Since the Great Recession struck several years ago, nearly a quarter of Americans have been laid off themselves, and another 50% of Americans have seen a friend or family member lose their job. Each week, we bring you true stories of unemployment, straight from the unemployed. This is what's happening out there.
"Retirement," an ancient and outmoded system in which elderly people were able to stop working without starving to death, is little more than a faint dream of bygone days in modern America. Still, many of our readers harbor secret hopes of one day being able to retire in comfort. As a service to those readers, we bring you the very latest updates on why that will never, ever happen.
The national book store chain Borders folded in 2011, leaving Barnes & Noble as the undisputed king of Big Huge Chain Bookstores. In that specific industry, B&N has had no competition for the past year and a half. Yet they are preparing to downsize anyhow. The Big Huge Chain Bookstore golden era has passed.
The "American Dream," which is dead, is to work a steady job for four decades or so, buy a house, watch some football, make some pineapple upside-down cake, and then retire at age 65 with a little pension to enjoy your useless time before death. Every single part of that setup is now crumbling to pieces.
Get a load of this one, the big joke of the day: students entering our nation's four-year colleges actually expect to graduate, from those colleges, in four years. I know. What?? Somebody give these kids some education!
A hedge funder is making noise about bringing down the salaries of executives at Morgan Stanley. Good. The government sure hasn't been successful at holding down corporate executive salaries, so maybe the market should work its magic—let hedge funds squeeze a few extra percentage points of profit in return for holding down the paychecks of the bosses of the banks they invest in. A worthwhile deal for the public. And a vindication of capitalism's mythical self-regulatory powers!
A new Pew report out today confirms that, yes, having a college degree does have some benefit: young people with college degrees did much better during the recent recession than their peers without college degrees. (One would hope!) Expect your local college to immediately begin leafletting the town with this report, as a marketing effort.
We live in a world in which wealth is distributed in a wildly unequal way. A tiny few have billions of dollars, while many more have nothing. Though the reactions to this persistent and growing state of inequality span the ideological spectrum, it's fair to say that most people consider it a problem. For the very wealthy—and their sympathizers—extensive philanthropy is often held up as their personal nod to the world's unfairness. These generous philanthropists are considered to be the good ones.
If you're living somewhere nice right now, chances are that you're paying more than the quadruple-digit average national rent, and that your rent is going up, fast. If you have a reasonable, three-digit rent and a landlord who doesn't try to squeeze you dry with every lease renewal, chances are you live in a shithole. You just can't win in today's America.
Will 2013 be the year when the student debt bubble pops, raining havoc down upon us all in the form of economic destruction? Eh, who knows. What we do know is that college prices, which have been shooting skyward for many years as institutions reaped every last dollar they could from the public's hope and ignorance, are now slowly—ever so slowly—calming down.
The Great Recession of the past several years took many things from America: our jobs. Our financial resources. Our pride. But as the economy returns to its former glory, we now face a new peril: our national supply of mansions is getting dangerously low.
Ever since the New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1792 amid the horse poop and scurvy of lower Manhattan, Ye Olde Stocke Prognosticationists have stood ready to predict how stocks would to in each upcoming year, in order to make YOU wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. And now, 220 years later, it is still not any more possible to predict the future of the stock market than it was then.
Mighty timely New York Times story this morning about colleges, institutions created to set bright young people on a course of lifetime penury. What with all the attention paid to the fact that students are drowning in debt due to student loans, we often overlook the financial situations of the schools themselves. How are they doing?
The official unemployment rate fell to 7.7% last month. But that number is misleading. The percentage of workers who are actually considered to be "participating" in the labor force is now hovering around a three-decade low. Persistent, extended, unrelenting unemployment is now a fact of life for millions of Americans. Every week, we bring you true stories of unemployment, from the unemployed themselves. This is what's happening out there.
Twinkie maker Hostess pissed off a lot of reasonable people by not only cutting worker pay while leaving the CEO's pay untouched, but also giving executives $1.75 million in bonuses at the same time they are liquidating the company and laying off 15,000 workers. That's some brazen shit. More enraging is how typical such behavior is.
As millions of Americans wait to find out whether their unemployment benefits will completely disappear at the end of the year, European unemployment reaches a record high. There are lots of unemployed people in the world today. Each week, we bring you true stories of unemployment from the unemployed themselves. This is what's happening out there.
