Political rants

But have you seen the inflation rate? I wouldn't want to immigrate here either! Rumor on the street Argentina has Netflix for like $2 a month. Should probably move out there.

@hell_hound7 I paid that 13 years ago at Disney World, haha! - In fact I think this is all a conspiracy from the amusement park industry to justify $5 bottled water. - It's amazing to think what $1 used to buy in the 1970's.

But yeah, if minimum wage was set to inflation, it would have been around $23 by now. Feel free to fact check that, I just pulled that number out of my head and am feeling lazy at the moment. I just remember its somewhere around there.

In 2009 the federal minimum wage was $7.25. Inflation rate is about 24% since then. So now it would be around $9 adjusted for inflation. Now in these strange times that number is probably higher thanks to the inflation mess we have going on now. It hasn't reached critical levels yet, and minimum wage should hover around $10 right now adjusted for inflation.

Your forgetting the 2011 recession. A lot of jobs were lost overnight, the older generations with time to save rushed to take more before our gen was released from college, the housing market getting out of whack, the general average of expendable income shrinking below the poverty line (Which curiously hasn't been adjusted to fit the new living costs), and a whole lot of other shit between then and the pandemic that kept our generation from saving, like student loans for instance. There's a bit of a disparity between the projected average the rest of us now. By the way, do you own a house? I mean without the assistance of roommates or family members.

Well that's the thing. This is an issue localized to geographic positions in the US. My state, nothing really happened. I have no idea about California or Ohio since I am not really invested in those states. Here, nobody lost their jobs aside from a few layoffs from a dying business at the time. Housing market was still a mess from the 2008 disaster. The expendable income issue is a load of nonsense where even the poorest of the poor have these fancy smart phones and televisions larger than 40". You don't need those things, you can't live in it, you can't drink it and you can't eat it. The pandemic indeed has it's issues, once again depending on where you live. Throughout the pandemic my state was shut down for 2 weeks, that was it. Nobody gave a shit about it and we were one of the states that came out one of the least affected. Now student loans is an issue in of itself and something that deserves class action lawsuits against the colleges themselves. In a pragmatic field like mathematics, engineering, biology, medical and others similar fields the student loans are easy to pay off. In something nonsensical like sociology, communications and other degrees where there are literally no jobs in, then you're screwed. I can't exactly blame the students because these were kids fresh out of high school and some filthy vulture scooped them up with promises of goodies that are never going to come. The professors of those classes deserve to be fired and a massive lawsuit levied against the schools who allowed them to teach that as a major in the first place. I did have a house at one point and lost it because I made bad decisions. It was a humbling moment.