention when it comes to social media. I've only increased social media usage past few years but my so call "increased" usage is hardly regular. I've always had the strong belief that everybody has to work what they have, that I dismissed those rants as misinformation, as click baits. It's becoming more clear to me that those people actually believe in their rants. They weren't joking around.
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About real estates... even the OGs, well established people are having difficulties with the mortgage since the interest rates are so high. The same property, same mortgage numbers, compared to 2021, the payment now is double. So yeah sure the younger adults will have a tough time. Costs of living are much higher now and it makes it a lot more difficult to save up for the down payment. And forget about a job that moves with inflation. You want that, you'll have to get a new job.
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I don't tolerate racists and haters. You are dismissed kid! Go back home and apologize to your parents for being stupid!
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Always funny since you can't actually pull yourself up by your bootstraps, the phrase was meant to describe something nearly impossible to do.
Just like when people describe some cops as just "bad apples" and like the rest of that phrase is "rots the whole bunch".
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> Just like when people describe some cops as just "bad apples" and like the rest of that phrase is "rots the whole bunch".
Perhaps they've been misled by [1]the Osmonds. [genius.com]
[1] https://genius.com/The-osmonds-one-bad-apple-lyrics
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Well, this is all pretty clear and confirmed by solid research results. But watch the denials coming in.
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This is a lesson that is unfortunately learned too late for most men. I've seen many others go through similar scenarios. It may have been frustrating when I was younger and wanted to date, but now that I'm older I'm glad to be in the bottom 95% of men that are invisible to women. It's bad enough being financially graped by the government, but at least I don't have to deal with an ex wife.
You mean realists? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Pessimist" is a boring and typical way to spell "Realist".
It should be obvious that capitalism benefits capitalists, i.e. those with investment capital who then go on to invest it, more than anyone else.
It has become obvious to most that the alleged "job creators" focus is to destroy jobs for profit.
These results make it obvious that Republicans have a harder time seeing this fact, but we knew that already. They have more faith that the invisible hand of the alleged "free market" (which is an ideal, not an actual thing which has ever existed) will benefit them than do other people. Republicans are far more likely to believe that profits are deserved than Democrats. IME they are more likely to believe that jobs are created solely by investment by billionaires. But jobs are created both by those who invest in their function and the customers who purchase goods or services. Without both of them existing, the job does not exist.
Once the wealthy gain money it is spent twice on average before it goes into some type of tax avoidance scheme. When the working class gets their hands on it, it is on average spent five times before that happens. [1]Allowing the capitalists to turn currency into capital therefore shrinks the economy [stlouisfed.org]. Then we ask how we're going to pay for social programs. The answer is conclusively not allowing capitalists to hoard currency.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
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The whole point of capitalism is that it is a scam to make people that would normally just use their charisma to create an army and plow and steal villages to instead fight each other using money.
However the scheme only works while there's fighting, no one is supposed to win in the capitalism scam.
"The inviisble hand of the free market" in theory should enforce that and "the government interference only makes it worse", but in practice a government that is fine tuned to force the companies to fight and comp
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"The invisible hand" is not the free market. In Adam Smith's own words, it was more like a spirit of generosity in the hearts of men, or maybe god's influence:
> [The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacitythey divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.
This is basically "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", except instead of being codified into law, it's just implicit social contract, and the rich should be moved to redistribute their own wealth for... reasons.
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> [The rich] consume little more than the poor
This was untrue even in his day. The rich consume MUCH more than the poor unless you are thinking specifically and only about volume of food.
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I believe the concept was in food and housing etc.
I think it holds on a log scale (to an extent).
example: the average (American) person consumes $3.3 million. The mega rich have 3,000x that much. Do you really think they will consume 3,000x as much (10 billion)? (We can see not because they all plan on having some leftover in the end).
I don't know what the practical limit is on consumption, but I doubt many of the people even with $10 billion consume much more than a billion over a lifetime (though I believ
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They certainly don't consume as much more as they have more, but they do still consume orders of magnitude more resources. Just think of the fuel consumption of their yachts alone.
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> They certainly don't consume as much more as they have more, but they do still consume orders of magnitude more resources. Just think of the fuel consumption of their yachts alone.
I think the point is, that even in Smiths own words, is that they shouldn't. It's strangely perverted that his works have become almost a fetishistic object of worship among libertarians and laize faire economists, when Smith's precondition for giving the market free reign is that most rich people would give most of their money to charity of their own accord.
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> The invisible hand"... In Adam Smith's own words ... was more like a spirit of generosity in the hearts of men, or maybe god's influence
Don't know about that, IIRC The "Invisible Hand", as described by Smith, was like a law of nature - like water seeking it's own level. The specific reason he called it "invisible" is because it operated with or without human interventions like generosity. It does however share Communism's pretense of somehow being based in science.
Re:You mean realists? (Score:4, Insightful)
A "free market" is a contradiction in terms. But politically, it is a wonderful illusion to sell.
No market of any size, dealing in goods of substantial value, can exist or survive without a robust regulatory framework. There must be police or guards to prevent pilfering and outright theft or robbery. Courts are essential to arbitrate the inevitable disputes over quality, payment, delays, cheating, etc. Standards and enforcement officials are desirable if goods such as food and drink are being sold - and so on. Once such an official framework exists, the market is no longer "free". The US government has long been making these facts crystal clear by preaching about free enterprise, free trade, and free markets while habitually preventing them from happening. Where is the "free market" when "sanctions" are imposed (illegally) on arbitrary traders?
The USA itself is the best demonstration that free markets do not generally exist, and if anything like one does appear, it quickly decays. Because corporations and other entrepreneurs hate competition and do their very best to destroy it. Their best weapon is the cartel - evrywhere illegal, but in practice impossible to prevent.
It's freer than you think (Score:3)
The ability of new companies to come along and eat the lunch of the established is a product of this being real. In the UK the upstart food retailer - Aldi, coming soon to a city near you - has done wonders for the consumer by offering high quality own brand food at spectacularly cheaper prices than the incumbents. It's got to the stage now where several of the older incumbents promise that their price for a small range of items match those of Aldi.
Similar effects can be seen in the demolition of IBM, DEC,
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IBM might not be a good example though, as it is still alive, and sometimes, it is even kicking.
Reverence of the free market (Score:2)
Is implanted in your head around the age of 12 to 15 which is during that critical time before your critical thinking skills have fully developed but your ability to learn things is developed. Religious organizations call it 4 to 14 and if you can get somebody at that time they basically have zero defenses and will believe anything you tell them.
I remember having a economics class in my freshman year high school and looking back it was just capitalist propaganda.
I don't say that lightly because it mak
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> I remember having a economics class in my freshman year high school and looking back it was just capitalist propaganda.
Shoot, this was my experience with the lower division economics class I took in college. It came complete with a conservative professor who would dismiss anything left wing out of hand without explaining himself.
Once I saw him doing this (he did it with other students as well) I stopped contributing during class time. Still got an A though.
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> before you would have had many more ma & pa shops, and less Walmarts, less Amazons, and other corporate giants & tyrants that squeeze every ounce of humanity away in the process of pursuing profit to the tune of data driven profit & performance, corporate profits, etc. Consumers often trade convenience and cheaper prices for the loss of that humanity
OTOH, another word for "squeeze every ounce of humanity away in the process of pursuing profit" is "efficiency". Wal-mart and Amazon squeeze like no one before... and we have lower real prices on goods than ever before. Of course, in order to make this squeezing benefit the consumer in addition to the shareholder you have to have competition . You need multiple "tyrants" trying to squeeze harder than the other tyrants to maximize their profits -- which requires giving consumers what they want. Not what t
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[1]Robert Reich [instagram.com] commenting on a clip he received.
>> Bill Burr: How does a CEO take an eight figure bonus while none of his employees have dental insurance? ...
> Reich: There are 700-800 billionaires in the U.S. and 70% of workers live paycheck to paycheck. ...
Flashing back to [2]Office Space [wikipedia.org] ... ( Geto Boys ) Damn It Feels Good To Be An Oligarch -- I mean, Gangsta.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNl1SHvNBll/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space
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"According to Forbes, there were 868 U.S. billionaires as of 2025, holding a combined wealth of $6.72 trillion as of the end of 2024, a decrease from the 813 reported by Forbes in its April 2024 list but with increased overall wealth. The United States has the most billionaires globally, with these individuals concentrated in states like California, New York, Florida, and Texas."
$6.72T / 375 milllion (population of USA) == $17,920 per person.
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> "According to Forbes, there were 868 U.S. billionaires as of 2025, holding a combined wealth of $6.72 trillion as of the end of 2024, a decrease from the 813 reported by Forbes in its April 2024 list but with increased overall wealth.
How is 868 a decrease from 813?
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I just copied the quote and didn't edit it.
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OK. But copied the quote from where? I can't find a source worded like that.
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Robert Reich, Labor Day 1995
"profits are up, paycheques are not"
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rW1kkAV-gw
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Or how about this. A CEO makes, by lunch on the first working day of the year, what the average worker makes in a year. By lunchtime.
People notice things like that - by lunch they already have made your salary for the year.
Is the CEO worth that much? I mean, they probably will lay you off sometime during the year.
The American Dream worked when companies rewarded loyalty - you work hard, you rise through from janitor to manager to C-suite. These days, that doesn't happen - it's all about squeezing costs ever
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> The American Dream worked when companies rewarded loyalty
And that only worked before the dominance of venture capital, rapid stock trading, and stock buybacks. Now the best way for the ultra-wealthy to become ultra-wealthier is to be a VC partner and invest in breaking a company up into its constituent pieces and selling them off. This destruction of a functioning job provider provides a rapid payoff that cannot be realized in any other way.
> Startups aren't generally better either - you might "get in on the ground floor" but they can rapidly degenerate as the CEO chases higher and higher valuations while your ownership share gets diluted more and more
Yes. The last startup I worked for did exactly this, and it wasn't even public. It just got its perceived value increased th
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"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are now for the richest 0.1%. The rest of you peasants need not reply.
Can you believe I'm going to for Funny? Where else can you go from an FP like that?
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s/reply/apply/
*sigh*
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Let them eat circuses.
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> Once the wealthy gain money it is spent twice on average before it goes into some type of tax avoidance scheme. When the working class gets their hands on it, it is on average spent five times before that happens.
This is known as, or at least related to, the [1]marginal propensity to consume (MPC) [wikipedia.org], an argument to be used against libertarian "taxation is theft" types, many of whom ironically prefer taxing to tolling as a way to pay for infrastructure!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_propensity_to_consume
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Libertarians are wild.
I hear the loudest cry about privatized toll roads coming from libertarians.
Like isn't that what you want?!
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I heard one libertarian argue that instead of having roads anywhere that a private entity doesn't feel like building one, people should just be driving offroad 4x4s through unmaintained mud trails, like in some of the more remote parts of Russia. Which is ideologically consistent at least.
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Yeah, I don't think a lot of libertarians realize that a lot of the first world standard of living comes from government.
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That was my first thought as well. The MAGAs have fucked everybody (including themselves, but they are too dumb to understand that) and continue to fuck everybody. And this time the damage is severe enough that it can likely not be repaired. The world now knows that the US is not a reliable partner in anything and is adjusting.
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> Not in the land of the American Dream.
Yes I know my enemies
Theyâ(TM)re the teachers who taught me to fight me
Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission
Ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite
All of which are American dreams
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Raging against the machine?