They will give the poor credit, buy now pay later, till there is nothing left to squeeze out of them/us.
I think this is the answer. They also need to advertise correctly so people feel the need to finance a $70.000 truck instead of buying a small used car for $4.000. Of course with interest and their credit score people will end up paying like double the price anyways.
Another option is to offer crappy versions of the same thing that are more affordable but break earlier. That way you also pay more over the years.
Vimes’ theory of boots!
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Ah, thanks! I knew there was a name for it but couldn’t remember.
So many useless pavement pricess pickup trucks.
That’s what they’ve been doing already. It already caused the 2008 financial crash with mortgages. The answer then was to throw around QE money to corporations like a socialist dressed up as Santa Claus and reduce interest rate to 0%.
Yeah but what happens when there’s nothing left though
You’ll owe your soul to the company store
If there are suddenly far fewer getting a paycheck there is still voting. I wonder what droves of the unemployed will vote for?
It’s irrelevant when neither parties do anything meaningful for the working class.
What if you artificially limited the options at the voting booth using a first past the post electoral system?
Who do you vote for when you don’t want any of them
Same thing they vote for now - whichever candidate’s lies sound better.
Apple devices led to Apple Pay, Apple Pay led to the Apple Card, the Apple Card led to Apple Pay Later (installments). Now there are rumors that Apple will offer loans to cardholders.
Google pay now, when?
You can see this in Argentina. You can buy pretty much everything in installments. Trips, clothing, electronics, groceries - pay in 3, 6, 12 installments.
Like I can with Klarna, Affirm, Zip, any number of credit cards, etc.
I suspect they will graciously provide the necessities in return for your labour and any remaining rights you have.
Take a look at how company stores and scrip worked. As the song goes: Saint Peter don’t you call me 'cause I can’t go/Sold my soul to the company store.
The lyric is “I owe my soul to the company store”. Sold requires a conscious choice, willingly entering into the agreement. Under a company script system children are forced into labor as early as possible to help pay the family debt. In less than a generation teenagers are given the “choice” to go to work or see their families already meager income reduced to cover “their portion” of the family debt.
I stand corrected.
The early 80s will happen again until the late 90s come back, So Reagan then Clinton. Crime will go up, Graffiti, homeless etc The rent is skyrocketing like when Reagan took over. The economy works when the middle class does well and we can’t keep funneling the money higher up. When the middle class can afford a home and cooperations stop buying them up to lease that might help.
The upper class: keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class: pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there…just to scare the shit out of the middle class." -George Carlin’
That’s the way the ruling class operates in any society: they try to divide the rest of the people; they keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the fucking money. Fairly simple thing… happens to work…" -George Carlin
Yo fuck the middle class, everyone should be thriving if their working. I’m tired of all this middle class shit… what about all the people living in poverty?
People who work full-time jobs used to be middle class. Living wages, affordable housing, yearly vacations, etc. Now, working people are still in poverty.
People who work full-time jobs used to be middle class. Living wages, affordable housing, yearly vacations, etc.
When?
Do you call camping in a campground a “family vacation” ? because that’s as far as my family had growing up in a pensioned job. We never could afford air travel, fancy new TVs, new cars… our house was very basic, we always drove beaters, we spent years without one thing or another to make it work.
This isn’t the current generation, or the last one, this was even earlier.
Just trying to understand when this idea that anybody in any job could have the white picket fence and world class quality of life was somehow a reality. I don’t think that’s ever been the case for the poorest full time workers or even the bottom 50%.
Do you call camping in a campground a “family vacation” ?
I would…
Sure, we never had the latest and greatest, fixed stuff ourselves and such, but we lived in a home that my parents owned and never really wanted for anything. That, to me, feels like a middle-class upbringing, and is what I’d like to be able to provide my own kids when I have them. However, right now the prospect of owning my own home seems increasingly far-fetched.
Campgrounds are everywhere and one in under a 2 hour drive is very doable throughout your whole life for a family vacation. You won’t lose access to that.
Housing costs will swing back. We’re around the point where we were in the last housing market crash. Prices are at the edge of affordability for the middle class. Mortgages are higher than what can be rented. One market course correction and a ton of people lose their houses and the market collapses again.
They’re doing everything they can to try and stop the collapse but homes are still increasing in price way more quickly than wages. Just a matter of time.
Lol growing up there was no fun gas only work gas.
weird, my single mom driving beaters could afford short driving trips (2 hours is short to me.) We did mostly go to a campground that was less than 15 minutes drive away from home though.
We heavily used food pantries though, literally every single week. No air conditioning, bunny ears on our simple tv, school bus rides to school. We even went a couple years without hot water when our hot water heater broke down just boiling water on the stove.
Everyone’s experience is different though. Though I was in one of the poorest families in my hometown. None of my aunts, uncles or parents own their own home today and they’re 50s and 60s now. The sacrifices of growing up in a wealthy middle class town will enable me to buy a house. Going to see an open house in 35 minutes!
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Everyone in America is middle class. You can be lower middle class or upper middle class, but you’re never not middle class.
We are all working class.
Middle class does all the work? LOL They are mostly fucking leeches making useless shit and legitimising the upper class. Also they are a minority.
The irony of the last quote. Keep fighting while the billionaires take everything.
I’d argue we’re already there. Once you hit zero it’s not like you zip out of existence. When everyone is poor and has no money, the rich get to hire you and pay you enough to buy their products and keep them comfortable. You’ll never make enough to get out of poverty because it’s designed to keep you there.
Poverty isn’t just about not having money, it’s about never making enough to get out of poverty. When you’re always living paycheck to paycheck, payday loan to payday loan - you’re screwed. The system will never let you out. You’re too profitable in that state to let out.
Think of the boot theory. If I only give you 10 bucks a year, you have to buy the 2 dollar boots every year that last only a year. The moment you made 11 dollars, you could buy the 5 dollar boot that lasts you a decade. The system incentivizes company’s to sell 2 dollar boots cause it makes them more money in the long run, and if the entire world agrees to never pay you more than 10 dollars a year, every company can make that much more money. That’s why your market value is not your fair pay.
The real reason poverty exists is because rich people need a slave class without being directly liable for owning them.
The first thing that came to mind upon reading the title is the movie Repo Men from 2010.
Plot from the Wikipedia:
In 2025, advancements in medical technology have perfected bio-mechanical organs.
A corporation known as The Union sells these expensive “artiforgs” on credit, and when customers are unable or unwilling to pay for their artiforgs The Union sends “repo men” to locate and forcibly repossess the organ - invariably resulting in the death of the owner.
I thought you were talking about the better, original version “Repo! The Genetic Opera” at first
“In Time” starring Justine Timberlake has a theme that is close.
Well the young people in China have taken to “lying flat”.
Finally, words for it. Thanks
Other companies like Klarna will pay and you’ll pay them back over however many months. My nan used to call that type of agreement ‘putting it on the never never’
You’re thinking about it like it’s some abstract future event. It’s not. It’s a very real thing, not limited to the future. There are people who are broke right now, and people have been going broke for a very long time.
There isn’t a point in time where everyone goes broke. People go broke at a rate. If you wait until everyone is broke you’ll be waiting forever.
The thing that’s wrong with the current financial reality is that the rate at which people go broke has increased. This means more homeless people on the streets than there were, say, 25 years ago.
Use us as cheap labor to produce products intended to be sold overseas, just like China has been doing for the past 40 years or so.
Do you really think the people that made your iPhone will ever be able to afford an iPhone?It’s like Monopoly, they just keep going until there’s only one player left and nobody is on speaking terms.
In The Outer Worlds video game it’s the reality - there’s a few megacorporations and people are basically their property.
We work to earn the right to work
Why would they need us except as consumers? At a certain point automation and AI actually do get far enough.
That may take longer than people think.
Some suspect that production will start to shift to worker owned enterprises and user owned services. These don’t work for profit like capitalistic enterprises and can provide cheaper goods and services, something desperately needed when money is tight.
Another trend is distributed production. Capitalism works with the central production and distribution. However solar and wind often generate local and go against that model. Likely more forms of local production and distribution of food and goods are going to happen.
More exploitation probably.
I imagine they’d go under if they rely on the general public as their customer base. Companies that cater to the wealthy would probably grow. Companies are created and go bankrupt all the time, individuals in the owner class will win or lose but that won’t affect the broad distribution of power. If it gets really bad feudalism might come back.
Companies catering to the wealthy is already happening. The richest man in the world, Bernard Arnault, sells luxury goods. It used to be that selling products to the most amount of people was better, Ford, oil barrons, even Wal-Mart. Now money is made selling products to the wealthy. The growth in inequality of the last 50 years shows up in many ways today. Housing sizes are larger because builders need to sell to the wealthy instead of to the masses where margins on modest sized homes are smaller or non-existent.
Trickle down shitononics will be taught to get your daily bread and water rations
