Yeah, that's kind of how this country markets itself. Being able to afford a home and a family on a regular worker's pay is literally part of "The American Dream."
They've done great. We lived in a rural area. It was possible because one of them came highly skilled and solicited to immigrate.
That being said I shudder when I hear "just move to rural blah blah blah". My life was horrible there. I was considered black, egytian, non-english speaking, to come from a family of savages or royalty or witchcraft depending on the speaker.
This whole "move to a rural place" really doesn't seem open to the non-white growing majority. Its certainly nothing like the Californian life I live now where I still cannot afford a home but can enjoy Mexican, Indian, Ethiopian, Korean, and american culture in a form of acceptance that was fully closed to me growing up.
[0] A lot of recent discussion centers on how many of the most successful US entrepreneurs come from privileged backgrounds, but you should not lose sight of the fact that literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard. Many things are broken in the US, but no other place on Earth has lower barriers to starting your own LLC and hiring your first employee.
US is 27th place on economic mobility index soooo....
It was a lot easier doing business in the UK. We had relatively low accounting overhead, the laws were not hard to follow, and we didn't have to deal with having employees and customers sprinkled over a dozen state jurisdictions.
We're fortunate to work in a growing and lucrative market, but it's not all peaches and cream.
So, yes, doing your own corporate taxes in the US is likely not a good idea, especially if you hire people across several states. But the cost of an accountant is a minuscule cost compared to paying X% more across your entire payroll (not to mention other aspects).
The heroic labor of immigrants notwithstanding, I strongly doubt that would be possible for a fresh-off-the-boater today. I told my 20-something kids about it and they just laughed, like hearing about someone who stumbled across a pot of gold or a magic goose in a fairytale. I can't say I blame them.
Seeing it as being guaranteed a home and family on an average workers pay is completely detached from that narrative.
> It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.
> By business I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
And that had an inflation adjusted earning potential of $4.81/hr (approx, in 2021)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
If you think working and living conditions are worse now than they were in 1933, I'd love some concrete examples.
I'm not saying things couldn't be better. I'm saying that most people talking about this seem to be completely devoid of context about life at all, and most proposed solutions just come across as strong arguments that they have no clue about the world at all, or why anything is the way it is.
Which is a solid vote in the column of 'changes proposed won't accomplish the stated goals, and will cause way more problems'. In my experience, anyway.
In my experience one of the biggest issues is that no one reports companies doing shitty things, and the labor orgs in the gov'ts get away with ignoring shitty things, because no one holds any politicians accountable on labor issues because most of the population is super complacent about everything.
Hell, Amazon and a number of other companies are super blatant about their ACTIVELY ILLEGAL ANTI-LABOR ORGANIZING, and not a peep seems to be coming from the appropriate labor departments.
And since everyone is super complacent (barely any protests even), then of course nobody cares. Because nobody is making them care.
If everyone really feels so badly about it, make it known by making them feel badly about it. Instead everyone seems to go back to candy crush after posting complaints online about how terrible things are.
We all work on or adjacent to embedded software for robots to replace people in these jobs so that they can go on to be 'free' to have a higher skill job doing....no one ever seems to know what. Except maintaining said robots.
I literally never worked for a company with an onboarding or training process until I got to a FAANG. At that point I had been in industry full time for ~ 13 years, and worked at everything from startups to established 200+ employee companies.
Everyone has been worried about 'automation' nuking the jobs since I was born, and outsourcing killing all industry too. First it was Japan that was going to own the world though. Then Outsourcing to India. Then China. And they had impacts. But somehow, everyone who is useful keeps working, and everyone actually seems better off. Hell, the 'maintain the robots as the only jobs left' was a 90's thing with worries about car manufacturing automation.
Back then, a lot of jobs were things like secretaries, gophers (task runners)/delivery workers, retail shopping workers, postal workers, etc. Now people use email and write their own documents, uber or ubereats what they want, have things shipped to their door. Quality of life is dramatically higher in every objective way I can see.
And if anything, there are waaaaay more jobs now, and people seem to be doing better everywhere. But they seem to hate everything and everyone way more, and FEEL poorer.
Capitalists gonna capitalist.
But they are limited to differing degrees due to policy. Our current state isn't inevitable.
Generally, It’s a means of locking in stasis in a particular field in general, or restricting competition to the ‘have’s’, just like the old Guild setup before that. Still very much a thing for MD’s in the US.
There is a reason why France in particular is notorious for not getting anything done.
German’s do it too of course, but in their own way which is focused more on results, so it tends to be less sclerotic and more productive.
It’s always a trade off - more protectionism, or more churn/chaos/competition. If they can provide good labor protections while maintaining economic growth enough to ‘lift the tide’ overall, hard to fault them. It’s easy to go so far that it strangles the economy and locks everyone into a pointlessly inefficient setup in favor of the protected classes though. (And they won’t necessarily be rich protected classes either).
Europe’s tide hasn’t been rising very rapidly for awhile, and many EU countries are clearly insolvent overall (Greece, Italy, etc), so we’ll see how long they can sustain it.
And housing wise - to be somewhat on topic - very unlikely those Nurses in the UK are doing so in London.
The American Dream is typically "come to the US with nothing and build a comfortable life, no matter who you are". I still think that's possible. Guaranteed? Of course not.
The American dream was effectively denied to my generation and it's only gotten worse for subsequent generations.