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This topic comprises 9 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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Author
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Topic: "The Living Wage" (coming soon to a Theatre Near You)
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-26-2018 09:31 PM
The auto industry enjoyed several years of increasing sales, with 2016 being a record year. But 2017 ended up being the first full year sales decline since the Great Recession. Sales were really down the first half of 2017. The industry had hoped hurricane damages (particularly in the Houston area in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey) would move a huge number of new vehicles. That didn't happen. Sales picked up some in the fall, but not enough.
New vehicles have been pretty good for more than 20 years. My pickup truck is pretty old now, but I've had no problems with it at all. It has just under 120,000 miles on it. My only costs of owning that truck has been fuel, tires and routine maintenance. The 1992 Camaro I owned previously was a decent car too. The only reason I got rid of it is some idiot drove into the back of my car as I was turning onto my street. The car's frame got bent pretty good, enough to total it.
Auto manufacturers are putting all sorts of new bells and whistles into vehicles. But some of the features, such as navigation, can be done by smart phones just as well and without another monthly service charge eating away at one's budget. I can't help but wonder if some of these high prices are ways for people to feed in the inner-douchebag part of their egos. Lots of Americans tie parts of their identity into their vehicles. It's like the Mercedes-Benz catch-phrase: the best or nothing.
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Buck Wilson
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 894
From: St. Joseph MO, USA
Registered: Sep 2010
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posted 01-26-2018 09:38 PM
quote:
There's another angle -- the notion that everybody deserves to have everything. The last sentence in the above quote says it all. It's just a societal change.
...
My mom and dad NEVER had a brand-new car in their whole lives. These days some people buy brand-new cars for their kids for high school graduation.
If a typical person commits to foregoing some of the expensive luxuries and makes "I can't afford that" part of their actual vocabulary, maybe they wouldn't have to go cheap in their shopping.
It seems to me the biggest difference between "now" and "then" is that today, people assume they deserve these luxuries in their lives, whereas "then," people would work hard to earn them - or they would just do without.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is the millions of people living in real actual poverty right under our noses. My next door neighbor, a very nice lady in her 70s with essentially no family left, has lived in her home since the early 80s. I don't think her home now is worth much more than it was then. She's on social security and can't work, but did work her whole life. She had to take out a reverse mortgage years ago to pay bills and can't pay it back. She does not have cable, internet, or satellite. Her landline has been shut off and now has no phone. Her furnace doesn't work. Her AC doesn't work. Her hot water heater doesn't work. She had to permanently shut off several circuits in her house due to wiring issues. She has exactly 2 working lights in her home and they're LED bulbs I gave her. I mow her lawn for her. She's been eating on "back of the cabinet" canned goods from the 80s. Her car is 20 years old, has skull sized rust holes all over, barely runs, loud exhaust, leaking gasoline tank, with 6 month expired tags. She no longer has trash service. She's either using the dumpster next door or god forbid nothing at all. Most recently her water has been shut off for not being able to pay her recently tripled sewer bill due to a big repair/diversion project the city is doing. Quite literally her only 'frivolous expense' is that she has 3 cats. I'm not sure what else she can or will have to do without... She's about to lose her house.
I am fortunate to be doing much better than her but I certainly wouldn't call myself well off. My house is 700sqft, one bedroom, and worth less than $30,000. I do have 3 cars, but they are all over 20 years old and all have over 200,000 miles. One has 345,000. I have to have some sort of backup to ensure I can keep my "main" job which is newspaper delivery. I have two jobs just to pay the bills and work 365 days a year, approximately 55-60 hours a week. I also don't have cable, satellite, or internet. ALL LED lit home. All my clothes are from the thrift store. 95% of my home furnishings were free or from thrift stores/garage sales. I buy used phones and am still using an iPhone 5, for which I only pay $30/mo for service. Comparable to landline bills of yore. I had to replace the roof over my porch myself, and certainly won't have the ten grand to replace the main roof for quite some time. Let alone the 68 year old furnace in the basement. I couldn't DREAM of buying a brand new car. The newest car I've ever owned was 4 years old, and I only paid $6500 for it because it too had over 200,000 miles on it. But again, I count myself lucky because I am at least able to pay my bills and slowly make small and moderate improvements to my home and afford repairs to my vehicles(most of which I also do myself).
Point is, sure quality of life has improved in many ways, but many people do indeed live without, and I'd wager that *generally* people don't have a whole lot of spending money past the basics. Seems those bigger tagged items like TVs(which have really come down in price) and phones are often tax return purchases, etc. Further, the average age of cars in the us just keeps going up and up. So as plenty of people are buying new, clearly even more are keeping their cars longer.
Lord someone make me stop talking.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-26-2018 09:45 PM
The first car I had after moving to the US was a '99 Civic, with 142k miles on the clock when I got it, and 205k when I involuntarily said goodbye to it. That was when I made the mistake of leaving it in the parking structure of San Bernarghetto ... oops, sorry, -dino Metrolink station. I was working an early shift at the Egyptian that day, and would be outta there while trains were still running, so I thought I'd give myself a break from the crawling traffic on the 10, plus having to share the freeway with a bunch of people who think they're the big rig driver in Duel.
When I got back that evening, the Civic had been stolen. The security guard at the station didn't seem at all concerned, commenting that "two or three a day" are taken from that facility. The San Bernardino Police Department gave me my report for the insurance claim, and made it clear that there is no way they could seriously investigate the incident. If it's anything less serious than a homicide, they don't have the manpower to do anything more than issue the reports.
If that hadn't happened, I had no plans to get rid of the Civic and would probably still be driving it. It broke down once while I had it, thanks to a coolant hose bursting, but after they'd all been replaced, it never needed anything more than routine maintenance. It was a bit of a guzzler (around 30 MPG), and having to change the oil every 3,000 miles (which in my case meant every month) was a bit of a pain, but the extra spent on gas was a helluva lot less than the depreciation on a new or nearly new car.
It would have been less viable to continue running a car that old if I wasn't able to do that routine maintenance myself, but even so, that experience shows that, as Bobby points out, every new generation of vehicles has a longer viable service life, which in turn gives the auto industry a problem when it comes to selling new vehicles in a sub-optimal economic climate. And of course pure electric cars will need a lot less maintenance than internal combustion engined ones.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-26-2018 10:07 PM
quote: Buck Wilson
Point is, sure quality of life has improved in many ways, but many people do indeed live without, and I'd wager that *generally* people don't have a whole lot of spending money past the basics. Seems those bigger tagged items like TVs(which have really come down in price) and phones are often tax return purchases, etc. Further, the average age of cars in the us just keeps going up and up. So as plenty of people are buying new, clearly even more are keeping their cars longer.
There's a lot of people who can't even afford the basics. The "failure to launch" trend is pretty bad. It's pretty ridiculous when someone graduates from college and because they're buried in student loan debt they have to move back in with the parents. Some kids don't even go to college and are still stuck at home for some reason. There's people hitting age 30 and still at home. They can live through the shame and embarrassment of that situation or do like you did and scrape by. The choice is either of those things or move into a place with one or more roommates.
In recent years I've seen a lot of "punching down," people who are well off or very well off spewing anger and disgust at middle and lower income people. They act like experts on what people with modest incomes can do without. It's pretty easy to say someone of modest means is being stupid with his money if he has a $50,000 new sedan parked in front of a shitty little apartment. But these douches expect the little people not to even have a fucking TV set or phone.
I thought about this when Mike mentioned subscriptions to Netflix. That's cheap; it's nothing like having a full blown cable bill. Here in Lawton cord-cutting is very common. Hell, I'm probably going to end up doing that. SlingTV would cost about half my Dish Network bill. I might do like my girlfriend and just get a new outdoor antenna use Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Amazon has their own "channels" thing where you can build up a package with only the channels you want. I'm not sure if that would be any less expensive than SlingTV though. A bunch of people here in Lawton don't even have Netflix. They're using those modded FireTV sticks and Kodi boxes, getting their TV shows and movies (illegally) free of charge.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-28-2018 02:00 AM
Well, you have that and the predatory nature of many used car businesses. If a customer cannot finance the sale through their own bank and they do the financing at the mercy of the used car business then they open themselves up to all sorts of predatory behavior. Make one single payment late and your car gets repossesed. The lot hits you with all sorts of re-stocking fees. And they move that same car along to the next sucker, or I mean "customer" ASAP.
My town (Lawton, Oklahoma) is not representative of all of America, but this town does speak volumes on how people in lower income and lower-middle income brackets are exploited. We have no shortage of predatory businesses who thrive on stomping their boot heels down on the necks of people struggling just to survive. I believe pay day loans operations are a puss-filled boil on the ass cheek of humanity and that these legalized loan-shark operations should be absolutely outlawed. Rent to own stores that sell furniture and appliances at hyper-inflated prices are stores that fully deserve to be fire-bombed. They are another parasitic social cancer of our society. All these freaking dollar stores are another giant-sized problem. They sell people all sorts of cheap crap and the food they sell is nothing more than highly processed poison imported from who knows where. Oklahoma has lots of pawn shops, but those things seem to be everywhere. We have all sorts of casinos in Oklahoma, which obviously causes even more problems. Then we have our for-profit, private prison industry, whose investors are looking to make even more money. So things like speeding tickets, court fines and other judgments may be kicked back to some preferred legalized loan-sharking finance operation if the defendant can't pay for the judgment 100% up front.
So, um, yeah I guess we can just keep up with this "punching down" behavior, pissing and shitting on those we believe are beneath us (but still worthy of exploiting for taxpayer revenue). But meanwhile a great deal of "little people" are leaving their zippers up in this environment. Breeding children into this absurd orgy of douchebag greed is only a cruel thing to do. It's going to be easier and far cheaper to just not bring any kids into the situation. Let the douchebags wrestle with the concept of population crash, national security crisis and the prospect of a country like China invading and winning.
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Jack Ondracek
Film God
Posts: 2348
From: Port Orchard, WA, USA
Registered: Oct 2002
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posted 01-28-2018 11:52 AM
quote: Bobby Henderson
So many people believe that jobs at McDonald's or wherever are just for teenage kids. If I visit a fast food restaurant for lunch during the work week I'm going to see nothing but grown-ass adults at the registers and working in the kitchen. Those people working there during regular business hours are trying to earn a livable wage, and if they're making only $7.25 an hour (minimum wage in OK) they'll have to get one or more additional shit-pay jobs to make up the difference. And then the taxpayers get to provide food stamps and other assistance to make up for how these folk's ends are not meeting.
OK, but if you overpay for the time, people who crutch on these entry-level jobs aren't likely to be motivated toward anything better. An entry-level job doesn't have to be reserved for a teen-ager. Experience level and the value of one's work isn't necessarily tied to age.
There are a lot of older folks, who are back in the workforce after thinking they'd be able to live off of their retirement. There are also those who are the victims of their own poor planning. Those entry-level jobs are about all that's available to them, because they either don't have the skills for something better, aren't motivated to attain them or employers don't see that age group being of value to their businesses. I'm uncomfortable with the number of them that have pushed kids out of a starting job, but I see why and admit to not having an easy answer for it. Over time, our system hasn't made it easy, given what's deducted from your social security for anything you make in addition.
I get your points, even if I don't happen to agree with them all... which is fine. I also don't like participation trophies and schools that turn off their scoreboard clocks so the kids won't feel traumatized by a loss. We have plenty of that around here, too.
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Dave Bird
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 777
From: Perth, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted 01-28-2018 01:20 PM
It all depends on how old you are I suppose. Saying people "have no choice" but to be "cheap" has hundreds if not thousands of individual qualifiers to make it true. I do contend at the outset, when my family hired "living wagers" to sell food, and most of the people in that town supported us every week, and most of those people were reasonably affluent, the whole system worked. But when the Wal Marts came to the next town offering "better prices" (often via lower quality and smaller sizes and definitely cheap unskilled part-time labor), those big tricked out Silverado crew cabs, Buicks and Cadillacs started to be seen driving out of town and supporting the cheapest price. They couldn't see that these retail employees of mine were customers of theirs too I guess, and the small towns started to suffer. But there are so many mostly voluntary choices that go in to "making a living". Saddling yourself with a mortgage not knowing the mine or the plant will close long before you pay it off is pretty common. Thinking you "deserve" stuff you see other people have (when most of it's probably bought with debt) sure bites a lot of people. It's a problem when you see middle-class disappearing (it'll be by taxes here in Canada, as well as the continued subsidization of big companies whose only real ability to undercut the little guys price is by using those subsidies to lower their cost of entry, and volume). But it's a fact that less people live in extreme poverty today than they did yesterday, a trend that's gone on for 150 years or more. The social justice warriors love to tell us why it's all going to hell, but that's a growth industry of its own of course. I just can't imagine, in a world of 7.5 billion people that I'm owed or "deserve" anything. There's an endless supply of people to replace me, no doubt most more competently too. So life's about hustle, I guess. Not sure if I'm winning, but haven't given up anyway. Living within one's means was always the first step, finding work (even if it was below the "living" wage) was the next. I hope the ambitious and the young aren't losing this stepping stone so the politicians can test ideologies.
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 01-28-2018 05:17 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
It's pretty ridiculous when someone graduates from college and because they're buried in student loan debt they have to move back in with the parents.
That happens a lot when they choose a degree that has no jobs available, or very few jobs. Or, a lot of kids are pressured to go to college when college may not be the right thing for them. Then they complain they "can't find any jobs in their field."
It's not like opportunities don't exist. In my own hometown, just to give one example, there is a great need for a plumber. We have one plumber in town but he's approaching retirement age. He is busier than two rabbits in heat. Some kid -- or two -- could graduate high school, go to a trade school to learn plumbing, come back here and make a handsome living.
There are opportunities here for college people too, they just need to get around the idea that "you can't enjoy life in a small town." We could provide nice livings right now for an optometrist, at least one carpenter, a body shop operator, and several motel entrepreneurs -- a lot of the business people in this town (including me) are approaching retirement age. We have one doctor in town who's in his mid-60s and will be looking for a new guy to take over. Ditto with two dentists. The list goes on.
But no, every parent (and all their peers) tell kids, "You've gotta get the hell outta this town." So here we are -- close to 2,000 people needing services and eventually, we'll have nobody to provide those services. I'd wager there are thousands of small towns all over that are in the exact same boat.
Occasionally some smart young person will buck the trend and come back. There's a girl who left town to experience the big-city life, lived in Denver a few years, then came back and started a women's clothing store with a beauty salon and is kicking ass.
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Dave Bird
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 777
From: Perth, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted 01-29-2018 10:40 AM
You're right Mike. My son is going into electrical shortly. Every summer I get the odd person with a "Masters" in some obscure or "already too many" field apply for part-time night popcorn making and it makes me wonder if anyone knows how to look up what might be in demand before they "follow their passion".
On "rural economics", there are two glitches in the small towns I hang around in. In this country anyway, our residential taxes approach or exceed "city" taxes and the commercial taxes are very high as well given the limited income and revenue potential. I'm starting to hear councils and mayors say "come talk to us, let's see what we can do" because I think they realize they're pricing us out of the market. At a certain point the numbers just can't be made to work. Another thing we're seeing is housing prices rising due to city retirees wishing to downsize. It's a windfall for some, to be sure, but the prices certainly are higher than what someone participating in the "local economy" can often afford. Half of those city ex-pats tend to get bored and leave, but there's an endless supply.
But most of all, I like the line that I think Lou Holtz used. "Don't talk about your problems. 80% of the people don't care and the other 20% are glad you have 'em."
Small-towners and retailers and theatre owners sure have 'em, but it's also up to us to solve 'em.
I like the story of the girl who went to Denver. My advice as a long-time small-towner to kids is yes, you do need to get out and see some things and spend some time in the city. You might find yourself there or you might not, but in doing so you'll be able to come back with complete satisfaction if that's your choice. Sounds like she was able to get a few ideas in her time away and figure out a way to make it work "back home".
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