Yep, all of this “inflation” and “rising cost of housing” bullshit is essentially wealthy people turning the screws. They know regular people can barely make this work, and they love that.
I’m traveling in Europe right now and the prices everywhere are so reasonable it really pisses me off. Inflation my ass, I’m convinced it’s just American corps squeezing us for everything we got.
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Spain and Germany this trip.
Very nice hotels for €100 in downtown areas that would cost easily $300/night in USA. Food in restaurants and cafes very reasonably priced, I got a couple coffees and pastries for like €8 and the coffee alone would be that much in the states let alone multiple pastries. €5 felafel. I can’t remember the last time I paid less than $15 for lunch.
Gas is super pricey but who cares when your cities are designed to be walkable and you have great public transport everywhere.
I get that I’m on the tourist route so this doesn’t represent true cost of living, but I understand rent is far cheaper in general, plus availability of healthcare and education leads me to believe COL in general is lower and some googling supports this.
I don’t know anything about their tax policies so I can’t comment on that either.
Comments welcome.
Inflation has hit us too, but not nearly as bad as the US. My grocery bill has essentially doubled and we’re paying €2.25/liter for gasoline ($9.14/gallon!)
But I saw a bag of chips for $12 in Chicago last year and I still haven’t recovered from the shock.
Yeah gas is expensive for sure. But who cares when you have all that sweet public transportation and nice walkable cities that are genuinely pleasant to be in. I can see how it would be a much bigger issue if you roads looked like this
Well I’m from the US so I’m unfortunately familiar with shit infrastructure. Also unfortunately, our public transportation in NL is a total joke (extremely expensive, dwindling , and unreliable) thanks to privatization and conservative politics. We are very lucky to have excellent bike infrastructure, but the weather makes it extremely inconvenient.
That’s surprising to hear, I’ve been all over NL and have a real high opinion of it (except the weather heh). It’s always kind of comforting though to hear that once you get past the surface there’s issues everywhere.
Amen.
You can’t keep slaves anymore, but you can own a company and pay your workers an amount that makes it hard for them to pay for basic necessities so they don’t have time for leisure, or organising unions, or finding other jobs. The workers are free to go, of course, but then they’ll fall into financial ruin and not have healthcare.
Frighteningly few have health care with full employment, sometimes it’s not offered, when it is, it’s still not budgetable.
That’s exactly what it is, then I’ve had people laugh at me when I compare it to slavery.
It’s called wage slavery and you can use that information to educate, if any will listen.
Nah, most will just say get a better job, you’re not working hard enough etc. Lots of people I speak to tend to frame it as a worker problem rather than a problem with the system. It’s also why lots of people seem to be anti strikes…
Well I did use a qualifier. I know. I was in McDonald’s one day getting a soda and they took forever. A young woman was griping that “it’s those kids! No one wants to work anymore!” I told her for those wages and what was expected, i don’t blame them. I got an angry glare.
“but they’re paying $15 an hour, isn’t that what you people* wanted?”
Uh, it was, but that was 10 years ago…
*not the racist “you people”, just the run of the mill ignorant one.
I giggled and took no offense.
Too many people seem to think that chattel slavery is the only thing that counts as slavery, and that even that doesn’t count if a slaver is less horrible to their slaves than other slavers are.
Sadly, yes.
They should just start their own business then and stop being a bunch of lazy complainers
Reminder that slavery was never outright abolished in the US, the constitution explicitly allows slavery as punishment for a crime which is why private for-profit prisons are a thing in the US.
We need to abolish that and make prisons truly rehabilitation facilities.
It’s a nice thought, but there are a lot of very bad people in prison. More often than not because of the system.
There is such a thing as too far gone.
Can’t we do both? I think the issue is that we’re sending people who can be rehabilitated to the same place we’re sending the “very bad people” with little to no hope of reintegrating into society
The thing is this is purely cultural conditioning. And every nation has to ask itself what it is willing to sacrifice. In European countries e.g. people sacrifice a few (read 10-20) unlucky victims amongst millions to people that are “too far gone” and exploit the rehabilitation system by being repeat offenders. The US sacrifices extremely large parts of their relative population (over 1 million prisoners) and minorities on very flimsy accounts and puts them away for good, sometimes with no reason. All to prevent repeat offenders and keep them locked away.
So you gotta ask yourself are you willing to completely ruin the lives of a million people (and have probably a greater death toll than a few dozen from that) and not have to trust anybody or are you willing to sacrifice a few innocent people on the grounds of failing to rehabilitate rare “uncurable villain” criminals?
I wish one of the bigger industrial countries had the balls to curb the state-like influence of billionaires, by flat out capping the amount of wealth they get to wield. It’s not even that people should not be allowed to be “rich”. But “rich” should mean owning 1-50 millions or so. Not billions.
You should try visiting Scandinavian countries. While being ultra rich isn’t disallowed, it’s so heavily taxed that ultra rich end up providing more for the welfare than any other group.
… that is until they move out to Switzerland.
Not true at all. Sweden has worse wealth equality than the US. Sure we have high income taxes, but basically no wealth or inheritance taxes. The only reason social democracy ever took off in Scandinavia was due to the fear of the nearby Soviet Union. The moment the Soviet Union collapsed all the countries of Scandinavia started dismantling the welfare and privatising.
An inconvenient truth is that life was a lot better for the working class in a lot of countries before the Soviet Union fell.
My buddy is in Switzerland doing his phD. He says col there is hella expensive. Do they have a tiny tax rate?
Oh no Switzerland is in shamble 😰
If we’re not going to abolish money, it should really be entirely illegal for the highest paid person in a company to make more than, say, 15-20 times more than the lowest paid person.
Reliance on the state to make things right is the fatal flaw. The purpose of the state is not to make our life better, it is to protect the powerful from us.
You’re assuming I’m in favor of keeping our existing government intact. I don’t. It was shit from the start, and now it’s entirely unsalvageable.
Even if the government itself was salvageable, the US is far too ideologically divided into sides that cannot and should not be reconciled with each other.
This country cannot and will not hold itself together much longer, and the only potentially viable course of action is to mitigate the harm that is going to happen no matter what by breaking it up in as controlled and peaceful a manner as possible.
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Lol 1 million doesn’t even buy a house where I live.
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Rather than worrying about trying to tax 1 person heaps (they will dodge it anyway)
Why not put in place improved worker protection and pay laws.
Higher minimum wage - say equal to the bottom quartile median house price in the area, mandatory health care even for the lowest paid employees, absolutely no overtime.
They can dodge this by moving manufacturing overseas… But they already did this.
Progressive history nerd with an “aKshUlLy” for you to consider:
Slavery was never abolished, it was moved. There are more slaves in the world today than ever before and the US (among others) is funding it. Our stores are full of goods made by slaves. It’s worse now than when slaves were just farmhands because those old high paying factory jobs were still a boon for the domestic worker. Those are slave jobs overseas now. A foundational economic pillar of stable, unionized labour was removed and never replaced.
So certainly, stagnant wages and everything is costing more and giving us less. Our current spiraling situation for workers at home is deplorable and getting worse, a true dystopia. But slavery is another kettle of fish. There’s a scene in Roots, the miniseries from the 70s about slavery. When we get to the aftermath of the civil war in the south, a governor told the nervous former slave owners that like peter rabbit trying to get into the garden, when the farmer puts up an obstacle, you just find a way around it. For a time, that meant chattle slaves simply become indentured slaves, working to pay off costs they can never quite catch up on. Once that was abolished, we just laundered our slavery through international borders. Out of sight out of mind for the average American. It’s the same people doing the same thing, it’s just a shell game. The oppression of the working class is intersectional as fuck with slavery, has the same root cause, and evolved along side slavery, but the human suffering experienced by actual slaves is much worse than the typical underpaid worker, so for me, I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. But this is just symantics.
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Responses from historians will rarely make you feel better, but will help you understand the complexities that people without that specialization often overlook.
Knowledge is its own reward.
Automation means that proportionally fewer slaves can provide more. That “denies the slave’s existence as a human being” bit is rather vague. Are you saying modern slavery is not denying the slave’s existence as a human being? What does that mean?
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The way they’re viewed really isn’t the problem. Someone being imprisoned and forced to work really isn’t affected by the man with the whips opinions of them, because of they slave away they don’t get whipped. They’re existence has been stripped too bare for such distinction to make a difference. Slavery is like war and war never changes.
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How is that different from current slaves? Attitude of the general population? Doesn’t seem to make much practical difference.
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Again, that makes little to no practical difference to the slave, they’re getting abused just the same.
Point to the time where prisoners in the U.S. were stacked up on boats and shipped across the Atlantic for months at a time.
You don’t see prisoners treated like cargo here. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t treated well, but there are certain factors here that I don’t think you’re considering.
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This has always been the case. Look at immigrant exploitation, the truck system, sharecropping, child labor, exporting work to undeveloped countries to exploit unregulated labor forces there.
It was always about bringing back slavery without calling it slavery.
And it will always be so long as we let them keep trying.
Violence is not the answer until the hour that it is.
Trying? Abolished? Sigh. Words. Slavery never left. Put all the pretty paint you want on those bars. It’s the change of perspective that comes with wisdom. Use that power well.
13th amendment anyone? Even as it “abolished” slavery. It literally codified and enshrined it in the US constitution for the first time.
Lets finally change it. Lets just get up and act, fuck it. I don’t want to play the game anymore.
Then be prepared to get hurt. Sure small strikes are tolerable to a government. Strikes that actually disrupt the economy are never tolerated, and are almost always met with police violence. It’s literally their first job, to maintain public order. Imagine what would happen if Lockheed Martin employees striked?
We are already hurt.
Individual action won’t accomplish anything it has to been collective and coordinated. Without strong unions I don’t know how that’s possible
Too many elite shitbags think they’re rich because it’s ordained when in reality their grammy and pee paw just fucked first.
Nothing divine or important about that.
So the next time you see a rich person give them the finger and a bad look because their family is probably a bunch of tax dodging cock sucking thieves.
Legacies are for insecure shit cunts.
They’ve lured us in with the promise of overtime to get us to work for them more, while keeping our wages artificially low so we have to work overtime.
Amazon workers with their forced over time go unheard.
Our only hope is to become a strong union country. Without collective power we’ll never reign in the greed of the billionaires
This is actually a way better and more efficient form of slavery. You need to feed, clothe, house, and medically treat slaves. WAY cheaper to pay minimum wage and tell them to fuck off.
You could pull yourself out of this misery by your own bootstraps. I sell those for only $20. It’s not a set though. And they rip easily, better buy some more.
You can work for it, I’ll give you one strap per week.
What’s this “trying to” bullshit? The for profit prison system and a legal system that punishes people for being poor would suggest they have already largely succeeded. Never mind that slavery is explicitly legal when it comes to prisoners.
Humans get powerful and don’t see the point in power unless they can abuse people
