While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work. Capitalism may need an unskilled class of workers to work, but paying them like crap is not necessary as we’ve seen here in the US and seemed to have forgotten over the generations.
> While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work
That was a temporary blip because the underclass had been temporarily exported to a bombed-out Europe that was unable to meet its production needs, giving the US a huge market and very little manufacturing competition. Then came the Nixon shock, stagflation, and Reagan.
>While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work
Black latino and asian people bought homes too you know. Thats what redlining was about: minorities and poor people were buying homes too close for comfort to the wealthy white people.
Literally the only thing every layman you're gonna ask knows about real estate is "location location location" which is exactly why redlining was harmful and has led to poverty that is measured in generations. Yes, racial minorities did buy homes (at a lesser rate than whites, and in worse places to buy homes) in redlined neighborhoods, with the added and so obvious it feels ridiculous I need to say it caveat that: the homes in redlined neighborhoods were worth substantially less, which not only meant they had a harder time being financed by colored applicants, and an easier one being financed by white ones for the purposes of rent extraction, but also meant even for the ones that did manage to buy, that the property was then worth substantially less when passed on to their children.
And, that's assuming that the neighborhood in question didn't get bulldozed for a freeway by Robert Moses or any of the dozens of urban planners that used eminent domain to rat fuck minority homeowners out of the meager scraps they had managed to acquire.
And, that's only racial minorities, that's not even going into women who thanks to being largely un-banked and the presumptions that finance was simply over their pretty little heads, and of course that their jobs were chronically underpaid if they even could get them, would be laughed out of a bank entirely if they tried to buy a home.
So like, was it ONLY white men buying homes? Nah. But it was predominantly white men buying all the homes you would actually want to buy and if you weren't a white man, you had an objectively, measurable harder time doing it.
I mean, that's just late stage capitalism. Growth is required, every revenue stream must have all slack taken out of it. Any money left in the market is inefficiency which capitalism inherently rewards those who can remove inefficiencies. A perfectly balanced market means that every exploitable dollar is, in fact, exploited, which means the poors can't have anything. Whatever money must be paid to them must be then recouped.
And if you think you're safe in the middle class, it was predicted that and would seem to be bearing out as correct that once capitalism has largely completed exploiting the underclass, it can't simply stop exploiting. The next class up becomes the underclass. Then the next. Then the next until we're all broke save for the rich on top, at which point the entire arrangement stalls, money stops flowing, and the system collapses into anarchy.
The project of neoliberalism is difficult to fully articulate, but a major component at least is the "taming" of capitalist economic systems so as to make them sustainable. This project succeeded for a good amount of time, but that was also predicated on having nations to exploit, and room to grow markets. As those things become less true the entire system seems less stable overall. I mean personally I've witnessed three "once in a lifetime" economic crashes so far, and we're looking to be winding up for another one with the incoming administration and their bonkers non-understanding of tariffs.
You forget that there is value in having moneyed consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more money than you could poor consumers. Arguably when you empower a doctors and lawyers class driving bmws and buying flights to aspen, they are spending proportionally more of their money in the economy than the billionaire class ahead of them that would have sat on this money if they extracted it by now and dumped it into gold bonds and land or something stupid like that instead of something that generates actual economic activity. And if you had them so poor they could barely afford food then there would be no BMW and no Aspen.
I don't disagree with you in the slightest, but I'm not in charge here, and our current batch of elites in power seem content to coast out the collapse, pocketing every dollar they can as the world crumbles around them. I don't personally think it's a good long term plan, and to be fair, numerous economists and even billionaires have come out saying that the world is not in a good way. But they still use their power to maintain the status quo and not foster badly needed change, so it's difficult to assess to what degree this is legitimate thought on their part, or simply saying what they know will sound good as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts of wealth.
The solutions here aren't arcane magic or anything: Money needs to leave the rich, and get to the working class to re-stabilize consumer habits. But since the Reagan era's slashing of all manner of corporate regulations, the system seems either incapable or unwilling to let that happen, no matter how much of an imminent threat it presents to that system. So we go on and circle the drain.
> as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts of wealth
It truly is, too.
I do appreciate the tropes of "It is the year 4,000 BC, and you are immortal, the pyramids are being built. You make $10,000 a day, tax-free, and spend none of it..."
But even that is hard to digest.
I'm in my mid-40s. If I tell my friends, "Someone gave you a million dollars a day, every single day since you've been born. And yet, there are multiple people out there with ten times more money than you," it becomes more digestible.
> You forget that there is value in having moneyed consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more money than you could poor consumers.
With increased financializarion and abstraction of tradable assets - the capital class no longer has to worry about "goods" or "customers" (in as much as they may be indicators of bad stocks with a dim future). Services are the future: as far as they are concerned, the amount of profits available in housing or healthcare may be infinite, of you need the chart to go up, increase the price of the cancer drugs in your portfolio.
Most countries have national healthcare systems which have pricing power over "cancer drugs". When those are expensive it's they're because genuinely very expensive to make, and increasingly they're personalized because every cancer is different.
