Robert Chapman's Empire of Normality is exactly what you're looking for
Wertheimer
joined 5 years ago
If you and your spouse are both on SSI I believe your combined benefits drop by at least 1/3.
Um, actually, Marx never wrote about "value" at all. He does have a bunch of texts about something called "Wert," which if I'm not mistaken is a non-cancerous form of viral growth usually occurring on the hands or feet.
I have an "invisible disability," at least on my better days, so I can see this attitude in some people's faces when they ask me what I do for a living.
And yet. About 30% of all income in the U.S. is unearned. Benefits payments are a small portion of that, and the vast, vast majority of benefits payments like SSI ultimately end up in the hands of landlords. But somehow my disability check makes chuds angrier than the fact that most of that check goes to rent.
The owners of this wealth, or capital, capture around 30 percent of the income produced by the country every year. This income flows to them, not because they work for it, but merely because they own income-generating assets like real estate, equity, and debt. In 2015, total US capital income was around $4.8 trillion.
If this unearned portion of the national income was distributed equally to every individual in society, then each person would receive around $15,000 of income per year in addition to whatever else they receive from working. For a family of four, this dividend alone would bring their household income to $60,000 per year.
$15,000, incidentally, is more than the maximum annual SSI payment. So even if so-called "laziness" were classified as a disability it would actually be the "lazy" who are getting a raw deal.
Found this article but most everything that Google is giving me is from paywalled academic journals - if you have any other recommended reading please let me know.
Edit - Particularly interested in more recent work. The Robert Allen study on internal neocolonialism they cite is from 1969 and the Lawrence Friedman book that discusses "differential segregation" is from 1970, and I'm curious to see this applied to post-2008 developments as well.
Over the last forty years, the human landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. The metamorphosis is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech, and the so-called creative class. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America’s hinterland, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo28433484.html
Article: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-of-life/
The analysis, from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), looks beyond whether people can afford daily necessities like food and shelter to consider whether they have the means to pay for things like the technology tools necessary for their jobs, higher education, and health and child care.
Article: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-of-life/
The analysis, from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), looks beyond whether people can afford daily necessities like food and shelter to consider whether they have the means to pay for things like the technology tools necessary for their jobs, higher education, and health and child care.
...
The Ludwig Institute also says that the nation's official unemployment rate of 4.2% greatly understates the level of economic distress around the U.S. Factoring in workers who are stuck in poverty-wage jobs and people who are unable to find full-time employment, the U.S. jobless rate now tops 24%, according to LISEP, which defines these groups as "functionally unemployed."
...
By those standards, the lowest-earning Americans around the U.S. are falling well short of what they need to maintain a decent standard of living, according to LISEP. These households, which in 2023 earned an average of $38,000 per year, would need to make $67,000 to afford the items the group tracks as part of its index, which also includes the cost of professional clothing and basic leisure activities.
Our best bet at stopping this is getting ankle bracelet companies to go to war to protect their market share.
In 
, the 
, and now the 
the ruling parties have essentially decided to give up on this year's elections. What are they trying to avoid being blamed for? Is it more than just a global recession? Wrong answers preferred.
The only possible good that can come of this wretched campaign is the ever-increasing likelihood that it will cause the Democratic Party to self-destruct. A lot of people are seriously worried about this, but I am not one of them. I have never been much of a Party Man myself. . . and the more I learn about the realities of national politics, the more I’m convinced that the Democratic Party is an atavistic endeavor – more an Obstacle than a Vehicle – and that there is really no hope of accomplishing anything genuinely new or different in American politics until the Democratic Party is done away with.
From Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Someone must have told him about it last night because his most recent tweet sez:
"To all the socialists: the labour theory of value, posited by Marx, is total horseshit. Reality has disproven it again and again."