Here's what's changed
- The market has collapsed into a few companies. That means that monopolistic forces are in nearly full force
- Labor unions have been severely weekend. In the 60s almost out of fear companies were practicing "corporate charity" to try and keep employees from unionizing. They've lost that fear.
- Regulations around corporate stock price manipulation have been all but eliminated. Buybacks use to be illegal because they allow a company to artificially inflate their stock completely unrelated to the actual performance of the company.
- Social safety nets have been gutted or underfunded.
- Public education has been destroyed. We used to have a fairly robust public university system that's been uber privatized with funding reduced to almost nothing.
- Hospital systems have consolidated as has insurance agencies which not only drives up the price of medical care, it drives down the wages of doctors and nurses while keeping them as minimally staffed as possible. This translates into terrible care that fucks you over when you need any medical work done.
We're all sacrificing life experiences so that a very, very, very small percentage of people can live like kings.
Pretty much, it's the very natural consequence of a deregulation and the an-cap philosophy. We've seen this before in america during the 1900s. It's the whole reason Teddy and FDR ended up getting elected.
So we need another FDR. Can we do it without a preceding depression this time around?
We can't because we have corporate propaganda news outlets that will work tirelessly to frame this "new FDR" as a fascist communist racist woke elite conman.
Pick your outlet and that will determine the words chosen to disparage them.
Hell just look at the supposed "liberal media" treating Bernie Sanders when he looked to be taking the lead in the primaries, suddenly every story was "Bernie loves Castro! Bernie loves Cuba! Be afraid! He likes communist stuff! Boo! Ahhh! Oh no it's Bernie!"
Don't forget the low blow campaign tactic of the "Bernie Bros" - and how I cannot be a feminist if I don't cast my vote for Clinton. I couldn't believe how biased NPR was in their coverage and framing of that primary. It caused me to stop being a supporter.
I’m still proud to be considered a 21 year old russian man named Vladimer online!!! (I am not even close to any of those but my twitter replies insist i’m wrong about that actually)
MSNBC's Chris Matthews literally said if Bernie was elected him and his rich buddies would be executed in Central Park.
Chris Matthews’ Wild Rant Connects a Bernie Sanders Win With Public Executions. The MSNBC host talked about socialist-led “executions in Central Park” while tying those fears to Bernie Sanders
In addition to this, the government is working to ban any news outlet that disagrees with them. They’re starting with “foreign” outlets like RT and TikTok, but they’ll soon move to anything that doesn’t toe the party line.
Democracy is dead.
I can understand literal propaganda outlets, government run news from countries we know have their orgs run with specific orders to run whatever stories would be an obvious thing to want to curtail here. I used to check into RT and all I'd see are anti-american stories or even using Americans to tell an anti-american government story from someone like Abby Martin. I can't imagine we'd be getting any news from say North Korean news outlets that isn't specifically meant to manipulate foreign countries citizens.
Tiktoc isn't really news, it's more like YouTube. If anything I'd say assholes like Zuckerberg lobby the government to kill foreign competitors in our market which is a whole nother issue that also sucks :(
You're about to elect Trump again. I shouldn't worry about there not being enough bad economic news.
First and foremost you should mention the corporate tax cuts. How can corporations afford consolidation and other malicious shit they do? Their tax bill was cut in half. And their executive income tax rate was cut dramatically.
Rather than paying their employees, they give massive bonuses to their executives and save the rest for buying out competitors or attracting suitors.
It's not so much the corporate tax rate that did it, it's capital gains tax (and especially how it's implemented) that's the big problem.
The fact that capital gains isn't treated as regular income tax creates all sorts of really bad incentives. It means that executives are generally primarily paid in stock which means they are incentivized to push the value of that stock up. And since everyone making those decisions are also primarily paid in stock they'll authorize things like stock buybacks to boost their own personal wealth.
5 regulations I'd make to fix this problem.
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No executives can be paid with equity.
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The maximum salary can not be more than 10x the lowest salary in a company.
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Tax capital gains as regular income.
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Bring back the 90% top income tax bracket
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Introduce a wealth tax. Perhaps 3% for a networth over 1 billion.
So, republicans happened.
Edit- before you tar and feather me, democrats went along. But all of those have been articles of faith in the GOP.
I mostly blame Reagan and Nixon. They were the harbingers of modern republican governmental stupidity. Nixon courted the racists out of the democrat party and Regan push dumbass deregulation. Bigotry + being the whipping boys for rich people is basically the only principles republicans stand on today.
Civil Rights happened.
Once it became clear to racist whites that Black Americans would have full access to the social programs that they enjoyed, they decided that they'd rather burn all those social programs to the ground before they'd share them. This is the basis of the modern Republican party, so you weren't wrong.
Incidentally, the scenario in this original post was never true for almost all black Americans.
Aren't there a lot more social programs today than there were in the period the OP refers to?
While all of this is true, I'll also add that this was an unrepeatable condition: WWII gutted Europe and the US was untouched. All of perks of the past society were part of an unsustainable economic bubble. USA citizens have never quite realized that.
The only part I would disagree with you on is that in the past 80 years productivity has grown by a huge margin, and if that translated into increased wages (as opposed to increased corporate profits) as it once did I think that quality of life would not be so unsustainable.
The richest 1% own almost half the world's wealth. The hoarders have mostly dug in and ensured that their hoarding is legal, will stop at nothing, is easier than ever, and is well defended and unopposed.
We live in the joke where the billionaire takes 99 cookies from the table, leaves one and says "Careful, peon, the [member of the minority you dislike] is after your cookie".
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While I agree with all of that and more, the world has gotten much more complex over the years. It’s not a bad thing to try to raise the bar on minimum education for everyone.
Also, for the part of it due to global outsourcing … there’s only so much protectionism can give you without ruining importer/exporters. A better approach is to try to bring a more educated workforce than offered by cheap third world labor
Regulations around corporate stock price manipulation have been all but eliminated. Buybacks use to be illegal because they allow a company to artificially inflate their stock completely unrelated to the actual performance of the company.
In that case, once a company sold stock to investors, they could never recoup it then? The only way for that to happen would be a single person or group organized to buy up a lot to get a controlling stake?
Effects ofWW2
Immigration
Lack of training in general.
Offshoring.
People buying loads if crap. Like seriously how many coats did your grandparents have in their adult life. Probably about the same you have in your closet right now, maybe less. Not to mention TV, phones, exotic food.
The housing market is fucked because land is undervalued.
Oil? (I might be wrong on this)
Somethings need to change but there are some things missed here.
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Coats, and devices for that matter, used to be built to last and be repairable. But if your customer consumer never needs to buy another product from you now that wouldn't make much business sense would it?
It would if you stole everyone else's business and that's what businesses used to compete on.
But consumers want fast fashion. They want cheap clothing and it doesn't matter if it only last 5 years instead of 30 because they are going to throw it out after 1 anyway.
Consumers have forced the hand of businesses in this case. People want cheap more than they want anything else.
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Personally I don't feel that way, but my personal experience isn't a particularly large sample size.
Consumers may want various things, but those wants aren't created in a vacuum. Otherwise advertising would be pointless.
I've pointed this out before-
On TV in the 1980s, Tom and Roseanne were out of work constantly, but they owned a house and they never lost it.
On TV in the 1980s, Al Bundy supported his housewife and two kids on a shoe salesman's salary.
You know what the criticism was? It wasn't that they owned a house. It was "their house is too big for what they make."
I don't remember anyone thinking it was ridiculous that Al Bundy was a homeowner. Because of course he would own a home.
Even renting and even in the 90s... no one said that it would be impossible to live in Manhattan and work in a cafe like on Friends. The criticism was that the apartment was too big. The idea that it was something you could do was not in question.
Yes, it's all TV and it's all fantasy, but the public reaction to it should show you something.
Simpsons did it too. That was part of Frank Grimes’ (Or Grimey, as he liked to be called) criticism of Homer.
I should hope that a technician at a nuclear power plant could afford that house. Sure, he was an idiot, but he still did the job.
Because of course he would own a home
This hits hard. It was pretty much accepted that as long as you generally had your life together enough to work a full time job, you could save up and buy a home.
Bundy was my first thought too, they were dirt poor with a clunker of a dodge, but they had a big house.
This will sound ridiculous to most people:
I didn’t go to school after the 8th grade. I dropped out for several reasons, but even without lying, I talked my way into a very good career in IT. There was no database of schooling and I was hired on my personal merits, then I built a user experience department before that was actually a thing.
Within a few years, I was responsible for hiring but couldn’t hire anyone like myself. I wasn’t allowed to even consider anyone without a college degree, so I would have had to reject myself.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. That was 2002, and now in 2024, we’re rejecting people who might be awesome at their job (not to toot my horn, but I was very good at what I did and won industry awards) because they can’t afford to get a degree, as I couldn’t.
Most industries are pay to play now, and you can’t even break in by being exceptional nowadays. We’re trapping people out of what they’re great at and would love to do just because they were born into poverty.
Imagine the gifts we’re suppressing and squandering.
Thank you for sharing :)
I think many will agree the bureaucracy and corporate life is killing a lot of things, because of absolute assholes in management positions. But without written out experiences like yours, it is just unsubstantiated ideological hate.
It's more than "you need a degree" now. Some jobs require a undergraduate "business" degree, as if that means anything. This by definition excludes people who get harder degrees.
So you will see entry level financial roles going to people who have taken a few "leadership" (handshaking) courses and basic accounting. While someone with an English or Sociology degree (who might actually know how to write an email) is rejected.
Don't get me started on internships. Getting coffee every day, handing out mail, and doing a 2 week office furniture inventory are not indicators of a promising future.
The main problem is, businesses literally don't know how to hire. If you know what skills you need, you can find someone in a day. You can literally set up a folding table at the metro entrance and find 5 good interview candidates.
Yeah, I’ve noticed a shift. Even 5 years ago I hardly ever saw the college degree requirement for software development, and if it ever came up my yea experience nipped the question in the bud. These days, with over a decade of experience, I am getting automated rejections because I don’t have a diploma. I have been contacted and actively turned down over the phone after clarifying that I do not have a degree (many AI systems read my resume as having a degree in “degree” for some reason.)
I’ve put out hundreds of applications, and have had a handful of interviews.
The degree means nothing. Someone going to school for development doesn’t make them a good developer, it means they test well. My decade+ in the industry with multiple completed projects however…
Back when this was a real thing, billionaires didn't exist. I say we try very hard to go back to this economic era.
We can't. Unless you want another world war, kill tens of millions, and destroy most of Western Europe, have Nazis, and nuke a country. Not to mention billions less on the planet.
This is what eventually pushed for the Marshall Plan that did help Europe and fuel the reconstruction that followed in the USA and elsewhere. Like the boomers lived through a period of time that was quite far, far from 'normal.' Only because it happened it does not mean that it was historically normal, nor does the remove the nuances of the time period, both the so-called good along with the horrible.
Problem seems to be that the lady on OP's post has the Historical knowledge and nuance of a toddler. Is that the average education system in the USA? Because if so, holy shit.
Back then there was this thing called the marginal tax rate which taxed the extremely wealthy 90%.
Current proposals for a marginal tax rate on anyone making over 10 million dollars is 70% and the billionaires of this country are using their wealth to convince the stupidest of the lower classes that such a thing will hurt them and not just the billionaires.
Sure. We’ll just have to make sure that women and minorities can’t get good jobs, and we’ve gotta get most of Europe leveled by war. Then we also need a wildly progressive president
But then it’s easy.
This time it has to be China also, not only Europe (and mostly not Europe, actually). Then, if the retaliatory nuke does not destroy everyone, you can again have the privilege of feeding off the rest of the world for a decade or 2 with no competition. I wonder if any kind of tech breakthrough can lead to the same advantage that could be shared by a nation and not only a few rich. Seems the answer is no. And the minorities issue is unlikely to fly again, as white people are no longer the overwhelming majority, the mix is way more diverse.
Also anything electrical beyond heating this thing or spinning that thing needs to go.
Imagine having a lucrative career as a comptometer operator.
Imagine hearing ad nauseum about the pending healthcare and manufacturing crisis that will be caused by the retirement of the boomers and thinking there won't be anything for people to do for work in the future because some things are automated.
We used to see these "good old days" posts from boomers. They mostly seem to have stopped since they mostly learned that this was a fantasy not shared by most people. It also ignores that most people today don't actually want to live under the conditions above. In 1960 only about half of all households had washing machines. This idyllic fantasy ignores that some lucky ladies were making this possibly with hours of hard domestic labor per day. It also ignores that huge economic boost the US got after WWII for being the only country that still had intact industry.
edit: typo
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And you're ignoring that Regan et al went after the unions and undermined your ability to negotiate against your much more powerful employer.
But I do agree, a lot of people forget that, while stress and uncertainty are up for a lot of people, material wealth is also way up. The thing is, it's an unnecessary trade-off. We could have an abundance of security in all areas of our lives.
As much as I think "whataboutism" is an overused word, this is a perfect example of it. It's not germane to anything in my post. I pointed out that the "good old days" claim in OP is a myth. A claim of, "so and so made things worse" has nothing to do with my statement.
While Reagan was president, one of my grandparents was in a union. They still had to use a toilet in the hall that they shared with the neighbor. They couldn't afford a car. They didn't have a TV. None of those things were available because all the factories in their country got bombed. At the same time my other set of grandparents paid taxes but never got to vote. They lived in a colony of the democracy-loving British but since they were natives they were second class citizens.
Pretending that the world was some paradise until Reagan and the neocons showed up is just willful ignorance.
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Maybe I didn't acknowledge strongly enough that you're 100% in saying that shit sucked back then. Shit sucks now, too. They just suck in different ways unique to each time.
The killing the unions comment was in reference to the idyllic income OP is nostalgic for, since they are part of the reason such a situation was possible. Sorry if that felt like "whatsboutism," it wasn't intended to be that way.
That makes sense.
I get frustrated at frequent oversimplifications. Reagan and the neocons certainly made things worse but they were a few out of many factors.
Even if we imagined a world where we have a bunch of Bernie Sanders all over government there are limits to what they can do. Strong unions in the US wouldn't have done anything to stop Asia from industrializing, Europe from rebuilding its economy or the rest of the developing world from trying to move out of agrarian economies. When the US car companies were the only game in town there was a lot of excess that could be spread around to workers. Once a bunch of other countries started offering cars it put more and more pressure on the US companies to spend more money on quality and charge less for finished products. Over here we got used to a war induced monopoly and convinced ourselves that's "normal" or that it's simply the result of democracy or American ingenuity.
If we actually want to improve the state of regular people we'll have much better success if we're honest with ourselves about both the present and history.
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Yup, totally agree, and I think the improved standards of living in those areas are absolutely a good thing, even if it's changed the way the American economy works. It was never going to be static anyhow. China is starting to produce higher quality products and their standard of living is increasing, too. Their low-end labor has moved to Vietnam, among other places, and hopefully they develop their own mature economy in due time.
I don't think a highschool education is enough to have a high standard of living in the American economy, that fact was pretty much always going to be true with the way the economy has changed. Still, the bottom has fallen out and there's little reason it should have outside of the union busting.
I suppose, had the American unions stayed strong this whole time, this meme might still have been produced, with people still remembering a time when less education was enough to climb higher on the economic ladder.
In 1960 only about half of all households had washing machines. This idyllic fantasy ignores that some lucky ladies were making this possibly with hours of hard domestic labor per day.
Being fair here, the absence of a washing machine in the home does not necessarily mean doing laundry by hand. Laundromats have been around since the 30s.
Also that the average house was like 1/3 the size of new homes today and a large portion of families had one car or fewer.
I would happily buy a below average size house instead of living in a below average sized apartment if that were an option.
There were many many things that were worse about the "good old days".
Cars sucked, phones sucked, computers sucked, houses were smaller, appliances sucked (if you had them at all), clothes sucked (yes there were some cool outfits but they were expensive, uncomfortable and high maintenance).
It's not like work conditions were universally awesome either. Consider how many women were regularly getting raped as part of their job and we didn't prosecute the Cosbys and Weinsteins of the world until recently. Today, if your boss sends you a harassing text, you go public with it. Back then, if you complained about your boss calling you "sugartits" and copped a feel, your options were basically STFU or GTFO (because you almost certainly can't prove it).
If we want to strive for a better future, we're more likely to succeed if we avoid romanticizing the past.
cars, phones, computers, and appliances were serviceable. that's something we can lament changing.
Sort of.
Some people could service cars, if they had the space, equipment and skills to do it.
For much of that period the people who could afford phones were not the ones who knew how to fix them. Part of it is that phones do more now. If you get an old flip phone it's basically bulletproof and you don't need to worry about repairing it (although you can typically swap out broken pieces). The problem is that you'll be rockin an ancient flip phone. Once you start adding a bunch of stuff (capacitive touch screen, wifi, camera, bluetooth, etc) it's gonna be harder to fix.
My desktop today is designed to be more serviceable than early computers were. I don't need to solder anything, parts just fit together and there's far better standards support. Did you ever have the joy of messing with autoexec.bat and config.sys just to get your mouse working? Do you remember what a PITA it was getting an old Soundblaster to work?
I've had a guy come out to repair by boiler, my dishwasher and (twice) my washing machine. Appliances are still serviceable but (just like in the old days) it usually involves calling someone.
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It was the norm for a brief period after World War 2, and only for the US, largely because it was the only country to get out of WWII without sustaining any real damage.
Pre-WWII was the great depression, where a large fraction of people without a high-school education were out of work. Life was miserable. People who were kids during the great depression and are in their 80s / 90s now might still stash food around the house because they're still afraid of going hungry. This eventually resulted in the New Deal which completely transformed the country.
Pre Great Depression, jobs were dangerous, housing was crowded, widows moved in with their adult children, old people moved back in with their families, people paid 1/3 of their salaries just for food (and the food sucked). Women might have only rarely worked outside the house, but the housework they did was extensive: no washing machines, no dishwashers, no refrigerator, no running water, many homes didn't even have a stove. Making or mending clothes was a near constant job. Clothing was also very expensive by modern standards, and was built for durability, not comfort. And that's for the lucky "white" people. Non-white people had it much worse.
A good life with only one breadwinner is not typical, and never has been. Maybe it should be, but don't think that the post-WWII US experience is typical.
If you go back far enough the primary occupations become gathering edible plants and killing animals. The US didn't get less productive per hour of labor between 1950 and 2024 the wealthy just started accruing a lot more of the benefits of our productivity.
This is the true answer none of these forum sliding wall of text class traitors will address.
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The US didn’t get less productive per hour of labor between 1950 and 2024
The point is that post-WWII is not the "normal" state of things. It was largely the result of a war that devastated every other major economy in the world, reducing competition from other countries. That gave the US a huge advantage. In addition there were strong government reforms from the pre-war depression-era time and reforms from during the war that curbed the excesses of the ultra-rich. The depression-era policies and the war-time policies also had the government playing a much more active role in the economy. Finally, this happened in a period where the world was much less "globalized" and relied on exploiting developing countries to a much greater extent than today.
Unless there's another devastating war that destroys every other major economy in the world, the US is never going to get the post-WWII advantage back. That was a big part of the reason a guy with a high-school education could support a family of 5 immediately after WWII. (Also, that mostly was the case for white guys, because the US post-WWII was a very racist country where the things like the GI Bill, which allowed veterans to get very cheap houses, was unavailable to non-whites.
The post-war period was one when the United Fruit Company convinced US presidents to orchestrate a coup in Guatemala in 1954 to remove the democratically elected president and install one who was more friendly to US international businesses. This meant cheap bananas for the US, big profits to US companies, and political violence and instability for Guatemala. So, the high-school educated guy supporting a family of 5 on his own was partially made possible by the exploitation of other countries by US-based businesses. I don't think anybody on the left wants that era to come back again.
But, it's possible to get the government to play a more active role in the economy again. For instance, in 1946 the top tax bracket was effectively 91%. Today it's 37%. Then there's enforcing anti-competitive statutes, going after all the monopolies, duopolies and cartels currently squeezing every American resident. Ideally, there would also be reforms to copyright laws that removed power from the entertainment cartel and handed it back to artists, or shortened copyright terms handing the fruits of copyright to the people.
A (white) guy with a high school education supporting a family of 5 in reasonable comfort was a historical anomaly. It relied on some good things like the government acting in the interest of regular people, taxing the super rich, and regulating large businesses. It relied on some shitty things, like the government helping out US-based businesses by orchestrating coups in other countries and otherwise aiding in the exploitation of developing countries. And it relied on some historical quirks, like the US being the only major participant to escape from WWII unscathed.
Increasing productivity per labor hour invested is sufficient for everyone to have a 1950s life because we are in fact many times more productive per hour invested than 1950. This more than balances the unusual characteristics of the 50s
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Increasing productivity per labor hour invested
How are you measuring that?
for everyone to have a 1950s life
Does this mean no Internet, no computers, no TV, or maybe a small black and white TV with only 3 channels, no washing machine, probably no refrigerator, one telephone for the entire family to share, etc.?
That was probably a good period, though it could sustain only a few % of the current world population. Now that we have billions (due to tech development, though mostly of tech you would call very-very low tech, like plow), only mass production is capable of supporting the population. And that means all kinds of things, including the extreme wealth concentration, which is only getting worse with further tech advances. Inequality is quite likely to become the real reason of the new world war that would trim population to more sustainable levels, and a new "golden age" of recovering. For these who survived. Fucking cycles...
To be clear, this was for white (Irish and Italians don't count) men, and many black, hispanic, and native families could not afford to live the American dream.
I think you don't realize how recent OP is talking about...
Fuck man, even the 1990s a single income household with 3 kids could be comfortable.
You're talking about Irish and Italian Americans like you think it was the 1890s...
Exactly, I remember this from when I was a kid! We're not talking about pre-industrial America, pre-civil rights movement America, or even pre cell phones America.
This is relatively recent, and it's a tragedy that it's so normalized that younger gens would assume otherwise.
My father dropped out of high school, got a job a HP as a line worker (manufacturing oscilloscopes), got married, had 6 kids, 3-4 cars (depending on needs), and a house to fit all those kids. This was in the late 70s-90s (when the last kid graduated high school). Mother didn't work. We lived comfortably (not wealthy by any means).
My wife and I have 4 degrees between us, both work full time, have a single kid. We live about as well as my parents did.
The middle class dream! It absolutely feels like the bar to clear to be able to achieve this is significantly higher now.
Unless you're already wealthy, you have to pick one or more from the following:
- delay starting a family until more secure
- both parents work
- multi-generational household
- living farther from major cities
- having fewer kids than you might otherwise
add
- College Degree/s (even when many/most jobs don't really need it) with likely student loans
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I supported a family of 4 on a single income from being a grunt in an autobody shop in 1999. We didn't live the high life, but we had a house, a paid off car, and took in-country vacations at least once a year.
The Simpsons seemed realistic in the 90s, with one shlob working as a chair moistener able to maintain a family of 5 in a four-bedroom house.
The 90's were choke full of their own issues and weren't some ideallic past. You could still get fired from a job if they found out you were gay, violent crime was at an all time high, and the 90's was the peak of outsourcing away all of the jobs that used to be able to support a family. Hell, a lot if country clubs only started allowing Jews in as members 20 years ago. The days of single income homes were more or less gone by the 70's. Thats why we see a massive spike in women joining the workforce then, since they couldn't afford to be stay at home moms anymore.
Now women can't afford to work because childcare costs as much as they would make at a job.
The 90s was just the declining slope from the 50s-70s post war economic boom. But even at the height of that boom, minorities and women were totally excluded. The subtext of "it was stolen from you", the "you" is white men.
Not only were the "good old days" oppressive for minorities, women, and LGBT, but also massive environmental degradation; Monroe Doctrine military adventurism; a government murderously hostile to left politics; all under the threat of nuclear extinction. Frankly this nostalgia is the lefty version of MAGA, and it's frustrating to see progressives looking backward.
Mate...
They were explicitly talking about economics, and nothing else.
I think the reason you're so upset, is you don't understand what people are talking about about.
Like, if I saw you on the beach and said "weather's nice today isn't it?"
And you started screaming at me about how pandas are endangered.
You're not wrong, just not relevant to the conversation.
At no point has anyone said that a single point of time was 100% perfect.
Naw.
Institutional racism exists still.
But in 2024 economically speaking it worse for all of us, regardless of race.
Like, if you were just making a dumb joke. Fine, whatever.
But if you honestly don't understand this, I can spare some time to help you
They said Irish and Italians weren't considered "white" at the time...
That isn't the 1990s which is the period referred to in OPs post.
But whatever racial/ethnic group you're talking about, they were better off economically in the 1990s than the 2020s.
So whatever they were saying, was wrong. It's just a matter of how they're wrong depending on what they meant. We won't know what they meant till they clarify.
So I have no idea why you rushed to make an uninformed "joke" like you did.
But the more you type, the less productive this looks like it'll be.
My great grandfather came to America from Ireland and supported a family of 9 with a single income
And there were successful blackmen in the US from 1820- segregation. American history is full of social classes based on race and ethnicity with white protestant men on top. Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics faced less discrimination than their black counter parts, but they still faced red lining, discrimination in jobs and getting loans and had a massive economic disadvantage. Obviously they managed to raise families, otherwise we wouldn't have those ethnic groups in America today.
America has always been built in inequality, its just that the WASP middle class used to have have an underclass to feel like they were better than. Now there isn't even a middle class because the wealthy have taken everything.
So your original statement is wrong:
To be clear, this was for white (Irish and Italians don't count) men, and many black, hispanic, and native families could not afford to live the American dream.
Because my Irish great grandfather very much lived the American dream. That is because this statement you made is also wrong:
America has always been built in inequality
The richest Americans had a tax rate of 91% in the 1960s. That number has plummeted since and income inequality has gotten to where it is today as a result.
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My mother worked to avoid boredom when my sister and I were at school. Good thing too, since it put her in a good position when everything but wages and computers got enormously more expensive starting in the '90s
They supported a family of 5 and a whole additional secret family in the city, somehow!
Wait...we are supposed to support our secret families? Shit, I thought you just got married had kids, and then moved to another state and changed your name when it got too hard lol.
When it really hit me was when I found out how much my girlfriend's parents paid for their house a few miles from the beach in San Diego on blue collar salaries. It was 1/5th the cost adjusted for inflation that it is now. If houses were still that price I could easily afford 2 on my salary, but instead I can't afford 1
I don't get it how this post is behing downvoted: understating Offical Inflation mathematically yields bigger Official GDP numbers due to how the Offical Inflation is used to deflate Nominal GDP to produce the supposedly inflation-free Real GDP which is the official one.
It doesn't take much to find politicians boasting about growing GDP, so there is huge political pressure to make that number high in ways which aren't obvious (and tweaking the basket of good and services used to calculate inflation is quite a subtle way to do it). It's not by chance that some countries (for example the UK) some years ago - basically since the house price bubble in there started going - even started using and Inflation Index that doesn't include house prices (I'm not quite sure if that's the case in the US).
It also fits the observeable effects: a salary in the 2020s that can barelly pay for a small appartment and food, which using the inflation indexes is inflation adjusted to produce a supposedly equivalent salary in the 60s, yields something that back then paid for a house, a car and all the expenses of family of 5, something that can only be explained by the inflation adjustment being wrong (if it was right, it would roughly buy the same now and back then) hence the inflation indexes are wrong and over the years have been much more wrong on the side of understating inflation than on the other side (and always erring in the same direction cannot be explained by the normal error in the method).
Mind you, this is not massive rigging of inflation with 10%+ "adjustments", it's more 1% here, 0.5% there, which over decades adds up to a 100%+ cummulative error.
I worked the factories in the late eighties, most had spouses that worked, most rented or bought a single wide, we all barely scraped by and were just a disaster away from being broke broke.
Sure you had a few, and I emphasize a few, guys who made decent bank, but they were specialists and most people were clamoring to be their right hand person to take over when they retired or quit.
That wasn't the bulk of us.
We didn't own that comparable sized house.
We didn't take vacations, we visited family in another state.
We didn't drive a nice or a lot of times even decent cars.
We on the line didn't support a family of five comfortably, we all fucking struggled to make ends meet but we could keep modest for on the table and a roof over our heads.
That family of five on a high schoolers education was always a bit of a myth but I will say it was certainly better back then than today, at least there was abundant factory work that paid better than the minimum.
Ya, more like 50's - 70's. A huge amount of factory work in the US had already been offshored or started offshoring in the 80's
Even back then, the average laborer wasn't living in a 2,500 sqft house with two cars in the garage
I don't think anyone promised 2500 square feet and 2 cars in the garage?
That said my parents were both government employees their entire career. Made it up into the gs 11-13 area which isn't too hard to do. 2,500 square foot house, 2 cars, 2 kids playing travel sports, and a deck that was probably another 200 square feet. That was the early 90's in Maryland, where all the civil servants live. Not some remote area of Montana. They've also said there's no way they could buy that house with the gs pay charts and housing prices from about 2005 on.
So even your exaggerated example was not out of reach.
That's because the meme references a time earlier than the 1980s. 1950-1970 or so would be the bubble of time where this was still possible. Union declines up to 1980 aided Reagonomics in thoroughly fucking everyone from middle incomes down.
Yeah, things have always been tough on the working class no matter how you slice it.
It used to be when a man's wife had a baby, all he got was a free beer after work with the boys before he went to see his wife in the hospital.
We've come a long way, but we've got much farther to go. The 50s-70s aren't some kind of magical economic utopia. Backwards is not forwards.
I would say a complete myth but they didn’t have cellphones, everyone didn’t have their own room, etc. it was a very different lifestyle.
Grandpa had five kids, the girls had one room, the boys had the other. Three in one room. Two in the other.
Everyone wore hand me downs and my grandpa worked a second job part time.
I would be content with not having the housing market cannibalized by AirBnB and real estate companies, a paycheck that isn't eaten up by greedflation and a passable healthcare (I live in Europe, so we have public healthcare, at least nominally).
Poverty in first world countries is a new phenomenon that has only emerged in the past 10 to 20 years.
Sarcasm aside.... yes, the working class is still being exploited. It didn't take Twitter tier propaganda to say it.
Poverty in first world countries is a new phenomenon
It's not new, it just had been fought back considerably in the last century or so.
Corporate propaganda is a powerful thing. And one fairly subtle aspect of it is having television programs that normalize the 2 parent working household.
and those families used to take long road trips together for weeks as a vacation. and their clothes lasted decades.
I'm not from the US. And I'm amazed how my dad put 4 of his kids through college during the late 80s and early 90s and here I am struggling with just 1 kid.
The message was lost with the example chosen.
TL;DR - the world sucks for most people nowadays who want to buy a house.
The idea was that at one point in America, a single earner could afford to buy a home and upgrade the quality of their life if they:
- work hard
- had a decent job
- saved money
- did not procreate themselves into poverty
Now, even with two-earner families, it is not enough to afford even a basic starter home without being house poor and in debt for the entirety of your life without ever really "owning" anything (other than the payments). The reason for this change in home ownership experience is what is always hotly debated.
Those with general wealth or an entrepreneurial spirit will argue that it is still possible. The working class who just wants to do a job, earn a paycheck and leave work behind at the end of the day will disagree. The poor worry more about how to pay their bills at the end of the month and still feed themselves to worry about a house.
There are a lot of factors in my opinion on what has changed to make it so hard today but no reason greater to me than when a house became an investment instrument instead of a place to raise a family. Something left to your heirs to give them a leg up in their future and that was how upward mobility worked. However, now that a house is not just a home but an investment tool, more and more people are finding the "American dream" is no longer achievable.
How the value of a house was derived hasn't really changed all that much. What has changed is how much that value is. It used to be that a single earner making 100k a year in a big city could afford to buy a home and with more kids (aka tax breaks) could afford to upgrade homes from the starter home to one in the suburbs. Then came the two-earner households. People could afford more so the real estate industry started charging more for the same things and people paid it ... because they could. The single earner was left behind because two incomes will always be more than one.
Then came the real estate get rich craze. Those modern families with two working adults and positive cash flow just waiting to be ... (oh wait, that's the infomercial sales pitch). There was money to be made for little to no effort. Just buy a property, charge someone rent and make sure that your income was greater than your expenses. Boom! That's it. Sit at home watching TV while your bank account gets rich. The two-earner family was now getting squeezed out by competition from the small investor. This also drove up the price of homes because the investor was willing to spend more if they thought they could charge more for the rental. The two-earner families now had to shell out more to buy or stay a renter because they could no longer afford to buy. Pretty cool business model where you can create your own customer base.
As is typical, it wasn't long before real estate corporations started to muscle in on the business as there was money to be made; especially with the deep pockets of bankruptcy protected corporate entities that could speculate on property values going up without worrying about losses. They also started exercising local political and financial influence over zoning and construction laws to ensure opportunity and property values would go their way. The small investors started to get pushed to the side and all the while, home prices kept going up (and inventory going down). Since profits must always go up, these so called developers started to decrease the actual size of the living space to squeeze more profits from the same properties. The original shrinkflation. That's how you ended up with shoebox sized apartments in big cities.
Finally, we come to modern day times, where publicly traded companies like the Zillow and Redfins of the world buy up whole markets in an effort to control supply and pricing. Real estate is unaffordable to most and the rich buy properties with no intention of using it for living. Instead, they use them as tax shelters for their wealth (tax deductible real estate investment trusts (REITs), 1031 exchanges, depreciation, and mortgage interest payments). Corporate shareholder interests also demand that housing costs keep rising regardless of the impact. What impact is that you say?
People are forced to rent, delay starting a family and find other ways to make money besides working for a living. Some try to do it through investments in the stock market where there are always more individual investor losers than there are winners. The same place the Zillows and Redfins of the world go to get their money so they can afford to try and manipulate said markets you can no longer afford to buy in. If you ask me, this is capitalism at its finest so long as you are on the right side of the financial wall. If your main focus in life is not to make money, then you will be supporting someone who does make it their focus. Welcome to modern serfdom.
"Serfdom, condition in medieval Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord." - Encyclopedia Brittanica
Something to ponder upon:
After World War Two there were a large number of demobilised men who were weapons trained and battle tested and they'd been promised 'sunlit uplands' when the war ended.
Not really for this.
The big change after WW2 was civil rights. Black soldiers from the South went to Europe where (especially in France) a bunch of white people treated them not only as equals, but saviors.
Even if the white people in their own armed service didn't.
When they came back, they understandably didn't want to go back to how it was.
I think you're thinking of the WW1 Bonus Army
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
The Bonus Army was a group of 43,000 demonstrators – 17,000 veterans of U.S. involvement in World War I, their families, and affiliated groups – who gathered in Washington, D.C., in mid-1932 to demand early cash redemption of their service bonus certificates. Organizers called the demonstrators the Bonus Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.), to echo the name of World War I's American Expeditionary Forces, while the media referred to them as the "Bonus Army" or "Bonus Marchers". The demonstrators were led by Walter W. Waters, a former sergeant.
Many of the war veterans had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 had awarded them bonuses in the form of certificates they could not redeem until 1945. Each certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment with compound interest. The principal demand of the Bonus Army was the immediate cash payment of their certificates.
On July 28, 1932, U.S. Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shot at the protestors, and two veterans were wounded and later died. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the U.S. Army to clear the marchers' campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.
A second, smaller Bonus March in 1933 at the start of the Roosevelt administration was defused in May with an offer of jobs with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) at Fort Hunt, Virginia, which most of the group accepted. Those who chose not to work for the CCC by the May 22 deadline were given transportation home.[2] In 1936, Congress overrode President Roosevelt's veto and paid the veterans their bonus nine years early.
Okay look this needs to stop.
First, the economic success has become overstated at this point. There was a relatively brief period in US history where this could happen. Being an adult during that period required living through both the great depression and WW2. The only people who truly got a free lunch were boomers born before 1955.
These times were also marked by extreme bigotry. Anyone who wasn't a straight white neurotypical cisgendered man faced comical levels of oppression.
Even for that subgroup, life could have a million difficulties. You know how a lot of seemingly successful boomers talk about how money isn't everything? There's a reason for that. All but the most privileged had to deal with shit like this:
- A culture where it was not acceptable to show emotion as a result of millions of men trying to collectively repress their massive PTSD
- Marrying (for life) the first woman you date.
- Having kids by 22
- having all the stress and responsibility that comes with being the sole provider with that, again at an extremely young age
- Coming home every day (until you get married) with the knowledge that there might be a Vietnam draft card in the mailbox
It feels like 90 percent of online discourse revolves around oppression, trauma, and marginilized groups. Yet everyone still pretends that the boomers all lived some super easy life.
Nearly all of those situations didn't overlap.
Housing wasn't cheap because people were racist, housing was cheap because the American dollar was strong from a well developed manufacturing base, net exports, and wartime technology innovations.
All those situations overlapped in that they were all things boomers had to deal with.
That's why you will never come to a meaningful answer, the assumption that because a and b existed at the same time, that they were interrelated.
informal fallacy.
My point was in regards to general online discourse around Boomers having it easy. As such, I listed the struggles they had.
That being said the ability to support a family on one income probably had a lot to do with taboos about women in the workforce.
Yeah, were a lot less nice to people who obstinately refuse to understand basic logic
"Oh but boomers had hard lives in other ways" isn't the point at all and those things have nothing to do with the post.
Baby boomers are exclusively those born between 1946 to 1964. 55% of the living boomers are presumably females safe from the draft and 45% are male. 95% of the draft was over by 1971 whereas only 38% of boomers were of draft age by then. Of the draft pool about 8% were drafted.
On net 1.3% of boomers were drafted for Viatnam. 0% went through the great depression 0% went through WW2.
These times were also marked by extreme bigotry. Anyone who wasn’t a straight white neurotypical cisgendered man faced comical levels of oppression.
In case you hadn't noticed 99.99% of the whining is from straight white neurotypical cisgendered men. Comical levels of oppression or not they on average came out of it with houses that ballooned in value 8x over and now enjoy the same degree of freedom from oppression as you and I along with their money and house and are steady trying to reinstate that comical level of oppression at the hands of the dictator they intend to give our democracy to.
I'm 43. Statistically the people that are whining are themselves extremely privileged who on average came of age after Vietnam. They don't get to use other people's suffering as a fuckin excuse.
So you look at people today demanding more and say "this has got to stop" and launch into some malarkey about how the worst generation actually honest had a real hard time and you believe other people are petulant. Alrighty then.
You have extremely limited empathy for boomers because they were the authority figures growing up. You still treat them like a teenager would treat their parents, as opposed to how an adult would approach the situation.
This tweet is alluding to some golden era of America that never really existed in the way that the Internet implies
Why would I have empathy for boomers? This is essentially a generational conflict. You don't win by having empathy.
"It feels like 90 percent of online discourse revolves around oppression, trauma, and marginilized groups. Yet everyone still pretends that the boomers all lived some super easy life"
Ding Ding
To underscore this... We had years and years of riots, strikes, and exploitation before WW2.
WW1 and then WW2 slaughtered millions, most of which were the backbone of the economy: young men. Basically every major nation tore itself apart, except the US, which entered both wars later, and didn't suffer serious losses or domestic destruction.
Like 27 million died in the Soviet Union. If you were a Soviet male who was 18-25 when the war started you had a 1 in 5 chance of seeing the end of the war alive and uninjured. China lost 20 million, and Japan tried their hardest to copy that slaughter in SE Asia... And where then in turn firebombed and nuked in turn. Germany lost 3 million troops on the Eastern Front alone.
So yeah, you could be an American with no degree and 5 kids and make it work in the post WW2 era -- because all of the other sources of labor were dead. 50 years later those populations and economies have rebounded, and that unparalleled advantage is long gone.
Oddly enough both of my grandmothers had full time jobs along with their husbands. It's never been a thing for me, although I know this is odd.
It's true, women worked many jobs in the past especially if they were poor. Feminism is mainly a tool to normalize the femme CEO, the femme worker is as old as England.
My grandmother was a telephone operator and then a nurse, my grandfather owned a neighborhood deli and later sold it and worked at a factory.
Paternal side Grandmother worked in a factory, grandfather was a mechanic.
Maternal side Grandmother was a nurse, grandfather worked in a factory and farmed.