{"id":481,"date":"2022-12-12T12:59:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T12:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/the-pain-of-a-forced-recession-is-intended-for-the-90-percent\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T18:57:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T18:57:40","slug":"the-pain-of-a-forced-recession-is-intended-for-the-90-percent","status":"publish","type":"essays","link":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/essays\/the-pain-of-a-forced-recession-is-intended-for-the-90-percent\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cPain\u201d of a Forced Recession is Mostly Intended for the 90%"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Disclaimer: I\u2019m now referring to the blog posts in this Q4 chunk of publishing as my \u201cpersonal finance angst\u201d era, because when I wrote them in September, I was genuinely angered by the Fed\u2019s decisions and how callous the goal of \u201cunemployment\u201d felt given the last 40 years of meager wage gains for the working and middle class. You can feel my frustration in this piece, so I\u2019ll ask for grace upfront.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There\u2019s one word on the Federal Reserve\u2019s mind in Q1 2023: Pain<\/span><\/a>. Pain! We\u2019re all going to feel some worthwhile pain, Fed chair Jerome Powell has warned us, in order to get things back under control. <\/p>\n

When they say \u201cpain,\u201d they\u2019re usually referring to two phenomena they\u2019re trying to induce with rate hikes: unemployment<\/strong> and downward pressure on wages<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the only way out of this inflationary nightmare, or so the story goes. Josh Brown encapsulates it cynically (and perfectly) in his piece<\/span><\/a> \u201cYou weren\u2019t supposed to see that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLook here, look there, look anywhere else. Just don\u2019t look at the almost-liberated wage slaves being put back into their places. How dare you ask for more, how dare you expect more?<\/em> Stock trading time is over, get back to loading these cardboard boxes. <\/em><\/p>\n

I know we\u2019re not supposed to admit these things about our system. We\u2019re not supposed to say them aloud in polite company. But how can you say they aren\u2019t true? How can you say that reality is anything other than what you\u2019ve just witnessed with your own eyes?\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201creality\u201d Josh is referring to? The last two years\u2014but more broadly, the last 40.<\/p>\n

How valuable are \u201cessential\u201d laborers?<\/h2>\n

The pandemic lifted the veil on a lot of carefully maintained \u201ctruths\u201d in our economy. Among the most disorienting? The widespread realization that there isn\u2019t a perfectly rational relationship between \u201cprice\u201d and \u201cvalue.\u201d <\/p>\n

The more valuable your work is, the more you\u2019re paid<\/em>, we thought. The market price you can command for your labor is mostly<\/em> tied to how important you are to the functioning of the business, right?<\/p>\n

It was easy to maintain this collective ruse\u2014until it wasn\u2019t. Until a rapidly spreading virus forced most of us inside, and those who often make the lowest wages in society were deemed the most \u201cessential.\u201d The people whose labor was so crucial for society to continue functioning that they had little choice in whether or not they came to work. Yes, this included doctors and pilots and other people who are compensated well for their labor, but it also included grocers and bank tellers and line cooks and Uber drivers and those who are, in most cases, not<\/em> compensated handsomely for their time and effort. <\/p>\n

If price equals value, the thinking goes, we can rationalize whom we pay very little and whom we pay extravagantly. <\/p>\n

The top 14 Fortune 500 CEOs<\/span><\/a> each made at least $200,000,000 in 2021. While the highest paid CEO, Elon Musk (with a total compensation of $10,000,000,000\u2014that\u2019s billion<\/em>), was also the entrepreneur who assumed the risk by owning the company (a common line of pushback when we question executive pay), the vast majority of executives are no different than any other employee\u2014they\u2019re simply hired to do a job. <\/p>\n

Even if you\u2019re working 80 hours per week\u2014approximately equivalent to working 12-hour days, every single day, 365 days a year\u2014earning $200 million is equivalent to a rate of $50,000 per hour. <\/p>\n

Per Bloomberg, the average Fortune 500 CEO made $18.3 million in 2021, an 18% raise from the year before.<\/p>\n

To suggest \u201cprice equals value\u201d in American capitalism is insulting to anyone with access to a calculator and median wage job: You aren\u2019t paid what you\u2019re worth, you\u2019re paid what you have the bargaining power to demand.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is usually the point at which someone says something like, \u201cWell, you can\u2019t blame all your problems on CEOs, you know! They work hard! We aren\u2019t entitled to their money!\u201d (See also: My TikTok comments section full of billionaire apologists.)<\/p>\n

And sure, it\u2019s easy (and palatable) to forget that the economy is, in some ways, a zero-sum game<\/strong>\u2014when some earn more, that necessarily means others earn less<\/em>. A company\u2019s revenue is finite; the profit pie can only be divided into so many slices. <\/p>\n

So who typically gets the shaft? I\u2019ll give you one guess.<\/p>\n

Over the last 40 years, it\u2019s been the \u201cbottom 90%<\/span><\/a>.\u201d Right now, 70%<\/span><\/a> of our collective \u201cwealth pie\u201d belongs to the top 10%, and the remaining 30% of the pie is being divvied up with plastic forks among the remaining 90%. <\/p>\n

When adjusted for inflation, the median household income in the US 40 years ago was around $55,000<\/span><\/a>. Today, it\u2019s $70,000. A real increase of 27%\u2014hardly representative of the increase in corporate profits<\/span><\/a> from $220 billion ($220,000,000,000) in 1984 to the staggering $3+ trillion<\/em> ($3,043,000,000,000) in 2021, a nearly 1,300% increase.<\/p>\n

At the lowest end of the wage distribution, meager pay is usually justified by the qualification that the work is not only less valuable, but \u201cunskilled.\u201d And sure, a line cook almost certainly requires less up-front training to perform their job than, say, a surgeon\u2014but this language is sneaky in its undermining of the true value of the job being performed (as evidenced in 2020 by some people being deemed so valuable<\/em> they weren\u2019t allowed to stay home).<\/p>\n

The more we examine so-called \u201csolutions\u201d for the low- and median-wage laborer crisis, the more threadbare they appear\u2014especially since none of them involve the rather obvious solution of lowering pay for those at the very top of the income distribution who\u2019ve been capturing a disproportionate, ever-increasing share for decades.<\/p>\n

Proposed solution #1: A supposedly endless supply of student workers?<\/h2>\n

Up first: \u201cCollege students should do these jobs.\u201d <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve tried to square those numbers myself, and I can\u2019t figure out how this suggestion would work in practice. Take New York City, for example, a place featuring both high cost of living and population density. It\u2019s estimated there are 2.5 million<\/span><\/a> service industry workers in New York City. (To be clear, that\u2019s not necessarily the same thing as being \u201clow wage,\u201d but typically, service industry jobs are what we associate with lower-paid work.) <\/p>\n

According to the latest data I could find, there are roughly 600,000 college students<\/span><\/a> living in New York City (this comes from a NYC real estate investment site that appears to be using US Census Data), meaning we\u2019d need roughly four times<\/strong> as many students to fill all these jobs (assuming every single college student also worked full-time in the service industry, which\u2026ain\u2019t gonna happen).<\/p>\n

Then<\/em> there\u2019s the issue of how these students afford their living expenses while in school in the first place; they\u2019re either surviving on student loans or family money (since we\u2019ve already identified that the wages themselves are not high enough to support a dignified life). <\/p>\n

Then<\/em> there\u2019s the problem of what happens to the 2.5 million existing<\/em> workers. Where do they work once the college kids have taken their jobs? If the implication is that white collar work is more dignified, \u201cvaluable,\u201d or aspirational, you\u2019d need 2.5 million white collar job openings to re-employ all these people\u2014assuming they even wanted<\/em> or were qualified for<\/em> the work. <\/p>\n

But\u2014and here\u2019s perhaps the biggest plot hole\u2014even if you could<\/em> find a willing college student with family money to work every single low-wage service industry job, and<\/em> you could find higher-paid white collar work for all the existing service industry workers, there\u2019s the issue of employee turnover. A student employee is functioning on a ticking clock of four, maybe five years before they\u2019re going to deploy their degree to (hopefully) find different, higher-paid work. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s estimated that employee turnover costs businesses thousands<\/span><\/a>\u2014if not tens of thousands\u2014of dollars per person in training costs and lost productivity, depending on the nature of the business, so if you have a workforce that\u2019s turning over at a rate of 20%\u201325% every single year at graduation time, that doesn\u2019t seem ideal for the businesses<\/em>, either. <\/p>\n

In short, it\u2019s a whole lot of mental and logistical gymnastics to solve a problem that\u2019s actually pretty simple: Pay a living wage to a worker who\u2019s not<\/em> a student\u2014to someone who wants<\/em> to work in that role to support themselves and their families. And while we run the risk of conflating small businesses like restaurants with major corporations in this example, the reality is that profit margins (read: what\u2019s left over after<\/em> accounting for costs of payroll) have almost never been higher<\/span><\/a>\u2014it\u2019s not like we can\u2019t afford<\/em> to do this, but Washington<\/span><\/a> is the Gucci glove the 1% wears to ensure we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Proposed solution #2: Some word salad including the phrase \u201cautomation & globalization\u201d<\/h2>\n

Up next: \u201cThese jobs can be automated, and that\u2019s why they\u2019re paid so poorly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then automate them. <\/p>\n

The threat of automation has been held over our heads for as long as I can remember, but there\u2019s a reason some of these jobs haven\u2019t been automated yet\u2014because that would require massive up-front technological investment that nobody\u2019s incentivized to do until people stop accepting low wages (a phenomenon that\u2019s currently playing out, generating a chorus of omnipresent refrains that nobody wants to work anymore<\/em><\/span><\/a>). <\/p>\n

Or perhaps more popular: \u201cGlobalization! The US has to remain globally competitive.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026except for the fact that the $50 trillion wealth transfer<\/span><\/a> from the working class to the top 1% that\u2019s occurred over the last 40 years happened within<\/em><\/span><\/a> the US economy, not between the US and its global trade partners. Translation: The profits were (and are) available to pay everyone fairly, but they\u2019re accruing to a very specific, very small, very removed group at the top in a cosmically disproportionate fashion. <\/p>\n

And lest you think you\u2019re exempt from this phenomenon because you\u2019re not a low-wage worker, remember that wage suppression has occurred for everyone<\/em> in the \u201cbottom 90%.\u201d That means if you earn less than around $200,000 per year<\/span><\/a>, this affects you, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the free markets!\u201d<\/h2>\n

Free markets can correct for many things, but they can\u2019t correct for 40 years of deliberate policy choices intended to benefit the richest 1%\u20139% of our nation\u2019s populace. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to remember the labor market isn\u2019t really<\/em> free\u2014it\u2019s manipulated<\/span><\/a> by the regulation (or lack thereof) of corporations. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s<\/span><\/a>, certain government and corporate interests chose<\/em> to cut taxes on the ultra-rich and deregulate the financial industry, allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, permit corporations through M&A to reach monopoly power so they can determine prices and wages, erode minimum wage and overtime thresholds, and<\/em> shrink the bargaining power of labor. <\/p>\n

We made four decades<\/em> of deliberate, conscious choices and then called the consequences the result of perfectly-rational-oh-shucks-what\u2019re-ya-gonna-do-about-it free market economics.<\/p>\n

Unmasking the truth<\/h2>\n

The pandemic turned this entire narrative upside down and right side out, because it forced most everyone<\/em>\u2014not just the low-wage workers living the most extreme version of this reality every single day\u2014to square all the \u201ctruths\u201d of economic theory with the world that was actually<\/em> playing out around them: <\/p>\n

The world in which the CEOs and hedge fund managers earning tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) for moving numbers around on a screen retreated to their Manhattan penthouse apartments and second houses in the Hamptons to work from the comfort of mahogany man caves and delivered groceries. Those deemed \u201ctoo important to stay home\u201d made $8\/hour ringing up groceries behind a plexiglass barrier that didn\u2019t actually do anything. <\/p>\n

The harsh reality was that these very workers were those most vulnerable to, oh, you know, the medical repercussions of the pandemic itself, <\/em>both because of their lack of socioeconomic resources and<\/em> lack of paid time off. Their jobs required them to be public-facing, and likely didn\u2019t provide the health insurance to see a doctor if they began experiencing symptoms. (And this isn\u2019t just my theory; we know now that people who live in low-income counties died at twice the rate<\/span><\/a> of Americans in wealthier areas.)<\/p>\n

And now, the Fed\u2019s relentless rate hikes will ensure those same people lose any sort of bargaining power they gained over the last two years, in the name of fighting inflation and keeping the capital class happy. <\/p>\n

Of course, this isn\u2019t to say inflation isn\u2019t a problem that needs to be addressed\u2014just that our crude mechanism for addressing it (increasing interest rates) does little to directly remedy the problem, and simultaneously creates damaging fallout (job loss, loss of wage gains, and decreased bargaining power) for average Americans.<\/p>\n

Personal finance-ing your way out of an economic hellscape?<\/h2>\n

The advice to do things like just \u201cbudget more aggressively\u201d or \u201csave for a home\u201d feels out of touch sometimes because it is<\/em>. Because while it\u2019s technically <\/em>true that it\u2019s technically<\/em> possible, it outright and willfully ignores an entire half of the equation\u2014the simple, obvious answer of companies simply paying people more. <\/p>\n

(Point this out and you\u2019ll be called \u201cwhiny\u201d or \u201cungrateful\u201d by some guy named Bill on Twitter or a real estate investor named Jason on Instagram.) <\/p>\n

There are only so many things you can cut\u2014so many subscriptions, takeout meals, and manicures you can relentlessly hack from your budget\u2014before you\u2019ve effectively stripped your life of all the small joys that make it feel worth living. Maybe that\u2019s why a lot of personal finance advice (including mine, sometimes) ends up boiling down to the frustratingly obvious directive to just earn more money<\/span><\/a>. \u201cFind a way to get yourself into the 10%\u2014they\u2019re the only socioeconomic tranche with a prayer anymore.\u201d <\/p>\n

I paid $7 the other day for a \u201cpumpkin upside down latte,\u201d which would almost certainly invite disdain and tsk-tsks<\/em> from those who believe young people\u2019s experience of constant economic precariousness is self-inflicted with such frivolity. <\/p>\n

But why should the working and middle classes have to give up their relatively infrequent, sub-$20 pleasures in order to afford their first home, while the capital ruling class\u2014the 1%\u2014is bebopping between their third and fourth ones via custom, cashmere-seated private planes<\/span><\/a>? Half the time I feel like we\u2019re living in a simulation concocted by Kylie Baby\/Kylie Swim\/Kylie Lip Kit, brought to you by Kris Jenner.<\/p>\n

The more things worsen, the more the \u201cindividual responsibility\u201d suggestions to strip your life of all joy so you can afford to build wealth on your $50,000\/year salary feel completely disconnected from common sense and, worse, human compassion.<\/p>\n

Is it possible? I guess. Should it be necessary? <\/strong>I suppose that\u2019s a decision we all have to make for ourselves.  <\/p>\n

To make matters worse, there\u2019s a distinct strain of well-intentioned personal finance gaslighting (of which I\u2019ve certainly been guilty in the past) that fetishizes wealthy people who cosplay poverty. Simply continue eating McDonald\u2019s every day and you, too, can be as rich as <\/em>Warren Buffett<\/em><\/span><\/a>! <\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s coded as inspirational\u2014the rich, they\u2019re just like us!<\/em>\u2014but it inadvertently reinforces the idea that the result of 40 years of wage stagnation shouldn\u2019t just be okay<\/em>, it should be manageable. <\/em><\/p>\n

That it shouldn\u2019t<\/em> meaningfully impact your own honest attempt at working hard and accumulating enough wealth to provide for your kids and<\/em> retire someday.<\/p>\n

Sure, the 90% can forgo all the little luxuries that were within reach for the middle class of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s so that the top 1% can maintain their \u201cEscalade car service and bespoke Armani suits\u201d standard of living\u2014but eventually, the vast absence of those little luxuries will make themselves known in corporations\u2019 bottom lines.<\/p>\n

Eventually, the masses will stop going to Starbucks. And buying new cars. And subscribing to streaming services\u2014and there simply aren\u2019t enough people in the top socioeconomic echelon to sustain the daily coffee habit of 300,000,000 people who will eventually be priced out of these little delights if they ever want to retire someday, and we\u2019ll take the wind out of the profit sails.<\/p>\n

(Hey, maybe cutting out Starbucks really is<\/em> the answer here!)<\/p>\n

While ridiculous, this highlights an important truth that the pandemic exacerbated: The \u201ceconomy\u201d is not an abstract, naturally occurring phenomenon. It\u2019s not money. It\u2019s people<\/strong>. People, their output, their consumption, and the way resources flow through various systems to hundreds of millions of individuals.  <\/p>\n

To suggest we can continue on this way\u2014suppressing wages, raising prices, and propping up the 1% with underpaid labor\u2014and the economy as a whole<\/em> won\u2019t collapse in on itself, is absurd. When 90% of the country systemically falls behind for decades, so does the economy itself. The OECD has confirmed as much<\/span><\/a>. <\/p>\n

So yes, there will be pain for the 90%, J-Pow\u2014but hey, that\u2019s a feature, not a bug. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Disclaimer: I\u2019m now referring to the blog posts in this Q4 chunk of publishing as my \u201cpersonal finance angst\u201d era, because when I wrote them in September, I was genuinely angered by the Fed\u2019s decisions and how callous the goal of \u201cunemployment\u201d felt given the last 40 years of meager wage gains for the working […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2480,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-481","essays","type-essays","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy"],"yoast_head":"\nThe \u201cPain\u201d of a Forced Recession is Mostly Intended for the 90% - Money with Katie<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/essays\/the-pain-of-a-forced-recession-is-intended-for-the-90-percent\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The \u201cPain\u201d of a Forced Recession is Mostly Intended for the 90% - 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