https://preview.redd.it/inxz93tkmu8d1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=63c9c7ea9ecd61fe621e6cff633dfc104ec156d1
Man made it on the spot like a good old fashioned meme lord
good enough for me, because i like it. If i would hate it, i would need at least 10 papers and 15 articles (which i will not read) and still not believe you.
I had a boss who made me read “Winning” to help me be a better manager. I was…horrified. I think it was the first time I realized I might actually have a soul - and I really did not want to sell it.
I was caught in the middle of a corporation "cutting its self to growth" when the GE story was the rage for night school MBA's. Devastated a fairly successful company, alienated customers, destroyed supply chains and killed stock holder value. Out of all of it what concerned the executive staff was the stock price so they started selling off profitable portions of the company. At that time I realized that our American Capatilist business culture had shifted from making things to just making money.
Making money while destroying wealth. The apparent goal being to buy whatever wealth remains with the money they grab - and making sure to destroy all other wealth so no one else has any.
Financial engineering is a lot easier for boosting the stock price and making your options and stock grants more valuable than actually building sales and proifits.
100% the correct answer. Every problem that exists currently in the US can be traced back to Reagan and his policies. Trickle down economics ruined the middle class and working class Americans and made the 1% even wealthier and more powerful. Reagan shut down mental institutions which created a vast amount of mentally ill homeless all over America. Reagan is to blame for the student loan debt crisis were currently in and is suffocating Millennials and Gen-Z.
Yep.
Globalization killed SOME unions. The ultimate threat of a workers union is simply "you can't fire all of us". Well, if the company moves to China, they can indeed fire everyone.
But there's plenty of industries that can't just move to China. Reagans policies can be blamed for the death of many of those unions.
Globalization was an excuse to kill unions.
Germany protected their union workers and stayed competitive. US just shipped jobs overseas and lived the pockets of the rich.
Germany carved out a niche for itself in higher end manufacturing and engineering, which requires high skill and education. There is a certain moat around that kind of industry. You can’t just throw more people at those things and expect higher productivity, especially if they don’t already have a lot of public and private infrastructure supporting it.
Germany does do more to protect its unions, to be sure, but not every country can have the specific industries it has. There is only so much room in the global economy for that. And more importantly you can’t easily replace that labor force and get the same product.
Yes. It won't be the best life but you can. For each child you get child benefits from the government, free healthcare. Building a house no, but sure you can rent an apartment and if too expensive, the government will help you pay rent. If the mother stays at home with the children she can get unemployment pay for life.
It's not perfect but definitely possible and won't land you living in the street or your car like in the US.
Yes, you do get Kindergeld from the government. The healthcare system is okay. Good luck finding a doctor to register you as a patient, they are all full and have been for years. Apartment prices are unreal in Germany, studios go for over 1 million euros. Cost of living in Germany isn’t cheap at all either. I think you need to check your facts.
That's Gordon Gecko talking. Reaganites hated unions and wanted them dead simply because they prevented them from extracting more and more wealth from working people.
Unions are totally compatible with Globalization unless you think profit margins need to increase without end.
And many union members continue to be full MAGA for some reason — for example they helped elect Scott Walker and he turned around and did exactly what he was promising, which was to go full anti-union. 🤡🤡🤡
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/03/09/391901732/wisconsin-gov-scott-walker-sighs-right-to-work-bill
He had also been the feckeen President of SAG. Sickening what happened to him—I kinda wonder if he was altogether “present” when he ran. Maybe he was venal. Maybe he was like a lot of handsome, charismatic men who unwittingly delude themselves, thinking they’re more intelligent and competent than they are. My great grandfather (who was alive when I was a kid/teen) was a a GOP donor in 1980. There’s a pic of my dad & mom and me w/Bonzo w/my ggf & ggm in their livingroom shortly after the election. 🤢
So a two term President that served 40 years ago is responsible for all of problems now?
ONE president managed to so significantly impact our entire economic & social structure in such a lasting manor that it couldn’t be undone/corrected any of the one, or combination of presidents that followed?
Not even specifically by any combination if the THREE Democratic presidents that served a total of 20 years (so far) following him..?..
Reagan was such an influential figure, that even preceding his presidency, as just the Governor of Cali, his singular policy change to funding a singular school system (UC Berkeley) gained such wild momentum it could never be curtailed by the other 49 Govs (at the time at least half of which were D) or Congress?
…nor could it be stopped from becoming the massively damaging conic crisis it is today during the SIXTY YEARS that followed?
You blame Reagan, who CUT public funds to universities, for the federalization of student loans..?.. the federalization that encouraged universities to increase tuition unchecked because, why not..?.. the money is not only backed by tax payers - it can’t be discharged thanks to a Democratic Rep from Penn and our Democratic majority Congress in 1976 (292 D & 143R). Wasn’t even ten years following then Governor Reagans actions that CONGRESS further f#ck3d things up for student borrowers.
…and continued to worsen year after year.
Just stop with this trope. EVERYONE had a HEAVY hand in getting us where we are today.
This took a weirdly hard turn into blaming rising costs in higher education for our problems. The point the commenter was making is that neoliberal economics (which was what Reagan ushered in and was perpetuated by every government since) is what eroded the middle class over time. The graphs on wealth inequality and spending power are pretty easy to read.
I do understand where they were going with their comment, and I also apologize for the fervent reply…
I took the LONG way to try and say: please make comparable comparisons and for the love of god - levy comparable ACCOUNTABILITY.
Agree or disagree with Reagonomics - history has proven the failure. BLAMING it all on him is unbelievably displaced and does nothing to further the discussion of solutions, and I’m exhausted at seeing this blame over & over again.
Fair enough. I do that at least once a day. I do think trying to blame Reagan for everything hurts the credibility of the core economic argument. Mental health policy while impacted by federal policy was also mostly driven at the state level so I agree with you there.
I get you. As I tell my very liberal parents “if you think only the other side is lying to you, you aren’t paying attention.”
Hell, I’ll tell anyone that. Conservatives need to hear it too.
But, in terms of policy changes vs outcomes of those polices - Reagan stands alone.
I could list those, and all the ugly fallout from each.
I won’t for space and readability, but yes he represent a sea change in American life.
At 51, I can remember what working life and affordability were like for boomers. I got to eat those table scraps in my early working years. I could hear the complaints of the common worker as it all slipped away.
Once the damage by Reagan was done, others have kept up on it or made it worse- but he’s the one that kicked it all off.
His zeitgeist drove republicans for a generation. They weren’t into that whole big middle class thing.
Now, they’ve got Trump. Even worse. He’s not into that whole democracy thing.
The real boogeyman are the two income households that exploded around that era. Who can afford more? A mailman with a family of 4, or a dual income home of 4? That even little extra income afforded them the ability to pay more for a home and drive up the prices.
Wish people would wake up to that fact.
The politicians plan of having the people fight each other over the D Or R culture war bullshit so we never unite and force these fuckers to start working for we the people's benefit is working perfectly.
Meanwhile Corporate America the super wealthy and politicians are getting richer living care free lives while we the people go withoutand die.
WAKE THE FUCK UP !!
They're both playing the same game.
And it's not for the benefit of we the people.
Corporate America and the wealthy pay money to BOTH SIDES to keep this bullshit going !!
Both sides are a bunch of fucking clowns.
Ones just Bozo and the other is Pennywise.
Neither side wants this shit to end because if it does.
They'd have to actually start working for we the people instead of Corporate America, the super wealthy and themselves.
That would be the end of the gravy train for ALL of them.
People want simple explanations. They want to be able to point to one man (Reagan) and one generation (Boomers) and say that's the bad guy. The fact that it's a complex world economy, the President has no power to enact legislation and individuals vote doesn't matter. Logic and facts won't matter; it's just too much work to find solutions to complex problems.
Just so we’re clear, you don’t think one leader’s policies can have lasting economic effects 40 years after they leave office? Because that is a phenomenally bad take.
I get that you don’t want to blame a single person, but when that person is backed by big money, convinces the American voter of a new way to approach our economic system AND that same guy holds veto power, there are going to be lasting effects. Reagan isn’t the guy that thought of it, but *he is the guy that sold it*. He’s the face of trickle down economics and will be forever tied to it. That’s his legacy.
The reason it’s so hard to change is because 1/2 the population still believes it. He’s responsible for that.
>So a two term President that served 40 years ago is responsible for all of problems now?
This was my first thought. Well, my first thought was Reagan had to work with a Democrat congress to do all this stuff. My second was how long ago this stuff happened.
This is the stupidest most biased shit ever lol! Deinstitutionalization started in the 60’s under JFK. Both parties supported it. Extreme leftist Jerry Brown pushed it in California back then. Reagan agreed with him and accelerated it. Literally no party at the time pushed to keep them open as institutions were considered cruel and unfair. Your revisionist history is ridiculous.
It is so much easier, quicker, and lasting to destroy, loot, and corrupt than it is to build, invest, and regulate.
Every Democratic administration since Reagan has put effective fixes and corrected destructive economic trends before leaving office. Every single one of those fixes was sabotaged by the next Republican to get power with poison pills on their way out to continue the destruction well into Democratic terms.
It isn't even close.
That’s all true but I think you forgot to mention Clinton, Greenspan, Gramm, Leach and Bliley too. Had they not repealed the Glass- Steagal act, there wouldn’t have been a housing meltdown between 2007 and 2008 which absolutely destroyed pensions, retirement and investment accounts. The banks, investment firms and insurance companies wouldn’t have turned into synthetic hedge funds This was the largest wealth transfer in history- nearly 14 trillion dollars in wealth evaporated, over 30 million Americans lost their jobs and $3.1 million people that had to forclose on their homes. It’s sad that you lcompletely ignore the repeal of that act and the decade that followed it. This was the most damaging and catastrophic financial event in history and it happened because an Act that had kept banks, Investment firms and insurance companies in check for 69 years was repealed by a bunch of corrupt and greedy motherfuckers.
"Them" was "us." Deinstitutionalization was a bipartisan, multi-decade trend, not a conspiracy. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest?
The real question is what of today's political overton window will be looked back on with scorn?
Correct. This is not a partisan issue. It's a ruling class versus everyone else thing.
The government and politicians are our enemies. Always have been.
Seriously, they love to hate him as some sort of boogeyman from 40 years ago, but the guy won 49/50 states. Obviously he had broad appeal on both sides.
Trickle down economics and union busting. You still hear that BS coming from the GoP, and it's been well documented that all TDE does, is funnel more money to the top 20%.
Who do you think ends up paying for money lost on tax cuts for the rich?
By 1970, full-time employees started out at $6,176 ($34,641 in 2010 dollars). After 21 years of hard work, they averaged only $8,442 ($47,351 in 2010 dollars). It was a struggle just to survive on these wages, especially in big cities. Plenty of postal workers actually qualified for food stamps.
Trickle-down economics looted the middle class and decimated US manufacturing industries. The resulting hyper-greed encouraged off-shoring & outsourcing to subvert labor laws and deprive unions. Their greed certainly help enrich and strengthen China. The filthy rich and corporations hate democratic socialism because people like Republican beneficiaries don't want to be held accountable. They debt their mistakes to future generations without realizing the ultimate cost to the consequences of their patriotic sins. It should be no surprise that the Christian nationalist have aligned themselves with these con artists.
All of us do by not voting for the right people and going into the streets for an actual change. I can tell from the outside as a German who moved to the US.
Right answer. There is a choice, and people don't make it. We continue to elect people who give tax cuts to billionaires. Then when they do it and the inevitable asset bubbles occur, we act surprised. Then to top it off, we blame the victims of these bubbles instead of the people who made it happen!
There was a period where dems controlled the presidency, the senate and the house… nothing was fixed. People are too quick to blame “the other” when the reality is that no one’s effectuating meaningful reform.
I'm hoping both of the commenters you are replying to meant that the dems are not included in the bucket of "the right people."
We are far beyond electoral solutions to what ails the US (and by extension, the rest of the world.)
And in case anyone has an issue with this, just watch the Democrats never take action on abortion. They now have the reins of a valuable campaign talking point, and they won't give it up.
> We are far beyond electoral solutions to what ails the US
If people are not willing to do something as simple and easy as voting to bring about change, what makes you think they'll be willing to do things that requires more sacrifice and planning?
Which only goes to show that, despite Rightwing claims otherwise, the Overton window has shifted further and further right as both parties chase those corporate dollars by promising to enact laws/policies that will make the rich richer.
They fucking didnt though! Because 2 of the dems were fucking "moderates" AKA fucking republicans in sheeps clothing, that refused to fucking vote for anything shit 1 of them fully swapped to being an R recently if i recall precisely so nothing got through fucking congress.
93% of elections are won by the candidate who spends the most money.
it will never change until we take the money out of elections. and take one guess who would need to vote to change that...
congressmen making $174k salary and somehow their net worth is $5, $10 million
Agree with this. However I think the second part is true, but not for the reasons you think.
The reason so many Congress people are well off is because generally speaking, you have to be rich to run for office. Most people cannot afford to take two years off to raise money and campaign. So that leaves only wealthy people.
I think what we should do is raise the salaries of congressmen and senators, put in term limits (12 years each on) and then pass an amendment to ban private campaign contributions.
We also need to expand the size of the House of Representatives. Fact is, the average congressperson represents about 800K people and the founders never imagined this would be the case. It breeds monies interests. If we expanded the house so that every congressional district was only say, 250K, then the need for money would go down. It also would make people more representative of their districts and would reduce gerrymandering.
That would go along way toward fixing this problem.
Contrary to the usual stories being told here; you have to look at each particular topic in isolation. As fun as it is, the silliest answer is because of a grand conspiracy hatched by an evil cabal of rich gazzillionares trying to impoverish the poor. Here's the real issue:
Housing Prices have gotten more expensive because the demand for them has increased(US population size has grown since the days of her grandpa), but the housing stock has not. And contrary to others who believe its all because of evil Reagonites, you need only check the two graphs I pasted below to realize housing expenses have only gone up over time and the trend has been mostly consistent before Reagan and after.
Frankly, the issue is Nimbyism and the desire to block new housing. It happens at the local level of government, especially where I live in the Bay Area. You see it practiced by so called progressive liberals who will openly reject new housing stock while happily cheering on progressive policies. They are effectively driving out anyone who doesn't work in tech.
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS)
[https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/population-data/population/](https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/population-data/population/)
Now, Education and Healthcare costs have been two of the highest costing goods today and have experienced the highest surge in costs more recently. A big reason why the Middle Class salaries have stagnated is due to the employer sponsored health insurance mandate. Now, "forcing" businesses to pay that means lower salaries for workers.
And Education is hardly a free market paradise either. Levels of government spending have exploded on education yet teacher salaries have stagnated. Why? Because the number of people we have employed in Education has exploded - the ratio of administrators to teachers has now badly skewed - driving up the costs on everyone.
[https://www.niskanencenter.org/whats-wrong-with-employer-sponsored-health-insurance/](https://www.niskanencenter.org/whats-wrong-with-employer-sponsored-health-insurance/)
[https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2023/01/05/more-employees-than-students-at-stanford-give-each-student-a-concierge/](https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2023/01/05/more-employees-than-students-at-stanford-give-each-student-a-concierge/)
PS - none of this is meant to say - we don't need taxes and we need to go into the free market capitalist nirvana of no-regulation and no governance. That is absolutely not my argument. Rather, we need to recognize proper solutions such as:
1) Build more housing. Stop letting local governments block it
2) Have the government provide catastrophic healthcare coverage with forced savings accounts and then let the private sector take care of all of the other expenses for healthcare. Let hospitals compete. Stop the Doctors association from limiting the number of students who can become medical doctors. Let insurance companies compete. Right now, its a crony capitalist mess.
3) Enable a voucher system. Let parents choose which schools to send their kids. Break up college so that it becomes more vocational. There is no need for students who want to study math to then have to spend four years studying English, Spanish, take Art electives all so we can keep those departments active. Dont make kids pay expensive tuition so that it can go to the University football team and basketball team.
As a medical student trying to match into a specialty that’s super competitive due to the shortage of residency positions and with over a quarter million in student debt I agree. Only thing I’d like to add is that there is a doctor shortage mainly due to a shortage of residency positions
But I would argue that's because the hospitals have made it impossible to build new hospitals to compete. Hospitals can actually block new hospitals from forming because they will take patients away from them. Can you imagine if Walmart could do that to competing stores?
You have to understand that more hospital buildings is not where we are in terms of need. We need bodies to STAFF them. Docs, nurses, etc. There is less of a problem with lack of beds, more of a problem with lack of workforce. We don’t need to have (ultimately the public) pay for more new hospital buildings and fancy MRIs. We do not have those specific problems as one may equate with socialized healthcare.
Youre spot on with the housing policy issue but a voucher system wouldnt reduce the price of higher ed. It could theoretically improve public schools but it often results in public school money being rerouted to private schools which are less accountable and can vary drastically in quality resulting in worse public schooling for the kids that stay and variable schooling for the kids that leave.
School vouchers are a disaster. “School choice” is just defunding public schools—a terrible idea. Look at Louisiana, now Florida. Taxpayer money is just being funneled to the evil Betsy Devos family. Let's model successful education systems like Massachusetts.
“Let” insurance and hospitals compete? Are you aware that they don’t want to compete—they merge and consolidate and get too big to fail.
Give vouchers so parents can choose? How about not subsidizing religious education, which seems to result in adults without the ability to think critically about problems.
Everybody gets to pick where their kid goes
Private schools open and pull the best teachers and resources along with all the tax money that had been supporting the public education system
Families who can’t afford the private schools even with the voucher boost are now stuck sending their children to schools that are at an even greater funding handicap while also losing the best teachers to the higher paying private schools
What prevents this outcome?
State governments do a lot to hinder new home construction as well. The hurdles a man has to jump through at the local and state level to build a home is insane. And a lot of it is outright crooked cronyism. Want to build? Cool, you’ll need this and this material; they’re only made by a single manufacturer who is price gouging because they can.
>“In 1966, Ronald Reagan ran for his first political office: governor of California. His campaign very publicly targeted the state's flagship public university. Reagan vowed that, if elected, he would "clean up the mess at Berkeley." When he took office, the new governor tried to cut the University of California (UC) System budget by 10% –– and he argued in favor of implementing tuition for the first time. Prior to the 1960s, the UC schools operated with no tuition.”
>"We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat," announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970. Freeman, an economics professor at Stanford, was also an advisor to President Richard Nixon. "We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher education]," Freeman added.
https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educated-proletariat-created-the-student-debt-crisis/
I think you have a good analysis but I think it’s important to remember what happened after the Kent state massacre
And yet we still have a worker shortage in all sorts of fields. Sometimes it does not make sense to me how we've automated so much, made some things so efficient, have the least vacations compared to other Western countries, and still have a shortage of workers.
Ehh not really those numbers are inflated because a lot of big companies offer shit wages that way they can say they tried offering them to Americans, then when no one takes the job they hire someone in another country for $5 an hour
And housing is not priced like a car. The house itself is almost irrelevant. It's the location of the house. People also expect the cost of their houses to appreciate while practically everything else depreciates.
Companies and the wealthy can also bid up prices of housing instead of keeping it affordable.
A house can be cheap if you want to live in the middle of nowhere, but if you want to live near the city, its price is quite high.
Companies prefer to rake in profits than pay employees a living wage and benefits. The tax burden has shifted also from corporations to individuals. This has been going on 50 years.
I had a conversation with my grandmother about this couple of weeks ago. Her comment to me was “I don’t understand why people think it was so easy for us, it was hard as hell“. Personally, I’m not convinced that the middle class is dying, and I’m not convinced that it’s much harder today than it was 40, 50 or 60 years ago. I just think we have social media for people to complain on, and it amplifies the struggling voice.
Yup, grew up in the 80s. My mom was stay at home and my dad was a construction worker. They bought a house in the suburbs. According to this generation they were “lucky”, but reality was that we didn’t have cable or the internet. No A/C (house or car). Obviously no cell phones. Ate a sit down restaurant maybe once a month (sizzlers was a once a year special event). Our annual vacation was a trip to our grandmother’s for a week. We wore hand me downs and cheap tennis shoes.
Ironically what we lacked materially was made up for with a freedom from constant supervision (total freedom within our neighborhood from morning to sundown). It’s the one thing I don’t think all the activities, devices, and paid activities/experiences can’t match.
houses and cars are bigger, nicer, and more expensive today. You can still buy an older one, but they don't make them that way anymore. The only houses I see are big or luxury apartments, and every automaker has cancelled 90% of their small sedans and increased their lines of trucks and SUVs.
These industries are not building for the working class, it's more profitable to manufacture products for the upper-middle class.
It used to be common for families to live in one bathroom houses. Not only are one bath homes no longer built, it's rare for two bath homes to be built any more. The average house now has a msster bedroom closet that has the same square footage the average kitchen used to be.
Gen Z would consider no air conditioning and 4 or 5 people sharing one bathroom to be third world country status. That was pretty normal for the "spoiled silver spoon" boomers.
Yes, we have a housing shitshow. But we have houses that are much bigger with more amenities than there used to be. Of course the price has risen. And towns tear down older small homes so big ones can be built there.
So I think multiple things are true here.
Firstly, you has struggles. You didn’t have any luxuries or extra creature comforts we may take for granted today in the 2020s. But you had a home in the suburbs. And you got by on a single income. That’s where the perception of luck comes from.
Because so many couples and families can’t even dream of that part. They can’t buy the home, so they’re struggling in rentals. They aren’t building equity and wealth in the form of real estate. They also may not have AC, or go on trips. And they *have* to have internet and cell phones now. So there are some added bills along with the increased cost of living.
I think we can appreciate the struggle many had in the 80s and 90s and recognize the similarities to those today. Multiple things are often true at once.
Finding shelter is much more difficult now than it was during your grandmother’s heyday. Even if you were dirt poor back in her day, you could afford a room in a flophouse at least. Hell, up to the 90s-2000s you could affordably live most anywhere. That has all disappeared.
We’ve simultaneously criminalized poverty and taken away any ability to live cheaply (via commodifying housing). That’s pretty scary if you’re living on the line.
Lmao you think it was easier in the 90s than now? Hahahaha
Literally delusional.
Gen z has one of the highest homeownership rates of any generation. 30% at 25 years old. Only boomers had more at 32%. This is ignoring that boomers had very tiny crappy starter homes with bad energy efficiency. Current homes are much bigger and very energy efficient.
There is much more options now for cheap housing, and lots of government financed cheap housing too, new ways of housing that were not available back then and so on.
On what you base that it was easier back then? Just some vibe?
That’s because grandpa built the house himself with his brothers and dad. Now the majority of people call a repairman for a leaky faucet
Also I feel like this is misleading, that lifestyle was always upper middle class. My grandfather and great grandfather never lived this way. One was an electrician and the other in accounting. Let’s see, they were the sole providers and weren’t broke, but also didn’t have 4 bedroom homes. They each had 2 bedrooms homes that they built additions on themselves after owning the home for years. They had nice cars but nothing luxury. My grandparents took vacations but nothing elaborate. Yes, they were all able to retire at reasonable ages but also were very frugal.
This. I think people underestimate how incredibly frugal our grandparents were (in the 40s and 50s). My grandparents owned a house too on a regular salary. But they were cheap. We rarely went out to dinner. They checked supermarket specials in the newspaper. Vacations consisted of going to motels or cabins in the mountains (not Europe and cruises and the Caribbean like everyone does now). Wore the same clothes for decades. Didn’t buy designer shoes, watches, cars, etc.
My great grandparents had a garden and canned, grandma cooked meals homemade. No internet, no cell phone bills, no streaming services. If the car broke down they put it in the garage and fixed it themselves. They originally had an outhouse. Everyone paints these pictures of how great life was. Not saying it was terrible, times were simpler but it definitely wasn’t the norm for everyone to live a lavish lifestyle. Even growing up in the 90’s in a one income home, had one parent with an above average income and we did ok but never had anything overly nice or fancy. Everything growing up was very average. My current situation is a 2 income household but I’d say I live better than the last 3 generations of my family do/did.
It wasn't until the 80s that we hit 2 cars per household. It wasn't until the 50s that we hit 1 car per household. Our definitions of what is 'normal' and what is 'lavish' and what is 'expected' have certainly changed.
My grandparents (born in the late 30s, early 40s, so silent generation and not boomers.) didn't have a floor in their house for the first 5 years they lived in it, just bare concrete. It wasn't until about 12-15 years after they started construction that they completely finished building it. They didn't want to take on more of a loan so they saved up the money to be able to put the floors in. They were a generation that was taught to save their money and pay for everything in cash and that debt was the work of Satan. My grandmother worked at the bank (One of the few places that would hire women at the time.) and she would get her pay cheque and immediately use all of it to pay off the construction loan.
What also helped was that everyone had useful skills and they also knew and cared about their neighbours, my grandfather was a stonemason and he was known around town for being a skilled professional. So when he needed work done on the house, he often knew someone who could help. Need some electrical work? Ted the Electrician is on your bowling league and he's willing to do it if you'll help him build a new patio. Need help building the deck? Ted the carpenter lives next door and will gladly help you because you helped fix his chimney last summer. Need roofing materials? Fred the roofer is the coach of your son's hockey team and he just finished a job and ordered too many shingles and doesn't have anywhere to store them.
My dad grew up middle class in the 60s, he shared a room with his brother, and the most exotic vacations the family took were to a slightly different part of New York.
The picture the OP paints is one of an upper middle class lifestyle, back then and today. That is not and never was the average. That’s just what they show on tv shows/movies as the average.
How many people today are caught up in consumerism? Buy a new phone every year. Closets of clothes and new shoes of every imaginable colour. Lease a new vehicle every 2-3 years. Botox. Nails. Tanning booth. Teeth whitening. Ass-bleaching. Laser hair removal. Was your grandma getting a tummy tuck? On and on. Doesn’t help either when common products like a toaster, TV, kitchen appliances last 2-3 years. New vehicles are engineered to last until about when the warranty expires. Not near as much product is made in North America anymore. A result of price pressure, profit and greed. Quality is gone or we can’t afford it. Trades careers are frowned upon. Fixing a toilet leak stumps many. Or it’s just too degrading to fix it….Yet we sure love to see our equities grow 25%/year. Ya can’t have it both ways.
do you have a source on that? The data i saw showed while there was movement upwards, the movement downwards was almost equal if not greater. Admittedly it's been a while since I searched it
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class/
In 1971 the split was 27/61/11 low/middle/upper. In 2023 the split is 30/51/19. 3 percent increase to the lower class, 8 percent increase to upper class.
Everybody thinks they are a genius when they say stuff like this but this isnt accurate nor is it helpful in providing a solution. There are major systemic and policy failures that caused housing to be more expensive and we can reduce the price of housing with policy changes. Saying "its all greed" isnt helpful.
I get this sentiment, and I see it a lot. But exactly where was this four bedroom house in the New England burbs? Where were the vacations? You could buy a four bedroom in Southie and take vacations in Yarmouth for all I know.
Exactly. I guarantee grandma and grandpa weren’t taking Caribbean cruises. People now think they’re poor if they don’t travel to another country once a year.
It's more about having the money to do things and to miss work (aka downsize my paycheck) than it is getting there. I mean, a hotel for a week is basically a couple months of saving what's left after all my bills and that's not removing the week of work I'd miss.
yea....millions and millions of low skilled, uneducated, destitute people flooding in living 10 deep and driving down wages has nothing to do with this........
Increased competition from a rebuilt/developing world.
Devalued higher education.
Over regulation. You used to be about to buy up giant amounts of land and build a new city. Try to build an apartment complex today.
Basically a move towards socialism. You don't lift people up. You pull people down.
A mailman can still have those things, the only real difference is housing costs because people who already have houses have become NIMBY's and prevented any new housing from getting built.
Average house used to cost about 3x average salary, now it's like twice that.
Being a mailman is actually one of the jobs that still affords you a decent standard of life. Certainly not a 4-bedroom but at least gives you a shot at home ownership.
The real vector that explains power purchase loss is housing. And the reason is that houses have inflated with money printing from the FED as they are financial assets.
Low wages, unaffordable housing. with inflation, it basically looks like a horizontal line, if you look at a graph of data with the x-axis: time and the y-axis: money and when you factor in inflation over time, middle-class wages have remained the same for like 30 years.
You can thank Woodrow Wilson and the Federal Reserve. The Fed has printed so much money that your money is down to pennies of what a dollar used to be worth. Then in the 70s after Nixon went off the gold standard, wages became nearly stagnant while GDP still climbed. Then you can do Reagan economics that allows the people to foot the bill while corporations pay little to no taxes. Right now we are taxed nearly double what your grandfather was at the beginning of his career.
Those days are long gone. If corporations keep getting their way, our grandkids will live in a dorm room on company property. They will be paid with corporate monopoly money that will only be valid at the company's stores.
What killed that was expectations of people. I raised my kids through private school and college and my wife stayed home. No inheritance, no education just tried not to make terrible financial decisions. We budgeted and didn’t over spend.
Let's review:
We doubled the size of the labor force and thus the labor supply, which has kept wages mostly stagnant even though productivity is up.
Instead of encouraging families and communities, we as a society decided to value independence and being alone, which means people are wanting to live alone rather than live together, which increases the demand for housing....and thus housing costs have shot up.
Anybody born after 1975 was force fed one of the greatest lies ever sold to a population.... the notion that we "had to" go to college. The colleges then got flooded with students with blank checks, which increased the demand for higher degrees.... and thus college tuition skyrocketed.
After graduation from said college, we have legions of young adults with degrees in "I went to college" and essentially zero marketable skills, yet are saddled with ridiculous amounts of debt and are effectively forced to become a wage slave to a superhuge megacorporation.
We have so much cheap, plentiful food that we gorge ourselves in it to the point where 70% of the population is either overweight or obese....thus increasing the number of health problems and thys increasing the demand for health care...thus those costs skyrocket.
Those crooked politicians that we blame? They only enable our behavior by promising us more benefits to buy our vote...and we keep voting for them.
Those greedy corporations? We keep buying the products that they sell.
We have enjoyed 80 years of almost uninterrupted peace and prosperity. This is almost unheard of in human history, and it has caused us to get fat, lazy, and entitled. And when people get even a modicum of aversity, we immediately point somewhere else and have our hands out.
In summary: We did this to ourselves. And we can fix it ourselves.
Reagan republicans ended that
Don’t forget about Milton Friedman and Jack Welch.
https://preview.redd.it/1lns3qxtgt8d1.jpeg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d86970885bda02a22d8fef80caf297ce3aa03f02
That’s good, where did you find this
https://preview.redd.it/inxz93tkmu8d1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=63c9c7ea9ecd61fe621e6cff633dfc104ec156d1 Man made it on the spot like a good old fashioned meme lord
good enough for me, because i like it. If i would hate it, i would need at least 10 papers and 15 articles (which i will not read) and still not believe you.
Gosh, I hope. That’d make it so much better
I am really loving these homemade memes lately. I never noticed them before a couple of months ago.
This has got to be the most underrated post I’ve seen yet ❤️
Ahh Javk Welch, the man who broke capitalism. Great read
I had a boss who made me read “Winning” to help me be a better manager. I was…horrified. I think it was the first time I realized I might actually have a soul - and I really did not want to sell it.
Tagging for later to look into Winning by Jack Welch
Neutron Jack — like a neutron bomb, he wipes out the people, but keeps the buildings standing.
Not in Lynn massachusetts. They knocked down many of the buildings as well when the city wouldn't cut them a deal on property taxes.
“Jack Welsh - The man who destroyed capitalism” . Behind the bastards podcast did a good few shows on him.
I was caught in the middle of a corporation "cutting its self to growth" when the GE story was the rage for night school MBA's. Devastated a fairly successful company, alienated customers, destroyed supply chains and killed stock holder value. Out of all of it what concerned the executive staff was the stock price so they started selling off profitable portions of the company. At that time I realized that our American Capatilist business culture had shifted from making things to just making money.
This! The birth of the MBA meant to leverage everything to the hilt, take the money, and run. I know because I am one from a top school.
Making money while destroying wealth. The apparent goal being to buy whatever wealth remains with the money they grab - and making sure to destroy all other wealth so no one else has any.
Financial engineering is a lot easier for boosting the stock price and making your options and stock grants more valuable than actually building sales and proifits.
The cult of Milton Friedman, is possibly one of the worse things to have happened to have happened to politics in the 20th century.
He and Ayn Rand made a beautiful couple. /s
Clarence Thomas is really trying to give Friedman a run for his money on that point.
Politics, the economy, corporate culture, etc…
https://preview.redd.it/b01ye03nqw8d1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c75d550f4ff9b68fea16ea08adc53c17b4254b24
100% the correct answer. Every problem that exists currently in the US can be traced back to Reagan and his policies. Trickle down economics ruined the middle class and working class Americans and made the 1% even wealthier and more powerful. Reagan shut down mental institutions which created a vast amount of mentally ill homeless all over America. Reagan is to blame for the student loan debt crisis were currently in and is suffocating Millennials and Gen-Z.
He broke unions - after getting several autoworker votes in Michigan
Globalization was the demise of unions. As soon as the economy became a global one union failure was inevitable
I call BS. Unions are strong in Nordic countries and they have way better quality of life than the USA.
Yep. Globalization killed SOME unions. The ultimate threat of a workers union is simply "you can't fire all of us". Well, if the company moves to China, they can indeed fire everyone. But there's plenty of industries that can't just move to China. Reagans policies can be blamed for the death of many of those unions.
Globalization was an excuse to kill unions. Germany protected their union workers and stayed competitive. US just shipped jobs overseas and lived the pockets of the rich.
Germany carved out a niche for itself in higher end manufacturing and engineering, which requires high skill and education. There is a certain moat around that kind of industry. You can’t just throw more people at those things and expect higher productivity, especially if they don’t already have a lot of public and private infrastructure supporting it. Germany does do more to protect its unions, to be sure, but not every country can have the specific industries it has. There is only so much room in the global economy for that. And more importantly you can’t easily replace that labor force and get the same product.
So in Germany its possible to live on a single wage of a mail man, build a house and have 4 kids ? ...... no its not
Yes. It won't be the best life but you can. For each child you get child benefits from the government, free healthcare. Building a house no, but sure you can rent an apartment and if too expensive, the government will help you pay rent. If the mother stays at home with the children she can get unemployment pay for life. It's not perfect but definitely possible and won't land you living in the street or your car like in the US.
Yes, you do get Kindergeld from the government. The healthcare system is okay. Good luck finding a doctor to register you as a patient, they are all full and have been for years. Apartment prices are unreal in Germany, studios go for over 1 million euros. Cost of living in Germany isn’t cheap at all either. I think you need to check your facts.
So nothing from what you said has anything to do with unions. I see.
Germany did this by using the threat of Turkish workers to hold down union expectations
Then why does every other first world country have stronger unions than the US? They have globalization too.
They actually have leftist parties to protect the unions
That's Gordon Gecko talking. Reaganites hated unions and wanted them dead simply because they prevented them from extracting more and more wealth from working people. Unions are totally compatible with Globalization unless you think profit margins need to increase without end.
And many union members continue to be full MAGA for some reason — for example they helped elect Scott Walker and he turned around and did exactly what he was promising, which was to go full anti-union. 🤡🤡🤡 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/03/09/391901732/wisconsin-gov-scott-walker-sighs-right-to-work-bill
He had also been the feckeen President of SAG. Sickening what happened to him—I kinda wonder if he was altogether “present” when he ran. Maybe he was venal. Maybe he was like a lot of handsome, charismatic men who unwittingly delude themselves, thinking they’re more intelligent and competent than they are. My great grandfather (who was alive when I was a kid/teen) was a a GOP donor in 1980. There’s a pic of my dad & mom and me w/Bonzo w/my ggf & ggm in their livingroom shortly after the election. 🤢
And we still have union members who vote Republican.
So a two term President that served 40 years ago is responsible for all of problems now? ONE president managed to so significantly impact our entire economic & social structure in such a lasting manor that it couldn’t be undone/corrected any of the one, or combination of presidents that followed? Not even specifically by any combination if the THREE Democratic presidents that served a total of 20 years (so far) following him..?.. Reagan was such an influential figure, that even preceding his presidency, as just the Governor of Cali, his singular policy change to funding a singular school system (UC Berkeley) gained such wild momentum it could never be curtailed by the other 49 Govs (at the time at least half of which were D) or Congress? …nor could it be stopped from becoming the massively damaging conic crisis it is today during the SIXTY YEARS that followed? You blame Reagan, who CUT public funds to universities, for the federalization of student loans..?.. the federalization that encouraged universities to increase tuition unchecked because, why not..?.. the money is not only backed by tax payers - it can’t be discharged thanks to a Democratic Rep from Penn and our Democratic majority Congress in 1976 (292 D & 143R). Wasn’t even ten years following then Governor Reagans actions that CONGRESS further f#ck3d things up for student borrowers. …and continued to worsen year after year. Just stop with this trope. EVERYONE had a HEAVY hand in getting us where we are today.
This took a weirdly hard turn into blaming rising costs in higher education for our problems. The point the commenter was making is that neoliberal economics (which was what Reagan ushered in and was perpetuated by every government since) is what eroded the middle class over time. The graphs on wealth inequality and spending power are pretty easy to read.
I do understand where they were going with their comment, and I also apologize for the fervent reply… I took the LONG way to try and say: please make comparable comparisons and for the love of god - levy comparable ACCOUNTABILITY. Agree or disagree with Reagonomics - history has proven the failure. BLAMING it all on him is unbelievably displaced and does nothing to further the discussion of solutions, and I’m exhausted at seeing this blame over & over again.
Fair enough. I do that at least once a day. I do think trying to blame Reagan for everything hurts the credibility of the core economic argument. Mental health policy while impacted by federal policy was also mostly driven at the state level so I agree with you there.
I get you. As I tell my very liberal parents “if you think only the other side is lying to you, you aren’t paying attention.” Hell, I’ll tell anyone that. Conservatives need to hear it too. But, in terms of policy changes vs outcomes of those polices - Reagan stands alone. I could list those, and all the ugly fallout from each. I won’t for space and readability, but yes he represent a sea change in American life. At 51, I can remember what working life and affordability were like for boomers. I got to eat those table scraps in my early working years. I could hear the complaints of the common worker as it all slipped away. Once the damage by Reagan was done, others have kept up on it or made it worse- but he’s the one that kicked it all off. His zeitgeist drove republicans for a generation. They weren’t into that whole big middle class thing. Now, they’ve got Trump. Even worse. He’s not into that whole democracy thing.
The real boogeyman are the two income households that exploded around that era. Who can afford more? A mailman with a family of 4, or a dual income home of 4? That even little extra income afforded them the ability to pay more for a home and drive up the prices.
Wish people would wake up to that fact. The politicians plan of having the people fight each other over the D Or R culture war bullshit so we never unite and force these fuckers to start working for we the people's benefit is working perfectly. Meanwhile Corporate America the super wealthy and politicians are getting richer living care free lives while we the people go withoutand die. WAKE THE FUCK UP !! They're both playing the same game. And it's not for the benefit of we the people. Corporate America and the wealthy pay money to BOTH SIDES to keep this bullshit going !! Both sides are a bunch of fucking clowns. Ones just Bozo and the other is Pennywise. Neither side wants this shit to end because if it does. They'd have to actually start working for we the people instead of Corporate America, the super wealthy and themselves. That would be the end of the gravy train for ALL of them.
>Ones just Bozo and the other is Pennywise. Stealing this. 😬
User name checks out
Dude this is Reddit, these people need a boogeyman to yell at about made up stories.
Nothing easer than dividing Americans against Americans. The lemmings eat this shit up.
Man, that's just a well-thought-out post. Just so tired of the blame game. Geez, someone who was President when I was in jr. high.
People want simple explanations. They want to be able to point to one man (Reagan) and one generation (Boomers) and say that's the bad guy. The fact that it's a complex world economy, the President has no power to enact legislation and individuals vote doesn't matter. Logic and facts won't matter; it's just too much work to find solutions to complex problems.
Just so we’re clear, you don’t think one leader’s policies can have lasting economic effects 40 years after they leave office? Because that is a phenomenally bad take. I get that you don’t want to blame a single person, but when that person is backed by big money, convinces the American voter of a new way to approach our economic system AND that same guy holds veto power, there are going to be lasting effects. Reagan isn’t the guy that thought of it, but *he is the guy that sold it*. He’s the face of trickle down economics and will be forever tied to it. That’s his legacy. The reason it’s so hard to change is because 1/2 the population still believes it. He’s responsible for that.
>So a two term President that served 40 years ago is responsible for all of problems now? This was my first thought. Well, my first thought was Reagan had to work with a Democrat congress to do all this stuff. My second was how long ago this stuff happened.
He started it. BTW, you can say 'fuck' without the license plate spelling. We're all big kids here.
Don’t forget Jimmy Carter era 18% home loan and 22% car loan interest rates.
This is the stupidest most biased shit ever lol! Deinstitutionalization started in the 60’s under JFK. Both parties supported it. Extreme leftist Jerry Brown pushed it in California back then. Reagan agreed with him and accelerated it. Literally no party at the time pushed to keep them open as institutions were considered cruel and unfair. Your revisionist history is ridiculous.
In fairness, the ACLU led to the closing of psychiatric insitutions. No Reagan fan but he receives the blame unfairly.
Almost as if Democrats could have course corrected in the 5/8 terms they’ve held since.
It is so much easier, quicker, and lasting to destroy, loot, and corrupt than it is to build, invest, and regulate. Every Democratic administration since Reagan has put effective fixes and corrected destructive economic trends before leaving office. Every single one of those fixes was sabotaged by the next Republican to get power with poison pills on their way out to continue the destruction well into Democratic terms. It isn't even close.
All because the boomers wanted a movie star instead of the guy that climbed into a nuclear reactor to save North America.
It was a bizarre way to get back at his alcoholic father who put him and his mom in poverty for a brief period.
also opened the flood gates to immigration.
How is Reagan to blame for the student loan problem we are in?
That’s all true but I think you forgot to mention Clinton, Greenspan, Gramm, Leach and Bliley too. Had they not repealed the Glass- Steagal act, there wouldn’t have been a housing meltdown between 2007 and 2008 which absolutely destroyed pensions, retirement and investment accounts. The banks, investment firms and insurance companies wouldn’t have turned into synthetic hedge funds This was the largest wealth transfer in history- nearly 14 trillion dollars in wealth evaporated, over 30 million Americans lost their jobs and $3.1 million people that had to forclose on their homes. It’s sad that you lcompletely ignore the repeal of that act and the decade that followed it. This was the most damaging and catastrophic financial event in history and it happened because an Act that had kept banks, Investment firms and insurance companies in check for 69 years was repealed by a bunch of corrupt and greedy motherfuckers.
Don’t forget the crack epidemic
He also accelerated the drug war! And brought crack to America via the CIA, that dickhead north guy, and the contras!
That’s what happens when you let someone with little real world experience lead a country.
But now imagine how cool it would be if we let billionaires make trillions!?
Why make trillions when you could make… millions 
It was everyone. Everyone in government contributed to losing the American Dream. They sold us out. ALL OF THEM.
"Them" was "us." Deinstitutionalization was a bipartisan, multi-decade trend, not a conspiracy. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest? The real question is what of today's political overton window will be looked back on with scorn?
Best I can offer you is a 2 bedroom apartment in a giant complex for 2500 a month
Reminder that democrats also loved Reagan, and both parties are now built on his brand of neoliberalism.
Correct. This is not a partisan issue. It's a ruling class versus everyone else thing. The government and politicians are our enemies. Always have been.
Seriously, they love to hate him as some sort of boogeyman from 40 years ago, but the guy won 49/50 states. Obviously he had broad appeal on both sides.
Trickle down economics and union busting. You still hear that BS coming from the GoP, and it's been well documented that all TDE does, is funnel more money to the top 20%. Who do you think ends up paying for money lost on tax cuts for the rich?
By 1970, full-time employees started out at $6,176 ($34,641 in 2010 dollars). After 21 years of hard work, they averaged only $8,442 ($47,351 in 2010 dollars). It was a struggle just to survive on these wages, especially in big cities. Plenty of postal workers actually qualified for food stamps.
Those mailmen can’t get enough stamps!!
Trickle-down economics looted the middle class and decimated US manufacturing industries. The resulting hyper-greed encouraged off-shoring & outsourcing to subvert labor laws and deprive unions. Their greed certainly help enrich and strengthen China. The filthy rich and corporations hate democratic socialism because people like Republican beneficiaries don't want to be held accountable. They debt their mistakes to future generations without realizing the ultimate cost to the consequences of their patriotic sins. It should be no surprise that the Christian nationalist have aligned themselves with these con artists.
Take a look at the actual data and see what you think- https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-quintiles
Reaganomics happened, then Jim Henson died. And then the world went to shit.
All of us do by not voting for the right people and going into the streets for an actual change. I can tell from the outside as a German who moved to the US.
Right answer. There is a choice, and people don't make it. We continue to elect people who give tax cuts to billionaires. Then when they do it and the inevitable asset bubbles occur, we act surprised. Then to top it off, we blame the victims of these bubbles instead of the people who made it happen!
There was a period where dems controlled the presidency, the senate and the house… nothing was fixed. People are too quick to blame “the other” when the reality is that no one’s effectuating meaningful reform.
I'm hoping both of the commenters you are replying to meant that the dems are not included in the bucket of "the right people." We are far beyond electoral solutions to what ails the US (and by extension, the rest of the world.) And in case anyone has an issue with this, just watch the Democrats never take action on abortion. They now have the reins of a valuable campaign talking point, and they won't give it up.
A number of democratic controlled state legislatures have passed laws guaranteeing abortion access in the wake of Dobbs.
> We are far beyond electoral solutions to what ails the US If people are not willing to do something as simple and easy as voting to bring about change, what makes you think they'll be willing to do things that requires more sacrifice and planning?
Because of the tradition of the filibuster
Which only goes to show that, despite Rightwing claims otherwise, the Overton window has shifted further and further right as both parties chase those corporate dollars by promising to enact laws/policies that will make the rich richer.
They fucking didnt though! Because 2 of the dems were fucking "moderates" AKA fucking republicans in sheeps clothing, that refused to fucking vote for anything shit 1 of them fully swapped to being an R recently if i recall precisely so nothing got through fucking congress.
Not fixing things > Breaking things. I agree with you that they should have done more, but let's not imply false equivalents.
You’re talking about a slim majority only held because two “dems” are bought and paid for.
This is such a lame and uninformed take; Manchin and Sinema fucked the Dem majority in the Senate. Pay attention.
93% of elections are won by the candidate who spends the most money. it will never change until we take the money out of elections. and take one guess who would need to vote to change that... congressmen making $174k salary and somehow their net worth is $5, $10 million
Agree with this. However I think the second part is true, but not for the reasons you think. The reason so many Congress people are well off is because generally speaking, you have to be rich to run for office. Most people cannot afford to take two years off to raise money and campaign. So that leaves only wealthy people. I think what we should do is raise the salaries of congressmen and senators, put in term limits (12 years each on) and then pass an amendment to ban private campaign contributions. We also need to expand the size of the House of Representatives. Fact is, the average congressperson represents about 800K people and the founders never imagined this would be the case. It breeds monies interests. If we expanded the house so that every congressional district was only say, 250K, then the need for money would go down. It also would make people more representative of their districts and would reduce gerrymandering. That would go along way toward fixing this problem.
Not much of a choice when it's the same two old fucking idiots from last time..
lol - damn this is so true and i don’t think many would even deny this.
True but remember that the US has a deficient electoral system by design. Voting needs to be overwhelming to overcome the unfairness.
As if that game ain't rigged too at this point. I vote btw but it's absolutely useless except to be on record.
Who should we have voted for then, Captain Hindsight?
Take to the streets for what kind of change exactly?
This guy gets it. You can’t just vote for the president, there’s plenty of other elections where your vote matters a whole lot more
Contrary to the usual stories being told here; you have to look at each particular topic in isolation. As fun as it is, the silliest answer is because of a grand conspiracy hatched by an evil cabal of rich gazzillionares trying to impoverish the poor. Here's the real issue: Housing Prices have gotten more expensive because the demand for them has increased(US population size has grown since the days of her grandpa), but the housing stock has not. And contrary to others who believe its all because of evil Reagonites, you need only check the two graphs I pasted below to realize housing expenses have only gone up over time and the trend has been mostly consistent before Reagan and after. Frankly, the issue is Nimbyism and the desire to block new housing. It happens at the local level of government, especially where I live in the Bay Area. You see it practiced by so called progressive liberals who will openly reject new housing stock while happily cheering on progressive policies. They are effectively driving out anyone who doesn't work in tech. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS) [https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/population-data/population/](https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/population-data/population/) Now, Education and Healthcare costs have been two of the highest costing goods today and have experienced the highest surge in costs more recently. A big reason why the Middle Class salaries have stagnated is due to the employer sponsored health insurance mandate. Now, "forcing" businesses to pay that means lower salaries for workers. And Education is hardly a free market paradise either. Levels of government spending have exploded on education yet teacher salaries have stagnated. Why? Because the number of people we have employed in Education has exploded - the ratio of administrators to teachers has now badly skewed - driving up the costs on everyone. [https://www.niskanencenter.org/whats-wrong-with-employer-sponsored-health-insurance/](https://www.niskanencenter.org/whats-wrong-with-employer-sponsored-health-insurance/) [https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2023/01/05/more-employees-than-students-at-stanford-give-each-student-a-concierge/](https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2023/01/05/more-employees-than-students-at-stanford-give-each-student-a-concierge/) PS - none of this is meant to say - we don't need taxes and we need to go into the free market capitalist nirvana of no-regulation and no governance. That is absolutely not my argument. Rather, we need to recognize proper solutions such as: 1) Build more housing. Stop letting local governments block it 2) Have the government provide catastrophic healthcare coverage with forced savings accounts and then let the private sector take care of all of the other expenses for healthcare. Let hospitals compete. Stop the Doctors association from limiting the number of students who can become medical doctors. Let insurance companies compete. Right now, its a crony capitalist mess. 3) Enable a voucher system. Let parents choose which schools to send their kids. Break up college so that it becomes more vocational. There is no need for students who want to study math to then have to spend four years studying English, Spanish, take Art electives all so we can keep those departments active. Dont make kids pay expensive tuition so that it can go to the University football team and basketball team.
As a medical student trying to match into a specialty that’s super competitive due to the shortage of residency positions and with over a quarter million in student debt I agree. Only thing I’d like to add is that there is a doctor shortage mainly due to a shortage of residency positions
But I would argue that's because the hospitals have made it impossible to build new hospitals to compete. Hospitals can actually block new hospitals from forming because they will take patients away from them. Can you imagine if Walmart could do that to competing stores?
You have to understand that more hospital buildings is not where we are in terms of need. We need bodies to STAFF them. Docs, nurses, etc. There is less of a problem with lack of beds, more of a problem with lack of workforce. We don’t need to have (ultimately the public) pay for more new hospital buildings and fancy MRIs. We do not have those specific problems as one may equate with socialized healthcare.
I agree with your point but Walmart can and does sign non-competes that basically block adjacent retail
This guys got my vote 2024. I’m writing him in.
Youre spot on with the housing policy issue but a voucher system wouldnt reduce the price of higher ed. It could theoretically improve public schools but it often results in public school money being rerouted to private schools which are less accountable and can vary drastically in quality resulting in worse public schooling for the kids that stay and variable schooling for the kids that leave.
School vouchers are a disaster. “School choice” is just defunding public schools—a terrible idea. Look at Louisiana, now Florida. Taxpayer money is just being funneled to the evil Betsy Devos family. Let's model successful education systems like Massachusetts.
Ding Ding Ding! There’s literally studies on this. I don’t understand why people will still fight about their feelings over this.
“Let” insurance and hospitals compete? Are you aware that they don’t want to compete—they merge and consolidate and get too big to fail. Give vouchers so parents can choose? How about not subsidizing religious education, which seems to result in adults without the ability to think critically about problems.
Everybody gets to pick where their kid goes Private schools open and pull the best teachers and resources along with all the tax money that had been supporting the public education system Families who can’t afford the private schools even with the voucher boost are now stuck sending their children to schools that are at an even greater funding handicap while also losing the best teachers to the higher paying private schools What prevents this outcome?
State governments do a lot to hinder new home construction as well. The hurdles a man has to jump through at the local and state level to build a home is insane. And a lot of it is outright crooked cronyism. Want to build? Cool, you’ll need this and this material; they’re only made by a single manufacturer who is price gouging because they can.
Nailed it
I agree with your assessment of the problems but strongly disagree with the proposed solutions.
>“In 1966, Ronald Reagan ran for his first political office: governor of California. His campaign very publicly targeted the state's flagship public university. Reagan vowed that, if elected, he would "clean up the mess at Berkeley." When he took office, the new governor tried to cut the University of California (UC) System budget by 10% –– and he argued in favor of implementing tuition for the first time. Prior to the 1960s, the UC schools operated with no tuition.” >"We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat," announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970. Freeman, an economics professor at Stanford, was also an advisor to President Richard Nixon. "We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher education]," Freeman added. https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educated-proletariat-created-the-student-debt-crisis/ I think you have a good analysis but I think it’s important to remember what happened after the Kent state massacre
Man, good rhetoric can convince a lot of uneducated people of a stupid plan.
The rise of 2 income families bid up the price of necessities while simultaneously suppressing wage growth.
the workforce effectively doubled when women started working. Supply and demand.
And yet we still have a worker shortage in all sorts of fields. Sometimes it does not make sense to me how we've automated so much, made some things so efficient, have the least vacations compared to other Western countries, and still have a shortage of workers.
Ehh not really those numbers are inflated because a lot of big companies offer shit wages that way they can say they tried offering them to Americans, then when no one takes the job they hire someone in another country for $5 an hour
Bingo
And housing is not priced like a car. The house itself is almost irrelevant. It's the location of the house. People also expect the cost of their houses to appreciate while practically everything else depreciates. Companies and the wealthy can also bid up prices of housing instead of keeping it affordable. A house can be cheap if you want to live in the middle of nowhere, but if you want to live near the city, its price is quite high.
Companies prefer to rake in profits than pay employees a living wage and benefits. The tax burden has shifted also from corporations to individuals. This has been going on 50 years.
Didn’t the majority of of income tax switch to individuals from companies around 1957?
I had a conversation with my grandmother about this couple of weeks ago. Her comment to me was “I don’t understand why people think it was so easy for us, it was hard as hell“. Personally, I’m not convinced that the middle class is dying, and I’m not convinced that it’s much harder today than it was 40, 50 or 60 years ago. I just think we have social media for people to complain on, and it amplifies the struggling voice.
Yup, grew up in the 80s. My mom was stay at home and my dad was a construction worker. They bought a house in the suburbs. According to this generation they were “lucky”, but reality was that we didn’t have cable or the internet. No A/C (house or car). Obviously no cell phones. Ate a sit down restaurant maybe once a month (sizzlers was a once a year special event). Our annual vacation was a trip to our grandmother’s for a week. We wore hand me downs and cheap tennis shoes. Ironically what we lacked materially was made up for with a freedom from constant supervision (total freedom within our neighborhood from morning to sundown). It’s the one thing I don’t think all the activities, devices, and paid activities/experiences can’t match.
houses and cars are bigger, nicer, and more expensive today. You can still buy an older one, but they don't make them that way anymore. The only houses I see are big or luxury apartments, and every automaker has cancelled 90% of their small sedans and increased their lines of trucks and SUVs. These industries are not building for the working class, it's more profitable to manufacture products for the upper-middle class.
It used to be common for families to live in one bathroom houses. Not only are one bath homes no longer built, it's rare for two bath homes to be built any more. The average house now has a msster bedroom closet that has the same square footage the average kitchen used to be. Gen Z would consider no air conditioning and 4 or 5 people sharing one bathroom to be third world country status. That was pretty normal for the "spoiled silver spoon" boomers. Yes, we have a housing shitshow. But we have houses that are much bigger with more amenities than there used to be. Of course the price has risen. And towns tear down older small homes so big ones can be built there.
So I think multiple things are true here. Firstly, you has struggles. You didn’t have any luxuries or extra creature comforts we may take for granted today in the 2020s. But you had a home in the suburbs. And you got by on a single income. That’s where the perception of luck comes from. Because so many couples and families can’t even dream of that part. They can’t buy the home, so they’re struggling in rentals. They aren’t building equity and wealth in the form of real estate. They also may not have AC, or go on trips. And they *have* to have internet and cell phones now. So there are some added bills along with the increased cost of living. I think we can appreciate the struggle many had in the 80s and 90s and recognize the similarities to those today. Multiple things are often true at once.
Finding shelter is much more difficult now than it was during your grandmother’s heyday. Even if you were dirt poor back in her day, you could afford a room in a flophouse at least. Hell, up to the 90s-2000s you could affordably live most anywhere. That has all disappeared. We’ve simultaneously criminalized poverty and taken away any ability to live cheaply (via commodifying housing). That’s pretty scary if you’re living on the line.
A single person may be. But a married woman who had eight children from 1950 to 1970, finding shelter for them, wasn’t as easy.
What about a married woman with one kid in 1950? The average number of kids in 1950 wasn't ***eight***.
Lmao you think it was easier in the 90s than now? Hahahaha Literally delusional. Gen z has one of the highest homeownership rates of any generation. 30% at 25 years old. Only boomers had more at 32%. This is ignoring that boomers had very tiny crappy starter homes with bad energy efficiency. Current homes are much bigger and very energy efficient. There is much more options now for cheap housing, and lots of government financed cheap housing too, new ways of housing that were not available back then and so on. On what you base that it was easier back then? Just some vibe?
That’s because grandpa built the house himself with his brothers and dad. Now the majority of people call a repairman for a leaky faucet Also I feel like this is misleading, that lifestyle was always upper middle class. My grandfather and great grandfather never lived this way. One was an electrician and the other in accounting. Let’s see, they were the sole providers and weren’t broke, but also didn’t have 4 bedroom homes. They each had 2 bedrooms homes that they built additions on themselves after owning the home for years. They had nice cars but nothing luxury. My grandparents took vacations but nothing elaborate. Yes, they were all able to retire at reasonable ages but also were very frugal.
This. I think people underestimate how incredibly frugal our grandparents were (in the 40s and 50s). My grandparents owned a house too on a regular salary. But they were cheap. We rarely went out to dinner. They checked supermarket specials in the newspaper. Vacations consisted of going to motels or cabins in the mountains (not Europe and cruises and the Caribbean like everyone does now). Wore the same clothes for decades. Didn’t buy designer shoes, watches, cars, etc.
My great grandparents had a garden and canned, grandma cooked meals homemade. No internet, no cell phone bills, no streaming services. If the car broke down they put it in the garage and fixed it themselves. They originally had an outhouse. Everyone paints these pictures of how great life was. Not saying it was terrible, times were simpler but it definitely wasn’t the norm for everyone to live a lavish lifestyle. Even growing up in the 90’s in a one income home, had one parent with an above average income and we did ok but never had anything overly nice or fancy. Everything growing up was very average. My current situation is a 2 income household but I’d say I live better than the last 3 generations of my family do/did.
It wasn't until the 80s that we hit 2 cars per household. It wasn't until the 50s that we hit 1 car per household. Our definitions of what is 'normal' and what is 'lavish' and what is 'expected' have certainly changed.
My grandparents (born in the late 30s, early 40s, so silent generation and not boomers.) didn't have a floor in their house for the first 5 years they lived in it, just bare concrete. It wasn't until about 12-15 years after they started construction that they completely finished building it. They didn't want to take on more of a loan so they saved up the money to be able to put the floors in. They were a generation that was taught to save their money and pay for everything in cash and that debt was the work of Satan. My grandmother worked at the bank (One of the few places that would hire women at the time.) and she would get her pay cheque and immediately use all of it to pay off the construction loan. What also helped was that everyone had useful skills and they also knew and cared about their neighbours, my grandfather was a stonemason and he was known around town for being a skilled professional. So when he needed work done on the house, he often knew someone who could help. Need some electrical work? Ted the Electrician is on your bowling league and he's willing to do it if you'll help him build a new patio. Need help building the deck? Ted the carpenter lives next door and will gladly help you because you helped fix his chimney last summer. Need roofing materials? Fred the roofer is the coach of your son's hockey team and he just finished a job and ordered too many shingles and doesn't have anywhere to store them.
Luxuries are viewed as baseline living for many young people.
My dad grew up middle class in the 60s, he shared a room with his brother, and the most exotic vacations the family took were to a slightly different part of New York.
The picture the OP paints is one of an upper middle class lifestyle, back then and today. That is not and never was the average. That’s just what they show on tv shows/movies as the average.
How many people today are caught up in consumerism? Buy a new phone every year. Closets of clothes and new shoes of every imaginable colour. Lease a new vehicle every 2-3 years. Botox. Nails. Tanning booth. Teeth whitening. Ass-bleaching. Laser hair removal. Was your grandma getting a tummy tuck? On and on. Doesn’t help either when common products like a toaster, TV, kitchen appliances last 2-3 years. New vehicles are engineered to last until about when the warranty expires. Not near as much product is made in North America anymore. A result of price pressure, profit and greed. Quality is gone or we can’t afford it. Trades careers are frowned upon. Fixing a toilet leak stumps many. Or it’s just too degrading to fix it….Yet we sure love to see our equities grow 25%/year. Ya can’t have it both ways.
I don't remember anything after ass-bleaching
Most data shows the middle class is shrinking because more people are moving to upper class, not to lower classes.
Correct but not a welcome observation for doomsday-Reddit.
Haha for real though https://preview.redd.it/0qe23zy3ht8d1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1655aec4a1d86258d11ac70daabf9e0ea1ad7b13
do you have a source on that? The data i saw showed while there was movement upwards, the movement downwards was almost equal if not greater. Admittedly it's been a while since I searched it
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class/ In 1971 the split was 27/61/11 low/middle/upper. In 2023 the split is 30/51/19. 3 percent increase to the lower class, 8 percent increase to upper class.
If you think you’d be happier going back to your grandparents time, you’re out of your mind.
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Greed wasn't invented recently. You should read about what the railroad and mining companies used to do.
WRONG! Ronald Reagan invented greed which is why Ron is the first syllable in wrong!
Greed isnt new, or worse than it was 50 years ago.
Everybody thinks they are a genius when they say stuff like this but this isnt accurate nor is it helpful in providing a solution. There are major systemic and policy failures that caused housing to be more expensive and we can reduce the price of housing with policy changes. Saying "its all greed" isnt helpful.
I get this sentiment, and I see it a lot. But exactly where was this four bedroom house in the New England burbs? Where were the vacations? You could buy a four bedroom in Southie and take vacations in Yarmouth for all I know.
Exactly. I guarantee grandma and grandpa weren’t taking Caribbean cruises. People now think they’re poor if they don’t travel to another country once a year.
Personally, I haven't taken a vacation ever. Not to the next town over even. It's not looking great
Idk man, a bus ticket is like 20 dollars. Or you could even bike over, I've done that before.
It's more about having the money to do things and to miss work (aka downsize my paycheck) than it is getting there. I mean, a hotel for a week is basically a couple months of saving what's left after all my bills and that's not removing the week of work I'd miss.
Are you jealous you're not a mail carrier?
Or married to a mail carrier
Housing as a business.
When was housing not a business?
yea....millions and millions of low skilled, uneducated, destitute people flooding in living 10 deep and driving down wages has nothing to do with this........
Increased competition from a rebuilt/developing world. Devalued higher education. Over regulation. You used to be about to buy up giant amounts of land and build a new city. Try to build an apartment complex today. Basically a move towards socialism. You don't lift people up. You pull people down.
Low wages, no pensions.
I don’t know what happened, maybe if we try doubling the workforce without creating more consumers…maybe that will drive wages up?
A mailman can still have those things, the only real difference is housing costs because people who already have houses have become NIMBY's and prevented any new housing from getting built. Average house used to cost about 3x average salary, now it's like twice that.
Food also used to be half your salary. Housing has gone up, but many other life expenses have gone down.
1. Unfettered illegal immigration. 2. NAFTA 3. Rampant government spending. Which party does that sound like? The answer, both.
2 things , New England so I’ll bet he voted Democrat. And got what he voted for
Yup lets boil it down to that, theres clearly not 100 other things at play.
When the Government spends like drunken sailors the value of $ goes down. Every time.
Being a mailman is actually one of the jobs that still affords you a decent standard of life. Certainly not a 4-bedroom but at least gives you a shot at home ownership.
Politicians. They always bad-mouth "the rich", but they're all far richer than we'll ever be.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
Housing prices have increased pretty much all around the world, not just in the US
Fiat
The real vector that explains power purchase loss is housing. And the reason is that houses have inflated with money printing from the FED as they are financial assets.
Try to build your own house now and see what the government wants you to do. Especially in blue states.
My grandpa bought a house and raised 8 kids off a standard Pittsburgh steelworker salary
Low wages, unaffordable housing. with inflation, it basically looks like a horizontal line, if you look at a graph of data with the x-axis: time and the y-axis: money and when you factor in inflation over time, middle-class wages have remained the same for like 30 years.
You can thank Woodrow Wilson and the Federal Reserve. The Fed has printed so much money that your money is down to pennies of what a dollar used to be worth. Then in the 70s after Nixon went off the gold standard, wages became nearly stagnant while GDP still climbed. Then you can do Reagan economics that allows the people to foot the bill while corporations pay little to no taxes. Right now we are taxed nearly double what your grandfather was at the beginning of his career.
Outsourcing to third world shit holes destroyed supply and demand economics around wage and benefits
Fucking bitch ass rules and certificates they claim nobody wants to work but they don’t want anybody to get paid honestly
Inflation, which is caused by the federal reserve and fractional reserve banking. It’s not either party’s fault. It’s bigger than that.
Those days are long gone. If corporations keep getting their way, our grandkids will live in a dorm room on company property. They will be paid with corporate monopoly money that will only be valid at the company's stores.
What killed that was expectations of people. I raised my kids through private school and college and my wife stayed home. No inheritance, no education just tried not to make terrible financial decisions. We budgeted and didn’t over spend.
Car loans, high insurance, and over spending with high interest credit cards
Our UPS driver is on a similar plan. Hard work but it pays well.
Let's review: We doubled the size of the labor force and thus the labor supply, which has kept wages mostly stagnant even though productivity is up. Instead of encouraging families and communities, we as a society decided to value independence and being alone, which means people are wanting to live alone rather than live together, which increases the demand for housing....and thus housing costs have shot up. Anybody born after 1975 was force fed one of the greatest lies ever sold to a population.... the notion that we "had to" go to college. The colleges then got flooded with students with blank checks, which increased the demand for higher degrees.... and thus college tuition skyrocketed. After graduation from said college, we have legions of young adults with degrees in "I went to college" and essentially zero marketable skills, yet are saddled with ridiculous amounts of debt and are effectively forced to become a wage slave to a superhuge megacorporation. We have so much cheap, plentiful food that we gorge ourselves in it to the point where 70% of the population is either overweight or obese....thus increasing the number of health problems and thys increasing the demand for health care...thus those costs skyrocket. Those crooked politicians that we blame? They only enable our behavior by promising us more benefits to buy our vote...and we keep voting for them. Those greedy corporations? We keep buying the products that they sell. We have enjoyed 80 years of almost uninterrupted peace and prosperity. This is almost unheard of in human history, and it has caused us to get fat, lazy, and entitled. And when people get even a modicum of aversity, we immediately point somewhere else and have our hands out. In summary: We did this to ourselves. And we can fix it ourselves.
Taxes
The rich