Late capitalism sucks, etc. I forget how cheap my East Village one bedroom was when I first moved in in 1979, but I know it was only $300 and change when I left in 1990. As the Pythons say in their Four Yorkshiremen sketch, you tell that to young people today, and they won’t believe you.
But hey, let’s keep voting Republican fellow patriots, because SOMEBODY has to defend the right of Mr. Potato Head to have a gender-specific plastic pipe and mustache.
Wow, Roy. When you’re right, you’re right. And I don’t mean THAT kind of “right!” I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, and yes, my parents regaled me with stories of the Good Old Days on the farms they grew up on. (The fact that they went from Farm to Town was considered a major life step up.) As parents, they just assumed that we would do better than they did. It was America, after all. It’s a damned shame that parents can’t assume this now. Many of my friends have children who can’t make it on their own. And these are well-educated white kids. Sheesh.
I've often thought that I (we?) grew up in a hiccup of time. The ability to do what you wanted just because you wanted. I took about 7 years off to do essentially nothing except work grunt jobs and get high between the end of college and the beginning of law school. And there was no problem there at all.
On the other hand I worked Legal Aid in Appalachia when I got out, boy was that an eye opener. Had a lot of trailer park residents as clients. Everybody ripping them off. Nuts.
Growing up in the NYC suburbs, we had a milkman. I went to school with his daughters. He made enough money as a milkman to own a house and send his two daughters to college. This was the '60s and into the '70s.
Today that job is making a re-appearance in the tonier neighborhoods. Milk and eggs and cheese delivered right to your front door! By an "independent contractor" earning sub-minimum wage. We've managed to devalue everything that makes a functioning society by elevating greed and acquisitiveness over human decency.
That the problem is absolutely systemic, if not screwing us over by design, is clear from the term the New Yorker must use to seem reasonable -- "fair-market wage." Ain't nothing fair about it at all. Wages are kept artificially low, everywhere, but particularly at the lowest levels.
I told a student that I had gotten out of my extensive schooling debt-free -- and there were really really angry to hear it. I think because most of the time those statements are couched as admonitions to work harder, not be a sucker. There were ways I had to go about doing so, and most were far more about luck than intention.
I barely remember the apartment my parents lived in before I started school. By the time kindergarten rolled around, we lived in The Trailer. It was a gawdawful salmon/pink color with horrible '50s-style aluminum trim. None of this double-wide stuff, either - after my brothers were born, we struggled to fit.
When we moved from the city to a smaller town after I finished first grade, The Trailer moved with us. The only real difference was instead of the outskirts of a city, this park was in the country, surrounded by farms. It was here I first began to notice a stigma attached to those of us whose homes had wheels on the bottom.
When it wasn't outright snobbery and prejudice, there would still be a wariness in dealing with us, a sense we weren't to be fully trusted and bore watching.
Then, after I finished third grade, we moved again. This time The Trailer did NOT go with us - my parents had bought a house! It was an older place, large and multistory, with plenty of room for all of us. I was in ecstasy - the trailer parks began to fade from my memory, replaced by pride in our home.
Which lasted right up until the end of elementary school, when a dismal economy forced my parents to sell the house and relocate to another state. Worse, the first place we lived in the new location was a fucking trailer park - just the thing to start middle school, right?
While the stay in the new park (and at least it wasn't The Trailer) was only a few months, it scarred me permanently. I never again felt safe, even after my folks moved from rentals to buying another house. And within a week of graduating high school, I was out on my own.
College would have meant staying with my family longer, and I wasn't going to live in the shadow of the trailer park any more. I got a job and my own place and never looked back.
And I never lived in a trailer again. To say the experience colored my outlook on life would be an understatement.
And this is why I'm not for the $15/hr minimum wage thing. The fight's been going on so long that $15 is bullshit money. Dunno anywhere that a family can live on a $450-600/wk salary. So first problem is the amount.
Next problem with the fight 4 $15 are the jobs paying shit money -- even maybe more than $15/hr. Part of the fallout from 08 financial collapse is that full-time jobs were replaced with not-so-fulltime. The 30 hr/wk full-time job is too close to the norm. And that's because 30 lets The Man avoid providing benefits, specifically healthcare, that they have to provide to 35 and 40 hrs/wk workers. Did I see reduced hours for low end jobs? There's the growth of gig, uh, gigs and independent contractor bullshit. And one of my favorite factoids again: ~25% of full-time workers need easy credit, public assistance -- food stamps and Medicaid -- and/or additional employment to make a living wage.
So fight for $15? Not even close the hill to die on. What's needed is a living wage has to be law (including a COLA). That's the hill. Everything, anything else is bullshit.
America is always transitioning economically. Consider Muncie, Indiana, the subject of two classics of sociology during the period from the 1920's to the 1930's: "Middleton" and "Middleton in Transition." With the coming of the Depression, everything changed. Housing, work, family life, community connections, all was overturned. The detail is mid-boggling. If, like me, you grew up with tales of the Depression, these books objectively dissect life before and after 1929 in ways your parents or grandparents couldn't. Each economic crisis since then has made life harder for the 99%. Every story of modern day Americans being ground down reminds me of that unemotional depiction of a town falling apart under American capitalism.
I grew up in Iowa, which used to be a fairly libertarian—leaning liberal—well-educated place. Granted we were always a few year behind the current fashion, but we were a very accepting populace. Iowa was one of the first states to embrace gay unions, It went for Obama very early on. Back in the day we always had senator Tom Harkin's populist politics to balance out that old curmudgeon Grassley. Now I'm fairly ashamed to call it "home" and, if not for my ailing sister, would never go back to visit.
Thatcherism and Ronnie's handlers unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the “animal spirits” of the entrepreneur they coyly named it in Britain) and the capitalist Godzilla will be very hard to reign in.
$15 an hr. minimum would be a start. Strong infrastructure jobs would be a mighty second step. Aussie friends who travelled the States were boggled at some people's dependence on tips to make any sort of wage.
I'm hoping (praying, desperately pining) that The U.S electorate give Joe and Kamala and Bernie and AOC and all the good guys an eight year run and so a reasonable chance at bringing back some sort of balance.
In the 60's my father could support a family of 5 on his one income as a salesman. My mother eventually went back to work as a teacher but that was after the kids grew up. For the first 25 years of my working life I was as bad with money as Roy, never made more than a working-class income, and often less. But I've never not had my own apartment in NYC, and I never had a roommate until I got married late in life and she would kill me if I called her that.
In 1964 the average annual wage (in 2019 dollars) was roughly $50k, also roughly what it was in 2019. But a loaf of bread was $1.78 vs $2.59, the price of a new house averaged $110k vs $238k, and the cost of college tuition was three to four times less than what it is now. The demise of unions has kept incomes down despite rising productivity, and the consequent rise of Wall St. parasitism has raised the price of practically everything to bear the hidden costs of their boundless greed. We've seen private equity vultures devour home ownership, education, and healthcare, so it's no wonder that the same people who invented the need for payday loans would see new profit opportunities in trailer parks.
“You could even get ahead.” I’m a bit older than Roy, whelped late in the Truman administration, but so far as I could tell from the Southern California suburbs of my youth was that upward mobility* was a central tenet of the civic religion: of course a family would trade up over time to grander houses, fancier cars. I know it’s fashionable to rag on the Boomers these latter decades, and certainly the chasm between the cohort’s soaring rhetoric of the sixties and its performance in power by the nineties invites a certain degree of censure and contempt. I think, though, that this early indoctrination of ours—for those of us raised, I mean, under class conditions in which such stultifying assumptions of security and progress might be nurtured—is not given due weight. It was one thing to live in (somewhat squalid) communal housing off-campus in the early seventies, to abjure and even to scorn many of the bourgeois amenities with which we’d been raised, but we all knew, whether or not we acknowledged it to ourselves, that should we ever tire of bohemian cosplay there would always be a spot waiting for us back in the “middle class.” Well, that comfortable certitude didn’t last out the decade, and as a friend of mine observed circa 1987 in approximately these terms, “A lot of people are waking up to the fact that there are only so many places at the table, and that some of us are going to be left out, and they’re saying 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘦, 𝘣𝘰𝘺!” Hell, I certainly sold out.
*“Upward mobility”—is that even a thing anymore? I don’t claim to maintain a careful watch on the youngs, but among the children of my friends, a generation now approaching forty, there appears to be a keen awareness that their lives are neither as comfortable nor secure as their parents” were, and have little prospect of being so until the latter peg out—for choice, without pouring the offsprings’ patrimony down the rathole of “assisted living.”
When I started my first real job in 1972 at $9,000/year, my one-bedroom apartment, a very nice one, was $180/month. This works out to 24% of my income. Now, a one-bedroom place in my area (Baltimore) $1,115/month. Even at $15/hour, it amounts to 45%. So move to Cincinnati, where the rent is $698.
I never really 'made it' in that classic sense. Never owned a house or a new car. Neither I, nor any love interest, thought marriage and a family was a good idea.
But I'm still alive. [ Year or two older than Roy ]
Late capitalism sucks, etc. I forget how cheap my East Village one bedroom was when I first moved in in 1979, but I know it was only $300 and change when I left in 1990. As the Pythons say in their Four Yorkshiremen sketch, you tell that to young people today, and they won’t believe you.
But hey, let’s keep voting Republican fellow patriots, because SOMEBODY has to defend the right of Mr. Potato Head to have a gender-specific plastic pipe and mustache.
Wow, Roy. When you’re right, you’re right. And I don’t mean THAT kind of “right!” I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, and yes, my parents regaled me with stories of the Good Old Days on the farms they grew up on. (The fact that they went from Farm to Town was considered a major life step up.) As parents, they just assumed that we would do better than they did. It was America, after all. It’s a damned shame that parents can’t assume this now. Many of my friends have children who can’t make it on their own. And these are well-educated white kids. Sheesh.
I've often thought that I (we?) grew up in a hiccup of time. The ability to do what you wanted just because you wanted. I took about 7 years off to do essentially nothing except work grunt jobs and get high between the end of college and the beginning of law school. And there was no problem there at all.
On the other hand I worked Legal Aid in Appalachia when I got out, boy was that an eye opener. Had a lot of trailer park residents as clients. Everybody ripping them off. Nuts.
Growing up in the NYC suburbs, we had a milkman. I went to school with his daughters. He made enough money as a milkman to own a house and send his two daughters to college. This was the '60s and into the '70s.
Today that job is making a re-appearance in the tonier neighborhoods. Milk and eggs and cheese delivered right to your front door! By an "independent contractor" earning sub-minimum wage. We've managed to devalue everything that makes a functioning society by elevating greed and acquisitiveness over human decency.
The multi-decade, systematic transfer of wealth out of Black neighborhoods has been described by Ta-Nehisi Coates as "plunder": https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/tanehisi-coates-reparations/427041/. Now the plunderers are coming for the rest of America, and it's finally being noticed that they are leaving no turn unstoned.
That the problem is absolutely systemic, if not screwing us over by design, is clear from the term the New Yorker must use to seem reasonable -- "fair-market wage." Ain't nothing fair about it at all. Wages are kept artificially low, everywhere, but particularly at the lowest levels.
I told a student that I had gotten out of my extensive schooling debt-free -- and there were really really angry to hear it. I think because most of the time those statements are couched as admonitions to work harder, not be a sucker. There were ways I had to go about doing so, and most were far more about luck than intention.
I barely remember the apartment my parents lived in before I started school. By the time kindergarten rolled around, we lived in The Trailer. It was a gawdawful salmon/pink color with horrible '50s-style aluminum trim. None of this double-wide stuff, either - after my brothers were born, we struggled to fit.
When we moved from the city to a smaller town after I finished first grade, The Trailer moved with us. The only real difference was instead of the outskirts of a city, this park was in the country, surrounded by farms. It was here I first began to notice a stigma attached to those of us whose homes had wheels on the bottom.
When it wasn't outright snobbery and prejudice, there would still be a wariness in dealing with us, a sense we weren't to be fully trusted and bore watching.
Then, after I finished third grade, we moved again. This time The Trailer did NOT go with us - my parents had bought a house! It was an older place, large and multistory, with plenty of room for all of us. I was in ecstasy - the trailer parks began to fade from my memory, replaced by pride in our home.
Which lasted right up until the end of elementary school, when a dismal economy forced my parents to sell the house and relocate to another state. Worse, the first place we lived in the new location was a fucking trailer park - just the thing to start middle school, right?
While the stay in the new park (and at least it wasn't The Trailer) was only a few months, it scarred me permanently. I never again felt safe, even after my folks moved from rentals to buying another house. And within a week of graduating high school, I was out on my own.
College would have meant staying with my family longer, and I wasn't going to live in the shadow of the trailer park any more. I got a job and my own place and never looked back.
And I never lived in a trailer again. To say the experience colored my outlook on life would be an understatement.
*sigh*
And this is why I'm not for the $15/hr minimum wage thing. The fight's been going on so long that $15 is bullshit money. Dunno anywhere that a family can live on a $450-600/wk salary. So first problem is the amount.
Next problem with the fight 4 $15 are the jobs paying shit money -- even maybe more than $15/hr. Part of the fallout from 08 financial collapse is that full-time jobs were replaced with not-so-fulltime. The 30 hr/wk full-time job is too close to the norm. And that's because 30 lets The Man avoid providing benefits, specifically healthcare, that they have to provide to 35 and 40 hrs/wk workers. Did I see reduced hours for low end jobs? There's the growth of gig, uh, gigs and independent contractor bullshit. And one of my favorite factoids again: ~25% of full-time workers need easy credit, public assistance -- food stamps and Medicaid -- and/or additional employment to make a living wage.
So fight for $15? Not even close the hill to die on. What's needed is a living wage has to be law (including a COLA). That's the hill. Everything, anything else is bullshit.
America is always transitioning economically. Consider Muncie, Indiana, the subject of two classics of sociology during the period from the 1920's to the 1930's: "Middleton" and "Middleton in Transition." With the coming of the Depression, everything changed. Housing, work, family life, community connections, all was overturned. The detail is mid-boggling. If, like me, you grew up with tales of the Depression, these books objectively dissect life before and after 1929 in ways your parents or grandparents couldn't. Each economic crisis since then has made life harder for the 99%. Every story of modern day Americans being ground down reminds me of that unemotional depiction of a town falling apart under American capitalism.
I grew up in Iowa, which used to be a fairly libertarian—leaning liberal—well-educated place. Granted we were always a few year behind the current fashion, but we were a very accepting populace. Iowa was one of the first states to embrace gay unions, It went for Obama very early on. Back in the day we always had senator Tom Harkin's populist politics to balance out that old curmudgeon Grassley. Now I'm fairly ashamed to call it "home" and, if not for my ailing sister, would never go back to visit.
Thatcherism and Ronnie's handlers unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the “animal spirits” of the entrepreneur they coyly named it in Britain) and the capitalist Godzilla will be very hard to reign in.
$15 an hr. minimum would be a start. Strong infrastructure jobs would be a mighty second step. Aussie friends who travelled the States were boggled at some people's dependence on tips to make any sort of wage.
I'm hoping (praying, desperately pining) that The U.S electorate give Joe and Kamala and Bernie and AOC and all the good guys an eight year run and so a reasonable chance at bringing back some sort of balance.
In the 60's my father could support a family of 5 on his one income as a salesman. My mother eventually went back to work as a teacher but that was after the kids grew up. For the first 25 years of my working life I was as bad with money as Roy, never made more than a working-class income, and often less. But I've never not had my own apartment in NYC, and I never had a roommate until I got married late in life and she would kill me if I called her that.
In 1964 the average annual wage (in 2019 dollars) was roughly $50k, also roughly what it was in 2019. But a loaf of bread was $1.78 vs $2.59, the price of a new house averaged $110k vs $238k, and the cost of college tuition was three to four times less than what it is now. The demise of unions has kept incomes down despite rising productivity, and the consequent rise of Wall St. parasitism has raised the price of practically everything to bear the hidden costs of their boundless greed. We've seen private equity vultures devour home ownership, education, and healthcare, so it's no wonder that the same people who invented the need for payday loans would see new profit opportunities in trailer parks.
“You could even get ahead.” I’m a bit older than Roy, whelped late in the Truman administration, but so far as I could tell from the Southern California suburbs of my youth was that upward mobility* was a central tenet of the civic religion: of course a family would trade up over time to grander houses, fancier cars. I know it’s fashionable to rag on the Boomers these latter decades, and certainly the chasm between the cohort’s soaring rhetoric of the sixties and its performance in power by the nineties invites a certain degree of censure and contempt. I think, though, that this early indoctrination of ours—for those of us raised, I mean, under class conditions in which such stultifying assumptions of security and progress might be nurtured—is not given due weight. It was one thing to live in (somewhat squalid) communal housing off-campus in the early seventies, to abjure and even to scorn many of the bourgeois amenities with which we’d been raised, but we all knew, whether or not we acknowledged it to ourselves, that should we ever tire of bohemian cosplay there would always be a spot waiting for us back in the “middle class.” Well, that comfortable certitude didn’t last out the decade, and as a friend of mine observed circa 1987 in approximately these terms, “A lot of people are waking up to the fact that there are only so many places at the table, and that some of us are going to be left out, and they’re saying 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘦, 𝘣𝘰𝘺!” Hell, I certainly sold out.
*“Upward mobility”—is that even a thing anymore? I don’t claim to maintain a careful watch on the youngs, but among the children of my friends, a generation now approaching forty, there appears to be a keen awareness that their lives are neither as comfortable nor secure as their parents” were, and have little prospect of being so until the latter peg out—for choice, without pouring the offsprings’ patrimony down the rathole of “assisted living.”
When I started my first real job in 1972 at $9,000/year, my one-bedroom apartment, a very nice one, was $180/month. This works out to 24% of my income. Now, a one-bedroom place in my area (Baltimore) $1,115/month. Even at $15/hour, it amounts to 45%. So move to Cincinnati, where the rent is $698.
I never really 'made it' in that classic sense. Never owned a house or a new car. Neither I, nor any love interest, thought marriage and a family was a good idea.
But I'm still alive. [ Year or two older than Roy ]