Congresswomen-elect Occasional-Cortex sent out this Tweet:
On top of paper napkins, diamond rings, & avocado toast-mortgage payments, Millennials are also Killing:
✅ Unpaid Internships
✅ Inaction on Climate Change
✅ Corporate Money in Politics
✅ Backroom tax rules to secretly hamstring progressive legislation https://t.co/3Rkcy4VAlF— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 13, 2018
Well, she’s partially right.
Millennials are killing paper napkins. This is only because we prefer to use paper towels. They are more versatile, absorbent, and cheaper. If dinner is fancy enough to warrant actual napkins, we’ll break out the cloth ones.
Millennials are killing the diamond industry. This is because paying three month’s salary for a shiny rock is stupid. I got my wife a plain gold ring and a down payment on a new car. If I only have so much money so spend, I will spend it wisely on more practical items.
The Avocado Toast Mortgage thing is the result of a meme that came about when an Australian developer told Millennials “When I was trying to buy my first home I wasn’t buying smashed avocados for 19 bucks and four coffees at $4 each,” implying that Millennials weren’t buying homes because they were wasting money on avocado toast. One article has the very accurate tagline “How the innocent avocado toast became a synonym for millennial excess.”
Personally I’m not sure if that is 100% accurate. Housing does cost more than in the past. Adjusted for inflation, the median house price has almost doubled between 1970 and 2000. I think a big part of the problem is the number of kids who go to college and piss away four years tuition to end up a socialist bartender.
Everything else she said is just wrong. Unpaid internships are up. The US is leading the world in emission reduction without signing the Paris Agreement. Google and Facebook filtering news and search results is an in-kind donation valued in billions. The only thing the Dems did with taxes is make it easier to increase them.
So I went down into the comments and damn.
First I saw this exchange.
That is financial advice that is so bad it should be criminal. If you are happy to not build equity because you love avocado toast that much, you should never have the right to vote.
Then there is this historically illiterate take on corporate taxes:
These people legitimately believe that the American economy of post WWII was the result of our corporate tax rate.
Not that most of the industrial nations of the world had been bombed flat, Soviet Communism and Maoism was depressing a quarter of the planet, central and south east Asia was just coming out of colonialism and was barely more than subsistence farming, and the US had a industry untouched by bombs and build off war time production.
Sure, we could could go back to 1950’s corporate tax rates and be successful… if we reduce all of our economic competitors to rubble through sustained bombing campaigns.
Also the 1973 recession was kicked off by the 1973 oil embargo, not cutting corporate tax rates.
No wonder they are socialists, if you really believe that economic performance goes up as corporate tax rates go up, than the strongest economy possible is when you have a 100% corporate income tax.
Just some good ol’ fashioned anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism.
No wonder this woman got elected. Her supporters are just a fucking stupid as she is.
One of my pet peeves is the idea that raising the corporate tax rate is a “good thing.” Just who the f**k do they think pay the corporate income tax? Corporations view taxes a just another cost of production like raw materials building rent, utilities, and salaries. When taxes go up the price of goods and services goes up. When the cost of goods and services go up without a corresponding increase in value, the economy suffers. How hard is this to figure out?
Exactly the same thing I said to a would-be socialist recently. Since they had no answer to that question, they mumbled something like “agree to disagree” and “we shouldn’t talk politics because neither of us will change.” Well, I won’t change. Still hoping that the nascent socialist will wake up.
My standard reply is that we put more thought into the question than they ever have. A lot of Leftist see corporations as a necessary evil to be just tolerated- others want them gone entirely. They don’t understand how the market works, or corporations or finance- none of it. Instead, there’s a fluffy mush of feelgoodism and faith in the Inevitability of Scientific Socialism. If they can just smash the old Bourgeois restraints repressing the people, pure Communism will arise and make peace on Earth.
Historic examples of Marx’s failure makes about the same impression as a lecture on the evils of drugs do to a junkie in denial.
JKB,
Very good post and true. However, there is one aspect of this story that many of my counterparts are blissfully unaware of.
The USA spent literally Billions of dollars (1940’s dollars!) on science and technology, and these S&T advancements fueled the post-war boom for many years. And, with our largess, we rebuilt towns and factories worldwide, and gave the devastated countries a new lease on life — even our erstwhile enemies.
People younger than me, excluding history buffs, are not aware that in 1940, open-cockpit, wire-and-fabric biplanes were still in active combat roles in some places. By 1945, jet fighters were on the scene. Of course, most people are aware of the nuclear power inventions, but other inventions included miniaturized electronics, manufacturing process inventions, assembly-line efficiencies (Ford was making one new bomber every hour!), shipbuilding, farm equipment, etc., etc., and a lot of square miles of plant and equipment. All this made it much easier for the USA to make the conversion to peacetime manufacturing, using new processes, new materials, and existing plant and labor.
This does not even address the host of new inventions that came out of the war.
Any idiot socialist who says anything about taxing industry in the same breath as 1945-1970 is a complete moron. Just saying.
Years ago, one of the members of our ham radio club brought in a VHF radio he helped develop for communication by clandestine operators to send and receive messages from an overhead aircraft. It was just a little larger than than the hand-talkies in use in the 80s. Inside the box was a circuit board with miniature vacuum tubes (1/2″ long, 3/8″ in diameter). Until transistors killed the vacuum tube industry, the US was so far ahead in vacuum tube technology no one else even tried.
Nuke,
Great story. I’m sure to remember that.
In a related line, I had to explain to a recent college graduate what a vacuum tube does. So, I said that they were the forerunners to transistors, and they asked, “what’s a transistor?” So I had to explain just what exactly is a “computer chip”.
The reason the subject came up was because I mentioned that the Navy had used vacuum tubes in new proximity fuzes for 5″ shells for anti-aircraft guns. The fuzes had a tiny radar and tiny vacuum tubes and an on-demand battery, and could withstand 20,000 g’s of acceleration and 30,000 RPM. It was top secret and known as the “Variable Time” fuze, or VT fuze. We shot down a lot of planes over the Pacific with these types of shells from the common 5-inch Navy gun. The Army adapted them for 90mm artillery in 1944, and General Patton was very pleased with the results. The 90mm shells would explode before hitting the ground, with devastating effect.
The radar proximity fuze idea was brought to the US in 1940, from the UK, by the Tizard Mission.
After development and testing, the Army and Navy got Westinghouse and other companies under contract to manufacture the tubes. Industry ramped-up production and produced millions of these tubes during the war, with the final cost per unit only a tiny fraction of the original cost.
This was just one project from idea to mass production, which illustrates the topic at hand.
Rereading my post, I forgot to mention that the time frame for the radio was WWII and it was used by the OSS in occupied Europe. Same guy brought in some VT fuses (sans explosive). Man what neat stuff he worked on.
That’s awesome! Must have been a great ham radio club!
Arizona Repeater Association, Phoenix, mid 80s. Lots of Motorola folks doing really interesting things (including cell phone stuff). Shared what they could.
D.Fosdick: World War II? Oh, that’s ancient history, you know, kings and queens, knights, pyramids and dinosaurs. Science and technology are no more. Today, they are called STEM, which is an acronym for Socialist Taxes Endless Money.
Yeah, I remember dinosaurs roaming around when I was a kid. My hero was Alley Oop!
That thumbs down was supposed to be a click on thumbs up.
And I’ve yet to find any socialist who isn’t moron.
Some of them are otherwise intelligent but have been deluded, I suppose….
Many of them are stupid. Some of them are evil — Stalin and Mao are examples that come to mind.
Note, it was Democratic Party Icon JFK who proposed tax cuts.
Housing does cost more than in the past. Adjusted for inflation, the median house price has almost doubled between 1970 and 2000.
Does that include the fact that homes were smaller in 1970? It wasn’t uncommon to find a “starter home” that wasn’t much over 1000 square feet. Now, they’re twice that size. My place was built in 1980 and it was 1240, but the garage added another ~400 square feet. My kids first house is over 2500.
I need to double check it, but it costs more per square foot too, not just per house.
One reason is (SURPRISE!) taxes.
The local tax collector wants a flat amount for a new house. That tax for a small house is insane, that tax rolled into a larger house is invisible. Thus, houses got bigger to better hide the stupid high millage for “new construction.”
Another part of it, just like cars, is the things houses come with today.
A house in the 70’s was unlikely to come with central air. Try buying a home today that doesn’t come with it.
I rented a house built in the 70’s at one point, I barely had 2 outlets per room. My house built in 2008 has outlets everywhere. Zoning has also changed so that construction is made more complicated but the rate of electrical fires has decreased because of it.
We see the same thing with cars. I heard stories from back when my dad was in college about the $500 pickup truck. That was before seat belts, crumple zones, and air bags were mandatory, and powered locks, windows, and air conditioning was standard. Some changes were market driven, some were mandated by law. But the sheer amount of technology in cars today is a large part of why they are so expensive.
AOC’s followers don’t DO house ownership. That’s like being part of the Bourgeois, man. They’re more about funky, hip apartments in funky, hip parts of the city.
I am totally taking my mortgage holding ass down to the fruit stand and buying some avocados tomorrow, then putting them on toast made from fresh Italian bread.
Eating half well and getting a mortgage aren’t mutually exclusive.
Now imagine you’re a 20 something with a six figure student loan debt and a masters degree in the Semiotics of Trans-Post Feminist Intersectional Basket Weaving in Queer Literature. You don’t have a real job, as you have the habit of writing “F^%$& The Patriarchy!” on every space on every job application you have ever filled out.
Yeah I never understood that. As a single man in college with no debt to pay at the time, I was able to live off of about 12k a year covering all rent and bills, eating well (steak!), drinking well (top shelf bourbon!), And being able to budget for 2-3 large purchases a year in the $500 range.
And this is in CT next to a college where rents and living in general aren’t cheap!
Now with a mortgage and debt I still eat and drink well and fuck around with my money plenty…. Living above your means and not being able to budget is the problem many people have. Many also don’t really know what they want so they cannot effectively prioritize.
Oh I should also mention that 12k also included my tuition and education costs.
There are things you need to do to be smarter than the game you are playing when living on a fixed budget like that; borrow books form the library, make copies of the $40 use once lab manuals produced by the school, ask professors for old editions of text books (this saved me about $500 one year), get digital editions when possible (I had 13 novels one semester and 10 were public domain, the other 3 cost about $20 total digitally), maintain and fix your own car, learn how to build/fix your own computer, etc etc.
I’ll admit, it takes a little luck not to get screwed by circumstance multiple times in a row, that certainly can break you (car breaks down, computer shits the bed, etc etc), but if you have a financial expenditure that breaks the budget that is what the credit card is for, save your ass temporarily.
I wouldn’t want to live like that forever, but my point is it is still possible.
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