The latest fantasy is that everything's going to be automated at 0% cost of capital, so it's futile to ask for a wage increase.
Futile perhaps. But contrary to popular belief, there aren't going to be any robots making Big Macs for jobless rioters in the future, while Amazon.com drones are dropping straight-from-China junk onto yuppy rooftops. Today's ill-gotten Central Bank fabricated "wealth" is every bit as unsustainable as any minimum wage increase.
Globalization was supposed to have spread wealth, but it just happens to have spread poverty instead. Is this a great fucking system? Or what?
China's race to the bottom, ended up at the bottom. China proved that Globalization doesn't work. No country tried harder to join the league of developed nations over the past 20 years than China. They make everything now, for 1/10th of developed world wages. If they can't bootstrap themselves to the big table no one can. They don't have a middle class, what they have instead are ultra-wealthy ponzi schemers trying to buy crack shacks in Vancouver before it all implodes.
The only modern "success" story was Japan which was the first country to use Export based strategies to bootstrap its way to the big table. Japan was successful to the extent of working its way up the value added ladder before they were beset by foreign imitators. Once that occurred, Japan's Export strategy yielded to stagnation as the strategy of duplicating everything the U.S. invents, was copied by the rest of Asia. Too many "Asian tigers" all trying to make DVD players and hard drives.
All of this points to the immutable fact that the consumption oriented lifestyle is over. It's toast. It was never sustainable, much less scalable. Developed nations use 3-5x as much resources as developing nations. In the context of a dying planet, the idea of scaling mass consumption, is wholly asinine. In the context of global debt up 50% since 2008, the Ponzi Scheme is in sudden death double overtime.
Today's dunces in leadership solved the debt crisis by borrowing more money. And the Idiocracy doubled down in the interim. Holy fuck...
The only path forward is via the sharing economy which embeds conservation. Something Hillary Clinton is against, since it doesn't serve the interests of her campaign donors. The very concept of conservation is unknown to the Walmart generation and anathema to corporations. It's inherently unprofitable.
Profit won't be the issue we are trying to solve in the days to come.
We need to start by raising the general IQ level which will only occur when the Idiocracy meets the pavement.
