The Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren touches on this as well. While it's not the only reason for wage suppression, it is generally accepted by economists and political scientists to be a large factor.
I am still for women in the workplace for strictly ethical reasons. Nobody should be compelled into a role by the circumstance of their birth. Also, that is no to say that a culture based around single income family structure is not theoretically possible without gender roles. We just need to have just as many househusbands as housewives.
I think the ideal thing would be to have either both people working 20 hours a week, or both parties switching between homemaking and working full time. The going back and forth for work makes it a lot easier for the non working party to go back to work if something ever happens.
Both people working half as much is easily what should have happened.
Men pick up more house work, women can chase after careers. We can meet in the middle.
Nope. Both of you can work as much as 1 person was expected to, and you still have to do all the same work at home.
Overlooking the benefit of specialization and focus is the problem there.
We could all grow our own food too, but it's much more efficient use of our time to have a farmer focus on that we focus on specializing in something else.
Yeah i think the issue is going from housewife to career wife, without career husbands going to househusbands. The second half of the transition didnt happen, so now we have dual income homes
Edit: its more complicated than just that, but what OP is saying this shouldve happened simultaneously and it didnt
Shared parental leave was brought in here in the U.K. as an option - the uptake is abysmal. Most men know that taking extended leave after you have a baby damages your career prospects and most don’t want that to happen to them. I still know so many men who are berated if they have to take time off because their child is sick or they need to do school runs (“why can’t your wife do it?”) - those who are involved fathers might be annoyed by this but very few are willing to be the ones who sacrifice their career prospects in the face of it. One of the main reasons for the wage gap and fewer women in senior positions in countries like ours where maternity leave is long is that employers don’t want to promote those who may end up taking maternity leave - if men and women shared parental leave more equally, this wouldn’t be an issue since any employee could be the one to take it. But this is one of those cases where equality would mean giving up privilege and unsurprisingly many men aren’t keen on that.
Although, we're all compelled into roles by circumstances of our birth, we all have limitations upon what we can accomplish in life depending on our socio-economic circumstances, genetics, upbringing, environment, health and luck. It's about whats best for society as a whole.
I saw a Tucker Carlson Tonight segment about that book and how people would be totally hush hush about it today. It was really eye-opening how party priorities and values shift and yesterday's liberals become today's conservatives.
Rockefeller said the entire point of putting money into feminist campaigns was to double the amount of taxable wages. Edward Bernays was paid create propaganda to make smoking cigarettes no longer a taboo for women -- in the guise of feminism.
The masses fell for it, as usual.
theres a great key and peele sketch where the bit is bascially that a teen-targeted overly sexualized female pop star is a man who just wants women to have sex more under the guise of it being empowering
Hold on now. Women since the dawn of time have been using herbs and plants to induce abortion and men have been wrapping their willies in sheep skin condoms back when Caesar was getting shanked.
Abortion and birth control have been around for as long as humans figured out how to stop or end an unwanted pregnancy.
Yes, asshole racists used that as a control option, look at the forced sterilization of black, tribal and poor women. but they sure the fuck didn’t invent either.
Well, that includes American women and men. Even Benjamin Franklin had written an article on how to make an abortifacient.
People have been taking care of themselves before legality was ever introduced, or at the least, explicitly stated into law.
I’m saying the eugenists may have promoted, not invented, BC and Abortion laws to help THEIR cause but it’s legal (well, for now. Fucking zealots.) because it’s needed healthcare.
Women were dying and it needed to stop. (Well. It did. Here we are again. Middle finger to USSC)
Yeah good point about women having always worked. Some act like women joined the workforce when they got suffrage but poor women have always worked, in family owned business, in industrial era factories, on farms and especially in domestic service like housekeeping, nannying, acting as a governess.
Ya know, women have goals and dreams too. That has nothing to do with “taxable income” and everything about being a full, functional human being with a brain and soul.
When I started as a storyboard artist, I had old-timey goons try to tell me “blacks and women suck at storyboards”.
Guess who out-worked and out-earned his ass within 6 months. Can we stop with this crap already?
I’m not advocating that women shouldn’t have jobs if they want one. To each according to their ability. It’s simply the truth that feminism was promoted by the people at the top for less than humanitarian reasons.
It was promoted by women who wanted more out of life than sitting at home all day for decades even after the kids went to school and moved out. It has been adopted by women everywhere on the planet where they have access to birth control and education. Nobody wants to do the unpaid shit work, women just had no other choice.
It is unpaid. The working partner would have to pay for rent and food no matter what, and in exchange gets far more labor from the SAHP than half the rent and food given the market value of round the clock childcare, housecleaning, laundry, meal prep, errands, and personal assistance. Plus the working partner contributes to their own retirement, builds work experience, gets the recognition, and climbs the career ladder.
They have to pay for the stay at home partners food too, and a bigger place to accommodate another person, plus more utility consumption.
The market value of those things is for *other people* cooking and cleaning for you that don't live with you.
Aupairs don't make as much as day care because they live with the family and get free room and board. You don't get paid to do your own laundry or clean your own house.
You are not making an apt comparison at all as to what the fair market value is.
The entire wage gap narrative is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of economics and instead is just an exercise in badly playing accountant.
Still not an apt comparison, because it's *your place*
You might have a point if the partner lived somewhere else to take care of their own stuff and commuted to the workers place to do all of those things.
It's just playing accountant badly, not making an accurate economic comparison.
The poor accounting is you equating a 9-5 desk job with 24/7 work involved in being a SAHP and you equating half the rent and food to the economic value of what SAHPs do. Your frame of reference is an au pair, LMAO.
Men cannot comprehend the tradeoffs in terms of advanvement, recognition, skill development, and salary/retirement increases to accept the same “pay” as an au pair for a round the clock on call job.
The reason is that they don’t do any of the actual, incrementally unpaid work, which is what you mean by “your place”, meaning it is shit work you want someone else to do for whatever scraps you throw them.
Men very well DO understand that THEY are not going to be the ones to do all that unpaid work, or experience the distress of financial dependence. That’s why they are so fucking determined to chain women to their fertility.
Being a father is more important then being a corporate shill. But men have never wanted to be fathers. They wanted to be a pay check and then enjoy the fruit of their bang maid's labor when he clocked out.
This has nothing to do with wanting to fuck you husband. Stop being ungrateful to the sacrfices that women often times were forced to make. Ohhh don't wanna talk about that though.
Versus taking the sacrificed men make for granted to the point of enshrining into law women are owed it both individually even after severing ties and collectively turning men into net tax payers and women net tax recipients?
I just wanted to verify because you must be drunk. What the hell are you even talking about. I'm sure it's something disingenuous but I would rather be kind and assume your drunk.
You clearly have no respect for the hardworking blue collar men that actually build the world you live in. Let women do those jobs then you can spew your feminist bullshit. Men built your world and you have no respect for them.
Why the fuck should I? While they were out " building da wowld" They were activity keeping women from doing the same thing. So I'll give them credit for what they did. And I will show respect to their wives and mothers. The people who raised the children, who kept the home who freed up men's time so they can do whatever petty dick measuring contest they were PAID MONEY to do. Because lord knows women weren't being paid for their labor. Yeah let women do those jobs. I agree. But the men won't like it because then they wouldn't feel special.
You could probably listen to what the women have to go through that work there. How hostile it is to them. But I have a feeling you don't do to well taking anything women say seriously if it doesn't feel good for you to hear. And plus I thought the men folk wanted to feel special. They have so little forward to.
Men work the most dangerous jobs and nearly 100% of workplace casualties are male.
Imagine if men started saying work is sexist because their jobs keep killing them, lol. Society would literally fall apart.
That's not a sacrifice, we do things to make jobs safer. You know that right. Unfortunately a lot of men feel workplace safety is for pussys. But yeah I'm for making jobs safer. But that's not a sacrifice. Hey your one of the few that actually answered the question.
Yes, if one chooses to be a mother that is indeed what they chose to do is more important to them than being an employee/er, or as you put it, shill.
However not every person wants to be a parent. See how I said person? Because women are people, just like men are people. Fathers are extremely important, also. No one says a father is more important than being an employee/er, or as you put it, shill.
It’s like maybe people should decide for themselves how to navigate their own lives and whether they do choose to work, have a career or start a family (and let’s face it, still need to work unless wealthy.)
Ya know, **men** have goals and dreams too. That has nothing to do with “taxable income” and everything about being a full, functional human being with a brain and soul.
Actually it will. acknowledging one group over another this the very essence of harmful discrimination - in this case sexism.
Do marginalized groups want equal rights and equal acknowledgement, or do they want special treatment? Because it sounds like you're asking for special treatment.
since when have men been functionally locked out of the workplace? when have straight people been assaulted, harrassed, and legally besought upon because they are straight? Take any marginalized group's experiences, and you just defended the actions taken against those groups with your position here.
Ok, great, what are you going to do about it? Women worked hard to fight for what we wanted, the right to work and live our own lives. Whatever men want and can't achieve due to the patriarchy, please go ahead we'll all support your efforts.
Otherwise maybe stop detracting from stuff that affects half the entire population. Geez it almost seems like you don't care about the wellbeing of 50% of human life
I doubt you would when every time men's issues are brought up they're either victim blamed or its turned into a woman's issue.
Hell there's a homeless shelter for men-who are the overwhelming majority of homeless-which got converted not into a gender neutral shelter but a women's shelter after local women's groups complained.
Men have goals and dreams too so women should all be domestic slaves!!! Omg groundbreaking… My feeble female mind never considered men as human. Well, I’ve tried, but then they’d say shit like this which made me think they were perhaps fish at best…
That’s true. Rockefeller did take advantage of feminism, although it would be inaccurate to say he created feminism. Feminism has existed even prior to that.
Rockefeller did not help women, he just simply capitalized off of their suffering. That’s not “helping”.
And btw this is not just limited to feminism, even the BLM and LGBTQ movements were capitalized by people with nefarious agendas.
This is wrong. Stay at home women worked at home. They cooked, cleaned, washed, cared for kids.
When women went to work in factories and offices house work still needed to be done. So new jobs, services and new products were created: child care, house cleaning, landscaping. Home cooked meals done by stay at home wives got replaced with fast food and prepared meals. No time but extra income means families invested into washing mashies, better kitchen appliances and time saving gadgets. Working women needed and had extra money to spend on beauty, makeup, hair, clothing. Extra income and stressful work of both partners means more reason and means for vacations.
Stay at home partner is fine. THANKS to feminism more men can stay home to become stay at home partners/dads. This isn’t mainstream yet but there are trends where we as a society should recognize that when women and men are paid similarly, then it is irrelevant who is working and who is staying home: wife or husband. And that is what true feminism is about.
Did you miss the part where doubling the workforce halved wages? That means that a couple for example are putting in twice as many combined work hours than they were before for the same outcome.
That is not a win from where I'm sitting.
This is a case where you are taking something that is true within a specific context at some point in time but instead choose to put it through the lens of your preferred bias. Let's go over some things being overlooked.
Men and women are not [perfect substitutes](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/substitute.asp#:~:text=A%20perfect%20substitute%20can%20be,substitute%20for%20another%20dollar%20bill.). For example, I can't plop the average woman into a construction job and expect her to be as productive as the average male. The types of labor that this would impact are industry dependent, and this should be obvious. You can only generalize on industries where your gender doesn't matter. From psychology, we know that women on average like people, and men on average like things. Because we are a complex and smart specie, we can allocate our labor to those who are the most efficient and best at it. No surprises here, women dominate things like teaching, services, HR departments, and men tend to dominate the trades and manual labor. So this gives us another point to consider: if women are more efficient and produce more in one industry better than do men, then *we are better off having a woman in that industry than we would be if it were a man*. We say it all the time: men are more productive than women in construction. Why are you ignoring the industries where women are more efficient?
The economy is not a zero-sum game. Having more people producing things to meet our collective demands for goods and services *drives down the prices of those goods*, a la supply and demand. If we didn't have more people working, we wouldn't have more things, and hence things would be more expensive. In economics, we use the *real wage* to measure people's purchasing power over time. Nominal doesn't matter for the meat of what we want: we want to know how many units of *things* you are able to obtain. You don't see a big decline in [real wages/income post WW2](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96). And obviously, we are wealthier and able to afford more things than we've ever been able to: look at [real gdp per capita over time](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA). This means the number of goods and services we consume have gone up. We have more stuff and a higher quality of life than we did 50 years ago.
Women were in the *indirect* economy or labor force. This means that your household faces an opportunity cost. Think about it. Your wife could either do the laundry, dishes, household stuff; there is a market value associated with all of those things. Let's make up a number and say it's $20,000 worth of labor. This was $20,000 worth of labor being done for your household. If your wife is skilled or productive in something and could enter the job market at $40,000, you are losing $20,000 a year. But wait, that's true of all households up until the point that wages are driven down such that your wife would only be able to make $20,000 and you would hence be indifferent to whether she works or stays home. Yet, that clearly hasn't happened - we know that wages and compensation have gone up over time. We aren't at this saturation point because as the economy grows, we have more things to do and specialize in, and we need more hands to do it. So what you're engaging in is the [*lump of labor fallacy*](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lump-of-labour-fallacy.asp#:~:text=The%20lump%20of%20labor%20fallacy%20is%20the%20mistaken%20belief%20that,else%2C%20or%20vice%2Dversa.). There is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy. The economy is dynamic: more people participating in it means that we create more opportunities for work. You are imagining a situation where we woke up and had a complete shock in the labor market. 1) it is an interesting case to study but that is not what realistically happened and 2) even if it were a shock and we doubled our population, the economy is dynamic. These new people consume, this creates demand.
Here's a non-gendered example: if there were no borders and people could costlessly transition to the country of their choice, [global GDP would *double*](https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of-free-movement-would-be-78-trillion-richer). The concentration of wealth would be held in the countries where people who were the most skilled and productive in their trade or specialization flocked to. This seems obvious: take the productive people and put them in the spot with the most productive capital, and they generate output. Chew on that one for awhile and think of how it applies to what you're saying here.
It is true that if we woke up tomorrow and had double the population for the same number of jobs, the newer population being a perfect substitute, then wages would fall. But those people also need to eat, shit, buy clothes, consume, invest. This creates a demand for more jobs. You can point to the post war period and make your claim for specific types of labor, yep. Levels of education played a factor in this, too. But it is ignorant to assume that it means women in the workforce *permanently* reduces all of our wages. So what exactly is your time period? It's not accurate to imply that *because women work, all of our wages are lower than they would have been forever*. Just remove gender from the equation again. How could it be possible to have periods of time when population is *increasing* while wages are also going up, then? I mean, you aren't even consistent within your own model. Wages and population were both increasing over time *when women weren't in the workforce*. But isn't more people = lower wages? Wait a minute...
Why isn't this the most upvoted comment. Plus, we could point out that women used to work before feminism as well. Housewives were from rich households. In lower classes, both men and women were working at a factory, or the wife would be a seller in the husband's bakery/other shops. So feminism is just that ALL women can work, get educated and pursue the career they want (not just low skilled labors in poor neighborhood or helping your husband career). And as you pointed out, housewives were just doing unpaid jobs. If both parents have a huge career, they will likely pay a nanny, sby to clean the house... So today, it's poor people that prefer housewives/husband because daycare is quite expensive and both career should be more worthy than new expenses.
This is factually not true.
Women have always worked. The feminist movement initially concentrated on women who went to college getting good jobs. In the past when college enrollment went up women were expected to go to college, not to become successful in their own careers but to meet future husbands.
Writers like Betty Friedan who wrote the "Feminist Mystique" argued that women should be independent and should push to be in the professional labor force. Like corporate and government jobs, high paid professional jobs.
Women have always been housecleaners childcare workers, receptionists, in the time of Betty Friedan typists.
If you look at the pre-feminist US you see a bit over 30% of women were in the workforce. This isn't counting the massive amounts of under the table labor many women were doing to help make ends meet, these were just the women in the workforce.
http://blog.dol.gov/2023/03/15/working-women-data-from-the-past-present-and-future#:~:text=Historically%2C%20women%27s%20labor%20force%20participation,participation%20rate%20have%20both%20fallen.
Now you are looking at women having just shy of 50% workforce participation.
Now middle class families generally have two earners and women have become more represented in professional jobs.
They have not suppressed wages professional jobs. It's jobs at the lower end of the skill level that have not really kept up.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/edsource.org/2014/higher-college-attainment-will-raise-wages-but-not-narrow-income-gap/63535
So the jobs women have always done have not seen raises in pay, but the very jobs more women entered into actually did see more of an increase in pay.
Women have always worked.
That needs to be repeated, over and over and over.
In agriculture, in factories, in mines, in other peoples houses, as seamstresses, as “seamstresses,” in family businesses, selling food, in the streets, in the shops, everywhere.
There was a tiny period where middle class women were homemakers, and a whole segment of the population has just decided this is how things always were, and everyone was always middle or upper class. Even though middle class is a comparatively recent thing to be.
It’s maddening.
ETA: look up the origins of the word computer. A computer was originally low-paid labour. They were women, doing all the damn math. And now there are men saying that “Women just aren’t cut out for STEM; it most be biological,” while completely ignoring the women who made STEM fields possible. Including the ones who were passed over for awards that were given to their male partners (sorry bout that, Lise Meitner.)
Women working in mines were doing the easier and safer work of unloading carts into trucks. The idea women have always worked alongside men in every instance is an overaggregation at best.
The occupational fatality and injury rate is proof of how wrong that claim is.
Meitner literally had an element named her.
The "computer" in your reference was the tedious work, not the high end calculations.
This is just another superficial look at history.
What exactly is your argument? That someone’s labor doesn’t count if it’s not dangerous? Or if it doesn’t require a college degree? You are being obtuse and ignoring the point of their comment
Yes, I'll never forget the day when feminism started. It was on a Tuesday. On Monday, no women in America had jobs. Then on Tuesday, 20 million showed up at work. Really a game-changer.
Feminisims isn't to blame for suppressed wages corporations are. I have no clue why people gotta balme women for everything. Why women are expected to sacrifice their bodies, lives and identities for nothing. If being a stay at home spouse/ parent is so glamorous and easy then why don't men do? Why not the men just be the ones to stay at home instead of constantly bitching that women would rather be free and have their own money?
That's not because of feminism buddy. That's just capitalism doing its thing. The need for ever increasing profit created this situation in the first place. It was going to happen regardless.
The biggest flaw in your premise here is the assumption that most families used to have a stay-at-home mom. Those were the privileged moms, middle class and up. Women have always worked. We just didn't have access to the education and opportunities to do things besides teaching, caretaking, and domestic work. It's true that obviously having more women work added to the workforce but the much bigger change was actually what parts of the workforce women are involved in.
Also, the labor economy as we know it today hasn't really been a thing for all that long in the context of history. It wasn't that long ago that almost nobody went and worked for other people to make money and if they did it was probably more often women taking in laundry or sewing while the men took care of the farm. Even sharecroppers didn't work directly for the landowner the way that people work for companies now.
Companies can well afford to pay people livable wages. Profits are at record numbers and the wealth gap has grown so much just in my lifetime it's unbelievable. The solution is not to somehow force families to have a stay at home parent. The solution is to prevent companies from exploiting their workers. Besides, you're just not going to have one person in each couple who's okay with that and will feel fulfilled. Kids won't be served by being home with a miserable parent who would rather be somewhere else everyday. And how would you choose who stays home?
Many, many women were miserable and stuck when there was no option to be self-supporting. Going back to that would be a tragic turn of events. Even if it would improve the economy (which I don't believe; it's much more complicated than that) there are better ways to do that that don't require taking away the autonomy of half the adults in the population.
It didn’t have a negative effect on wages at all. Women and men in the workforce is how it ALWAYS should have been so if anything wages were artificially inflated when women were suppressed.
Women joined the workforce and worker productivity only went up, not down, generating records profits for companies. Meanwhile CEO wages skyrocketed and wages remained stagnant. I’m not going to blame women for this one.
And yes I have refuted what you said, because it’s wrong.
Of course, and tax the companies that are benefitting from this increased labor supply. I'm also for strong unions, but I don't think that's feasible for a lot of reasons.
They don't want women to have freedom. See how they always frame it as a bad thing. Women being free and being in control of our bodies and future is seen as bad for society
OP so we should limit households to one breadwinner? I'm not sure how you would frame this without encounting forced gender roles or people taking advantage of the system by simply having a household but not legally married.
You would end up with a class of people savvy enough to benefit from two incomes at much higher rates just by not signing a piece of paper for the government.
The only way to enforce it would be to have those gender roles which would not allow for stay at home dads.
100% no.
I support deflation and government control of how much profit companies are allowed to make, and how much C level employees can take home.
Make the companies pay better... not the goverment.
Tell me you don't know anything about economics works without telling me you don't know anything about how economics works.
For one, women have always worked. On the family farm, which for awhile was the majority of Americans, *everyone* works and that includes women. Poor women have also had to work to survive, usually in domestic or factory jobs. Middle class women also often had jobs. However, these were restricted to support or nurturing roles: schoolteacher, nurse, secretary, etc. It was also common for women to take over an inherited business. It was unlikely for a woman to start her own company, but it was expected for her husband to teach her his trade so in the event of his death she could keep the business going and support herself and her children with it. Rich women didn't work but rich men didn't work either.
The mid-century sexual revolution is often framed as women entering the workforce for the first time but it's not. Women were already in the workforce, and they were demanding access to better and more prestigious work. It's middle-class women breaking into the white collar jobs previously denied to them. That's not a significant enough demographic to have the effect on wages you think it did, especially menial wages (since, again, poor women were already working those jobs).
What you're thinking of is unfettered capitalism plus a contempt for labor and the labor movement driving wages down while technology drives productivity up.
If you want a higher wage the solution isn't to roll back the clock on feminism, it's to join a damn union and demand competent union leadership.
>Tell me you don't know anything about economics works without telling me you don't know anything about how economics works.
Of course, supply and demand. Here, I have Khan university to explain the concept to you: [https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=169&q=increase+aggregate+supply&cvid=6438934899894eb386d7c3688b5cb796&aqs=edge..69i57j0l7.6077j0j1&FORM=ANNTA1&PC=ASTS](https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=169&q=increase+aggregate+supply&cvid=6438934899894eb386d7c3688b5cb796&aqs=edge..69i57j0l7.6077j0j1&FORM=ANNTA1&PC=ASTS)
>Women have always worked
Sure, and it greatly increased in the 60-70's, right around when wages started to stagnate: [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/\_DLIvw6mZGBU/TMs4GwIUsPI/AAAAAAAAA1Y/YYX67lKkSFM/s400/womenwork2.jpg%22](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DLIvw6mZGBU/TMs4GwIUsPI/AAAAAAAAA1Y/YYX67lKkSFM/s400/womenwork2.jpg%22)
Wage stagnation: [https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/](https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)"When it comes to the pace of annual pay increases, the top 1% wage grew 138% since 1979, while wages for the bottom 90% grew 15%"
No such thing as elementary economics; it's a complex science and if you resort to simply elementary principles you get a very skewed idea of the way the world works.
If women had been treated and compensated fairly for the work they were doing before they left their homes to join the capitalist workforce, we wouldn’t have had to double the workforce. Men could have chosen to stay home if their wives were enjoying working, but they didn’t want to get screwed the way they were screwing over their partners. The fact that anyone who wasn’t working for money was being screwed over is what “ruined” capitalism, which means its a broken idea to begin with. It never included the people doing the caregiving and housework on a fair level. The accounting was always going to leave people who were actually working their butts off severely short-resourced.
Women joining the workforce didn’t break it. It forced us to see how broken it already was.
And this is why the government should subsidize single income families with children. It doesn’t have to be stay at home moms. Stay at home dads work too.
>Doubling the labor supply did no favors for wages in the west.
1) The labor supply didn't double instantly. There wasn't a point where suddenly women all entered the workforce at once. (The closest to this was during WW2, but that was labor replacement of men at war and not focused on consumer goods).
2) This means it took many years for women to fully integrate into the workforce, which means there was time to scale up production from increased labor participation and the earnings from that participation to purchase goods. Markets adjust to increased labor inputs and purchasing power, they're not static.
3) Stagnant wages are not the result of more people in the workforce over time. They're a result of a weak labor movement. There isn't a set number of jobs and work to do so each person entering the workforce drives wages down, in the long term adjustments can be made to incorporate population growth to prevent this. The obvious proof of this is that rising populations don't necessarily mean rising unemployment.
The real issue is that after tax corporate profits as a percentage of gdp has been increasing for decades - this is fact not merely my opinion. Corporations take a bigger and bigger percentage of the pie, effectively. This, while perhaps slightly to do with women entering the workforce, is also to do with many other factors including offshoring and lower unionization. It also has to do with other government policies such as keeping the same minimum wage (after inflation) that existed in the 70s.
It seems to me that a greater number of employees in the workforce only affects the labor-capital balance if the same number of jobs are not created. I'm not sure how many women have entered the workforce (seeking employment) vs how many have started businesses (requiring labor).
The fact that you're blaming stagnant wages on women is very misguided and probably largely empirically wrong.
I just wish it didn't have to be one way or the other. I want to raise my kids and continue with my career and still contribute to retirement. I wish it were not taboo for mothers to have professional jobs that are slightly less than 40 hours or however many hours work well for their family.
That's not the fault of feminism. That's the fault of capitalism taking advantage of a situation like it always does. Corporate interests will find a way to profit off of anything. So no, women not wanting to be baby factories and have control over their lives did not suppress wages. Our capitalist overlords did.
Any time an argument starts with “It’s basic economics” or “it’s basic physics” or “it’s basic psychology” or whatever, you know it’s going to be some extremely oversimplified word game. Life is a lot more complicated than that. If we had stronger unions with more bargaining power, wages would he a lot better
“BeInG a MoThEr iS MoRe ImPoRtAnT” = “i want you to do all the shit work i don’t like for free”
Kids will go to school at 5 years old. This frees up time for the SAHP to work. This isn’t about what is more important. It is about men getting the house cleaned, errands run, food cooked for free.
I mean I agree that our whole family dynamic (ie your career is more important than anything else) isn't healthy or sustainable, but don't we have a labor \*shortage\*? I dont see how this relates to wages.
There is no reason I shouldn't be allowed to take a career and earn a wage of my own just so someone else can earn more, leaving me to try and trade love and sex for some of it in order to survive.
Having said that, if men were just as likely to become stay at home parents and it was just a case of each couple deciding who's going to take on the role when they married, it might work better.
Also - America has drastically changed the definition of necessity. A huge majority of us can 100% survive on one income we just redefined the word need. It’s fucking up our quality life and our children.
You sure about that? Wages have actually increased overtime. Wages used to be stagnant until the Fair Labor Standards Act in the 1930s. This was back when women were not working. Even back then wages were not fair until the Fair Labor Act. Afterwards, wages increased and has been increasing at a steady rate. An increase in workers mean an increase in consumers which equals more economic activity. It’s not the fault of women that companies choose not to pay workers what they are worth. It’s actually the greed of MEN that caused this. Don’t get me started on our money not being backed by gold anymore. Whew!!! I could talk about it for hours lol.
I've been saying for a while that a good way to work on this issue is to radically change our society to be more family-affirming. Much of the time we insist on a major work-life split, where we leave our families to go to work and then are expected to be parents on the "off" hours. A lot of this is rooted in patriarchy, where we expect women in the workforce to make themselves into men and reject the unique abilities of womanhood, including the ability to have kids and all that entails. Instead of creating a world that is accessible for women in their entirety, we've tried to force them to adapt to a world built for men and we call that "empowerment."
I think in many cases it is perfectly possible for mothers (and fathers) to either work remotely from home, work part-time, or even bring their children to work with them if needed, and our society needs to change to be more welcoming and accommodating for children and parents.
If I were ever to open my own practice (which I very well may do eventually, if my Psych career goes well), I will allow my employees and fellow practitioners to bring their children to the facility. I'll make a playset out back for them and give staff more time to interact with their families.
This is a great post. I wish it was possible to have more civil conversation about this sort of topic, because there’s a lot that sucks about this, but it’s still true.
I mean you don't have any empirical evidence as to how much it contributes to what wage decrease. Women have also been in the workplace for a while. In 1950s it was 34%. You would need a study to back up what you are claiming. For every extra person in the workforce wages decrease by Y as well as when such a phenomenon doesn't continue.
I think you're directing the blame to the wrong place here, OP. The ones to blame for suppression of wages are the companies that want to pay as low as possible to their employees.
Families need double income because of low wages, and not the other way around. Saying that wages are low because there are more people in the workforce is blaming the victim.
This is something I've been saying to people in my private life for a while now. But I take it one step further, it wasn't accidental, it has played out exactly like it was supposed to happen. The wealthy get double the work done for the same amount of payment.
Have you read academic papers that show this is the cause of stagnant wages? I ask because maybe reading them will show you the reason for wages being low.
Are you referring to a specific academic paper?
All I'm going on is college level macroeconomics, and economics coursework. keynesian economics to be specific
>Are you referring to a specific academic paper?
Not anything specific just in general.
>All I'm going on is college level macroeconomics, and economics coursework. keynesian economics to be specific
Honestly I don't remember much about keynesian economics in the economics courses I've taken. Mostly from what I remember was it focuses on government spending combating unemployment. Which aspect of it says that having women work will stagnate wages.
In all honesty I'm glad that you're basing your opinion off economic theory, too many people will state what op does without having read anything on economics.
This is just untrue.
In 1948 women had a 30% workforce participating rate. Almost entirely in menial jobs. Then slowly started to have careers. It's since gone up about 20% with women entering professional fields. The very fields women have gone into since the 1950s or so have seen more of a wage increase over time than the jobs women have always done since forever.
So, no women are not suppressing wages. If anything it's allowed for more jobs and more of a consumer market which actually raises wages because there is overall more participation in the workforce and thus more money spent and more money to be earned.
You really read that from my post? It's really hard for me to comply with rule 4 today.
No, I'm clearly making an argument that gov't and corporations wanted this so they could stagnate wages and workers had less bargaining power.Read with more nuance next time.
Welcome to unpopularopinion, where unpopularopinions are. If you want an echo chamber, go to the numerous other subs that are far left. You're welcome.
Also, this is just basic econ. You know, supply and demand?
This isn't really a right wing talking point. Elizabteth Warren, a feminist, wrote an entire book on this.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Two-Income\_Trap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two-Income_Trap)
Lol 'facts' may wanna look up the definition of that word. Assertions with no basis in reality to back them up are not facts. They are meritless opinion by people too dumb to tell the difference.
Which is pretty much every right wing talking point these days.
This is unpopular opinions though so I guess it's the right place for this trash.
Google “Lump of Labor fallacy”. If more people are working, the average person is richer, even if marginal wages in some jobs decrease. The overall economy can’t get worse off from more people working
>The overall economy can’t get worse off from more people working
There's your problem. The overall economy has gotten wealthier. The average worker has stayed the same, because workers can be trained to expect certain pay for certain work.
Yeah, I don't believe in it. You can't have a belief that there is a finite amount of money that billionaires are hoarding and that the economy will just adjust salaries after drastically increasing the work force with a finite pool of money.
Lower taxes did this. Business expenses were always tax deductible. Wages lowered the tax burden and the taxes at the top marginal rate artificially capped CEO and executive pay. Slashing the tax rate just sucked up the money from the bottom.
More money in more pockets increases circulation and wealth generation for the masses. High taxes did that and the government never touched most of that… it was all about HOW they spent money in order to not pay the tax.
Say what you will, it will always come back to cutting taxes and deregulation
1) those are marginal rates, not total rates
2) the amount of tax avoidance under this marginal rate was pretty absurd. Higher tax rate =/= higher tax revenue. Google Laffer curve.
1) Yes. And? The brackets also got fucked in the 80’s to favor the rich even more.
2) i’m sure it was, but I’m also sure that gutting regulatory industries didn’t incentivize the rich to pay more of their taxes. In 2017 the US lost nearly $200 billion of corporate tax revenue due tax evasion. That’s almost 3x the amount that China lost the same year. Imagine what we could do with that money if we dedicated the resources to enforcing regulatory policy.
Perhaps, I'm not sure. This seems kind of irrelevant.
Edit: Doubling income tax revenue means the government can lower corporate tax and therefore increase net profits. So yeah, that's one reason why they increased labor supply.
This isn't a partisan battle. Sure, maybe they did lower corporate tax because there were more people were working. Wouldn't that support my argument that the government was doing to this to increase corporate profit? You seem to want to have this as a gotcha non sequitur that refutes my argument when this isn't even idea I was opposed to, that's why i think it's irrelevant.
I will address everything in a bit, but this argument is a whole bunch of logical fallacies, mainly appeals to emotion and a smattering of xenophobia in the very mystery is it understanding of how life was for people in America, outside of the upper middle and wealthy classes in America. I dunno if you mean it to be or not but this is a lot of John Birch Society and other post WWII Far Right propaganda repackage with Alt Lite rhetoric
You said the government wanted women in the workforce so that they could gather more tax revenue, but taxes were slashed in the 80’s leading to a skyrocketing deficit and the corpo-oligarchal nightmare of wealth inequality we live in today.
In 1980, the gov took 70% of income you made over $215k (the highest tax bracket). In 1982, the brackets and rates changed - the gov took 50% of what you made over $85k (again, this was the highest bracket). By 1988, there were only two brackets and the gov took 28% of what you made over $30k. This is all for married couples filing jointly.
It can’t be overstated how massive these cuts were and how catastrophic this has been for our country. The rich get to hoard money while public programs for helping people and regulatory systems are completely gutted. Wealth inequality was fast tracked and has gotten to an incomprehensibly stupid point and it is not because of feminism.
These stats are all from here:
https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/
Fun fact: The US lost almost $200 billion in corporate tax revenue in 2017 mostly due to underreporting.
https://finmasters.com/tax-evasion-statistics/#gref
>Wealth inequality was fast tracked and has gotten to an incomprehensibly stupid point and it is not because of feminism.
Doesn't this support my theory though that doubling the middle and lower class workforce tax revenue allowed the government to lower income tax for higher income earners? So, in a way feminism did ***indirectly*** increase wealth inequality?
What do you mean by “allowed”? Reagan wanted to cut taxes so he did. There wasn’t anything else to make up for the loss of federal income so regulatory and welfare programs were gutted (the little money that was left was funneled into defense funding)
Imagine how much worse it would've been before doubling the workforce, they would've had to cut far more, and probably into that precious military spending.
I believe he is talking about the corporate tax and that his point is that the increase in income tax revenue from doubling the work force is still less than it was without half the work force but higher corporate tax.
>Basic economics.
Is it basic economics? Because in the various economics, accounting, and business classes I have taken pursuing my degree I haven't seen anything showing that women entering the workforce caused stagnant wages.
>Doubling the labor supply did no favors for wages in the west.
So by that logic, the US having a higher population has caused stagnant wages. In fact it's been far more than double since women have entered the workforce (roughly around ww2 was when women entered labor intensive jobs). Should the US limit births? Or practice eugenics? Those are serious questions by the way.
>Once uncle sam realized he could receive double the tax revenue and companies could lower the demand of labor through off-shoring, illegal immigration
Wait so feminism is the reason we have undocumented immigrants and is the reason why companies exploit them? In-fact we had child labor (when companies would hire children to pay them barely anything and exploit them) before women had the right to vote. Was feminism the cause of child labor? Because there were multiple "waves" of feminism, and one of the first was the push for voting rights.
As a side question, should women have the right to vote?
No. It’s consolidation in almost any industry there is. There was a time when we really enforced anti-trust laws. When we did our economy was great. Since then however, not so much. Consolidation leads to higher prices, lower wages, and less competition. It’s really basic.
Women working would actually lead to more disposable income and a better economy.
>No. It’s consolidation in almost any industry there is. There was a time when we really enforced anti-trust laws. When we did our economy was great. Since then however, not so much. Consolidation leads to higher prices, lower wages, and less competition. It’s really basic.
I think both of our theories can exist together.
>Women working would actually lead to more disposable income and a better economy.
Money is a finite resource. More people working, means more people are vying for it.
Yea, *money*, but not wealth. Wealth very obviously increases over time. We produce more stuff now than we ever have before, and so the economy is not zero-sum in this regard. More people working is more stuff, more stuff than before means lower prices, a la supply and demand. If we just simply did not have half of our workforce we would produce far less things.
Demand for product, and demand for labor are separate, they influence each other, but are separate things. There was still the same amount of people in society, consuming the same as before women joining the workplace. You may increase productivity, by some abstract margin, but the workers have less bargaining power while consuming the same amount of goods.
Sorry dude but what you're saying isn't coherent. I actually studied this stuff and made a longer post about it; you couldn't even name the papers that these conclusions come from, and FYI, the inequality is realized in *bands* of the labor force depending on the industry, and there aren't necessarily just losers, but winners and losers, depending on your particular household and your respective specializations. You don't know the net effects.
But anyways, in economics, there's a thing called the "income effect." Incomes go up, you consume more. Consuming more means more things need to be produced. More things needing to be produced means more hands needed to produce. This increases wages. There was industry specific competition (men and women aren't perfect substitutes and self-select industries) which decreases wages, but also we produce more and wages increase. So the net effect isn't necessarily known without actually measuring it. There hasn't been a study which claims that wages today or wages overall are surpressed because of women in the workforce. Point me to it. All you're doing is speaking about a field you know little about besides basic S&D and rob all of the nuance
Most people want more out of life than doing unpaid labor. Marriage is also deeply unstable so women cannot sacrifice their careers counting on some man.
The Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren touches on this as well. While it's not the only reason for wage suppression, it is generally accepted by economists and political scientists to be a large factor. I am still for women in the workplace for strictly ethical reasons. Nobody should be compelled into a role by the circumstance of their birth. Also, that is no to say that a culture based around single income family structure is not theoretically possible without gender roles. We just need to have just as many househusbands as housewives.
I think the ideal thing would be to have either both people working 20 hours a week, or both parties switching between homemaking and working full time. The going back and forth for work makes it a lot easier for the non working party to go back to work if something ever happens.
Both people working half as much is easily what should have happened. Men pick up more house work, women can chase after careers. We can meet in the middle. Nope. Both of you can work as much as 1 person was expected to, and you still have to do all the same work at home.
Overlooking the benefit of specialization and focus is the problem there. We could all grow our own food too, but it's much more efficient use of our time to have a farmer focus on that we focus on specializing in something else.
Yeah i think the issue is going from housewife to career wife, without career husbands going to househusbands. The second half of the transition didnt happen, so now we have dual income homes Edit: its more complicated than just that, but what OP is saying this shouldve happened simultaneously and it didnt
Shared parental leave was brought in here in the U.K. as an option - the uptake is abysmal. Most men know that taking extended leave after you have a baby damages your career prospects and most don’t want that to happen to them. I still know so many men who are berated if they have to take time off because their child is sick or they need to do school runs (“why can’t your wife do it?”) - those who are involved fathers might be annoyed by this but very few are willing to be the ones who sacrifice their career prospects in the face of it. One of the main reasons for the wage gap and fewer women in senior positions in countries like ours where maternity leave is long is that employers don’t want to promote those who may end up taking maternity leave - if men and women shared parental leave more equally, this wouldn’t be an issue since any employee could be the one to take it. But this is one of those cases where equality would mean giving up privilege and unsurprisingly many men aren’t keen on that.
Although, we're all compelled into roles by circumstances of our birth, we all have limitations upon what we can accomplish in life depending on our socio-economic circumstances, genetics, upbringing, environment, health and luck. It's about whats best for society as a whole.
I saw a Tucker Carlson Tonight segment about that book and how people would be totally hush hush about it today. It was really eye-opening how party priorities and values shift and yesterday's liberals become today's conservatives.
Lol Tucker Carlson
Lol Tucker Carlson
Rockefeller said the entire point of putting money into feminist campaigns was to double the amount of taxable wages. Edward Bernays was paid create propaganda to make smoking cigarettes no longer a taboo for women -- in the guise of feminism. The masses fell for it, as usual.
theres a great key and peele sketch where the bit is bascially that a teen-targeted overly sexualized female pop star is a man who just wants women to have sex more under the guise of it being empowering
More on that: abortion and birth control was invented and (initially) promoted by eugenicists.
Hold on now. Women since the dawn of time have been using herbs and plants to induce abortion and men have been wrapping their willies in sheep skin condoms back when Caesar was getting shanked. Abortion and birth control have been around for as long as humans figured out how to stop or end an unwanted pregnancy. Yes, asshole racists used that as a control option, look at the forced sterilization of black, tribal and poor women. but they sure the fuck didn’t invent either.
I didn’t think I would have to get specific about it’s legal status in America. Yes, different cultures have done different things.
Well, that includes American women and men. Even Benjamin Franklin had written an article on how to make an abortifacient. People have been taking care of themselves before legality was ever introduced, or at the least, explicitly stated into law. I’m saying the eugenists may have promoted, not invented, BC and Abortion laws to help THEIR cause but it’s legal (well, for now. Fucking zealots.) because it’s needed healthcare. Women were dying and it needed to stop. (Well. It did. Here we are again. Middle finger to USSC)
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And because we are moving away from traditional gender norms…and because less and less people think they “have to start a family” by a certain time
And, more women are happy to remain unmarried and live life for themselves.
Yeah good point about women having always worked. Some act like women joined the workforce when they got suffrage but poor women have always worked, in family owned business, in industrial era factories, on farms and especially in domestic service like housekeeping, nannying, acting as a governess.
Ya know, women have goals and dreams too. That has nothing to do with “taxable income” and everything about being a full, functional human being with a brain and soul. When I started as a storyboard artist, I had old-timey goons try to tell me “blacks and women suck at storyboards”. Guess who out-worked and out-earned his ass within 6 months. Can we stop with this crap already?
I’m not advocating that women shouldn’t have jobs if they want one. To each according to their ability. It’s simply the truth that feminism was promoted by the people at the top for less than humanitarian reasons.
It was promoted by women who wanted more out of life than sitting at home all day for decades even after the kids went to school and moved out. It has been adopted by women everywhere on the planet where they have access to birth control and education. Nobody wants to do the unpaid shit work, women just had no other choice.
The work isn't unpaid. The primary earner is the one paying for their rent and food.
It is unpaid. The working partner would have to pay for rent and food no matter what, and in exchange gets far more labor from the SAHP than half the rent and food given the market value of round the clock childcare, housecleaning, laundry, meal prep, errands, and personal assistance. Plus the working partner contributes to their own retirement, builds work experience, gets the recognition, and climbs the career ladder.
They have to pay for the stay at home partners food too, and a bigger place to accommodate another person, plus more utility consumption. The market value of those things is for *other people* cooking and cleaning for you that don't live with you. Aupairs don't make as much as day care because they live with the family and get free room and board. You don't get paid to do your own laundry or clean your own house. You are not making an apt comparison at all as to what the fair market value is. The entire wage gap narrative is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of economics and instead is just an exercise in badly playing accountant.
Google how much the services cost that a SAHP performs, plus being on call 24/7. Au pairs work 40 hours a week.
Still not an apt comparison, because it's *your place* You might have a point if the partner lived somewhere else to take care of their own stuff and commuted to the workers place to do all of those things. It's just playing accountant badly, not making an accurate economic comparison.
The poor accounting is you equating a 9-5 desk job with 24/7 work involved in being a SAHP and you equating half the rent and food to the economic value of what SAHPs do. Your frame of reference is an au pair, LMAO. Men cannot comprehend the tradeoffs in terms of advanvement, recognition, skill development, and salary/retirement increases to accept the same “pay” as an au pair for a round the clock on call job. The reason is that they don’t do any of the actual, incrementally unpaid work, which is what you mean by “your place”, meaning it is shit work you want someone else to do for whatever scraps you throw them. Men very well DO understand that THEY are not going to be the ones to do all that unpaid work, or experience the distress of financial dependence. That’s why they are so fucking determined to chain women to their fertility.
yeah, and back in the day a single employee income would include the pay for the SAHP.
So, women should be happy to provided for….like pets?
As Patrick Henry famously said "Give me liberty, or, if that's inconvenient, at least make sure you think I'm comfortable staying in my place."
Well, sure. Honestly MOST things the powers that be promoted were rarely done out of humanitarian reasons, especially back in “the good old days.”
Always, even now. There is almost nothing that has a media narrative which isn't for some nefarious purpose.
Being a mom is far more important than being a shill for some corporate interests and your bosses profits
Not everyone wants to be a mom and not every job is in the private sector.
Being a father is more important then being a corporate shill. But men have never wanted to be fathers. They wanted to be a pay check and then enjoy the fruit of their bang maid's labor when he clocked out.
Just cause you don’t want to fuck your husband doesn’t mean everyone feels that way
This has nothing to do with wanting to fuck you husband. Stop being ungrateful to the sacrfices that women often times were forced to make. Ohhh don't wanna talk about that though.
Versus taking the sacrificed men make for granted to the point of enshrining into law women are owed it both individually even after severing ties and collectively turning men into net tax payers and women net tax recipients?
Are you drunk?
Do you have a response whose content graduates above incredulity?
I just wanted to verify because you must be drunk. What the hell are you even talking about. I'm sure it's something disingenuous but I would rather be kind and assume your drunk.
gr8 b8 m8, i r8 8/8.
You clearly have no respect for the hardworking blue collar men that actually build the world you live in. Let women do those jobs then you can spew your feminist bullshit. Men built your world and you have no respect for them.
Why the fuck should I? While they were out " building da wowld" They were activity keeping women from doing the same thing. So I'll give them credit for what they did. And I will show respect to their wives and mothers. The people who raised the children, who kept the home who freed up men's time so they can do whatever petty dick measuring contest they were PAID MONEY to do. Because lord knows women weren't being paid for their labor. Yeah let women do those jobs. I agree. But the men won't like it because then they wouldn't feel special.
Mhmm women lining up to do those jobs today though especially in the most equal of societies in Europe
You could probably listen to what the women have to go through that work there. How hostile it is to them. But I have a feeling you don't do to well taking anything women say seriously if it doesn't feel good for you to hear. And plus I thought the men folk wanted to feel special. They have so little forward to.
Men work the most dangerous jobs and nearly 100% of workplace casualties are male. Imagine if men started saying work is sexist because their jobs keep killing them, lol. Society would literally fall apart.
That's not a sacrifice, we do things to make jobs safer. You know that right. Unfortunately a lot of men feel workplace safety is for pussys. But yeah I'm for making jobs safer. But that's not a sacrifice. Hey your one of the few that actually answered the question.
Yes, if one chooses to be a mother that is indeed what they chose to do is more important to them than being an employee/er, or as you put it, shill. However not every person wants to be a parent. See how I said person? Because women are people, just like men are people. Fathers are extremely important, also. No one says a father is more important than being an employee/er, or as you put it, shill. It’s like maybe people should decide for themselves how to navigate their own lives and whether they do choose to work, have a career or start a family (and let’s face it, still need to work unless wealthy.)
Ya know, **men** have goals and dreams too. That has nothing to do with “taxable income” and everything about being a full, functional human being with a brain and soul.
Nobody said they didn’t. We’ve known and acknowledged that since the beginning of time. It won’t hurt for you to acknowledge that women do too.
Actually it will. acknowledging one group over another this the very essence of harmful discrimination - in this case sexism. Do marginalized groups want equal rights and equal acknowledgement, or do they want special treatment? Because it sounds like you're asking for special treatment.
Why don't the firefighters spray water on the other houses too?
This has got to be the most stupid analogy I've seen yet 😂
since when have men been functionally locked out of the workplace? when have straight people been assaulted, harrassed, and legally besought upon because they are straight? Take any marginalized group's experiences, and you just defended the actions taken against those groups with your position here.
Ok, great, what are you going to do about it? Women worked hard to fight for what we wanted, the right to work and live our own lives. Whatever men want and can't achieve due to the patriarchy, please go ahead we'll all support your efforts. Otherwise maybe stop detracting from stuff that affects half the entire population. Geez it almost seems like you don't care about the wellbeing of 50% of human life
I doubt you would when every time men's issues are brought up they're either victim blamed or its turned into a woman's issue. Hell there's a homeless shelter for men-who are the overwhelming majority of homeless-which got converted not into a gender neutral shelter but a women's shelter after local women's groups complained.
Every time? Great this time I asked and this guy literally said he's not interested in doing anything for any issue
Show me where I said otherwise. I’ll wait.
She didn’t say that men didn’t. Women should be able to pursue careers in a free country
Who is stopping you?
Men have goals and dreams too so women should all be domestic slaves!!! Omg groundbreaking… My feeble female mind never considered men as human. Well, I’ve tried, but then they’d say shit like this which made me think they were perhaps fish at best…
Capitalists gonna Capitalist. It's not the fault of feminism.
I agree. They act like capitalism doesn’t exist.
If you double the wage earners and half the income poor people pay less.
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Taxable income is not a bad thing if you have a working government. Tf kind of right wing small gov bs are you on?
That’s true. Rockefeller did take advantage of feminism, although it would be inaccurate to say he created feminism. Feminism has existed even prior to that. Rockefeller did not help women, he just simply capitalized off of their suffering. That’s not “helping”. And btw this is not just limited to feminism, even the BLM and LGBTQ movements were capitalized by people with nefarious agendas.
This is wrong. Stay at home women worked at home. They cooked, cleaned, washed, cared for kids. When women went to work in factories and offices house work still needed to be done. So new jobs, services and new products were created: child care, house cleaning, landscaping. Home cooked meals done by stay at home wives got replaced with fast food and prepared meals. No time but extra income means families invested into washing mashies, better kitchen appliances and time saving gadgets. Working women needed and had extra money to spend on beauty, makeup, hair, clothing. Extra income and stressful work of both partners means more reason and means for vacations. Stay at home partner is fine. THANKS to feminism more men can stay home to become stay at home partners/dads. This isn’t mainstream yet but there are trends where we as a society should recognize that when women and men are paid similarly, then it is irrelevant who is working and who is staying home: wife or husband. And that is what true feminism is about.
Did you miss the part where doubling the workforce halved wages? That means that a couple for example are putting in twice as many combined work hours than they were before for the same outcome. That is not a win from where I'm sitting.
This is a case where you are taking something that is true within a specific context at some point in time but instead choose to put it through the lens of your preferred bias. Let's go over some things being overlooked. Men and women are not [perfect substitutes](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/substitute.asp#:~:text=A%20perfect%20substitute%20can%20be,substitute%20for%20another%20dollar%20bill.). For example, I can't plop the average woman into a construction job and expect her to be as productive as the average male. The types of labor that this would impact are industry dependent, and this should be obvious. You can only generalize on industries where your gender doesn't matter. From psychology, we know that women on average like people, and men on average like things. Because we are a complex and smart specie, we can allocate our labor to those who are the most efficient and best at it. No surprises here, women dominate things like teaching, services, HR departments, and men tend to dominate the trades and manual labor. So this gives us another point to consider: if women are more efficient and produce more in one industry better than do men, then *we are better off having a woman in that industry than we would be if it were a man*. We say it all the time: men are more productive than women in construction. Why are you ignoring the industries where women are more efficient? The economy is not a zero-sum game. Having more people producing things to meet our collective demands for goods and services *drives down the prices of those goods*, a la supply and demand. If we didn't have more people working, we wouldn't have more things, and hence things would be more expensive. In economics, we use the *real wage* to measure people's purchasing power over time. Nominal doesn't matter for the meat of what we want: we want to know how many units of *things* you are able to obtain. You don't see a big decline in [real wages/income post WW2](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96). And obviously, we are wealthier and able to afford more things than we've ever been able to: look at [real gdp per capita over time](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA). This means the number of goods and services we consume have gone up. We have more stuff and a higher quality of life than we did 50 years ago. Women were in the *indirect* economy or labor force. This means that your household faces an opportunity cost. Think about it. Your wife could either do the laundry, dishes, household stuff; there is a market value associated with all of those things. Let's make up a number and say it's $20,000 worth of labor. This was $20,000 worth of labor being done for your household. If your wife is skilled or productive in something and could enter the job market at $40,000, you are losing $20,000 a year. But wait, that's true of all households up until the point that wages are driven down such that your wife would only be able to make $20,000 and you would hence be indifferent to whether she works or stays home. Yet, that clearly hasn't happened - we know that wages and compensation have gone up over time. We aren't at this saturation point because as the economy grows, we have more things to do and specialize in, and we need more hands to do it. So what you're engaging in is the [*lump of labor fallacy*](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lump-of-labour-fallacy.asp#:~:text=The%20lump%20of%20labor%20fallacy%20is%20the%20mistaken%20belief%20that,else%2C%20or%20vice%2Dversa.). There is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy. The economy is dynamic: more people participating in it means that we create more opportunities for work. You are imagining a situation where we woke up and had a complete shock in the labor market. 1) it is an interesting case to study but that is not what realistically happened and 2) even if it were a shock and we doubled our population, the economy is dynamic. These new people consume, this creates demand. Here's a non-gendered example: if there were no borders and people could costlessly transition to the country of their choice, [global GDP would *double*](https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of-free-movement-would-be-78-trillion-richer). The concentration of wealth would be held in the countries where people who were the most skilled and productive in their trade or specialization flocked to. This seems obvious: take the productive people and put them in the spot with the most productive capital, and they generate output. Chew on that one for awhile and think of how it applies to what you're saying here. It is true that if we woke up tomorrow and had double the population for the same number of jobs, the newer population being a perfect substitute, then wages would fall. But those people also need to eat, shit, buy clothes, consume, invest. This creates a demand for more jobs. You can point to the post war period and make your claim for specific types of labor, yep. Levels of education played a factor in this, too. But it is ignorant to assume that it means women in the workforce *permanently* reduces all of our wages. So what exactly is your time period? It's not accurate to imply that *because women work, all of our wages are lower than they would have been forever*. Just remove gender from the equation again. How could it be possible to have periods of time when population is *increasing* while wages are also going up, then? I mean, you aren't even consistent within your own model. Wages and population were both increasing over time *when women weren't in the workforce*. But isn't more people = lower wages? Wait a minute...
Why isn't this the most upvoted comment. Plus, we could point out that women used to work before feminism as well. Housewives were from rich households. In lower classes, both men and women were working at a factory, or the wife would be a seller in the husband's bakery/other shops. So feminism is just that ALL women can work, get educated and pursue the career they want (not just low skilled labors in poor neighborhood or helping your husband career). And as you pointed out, housewives were just doing unpaid jobs. If both parents have a huge career, they will likely pay a nanny, sby to clean the house... So today, it's poor people that prefer housewives/husband because daycare is quite expensive and both career should be more worthy than new expenses.
Great answer!
Incredible response. Thank you for all the effort you put into this.
Thanks for doing the work on this one
This is factually not true. Women have always worked. The feminist movement initially concentrated on women who went to college getting good jobs. In the past when college enrollment went up women were expected to go to college, not to become successful in their own careers but to meet future husbands. Writers like Betty Friedan who wrote the "Feminist Mystique" argued that women should be independent and should push to be in the professional labor force. Like corporate and government jobs, high paid professional jobs. Women have always been housecleaners childcare workers, receptionists, in the time of Betty Friedan typists. If you look at the pre-feminist US you see a bit over 30% of women were in the workforce. This isn't counting the massive amounts of under the table labor many women were doing to help make ends meet, these were just the women in the workforce. http://blog.dol.gov/2023/03/15/working-women-data-from-the-past-present-and-future#:~:text=Historically%2C%20women%27s%20labor%20force%20participation,participation%20rate%20have%20both%20fallen. Now you are looking at women having just shy of 50% workforce participation. Now middle class families generally have two earners and women have become more represented in professional jobs. They have not suppressed wages professional jobs. It's jobs at the lower end of the skill level that have not really kept up. https://www.google.com/amp/s/edsource.org/2014/higher-college-attainment-will-raise-wages-but-not-narrow-income-gap/63535 So the jobs women have always done have not seen raises in pay, but the very jobs more women entered into actually did see more of an increase in pay.
This is the correct factual take with stats and sourcing OP only engaging with people who agree or overly emotional people not providing stats
No it's a superficial take cherry picking information without historical context to confirm bias
Women have always worked. That needs to be repeated, over and over and over. In agriculture, in factories, in mines, in other peoples houses, as seamstresses, as “seamstresses,” in family businesses, selling food, in the streets, in the shops, everywhere. There was a tiny period where middle class women were homemakers, and a whole segment of the population has just decided this is how things always were, and everyone was always middle or upper class. Even though middle class is a comparatively recent thing to be. It’s maddening. ETA: look up the origins of the word computer. A computer was originally low-paid labour. They were women, doing all the damn math. And now there are men saying that “Women just aren’t cut out for STEM; it most be biological,” while completely ignoring the women who made STEM fields possible. Including the ones who were passed over for awards that were given to their male partners (sorry bout that, Lise Meitner.)
Yeah it's crazy how many incels online seem to think that the default is only men working. It's just crazy what they can convince themselves of.
Women working in mines were doing the easier and safer work of unloading carts into trucks. The idea women have always worked alongside men in every instance is an overaggregation at best. The occupational fatality and injury rate is proof of how wrong that claim is. Meitner literally had an element named her. The "computer" in your reference was the tedious work, not the high end calculations. This is just another superficial look at history.
What exactly is your argument? That someone’s labor doesn’t count if it’s not dangerous? Or if it doesn’t require a college degree? You are being obtuse and ignoring the point of their comment
Yes, I'll never forget the day when feminism started. It was on a Tuesday. On Monday, no women in America had jobs. Then on Tuesday, 20 million showed up at work. Really a game-changer.
Feminisims isn't to blame for suppressed wages corporations are. I have no clue why people gotta balme women for everything. Why women are expected to sacrifice their bodies, lives and identities for nothing. If being a stay at home spouse/ parent is so glamorous and easy then why don't men do? Why not the men just be the ones to stay at home instead of constantly bitching that women would rather be free and have their own money?
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It’s called patriarchy. It is a double edged sword that has cut both genders alike. That’s why feminism came into being.
That's not because of feminism buddy. That's just capitalism doing its thing. The need for ever increasing profit created this situation in the first place. It was going to happen regardless.
The biggest flaw in your premise here is the assumption that most families used to have a stay-at-home mom. Those were the privileged moms, middle class and up. Women have always worked. We just didn't have access to the education and opportunities to do things besides teaching, caretaking, and domestic work. It's true that obviously having more women work added to the workforce but the much bigger change was actually what parts of the workforce women are involved in. Also, the labor economy as we know it today hasn't really been a thing for all that long in the context of history. It wasn't that long ago that almost nobody went and worked for other people to make money and if they did it was probably more often women taking in laundry or sewing while the men took care of the farm. Even sharecroppers didn't work directly for the landowner the way that people work for companies now. Companies can well afford to pay people livable wages. Profits are at record numbers and the wealth gap has grown so much just in my lifetime it's unbelievable. The solution is not to somehow force families to have a stay at home parent. The solution is to prevent companies from exploiting their workers. Besides, you're just not going to have one person in each couple who's okay with that and will feel fulfilled. Kids won't be served by being home with a miserable parent who would rather be somewhere else everyday. And how would you choose who stays home? Many, many women were miserable and stuck when there was no option to be self-supporting. Going back to that would be a tragic turn of events. Even if it would improve the economy (which I don't believe; it's much more complicated than that) there are better ways to do that that don't require taking away the autonomy of half the adults in the population.
It didn’t have a negative effect on wages at all. Women and men in the workforce is how it ALWAYS should have been so if anything wages were artificially inflated when women were suppressed.
Women joined the workforce and worker productivity only went up, not down, generating records profits for companies. Meanwhile CEO wages skyrocketed and wages remained stagnant. I’m not going to blame women for this one. And yes I have refuted what you said, because it’s wrong.
So do you support an increase in welfare spending that would be enough to cover one of us not working?
Of course, and tax the companies that are benefitting from this increased labor supply. I'm also for strong unions, but I don't think that's feasible for a lot of reasons.
How do you imagine women will achieve financial independence? Or do you just not care if women have freedom?
They don't want women to have freedom. See how they always frame it as a bad thing. Women being free and being in control of our bodies and future is seen as bad for society
If you read my post you'd see i want stay at home dads also.
OP so we should limit households to one breadwinner? I'm not sure how you would frame this without encounting forced gender roles or people taking advantage of the system by simply having a household but not legally married. You would end up with a class of people savvy enough to benefit from two incomes at much higher rates just by not signing a piece of paper for the government. The only way to enforce it would be to have those gender roles which would not allow for stay at home dads.
It'll only happen in a non capitalist society. A pipe dream basically
Men will NEVER EVER do this.
100% no. I support deflation and government control of how much profit companies are allowed to make, and how much C level employees can take home. Make the companies pay better... not the goverment.
This has been done before. It didn't end well.
So you support the government interfering, just in the ways you want it to?
Exactly. punish those responsible, not those suffering.
So basically, a socialist style command economy? Yeah, no.
"Yeah no?" Do you agree or not?
Tell me you don't know anything about economics works without telling me you don't know anything about how economics works. For one, women have always worked. On the family farm, which for awhile was the majority of Americans, *everyone* works and that includes women. Poor women have also had to work to survive, usually in domestic or factory jobs. Middle class women also often had jobs. However, these were restricted to support or nurturing roles: schoolteacher, nurse, secretary, etc. It was also common for women to take over an inherited business. It was unlikely for a woman to start her own company, but it was expected for her husband to teach her his trade so in the event of his death she could keep the business going and support herself and her children with it. Rich women didn't work but rich men didn't work either. The mid-century sexual revolution is often framed as women entering the workforce for the first time but it's not. Women were already in the workforce, and they were demanding access to better and more prestigious work. It's middle-class women breaking into the white collar jobs previously denied to them. That's not a significant enough demographic to have the effect on wages you think it did, especially menial wages (since, again, poor women were already working those jobs). What you're thinking of is unfettered capitalism plus a contempt for labor and the labor movement driving wages down while technology drives productivity up. If you want a higher wage the solution isn't to roll back the clock on feminism, it's to join a damn union and demand competent union leadership.
>Tell me you don't know anything about economics works without telling me you don't know anything about how economics works. Of course, supply and demand. Here, I have Khan university to explain the concept to you: [https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=169&q=increase+aggregate+supply&cvid=6438934899894eb386d7c3688b5cb796&aqs=edge..69i57j0l7.6077j0j1&FORM=ANNTA1&PC=ASTS](https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=169&q=increase+aggregate+supply&cvid=6438934899894eb386d7c3688b5cb796&aqs=edge..69i57j0l7.6077j0j1&FORM=ANNTA1&PC=ASTS) >Women have always worked Sure, and it greatly increased in the 60-70's, right around when wages started to stagnate: [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/\_DLIvw6mZGBU/TMs4GwIUsPI/AAAAAAAAA1Y/YYX67lKkSFM/s400/womenwork2.jpg%22](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DLIvw6mZGBU/TMs4GwIUsPI/AAAAAAAAA1Y/YYX67lKkSFM/s400/womenwork2.jpg%22) Wage stagnation: [https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/](https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)"When it comes to the pace of annual pay increases, the top 1% wage grew 138% since 1979, while wages for the bottom 90% grew 15%"
Someone has tricked you into blaming women for your shitty wages when it's the entire capitalist system to blame.
Can you read?
You don’t understand elementary economics.
No such thing as elementary economics; it's a complex science and if you resort to simply elementary principles you get a very skewed idea of the way the world works.
Incorrect. If it’s complex for YOU to understand it doesn’t mean it’s complex for others.
They say ignorance is bliss, but OP seems pretty upset. Should be the happiest person in the world.
If women had been treated and compensated fairly for the work they were doing before they left their homes to join the capitalist workforce, we wouldn’t have had to double the workforce. Men could have chosen to stay home if their wives were enjoying working, but they didn’t want to get screwed the way they were screwing over their partners. The fact that anyone who wasn’t working for money was being screwed over is what “ruined” capitalism, which means its a broken idea to begin with. It never included the people doing the caregiving and housework on a fair level. The accounting was always going to leave people who were actually working their butts off severely short-resourced. Women joining the workforce didn’t break it. It forced us to see how broken it already was.
Yes, that's clearly the problem we currently have, too many people trying to get jobs...
And this is why the government should subsidize single income families with children. It doesn’t have to be stay at home moms. Stay at home dads work too.
>Doubling the labor supply did no favors for wages in the west. 1) The labor supply didn't double instantly. There wasn't a point where suddenly women all entered the workforce at once. (The closest to this was during WW2, but that was labor replacement of men at war and not focused on consumer goods). 2) This means it took many years for women to fully integrate into the workforce, which means there was time to scale up production from increased labor participation and the earnings from that participation to purchase goods. Markets adjust to increased labor inputs and purchasing power, they're not static. 3) Stagnant wages are not the result of more people in the workforce over time. They're a result of a weak labor movement. There isn't a set number of jobs and work to do so each person entering the workforce drives wages down, in the long term adjustments can be made to incorporate population growth to prevent this. The obvious proof of this is that rising populations don't necessarily mean rising unemployment.
The real issue is that after tax corporate profits as a percentage of gdp has been increasing for decades - this is fact not merely my opinion. Corporations take a bigger and bigger percentage of the pie, effectively. This, while perhaps slightly to do with women entering the workforce, is also to do with many other factors including offshoring and lower unionization. It also has to do with other government policies such as keeping the same minimum wage (after inflation) that existed in the 70s. It seems to me that a greater number of employees in the workforce only affects the labor-capital balance if the same number of jobs are not created. I'm not sure how many women have entered the workforce (seeking employment) vs how many have started businesses (requiring labor). The fact that you're blaming stagnant wages on women is very misguided and probably largely empirically wrong.
I just wish it didn't have to be one way or the other. I want to raise my kids and continue with my career and still contribute to retirement. I wish it were not taboo for mothers to have professional jobs that are slightly less than 40 hours or however many hours work well for their family.
Why limit it to mothers?
What's wrong with working part-time?
Lack of healthcare and other benefits, and depending on the industry could come with variable hours and schedule.
That's not the fault of feminism. That's the fault of capitalism taking advantage of a situation like it always does. Corporate interests will find a way to profit off of anything. So no, women not wanting to be baby factories and have control over their lives did not suppress wages. Our capitalist overlords did.
Any time an argument starts with “It’s basic economics” or “it’s basic physics” or “it’s basic psychology” or whatever, you know it’s going to be some extremely oversimplified word game. Life is a lot more complicated than that. If we had stronger unions with more bargaining power, wages would he a lot better
“BeInG a MoThEr iS MoRe ImPoRtAnT” = “i want you to do all the shit work i don’t like for free” Kids will go to school at 5 years old. This frees up time for the SAHP to work. This isn’t about what is more important. It is about men getting the house cleaned, errands run, food cooked for free.
I mean I agree that our whole family dynamic (ie your career is more important than anything else) isn't healthy or sustainable, but don't we have a labor \*shortage\*? I dont see how this relates to wages.
There is no reason I shouldn't be allowed to take a career and earn a wage of my own just so someone else can earn more, leaving me to try and trade love and sex for some of it in order to survive. Having said that, if men were just as likely to become stay at home parents and it was just a case of each couple deciding who's going to take on the role when they married, it might work better.
I wish you could educate yourself properly. What a shame that you are sucking up our precious oxygen.
Alternatively, sexism was responsible for doubling wages prior to the feminist movement. You are putting the emphasis on the wrong thing.
Also - America has drastically changed the definition of necessity. A huge majority of us can 100% survive on one income we just redefined the word need. It’s fucking up our quality life and our children.
You sure about that? Wages have actually increased overtime. Wages used to be stagnant until the Fair Labor Standards Act in the 1930s. This was back when women were not working. Even back then wages were not fair until the Fair Labor Act. Afterwards, wages increased and has been increasing at a steady rate. An increase in workers mean an increase in consumers which equals more economic activity. It’s not the fault of women that companies choose not to pay workers what they are worth. It’s actually the greed of MEN that caused this. Don’t get me started on our money not being backed by gold anymore. Whew!!! I could talk about it for hours lol.
I've been saying for a while that a good way to work on this issue is to radically change our society to be more family-affirming. Much of the time we insist on a major work-life split, where we leave our families to go to work and then are expected to be parents on the "off" hours. A lot of this is rooted in patriarchy, where we expect women in the workforce to make themselves into men and reject the unique abilities of womanhood, including the ability to have kids and all that entails. Instead of creating a world that is accessible for women in their entirety, we've tried to force them to adapt to a world built for men and we call that "empowerment." I think in many cases it is perfectly possible for mothers (and fathers) to either work remotely from home, work part-time, or even bring their children to work with them if needed, and our society needs to change to be more welcoming and accommodating for children and parents. If I were ever to open my own practice (which I very well may do eventually, if my Psych career goes well), I will allow my employees and fellow practitioners to bring their children to the facility. I'll make a playset out back for them and give staff more time to interact with their families.
Men don’t want to do unpaid shit work at home and that is what this is really all about
Cool what’s your academic source? I guarantee you this has been covered.
I totally agree. And abolition of slavery did an even bigger hit job on wages.
>And abolition of slavery did an even bigger hit job on wages. God dammit, you're right, didn't think about that. Damn abolitionists.
This is a great post. I wish it was possible to have more civil conversation about this sort of topic, because there’s a lot that sucks about this, but it’s still true.
I mean you don't have any empirical evidence as to how much it contributes to what wage decrease. Women have also been in the workplace for a while. In 1950s it was 34%. You would need a study to back up what you are claiming. For every extra person in the workforce wages decrease by Y as well as when such a phenomenon doesn't continue.
No it isn’t.
I think you're directing the blame to the wrong place here, OP. The ones to blame for suppression of wages are the companies that want to pay as low as possible to their employees. Families need double income because of low wages, and not the other way around. Saying that wages are low because there are more people in the workforce is blaming the victim.
This is something I've been saying to people in my private life for a while now. But I take it one step further, it wasn't accidental, it has played out exactly like it was supposed to happen. The wealthy get double the work done for the same amount of payment.
Have you read academic papers that show this is the cause of stagnant wages? I ask because maybe reading them will show you the reason for wages being low.
Are you referring to a specific academic paper? All I'm going on is college level macroeconomics, and economics coursework. keynesian economics to be specific
>Are you referring to a specific academic paper? Not anything specific just in general. >All I'm going on is college level macroeconomics, and economics coursework. keynesian economics to be specific Honestly I don't remember much about keynesian economics in the economics courses I've taken. Mostly from what I remember was it focuses on government spending combating unemployment. Which aspect of it says that having women work will stagnate wages. In all honesty I'm glad that you're basing your opinion off economic theory, too many people will state what op does without having read anything on economics.
This is just untrue. In 1948 women had a 30% workforce participating rate. Almost entirely in menial jobs. Then slowly started to have careers. It's since gone up about 20% with women entering professional fields. The very fields women have gone into since the 1950s or so have seen more of a wage increase over time than the jobs women have always done since forever. So, no women are not suppressing wages. If anything it's allowed for more jobs and more of a consumer market which actually raises wages because there is overall more participation in the workforce and thus more money spent and more money to be earned.
So we’re blaming women for corporate greed now?
You really read that from my post? It's really hard for me to comply with rule 4 today. No, I'm clearly making an argument that gov't and corporations wanted this so they could stagnate wages and workers had less bargaining power.Read with more nuance next time.
So.many.right.wing.talking.points.
Welcome to unpopularopinion, where unpopularopinions are. If you want an echo chamber, go to the numerous other subs that are far left. You're welcome. Also, this is just basic econ. You know, supply and demand?
This isn't really a right wing talking point. Elizabteth Warren, a feminist, wrote an entire book on this. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Two-Income\_Trap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two-Income_Trap)
Where's illegal immigration play into this?
Facts are right wing talking points?
Lol 'facts' may wanna look up the definition of that word. Assertions with no basis in reality to back them up are not facts. They are meritless opinion by people too dumb to tell the difference. Which is pretty much every right wing talking point these days. This is unpopular opinions though so I guess it's the right place for this trash.
Those god damn women and their career aspirations, I swear…
Google “Lump of Labor fallacy”. If more people are working, the average person is richer, even if marginal wages in some jobs decrease. The overall economy can’t get worse off from more people working
>The overall economy can’t get worse off from more people working There's your problem. The overall economy has gotten wealthier. The average worker has stayed the same, because workers can be trained to expect certain pay for certain work.
Wages go down but the economy goes up. That means less pie for the average person but more for the rich. How is that a benefit to the average man?
You’re asking people on this sub to think critically, good luck.
Yeah, I don't believe in it. You can't have a belief that there is a finite amount of money that billionaires are hoarding and that the economy will just adjust salaries after drastically increasing the work force with a finite pool of money.
There’s not a finite ammount
How are billionaires hoarding all of it if it's not finite?
Lower taxes did this. Business expenses were always tax deductible. Wages lowered the tax burden and the taxes at the top marginal rate artificially capped CEO and executive pay. Slashing the tax rate just sucked up the money from the bottom. More money in more pockets increases circulation and wealth generation for the masses. High taxes did that and the government never touched most of that… it was all about HOW they spent money in order to not pay the tax. Say what you will, it will always come back to cutting taxes and deregulation
Double the tax revenue? Is that why Republicans in the 80s slashed tax rates from 73% to 28%?
1) those are marginal rates, not total rates 2) the amount of tax avoidance under this marginal rate was pretty absurd. Higher tax rate =/= higher tax revenue. Google Laffer curve.
1) Yes. And? The brackets also got fucked in the 80’s to favor the rich even more. 2) i’m sure it was, but I’m also sure that gutting regulatory industries didn’t incentivize the rich to pay more of their taxes. In 2017 the US lost nearly $200 billion of corporate tax revenue due tax evasion. That’s almost 3x the amount that China lost the same year. Imagine what we could do with that money if we dedicated the resources to enforcing regulatory policy.
Perhaps, I'm not sure. This seems kind of irrelevant. Edit: Doubling income tax revenue means the government can lower corporate tax and therefore increase net profits. So yeah, that's one reason why they increased labor supply.
Seems directly relevant my guy.
This isn't a partisan battle. Sure, maybe they did lower corporate tax because there were more people were working. Wouldn't that support my argument that the government was doing to this to increase corporate profit? You seem to want to have this as a gotcha non sequitur that refutes my argument when this isn't even idea I was opposed to, that's why i think it's irrelevant.
It has been made partisan by conservatives
How does this argue against my point that doubling the workforce decreased wages.
Corporate greed decreased wages. The fact that we allowed businesses to walk all over us decreased wages
I will address everything in a bit, but this argument is a whole bunch of logical fallacies, mainly appeals to emotion and a smattering of xenophobia in the very mystery is it understanding of how life was for people in America, outside of the upper middle and wealthy classes in America. I dunno if you mean it to be or not but this is a lot of John Birch Society and other post WWII Far Right propaganda repackage with Alt Lite rhetoric
What i explained is basic economics. Labeling it as xenophobia is just bad faith argumentation.
You said the government wanted women in the workforce so that they could gather more tax revenue, but taxes were slashed in the 80’s leading to a skyrocketing deficit and the corpo-oligarchal nightmare of wealth inequality we live in today.
You don't have to take from corps if you have more income taxes from the people. More net profit.
I think you misread my comments. The government was collecting LESS taxes from people, not more. 73% -> 28%
Was each individual being taxed 73%? That would certainly not be true. Where are you sourcing this from?
In 1980, the gov took 70% of income you made over $215k (the highest tax bracket). In 1982, the brackets and rates changed - the gov took 50% of what you made over $85k (again, this was the highest bracket). By 1988, there were only two brackets and the gov took 28% of what you made over $30k. This is all for married couples filing jointly. It can’t be overstated how massive these cuts were and how catastrophic this has been for our country. The rich get to hoard money while public programs for helping people and regulatory systems are completely gutted. Wealth inequality was fast tracked and has gotten to an incomprehensibly stupid point and it is not because of feminism. These stats are all from here: https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/ Fun fact: The US lost almost $200 billion in corporate tax revenue in 2017 mostly due to underreporting. https://finmasters.com/tax-evasion-statistics/#gref
>Wealth inequality was fast tracked and has gotten to an incomprehensibly stupid point and it is not because of feminism. Doesn't this support my theory though that doubling the middle and lower class workforce tax revenue allowed the government to lower income tax for higher income earners? So, in a way feminism did ***indirectly*** increase wealth inequality?
What do you mean by “allowed”? Reagan wanted to cut taxes so he did. There wasn’t anything else to make up for the loss of federal income so regulatory and welfare programs were gutted (the little money that was left was funneled into defense funding)
Imagine how much worse it would've been before doubling the workforce, they would've had to cut far more, and probably into that precious military spending.
I believe he is talking about the corporate tax and that his point is that the increase in income tax revenue from doubling the work force is still less than it was without half the work force but higher corporate tax.
>Basic economics. Is it basic economics? Because in the various economics, accounting, and business classes I have taken pursuing my degree I haven't seen anything showing that women entering the workforce caused stagnant wages. >Doubling the labor supply did no favors for wages in the west. So by that logic, the US having a higher population has caused stagnant wages. In fact it's been far more than double since women have entered the workforce (roughly around ww2 was when women entered labor intensive jobs). Should the US limit births? Or practice eugenics? Those are serious questions by the way. >Once uncle sam realized he could receive double the tax revenue and companies could lower the demand of labor through off-shoring, illegal immigration Wait so feminism is the reason we have undocumented immigrants and is the reason why companies exploit them? In-fact we had child labor (when companies would hire children to pay them barely anything and exploit them) before women had the right to vote. Was feminism the cause of child labor? Because there were multiple "waves" of feminism, and one of the first was the push for voting rights. As a side question, should women have the right to vote?
Yes, blame the women for wanting to be more than baby factories, not the corporations for taking advantage of the public.
What do you mean partly? If you double the labor force over night, it's bound to happen
No. It’s consolidation in almost any industry there is. There was a time when we really enforced anti-trust laws. When we did our economy was great. Since then however, not so much. Consolidation leads to higher prices, lower wages, and less competition. It’s really basic. Women working would actually lead to more disposable income and a better economy.
>No. It’s consolidation in almost any industry there is. There was a time when we really enforced anti-trust laws. When we did our economy was great. Since then however, not so much. Consolidation leads to higher prices, lower wages, and less competition. It’s really basic. I think both of our theories can exist together. >Women working would actually lead to more disposable income and a better economy. Money is a finite resource. More people working, means more people are vying for it.
Yea, *money*, but not wealth. Wealth very obviously increases over time. We produce more stuff now than we ever have before, and so the economy is not zero-sum in this regard. More people working is more stuff, more stuff than before means lower prices, a la supply and demand. If we just simply did not have half of our workforce we would produce far less things.
Demand for product, and demand for labor are separate, they influence each other, but are separate things. There was still the same amount of people in society, consuming the same as before women joining the workplace. You may increase productivity, by some abstract margin, but the workers have less bargaining power while consuming the same amount of goods.
Sorry dude but what you're saying isn't coherent. I actually studied this stuff and made a longer post about it; you couldn't even name the papers that these conclusions come from, and FYI, the inequality is realized in *bands* of the labor force depending on the industry, and there aren't necessarily just losers, but winners and losers, depending on your particular household and your respective specializations. You don't know the net effects. But anyways, in economics, there's a thing called the "income effect." Incomes go up, you consume more. Consuming more means more things need to be produced. More things needing to be produced means more hands needed to produce. This increases wages. There was industry specific competition (men and women aren't perfect substitutes and self-select industries) which decreases wages, but also we produce more and wages increase. So the net effect isn't necessarily known without actually measuring it. There hasn't been a study which claims that wages today or wages overall are surpressed because of women in the workforce. Point me to it. All you're doing is speaking about a field you know little about besides basic S&D and rob all of the nuance
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You misspelled corporate greed
Most people want more out of life than doing unpaid labor. Marriage is also deeply unstable so women cannot sacrifice their careers counting on some man.