NBS

[NBS @SoggySpine]

Is the economy ever going to be a concern for our politicians or are they just going to react once the dominoes start falling

[NBS @SoggySpine]

@MrBeast 2.9 million

[QE Infinity @StealthQE4]

So serious question:

What’s the incentive to do the right thing anymore?

Everyone that does the right thing loses.

Everyone that grifts, cheats, and steals wins.

Our financial system is filled with nothing but crooks and thieves that are unregulated by anyone.

[NBS @SoggySpine]

@Cody36725142880 @HunterBiden @realDonaldTrump How can someone be dumb if they’re not wrong?

[Papii🥤 @ammalusty]

I've noticed that inflation has not caused the boomers to update their schpeal.
They're still throwing 2012 prices around. "Maybe you could afford a house if you stopped buying $7 fancy sandwiches" and it's like. that's actually a pretty reasonable price for a sandwich

[NBS @SoggySpine]

I’ve been saying. People don’t make enough money. Buying power has shrunk while wages stagnate. People resort to credit which turns into debt. Consumer spending is drying up. And the economy is being kept together by the top. It’s only a matter of time before they can’t carry the load anymore.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

The richest 20% are the only ones powering the U.S. economy, per Moody's Zandi.

[NBS @SoggySpine]

That argument proves my point, not yours. You’re describing a race to the bottom where wages get crushed no matter what, so the “solution” is workers accept poverty forever or jobs flee. That’s exactly why a wage floor exists. And the China part is backwards. We already buy most of it from China and wages here still stagnated, so clearly low pay isn’t keeping anything here. Costco pays double the industry standard and undercuts competitors anyway. Higher pay isn’t what kills a business, bad management is.

[NBS @SoggySpine]

It literally is and was and that’s what it was intended for when it was implemented. FDR said in debates for the minimum wage “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country… By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of decent living.” It’s minimum wage for minimum to live off of but the problem is the government is always late to raise it as it is, and stays stagnant while being outpaced from inflation and then the apprentice wage becomes the talking point by the greedy when people start struggling at the minimum and when it’s time that It should be increased to rebalance the lower classes buying power because greed and lobbying by companies and CEOs.

[NBS @SoggySpine]

Things are not and will not get better.

Great Depression 2.0
Coming Soon

[NBS @SoggySpine]

“The bottom 2% caused all your problems.”

Did the homeless guy crash the economy in 2008? Set healthcare prices? Engineer 40 years of wages flatlining while productivity doubled?
You’re aiming your anger at the people with the least power in the entire system. Which is exactly where the people with the most power would love you to aim it.

The top 1% holds ~31% of all wealth and owns nearly half the stock market. The bottom 50% owns 2.5% and almost no stock. Oppression requires leverage, the power to set the terms of your life. So ask what the bottom 2% can actually do to you.

Sure, dysfunction at the bottom makes daily life worse. Disorder is real and it sucks to live around. But “makes your day annoying” isn’t “caused the manifest problems in your life.”
Your rent, your premiums, your stagnant paycheck and the price of everything, none of that is set by the bottom 2%. They have no leverage over the system, they’re the output of it.

[Prism @fwprism]

Asmongold gives his BASED opinion, says: "You're not being oppressed by the top 2% of society. You're being oppressed by the bottom 2% of society instead 👀

"People ain't gunna like this one: the bottom 2% of society have caused all of the manifest problems in your lives”

[NBS @SoggySpine]

@Real_SilverLine @gridnpixel @bindureddy eh, lost interest. you can have the last word on this one

[BridgeMind @bridgemindai]

News coming soon on Fable 5.

This has gone on long enough.

[NBS @SoggySpine]

Actually it’s more like:

As wages go up,
Productivity goes up,
More goods are made,
Supply goes up,
As supply goes up, prices
Can actually come down,
Those who earn more
Buy more, for less.
But wages never rose,
Greed did,
Prices climbed anyway,
Paychecks stayed still,
As costs outpaced earnings,
The worker fell behind,
Now the economy teeters,
And the many pay the price
For the few who took more
Than they ever needed.

[NBS @SoggySpine]

The stock market is at all-time highs. Celebrate that.

Also celebrate this:

→ Prices are up. Quality is down. Portions shrink. Bills don’t.
→ Retirees going back to work.
→ Young people locked out of opportunity.
→ The middle class drowning in debt.

These aren’t coincidences. They’re the cost.

Shareholders demand returns. Companies deliver — not through innovation, but through squeezing consumers. Shrinkflation. Junk fees. Price hikes dressed up as “market conditions.”

The market doesn’t rise in a vacuum. Sometimes it rises because someone stuggles.

And somewhere on the horizon, a recession is forming. Built by the same hands popping champagne today.

And when it hits? It won’t touch them the same way.

The people already stretched thin lose jobs, homes, and savings. The ones who built the conditions that caused it restructure, rebound, and come out fine. Maybe better. Meanwhile the rest are left picking up the pieces of an economy that was never really built for them in the first place.

The cycle doesn’t break. It just resets — and starts again.

[NBS @SoggySpine]

Fair point on the ‘long run’ qualifier — but your long run argument is still just textbook price floor theory, not empirical reality. Card & Krueger’s natural experiment comparing NJ and PA after NJ raised its minimum wage, a Nobel Prize winning research, showed fast food employment actually increased in NJ long-term. Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has been studied extensively and showed minimal employment effects even years out. The ‘locked into low skill jobs’ narrative also falls apart when you look at states with higher minimums having more labor mobility, not less, because workers have more financial stability to pursue training and better opportunities.

On ‘research is politically compromised’, you’re doing motivated dismissal. You’re rejecting the entire empirical literature without offering alternative evidence, just vibes and theory. Price floor theory predicts job loss. The real world data repeatedly fails to confirm it at modest increases. If your theory keeps failing its predictions, the theory needs updating, not the data.

The power balance point is also backwards as without a wage floor, employers hold all the leverage over workers who have no outside option. The floor is what restores some balance, not removes it.

[NBS @SoggySpine]

You’re conflating pre-FLSA state/Davis-Bacon era laws with the 1938 federal law. The racist compromise in FLSA was excluding farm and domestic workers and not the wage floor. Also ‘it doesn’t help anybody’ contradicts decades of research showing modest minimum wage increases have minimal employment effects. Origins ≠ outcomes.

[NBS @SoggySpine]

You're right that corporations don't exist to pay workers. They exist to make profit. But profit requires customers. And customers need money to spend. That money comes from wages. So when you suppress wages long enough, you kill your own customer base.

Henry Ford figured this out in 1914 when he doubled his workers' wages so they could afford to buy the cars they were building. That's not a radical idea. It's 100 year old capitalism.

You admitted you decided to mock me instead of argue, then threw out communist and socialist buzzwords as a substitute for facts. That tells everyone reading this thread everything they need to know about which side had the stronger case. The only substantive point you made was about trades and skilled labor — which I already addressed.