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2024: Big Mac costs $11 and minimum wage is still $7.25
2025: Mid Mac costs $12.50 and minimum wage is repealed
Dr Manhattan meme
Great news, everyone! 2025 came early: Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands
But if they’d raised min wage to $15, big macs would cost $30! There’s just no possible way to improve things (unless you’re already a member of the bourgeoisie, of course).
What if we made all wages zero and also all prices zero
Nah, we just need to remove all those pesky “regulations” impeding the free market. Once we so that, the invisible hand of the market will pummel the price of the big mac into the ground
That’s too many bowel movements you should see a doctor
back in my day we took 48 shits a day, on the clock
That poor clock
Gotta respect the aiming
A joke that would make Terry Pratchett proud
Read Value, Price and Profit
yeah, its a fantastic dunk on citizen weston. also one of the texts that early on convinced me of socialism
Reminds me of my friend who’s getting a business degree showing me some of her lectures. Dunno the English terminology for it but it was something along the lines of “Customers will spend a certain percentage of their income on different needs/desires (food, rent, leisure etc) that scales linearly with their income”, down to assigning percentages to individual food items.
It took me like 30 seconds before I realized how completely insane and obvious nonsense that statement was. Someone who makes 500k a year obviously doesn’t spend 10x as much on eggs as someone who makes 50k. The sheer ideology in these presentation slides was genuinely shocking. Complete lunacy.
tl;dr business majors aren’t people.
Wasn’t there a twitter thing with rich people budgeting for like gallons and gallons of milk for every day and wondering why they weren’t any better off after a pay rise? If you’re going to get a job charging commission to people who didn’t need intelligence to earn their wealth, maybe this business degree lark has it’s uses.
If you want to learn bourgeois economics, become conservative. If you want to understand bourgeois economics, read Marx. – Rogan Renald
Business schools are fake schools, and a business degree is a fake degree.
I’ll never forget randomly picking a business law class as an elective in college and on the very first day of that the professor bragged about being a right wing talk radio host, stated that if anyone ever left the classroom for any reason during class they would immediately be dropped from the course, and went on an unhinged rant about how the Duke Lacrosse case was a Democrat conspiracy against white people.
I dropped the class and took chemistry instead, where I got a professor who looked like a cross between Danny Devito and Wallace Shawn and who showed videos of him setting off crude bombs in the woods as part of his lessons on “exothermic reactions”.
I went by the farmers’ market the other day and a stall had duck eggs for $8-10 a dozen. Buying 36-packs from Walmart is maybe about $1 a dozen. I don’t see it going much lower than that, or higher than $20, though.
For a while now I’ve been fairly convinced that everyday expenditures scale logarithmically with income. The increase is pretty smooth, and tapers off pretty smoothly too.
The reality’s even worse. Big Mac shrank in size compared to before.
This argument that higher wages = higher prices was discredited at length by Karl Marx in his pamphlet Value, Price and Profit
Don’t worry, liberals will continue to “debunk” Marxism without ever reading any theory.
“I went to the store therefore I am capitalistism 101” - some lib dumbass
It would be more damming if the 1980 figures were adjusted for inflation. Especially the minimum wage.
Since we’re directly comparing the price of a product over time, aren’t we already taking inflation into account? Like this is a direct depiction of inflation and the fact that minimum wage hasn’t kept up.
I think Red_Sunshine is referring to both compared to the CPI. Since 1980 the CPI has risen 355%, while the minimum wage has risen 233% and the big mac has risen 1600%. So the price of a big mac has outpaced CPI by a factor of nearly 5 while wages have underpaced by factor 0.66.
For visual learners:
Damn, I would have expected it to be something that stuck close to the average inflation of all consumer products (CPI, I guess). Like that graph would be completely expected if we were talking about housing, but not a burger.
What’s a product that has stuck close to CPI?
Does it show monopoly pricing, as well, maybe?
Yeah campbell tomato soup index is my favorite inflation measure. According to it, the dollar has lost 10x it’s value since 1971.
but it doesn’t really factor in campbell becoming more greedy over time
According to it, the dollar has lost 10x it’s value since 1971.
so it’s literally in the negatives? Didn’t know things were that bad…
I think it hits harder if it’s in “units you can relate to on a visceral level”
I think “big macs per hour” is probably the most viscerally relatable metric for the average American
$11.85/hr
$1.85/bm
The prevailing minimum wage at a job I started a few years ago was well under that.
Yup. And that’s not even accounting for disproportionate inflation in the necessity basket. Just market inflation.
I guess the cost of food being so insanely inflated shows up in this comparison, but housing and loan/consumer credit isn’t
$3.10 in 1980 would be the equivalent of 11.40 or so in 2023 and a .50 Big Mac would be about 1.50.
I don’t understand how we got here. It just seems crazy now, how could things ever have been so cheap. Can we ever go back? I don’t know, it is like this or worse in every country I visit.
90% tax on the top percentile does a lot of good for society
I don’t understand how we got here.
cant tell if trolling
rich people bribe politicians to lower the richtax. repeat for 50 years
BOSNIA
Can we ever go back?
Oh my yes with this one weird trick. Billionaires hate me!
But go back to what? Marx warns that this is a process that constantly and continually centralize and consolidates capital into the hands of a few. A large part of socialism is to change these dynamics qualitatively so the centralization of power isn’t for the benefit of the very few.
Removed by mod
I, too, love to generalize the reigning ideology, an artifact of an extremely recently developed system that has existed for only an incredibly brief period in human history as if it were something intrinsic to nature
Human nature arguments boil down to the fact that the ruling ideology of society is shaped by the base economic relations. In other words, we perceive it as “natural” to work for monetary incentives because that’s pretty much the only choice we have right now. It seems “natural” that there should be hierarchy because we have them at our jobs, in our democracy, in the home thanks to patriarchal family relations, etc. Humans seem greedy “by nature” because without money, we starve or can’t pay for shelter, so it is in our interest to try to accumulate money in under the current economical setup. Capitalism literally compels capitalists to behave in a way that can be perceived as greedy, because if they don’t, their competitor will and then they will be gobbled up or put out of business. It’s the system that makes these things seem natural or essential.
To attribute contemporary human behavior to “human nature” without looking at history and without considering the effects of the environment and social relations that necessarily shape human behavior is simplistic and unscientific, and it is usually an excuse made by the politically faint of heart or those who benefit from the current economic system.
The Big Mac is already so overpriced that I’d rather just order a burger from a pub. Even if it’s at a workday, I can just call/Doordash the pub and go pick it up in a few minutes. Let McDonald’s bring that price up and force them to do something interesting to remain profitable.
If we raise wages, we’re screwed. If we don’t raise wages, we’re screwed.
Wow, it’s almost like this system is designed to screw you over no matter what.
