Ford CEO admits 'the customer has spoken' amid company's worst performance slip since 2008 financial crisis: 'It's a big miss'

[AzScorpion]

as the middle class has shrunk significantly over the decades more and more wealth has been transferred to those who are already well heeled.

Yes it is shrinking but not like you and others think. We've beaten this to death on another financial forum I'm on and the ones who tend to think it's shrinking is because of their own personal wealth which you have to look beyond that. Most lower and middle class are/have moved up so the numbers look like it's shrinking. Now some of this (net worth) is because house values have risen but the chart clearly shows a rise in income.

The most recent data appears to be for 2023. Presenting 2023 data using 2016 dollars,

• About 32% of households are in the top tier, continuing the trend of more households being well off.
• About 46% of households are in the middle tier - an increase in the middle tier.
• About 22% of households are in the bottom tier - dramatically fewer households are poor.

The big change is people movin' on up: Lots and lots of families in the bottom tier moved up to the middle tier. That is a pretty dramatic change and of course reinforces that we are living in good times.

Perhaps that is why so many long-time middle class people feel worse off - so many formerly poor people have joined the middle class, and hence fewer families are "beneath" the long-time middle class dwellers.

There's a lot of truth to this....for many people if their neighbor has a dollar more then they're "rich".

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[woodworker]

Those things are pretty much indestructible! My buddy has a few of them and restores them when he has time. He still uses one for around his house and it's outlasted almost every other one of our friends conventional mowers over the past 30+ years.

My dad bought a Wheel Horse 655 with a Tecumseh engine in the mid 60’s. They were built with real metal then.

 

[dtech]

Good info about the middle class, from Pew Research titled the state of the american middle class that takes several different perpectives about income levels in the 3 classes, an excerpt from the report which is in concert about what you posted, in sheer numbers Pew states middle class shrinkage of 10% but I believe that is since 1970 , the report does go beyond just that barometer. And one thing that many may disagree on but most reports don't factor in is the increasing national debt which as of Feb is $286k per household , debt that many argue has allowed us to live beyond our means.

But the middle class has fallen behind on two key counts. The growth in income for the middle class since 1970 has not kept pace with the growth in income for the upper-income tier. And the share of total U.S. household income held by the middle class has plunged.

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class/

and this from aei research which I think agrees with what you have stated:

Abstract
Populists on both the political left and right routinely claim that the middle class has been hollowed out. These claims, to the extent they are based on evidence, rely on a relative definition of the middle class, such that if income doubles for every family, the middle class does not grow. Using an absolute definition of the middle class, we find that the “core” middle class has shrunk, but only because more families have become upper-middle class over time. The upper-middle class boomed from 10 percent of families in 1979 to 31 percent in 2024, and its share of income doubled. The share of families whose income left them short of the core middle class fell from 54 percent to 35 percent. Claims of a hollowed-out middle class wrongly reinterpret widespread (if unequal) gains across the income distribution as rising insecurity and declining living standards.

 

[Cmar]

This depresses me as I see the exact thing happening here. When I was young I bought a three bedroom house in what was effectively the inner suburbs, I had only been working a couple of years after university, but I was able to earn sufficient money to not only buy it, but still live relatively easily (on my own).
Ok by today's standards it was just a plain brick and tile house, no aircon, basic (but well made, solid brass and copper) fittings, and I had to do a little bit of work on it, but it was a house, just 7 minutes drive from the city centre.

No one builds simple affordable houses like this any more. They are all hideous giant 2 and 3 story boxes with 3,000 rooms, that take up almost 100% of the block leaving you with no yard, with duct-ed air con and heating to every room, with windows the size of a football field which are absolute heat soaks in this climate, thus a power consumption similar to a small outback town, and costing $2,000,000.
Unfortunately many of them are also all show, underneath they are shoddily and cheaply built, use cheap, but expensive looking fittings, leak like sieves, and suffer from rot, and masonry cracks, due to poor foundations done quickly and nastily.

My 20 year old house I bought was built in the mid 60's simply needed a coat of paint internally, fix a leaking shower, replace the stove, (it had been a rental for a while - that stove was DNR) - got a really nice one from a relative who was re-modeling their kitchen, and replace a few rotten boards on the verandah (I went to a timber yard and they gave me some odd sized off-cuts for free). The rest was sound and perfectly serviceable for many more years.

My oldest son and his partner who both work in good jobs, recently scraped together enough to buy a townhouse in the outer suburbs, (after living with us for a couple of years to save up) but it was a struggle for them, and they still have to budget carefully.
I now fear that my youngest son and his partner who have just finished university may never be able to get on the housing round about the way things are going. This is insane, we have a country the size of the US with a fraction of the population, there is no shortage of room.
This much change in just 40 years. (Rant over)

 

[got3fords]

It just burns my ass to see the money some of these people are making. I’ll leave it at that.

I don't give a shit how much money someone makes. But when they use their wealth for nefarious purposes, then I take issue. Yes, I'm talking to you Soros family.

 

[AzScorpion]

This depresses me as I see the exact thing happening here. When I was young I bought a three bedroom house in what was effectively the inner suburbs, I had only been working a couple of years after university, but I was able to earn sufficient money to not only buy it, but still live relatively easily (on my own).
Ok by today's standards it was just a plain brick and tile house, no aircon, basic (but well made, solid brass and copper) fittings, and I had to do a little bit of work on it, but it was a house, just 7 minutes drive from the city centre.

No one builds simple affordable houses like this any more. They are all hideous giant 2 and 3 story boxes with 3,000 rooms, that take up almost 100% of the block leaving you with no yard, with duct-ed air con and heating to every room, with windows the size of a football field which are absolute heat soaks in this climate, thus a power consumption similar to a small outback town, and costing $2,000,000.
Unfortunately many of them are also all show, underneath they are shoddily and cheaply built, use cheap, but expensive looking fittings, leak like sieves, and suffer from rot, and masonry cracks, due to poor foundations done quickly and nastily.

My 20 year old house I bought was built in the mid 60's simply needed a coat of paint internally, fix a leaking shower, replace the stove, (it had been a rental for a while - that stove was DNR) - got a really nice one from a relative who was re-modeling their kitchen, and replace a few rotten boards on the verandah (I went to a timber yard and they gave me some odd sized off-cuts for free). The rest was sound and perfectly serviceable for many more years.

My oldest son and his partner who both work in good jobs, recently scraped together enough to buy a townhouse in the outer suburbs, (after living with us for a couple of years to save up) but it was a struggle for them, and they still have to budget carefully.
I now fear that my youngest son and his partner who have just finished university may never be able to get on the housing round about the way things are going. This is insane, we have a country the size of the US with a fraction of the population, there is no shortage of room.
This much change in just 40 years. (Rant over)

Being in construction for 42 years I've seen the whole housing industry change from nice small 1,200-1,400 sq ft ranches, capes & colonials to these larger (mostly ugly) big square boxed 3,000-4,000 sq ft homes now. We had a 1,200 sq ft 3/1 ranch with 4 of us and survived well. Sure it was a challenge when me and my sister were in high school and there were 4 of us trying to get ready to go out on a Saturday night but we managed.

The average house in the 1950s was about 1,000 square feet. The famous Levittown houses were 750 square feet, with one bathroom - for mom, dad, and sometimes the 4-6 kids. Today, the average house is about 2,500 square feet, even though the average number of people in it declined from 3.4 in 1950 to 2.5 in 2024. This is why so many are in huge debt now and are house strapped. I wont say house poor because usually you're accruing equity unless you bought at the top in 2022. Now add in a couple of car payments and insurance and along with rising inflation and it makes things a lot harder to survive. One thing people tend to forget is that even though inflation is down, prices rarely come down because they're set at the high which was 9% back in '22. This just means that things are going up slower and the only way to reduce inflation is usually through a big recession and/or less government spending which devalues our dollar. We all know that's never going to happen!

 

[TJC]

The $100 bill is the new $10 bill. Moving to >$100K means nothing. The real inflation rate is far higher than the government reports.

 

[TxOTRRanger]

Being in construction for 42 years I've seen the whole housing industry change from nice small 1,200-1,400 sq ft ranches, capes & colonials to these larger (mostly ugly) big square boxed 3,000-4,000 sq ft homes now. We had a 1,200 sq ft 3/1 ranch with 4 of us and survived well. Sure it was a challenge when me and my sister were in high school and there were 4 of us trying to get ready to go out on a Saturday night but we managed.

The average house in the 1950s was about 1,000 square feet. The famous Levittown houses were 750 square feet, with one bathroom - for mom, dad, and sometimes the 4-6 kids. Today, the average house is about 2,500 square feet, even though the average number of people in it declined from 3.4 in 1950 to 2.5 in 2024. This is why so many are in huge debt now and are house strapped. I wont say house poor because usually you're accruing equity unless you bought at the top in 2022. Now add in a couple of car payments and insurance and along with rising inflation and it makes things a lot harder to survive. One thing people tend to forget is that even though inflation is down, prices rarely come down because they're set at the high which was 9% back in '22. This just means that things are going up slower and the only way to reduce inflation is usually through a big recession and/or less government spending which devalues our dollar. We all know that's never going to happen!

All very true and well said.

 

[woodworker]

This is one area where I'll have to disagree with you.

If we start regulating what someone (or a company) can make we're going to be a socialist country. While their worth is astounding it was all done legally and all of them benefiting from al the legal tax loopholes. That's like saying you're not going to take all your legal deductions on your own tax returns because it's not fair to someone who's poor and doesn't receive the same. When I was in business I wrote off everything I could from my trucks (which was everything I bought for them like some killer stereos &wheels), cloths, all my stationary and envelopes and even a few nice big screen tvs over the years. They were in my office and I used them as my computer monitor.

Take Elon for instance. When he owned SolarCity he made a ton of money off the government subsidies because most of SCs customers were leasing their systems. When you lease your system the installer gets the rebates not the customer so all those tens of thousands of homes they did he was getting all the rebates which is brilliant and well deserved. Heck just my small 14 panel array qualified for $6,000 Federal and $1,000 State subsidies which I was able to take 100% right off my income in 2016. I was still working then and being self employed it allowed me to skip a few quarterly payments. Now multiply that by the amount they did and you can see where a good chunk of money was made besides the installs and the materials.

Don't hate the player, hate the game. Hint, it's rigged against all us little guys.

We can disagree all we want but how much is really enough? What man walking upright needs to be worth billions while the people that helped him make those billions, for the most part, struggle to make ends meet? That’s my point. I guess I would never make a good CEO because I probably would invest in my people’s lives. Someone asked me what I would do with the money if I won the lottery when it was up over a billion here in Virginia. I said probably give most of it away. I made a very decent living in nuclear power plant maintenance and management. It was nowhere near millions or billions and I am very happy right now. Is the amount they make like an ego thing or why does a person need that much? My son use to pay $10.00 a month for the meds he needs. Now, they have cut his insurance so far that I think he pays $250 a month for the same stuff. Guess the stock holders were not in the billion range yet.

 

[AzScorpion]

We can disagree all we want but how much is really enough? What man walking upright needs to be worth billions while the people that helped him make those billions, for the most part, struggle to make ends meet? That’s my point. I guess I would never make a good CEO because I probably would invest in my people’s lives. Someone asked me what I would do with the money if I won the lottery when it was up over a billion here in Virginia. I said probably give most of it away. I made a very decent living in nuclear power plant maintenance and management. It was nowhere near millions or billions and I am very happy right now. Is the amount they make like an ego thing or why does a person need that much? My son use to pay $10.00 a month for the meds he needs. Now, they have cut his insurance so far that I think he pays $250 a month for the same stuff. Guess the stock holders were not in the billion range yet.

I agree I think I know it's an ego thing. Just look at all of them and they way most flaunt it and have that higher than thou attitude. There's a reason these old decrepit politicians stay in office until they're dead. Power, money and greed and what's sad is with 340 million people in this country this is what we get every 4 years!

Greed is an awful thing and like you I'm comfortable and happy with my lifestyle. Sure it could be better but it could also be a lot worse and that I'm grateful for. It's nice to dream about hitting the lottery big but I'd take a percentage and use the rest to help family and friends and donate to a few good causes like ST Judes and The Disabled American Veterans.

 

[woodworker]

I agree I think I know it's an ego thing. Just look at all of them and they way most flaunt it and have that higher than thou attitude. There's a reason these old decrepit politicians stay in office until they're dead. Power, money and greed and what's sad is with 340 million people in this country this is what we get every 4 years!

Greed is an awful thing and like you I'm comfortable and happy with my lifestyle. Sure it could be better but it could also be a lot worse and that I'm grateful for. It's nice to dream about hitting the lottery big but I'd take a percentage and use the rest to help family and friends and donate to a few good causes like ST Judes and The Disabled American Veterans.

Absolutely, we think alike there. Family and friends first. Me being an animal lover, I would donate to the rescues as well.

 

[got3fords]

I used to be poor as shit, by my own poor judgement. I wouldn't give crap to any charity because I needed anything I got for my own bills. Then I started to wake up, got an education, made better decisions, started to save and invest. Now I would not consider myself rich, but my future is solid. With myself on track, I find myself being much more charitable. I give to well rated charities. I give some to politicians who represent my values.
My point, I don't disparage rich people in general. Their wealth trickles down, whether they give generously to charity, or by the mere fact that people who work for people who work for people who work for them on down the line, in large part benefit from the rich.
You never hear anyone say, I work for a poor man!
I totally agree there are exceptions to the rule, but by and large that is how capitalism works.

 

[AzScorpion]

I used to be poor as shit, by my own poor judgement. I wouldn't give crap to any charity because I needed anything I got for my own bills. Then I started to wake up, got an education, made better decisions, started to save and invest. Now I would not consider myself rich, but my future is solid. With myself on track, I find myself being much more charitable. I give to well rated charities. I give some to politicians who represent my values.
My point, I don't disparage rich people in general. Their wealth trickles down, whether they give generously to charity, or by the mere fact that people who work for people who work for people who work for them on down the line, in large part benefit from the rich.
You never hear anyone say, I work for a poor man!
I totally agree there are exceptions to the rule, but by and large that is how capitalism works.

Congratulations on turning things around, it's not an easy thing to do. One thing I learned a long time ago is to not get hung up on what others have because there's always going to be someone better off than you are. Sure I'm envious of some but I'm just happy and blessed to have what I do and to be able to do the things I've done so far in life.

The easiest way to gain wealth is to just live within your means and always put money into your investment account (IRA, 401K) no matter how much (or little) it is. So many people don't realize the value of compounding over 30+ years and starting young gives you a huge advantage. I stopped giving to Goodwill and the Red Cross after finding out where the money really went. Just make sure your money is going to the cause and not into the CEOs pocket.

 

[Cmar]

We can disagree all we want but how much is really enough? What man walking upright needs to be worth billions while the people that helped him make those billions, for the most part, struggle to make ends meet? That’s my point. I guess I would never make a good CEO because I probably would invest in my people’s lives. Someone asked me what I would do with the money if I won the lottery when it was up over a billion here in Virginia. I said probably give most of it away. I made a very decent living in nuclear power plant maintenance and management. It was nowhere near millions or billions and I am very happy right now. Is the amount they make like an ego thing or why does a person need that much? My son use to pay $10.00 a month for the meds he needs. Now, they have cut his insurance so far that I think he pays $250 a month for the same stuff. Guess the stock holders were not in the billion range yet.

I was reading an interview with a fairly well known local businessman from here who basically rose up from a being an auto electrician to a multi millionaire through a combination of hard work and good business sense. He's come under fire from some quarters of the rich community because he has given quite a lot of his fortune away, (and deliberately embarrassed other millionaires who haven't) and spent other money in buying local business that about to go under, or be taken over by overseas interests, and shoring them up, and turning them around. (Most of which has been successful)

His reply is that he has more than enough to live on, and any more is just unnecessary. Furthermore he allegedly when in New York for a business meeting, asked a NY stockbroker in his opinion, how much money is really required to keep up a "modest" millionaire lifestyle and was staggered to hear that properly invested, how low the amount was and how close it was to his estimates. So he said what about the rest then? The reply - pride and vanity.

 

[TJC]

My dad bought a Wheel Horse 655 with a Tecumseh engine in the mid 60’s. They were built with real metal then.

They were bought out by American Motors in 1974 for $30 million. In 1982 an AMC management buyout occurred, and the robust designs that made them so popular continued. That all changed when Toro purchased the company in 1982 for $8 million. Toro started labeling their cheap steel stamped economy lines as WheelHorse. They finally dropped the Wheelhorse name completely in 2007.

For several years you could request Toro to build an original Wheelhorse tractor, but the price was extremely high. It ceased being an option when the Wheelhorse parts inventory was exhausted.

Mine is easy to maintain, and use. It is staying as long as I am. I own a modern cub cadet that cuts better, but it is not the industrial machine that the Wheelhorse is. The PTO on the Wheel horse is really nice, simple to maintain and allows for all kinds of options.

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