Still waiting for inflation to hit my effing salary.

I know it won't, because we're entering stagflation territory and unemployment is going to go up. COVID was a massive wealth transfer from the lower and (esp) middle class to the oligarchs.

I am hiring, and you look like a perfect fit for my team. Send me a message.

Have you asked for a raise?

People at my company have, in all-hands meetings. Is the company going to raise our salaries to compensate from the widely acknowledged inflation that's going on, given the company nets billions a year? No comment.

Stop thinking of yourself as a employee and start thinking yourself as a services vendor. They aren't going to raise your rates of their own accord, you need to go out and generate leads for that to happen.

In a high inflation environment you may find yourself in a position where you have to shift more resources to sales rather than operations. Your current situation with it's pre-inflation salary might just not meet your business goals. Just like they may choose to spend additional income from inflation adjustments on things other than your salary, you can choose how much time you devote to things that are important to you depending on how they reward you.

Fuck that.

Stop thinking of yourself as an individual employee and start thinking of yourself as a member of a union. Then actually form that union.

You don't get across-the-board raises by "generating leads". You get them by collectively bargaining.

And I reject entirely the notion that one should be only looking out for one's own gain.

I went from washing dishes to six figures my way. Has your way done well for you thus far?

Moving to a union environment has left me working fewer hours, getting better benefits, and more than doubling my salary. I'm glad things worked out for you [presumably in what is currently one of the hottest occupations], but a union has been a boon to my total compensation.

The whole point is this isn't about you. This is about all of us.

We live in a society, and we damn well need to start acting like it again, rather than the proverbial crabs in a bucket, desperately stepping on each other to try to get ourselves higher.

What union are you in?

Companies rarely increase wages of existing employees commensurate with inflation. You get the appropriate inflation-adjusted increase only when you switch jobs. It is the one bit of leverage you have as an employee - I would suggest using it. Complaining to management feels good but gets you nowhere.

They used to. Some do, I hear.

My parent made a living working for the same employer. My SO's parent made a living working for the same employer. Somehow, not canning the entire staff every two years worked for their generation.

Meanwhile, I work for tech companies where hardly anyone knows anything because nobody has any experience because the entire workforce has to turn over every two years just to try to recoup what inflation has devalued their salary to?

You direct supervisor likely will even sympathize, but these decisions are made in most companies by people who don't even know your name.

Companies aren't going to do sweeping COL raises voluntarily. You should directly ask your manager, they most likely have the flexibility to make it happen.

Rehire for the same position.

Hiring budget is 3x bigger than rises budget.

Dont ask me whose retarded idea is that.

It was Mark's idea.

Who's Mark?

Oh, he worked here three years ago.

The company I work for is directly (negatively) impacted by rising rates, so I don't expect they'd be amenable to granting raises at the moment.

> because we're entering stagflation territory and unemployment is going to go up

Citation needed. Unemployment is at 3.6% and the population on UE insurance is below 1%, and we are adding 400k+ jobs/mo.

This of course can change, but as of right now, UE is not going up.

...and the lower classes hold a lot of debt, which under high inflation would start to vaporize. It would effectively transfer a lot of wealth from those who hold a lot of cash to those who don't.

Can't have that.

The lower classes hold a lot of debt? Can you source that? I would assume middle/upper class would hold most debt.

Middle/upper class hold a higher nominal value. Lower class tends to hold a higher debt level to their income, and it tends to be in high interest revolvers such as credit cards which are almost impossible to pay off if all you can afford is to make the bare minimum monthly payment.

The upper/middle classes hold more debt overall, but it's debt that's much easier to shed - mortgages. You can just walk away from that mortgage at any time. The lower classes are saddled with medical debt, credit card debt, and student loans which aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy.

The middle class is the largest holder of student loan debt.

Poor people either don't go to college, or go to a cheap community college, or get scholarships/financial aid.

Very rich families just pay for college without taking out student loans.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/10/09/who-owes-...

> The highest-income 40 percent of households (those with incomes above $74,000) owe almost 60 percent of the outstanding education debt and make almost three-quarters of the payments. The lowest-income 40 percent of households hold just under 20 percent of the outstanding debt and make only 10 percent of the payments.

Also, medical and credit card debt can generally be discharged in bankruptcy. Student loan debt can't, but consider this from the same link:

> What may be more surprising, however, is the difference in payment burdens. A growing share of borrowers participate in income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, which do not require any payments from those whose incomes are too low and limit payments to an affordable share of income for others. And some borrowers are in forbearance or deferment because of financial hardships. As a result, out-of-pocket loan payments are concentrated among high-income households; few low-income households enrolled in IDR are required to make payments.

Exactly, who have the biggest mortgages?

Part of the picture - though this is by geography - https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/household...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/household... for a higher level set of charts.

If you look at it by state, you can draw a north south line from the western boundary of Texas to the western boundary of North Dakota. West of that line is debt; east of that line (until you hit the coast) its better.

Running it from 1999 to present is also kind of interesting.

The St. Louis Fed has a report on Income Distribution, Household Debt, and Aggregate Demand: A Critical Assessment1 https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed... - it is not light reading.

From part of the summary (on page 29):

> With respect to the long-term rise in household debt: This is a monetary phe- nomenon. Fundamentally, it is the result of higher interest rates and lower real income growth and inflation. On the other side of the equation, increasing income inequality has simply led to an increase in private consumption inequality. To the extent that consumption demand has been stronger than would be predicted by a Keynesian story of consumption propensities declining with income, the ex- planations appear to be a mix of increased luxury consumption by high-income households and and increased social spending classified as household consumption in the national accounts. Income inequality may indeed have contributed to weaker aggregate demand. But so may a number of other factors affecting desired consump- tion and investment, including: the progressive satiation of consumption demand; slowing population growth; increasing monopoly power; the shift from manufac- turing to less capital-intensive services; changes in the fraction of profits retained in the business sector; the trade deficit; and increased longevity of capital goods. The possible influences of all these factors, along with countervailing forces tending to raise aggregate demand, need to be investigated systematically we should not immediately focus on one possible story to the exclusion of the others.

Page 28 appears to have the line item you're after:

> Household debt is concentrated near the top of the income distribution; very little is owed by lower-income households.

Another chunk of data to work from: https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/demographics/

I don’t know anyone who has had their salaries keep pace with inflation. And I presume the lack of pay rises is the cause for all the industrial action I keep hearing about.

CEO pay has more than tracked inflation.

Real wages had been rising in the decade bevor COVID hit:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I’m talking post COVID when inflation started to kick in.

I think every possible "tanking the economy" scenario always hurts the poor the most.

That's a straightforward, non-cynical thing to say just like 'what comes up must come down.' People don't seem to think so.

Anyone with $1,000 has the resources to stop any (or several) of a large number of unfortunate circumstances that they may encounter. $10,000 even more so. $100,000 should be years of runway along the same lines. So it makes sense that when everyone is riding an economy downward, the people with the least cushion get hurt the worst.

Frankly the poor are always going to get hurt no matter what you do. Being poor isn’t a position of strength in the first place. When you’re living hand to mouth you are very sensitive to any changes in the environment.

I think unemployment hurts the poor the most because bosses fire the least productive people (untrained workers), even when those people spend a bigger portion of their salary on consumption and thereby generate demand for products to sell. A lot of the more "productive" people already have what they want and spend their money on acquiring capital which is kind of pointless if nobody is there to buy your products.

What good is a higher wage if inflation is worse.

Unfortunately it really depends on which side of inflation one is in. Wage increases still help in an inflationary environment if one has existing debt (i.e. a mortgage).

Furthermore, a lot of inflation is in housing itself, so if one already is a homeowner, then a significant amount of inflation is bypassed.

Reduces preexisting debt