This should be the norm for the average family again

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.
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.
  No executives can be paid with equity.
  The maximum salary can not be more than 10x the lowest salary in a company.
  Tax capital gains as regular income.
  Bring back the 90% top income tax bracket
  Introduce a wealth tax. Perhaps 3% for a networth over 1 billion.
- 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.
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.
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
Great summary of how things suck. Also, Severely Weekend would make a great band name.
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.
- 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?

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.

They were called millionnaires!
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 can, eat the rich. It's that simple.
- Sounds like the reset we need /s
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.
- Also anything electrical beyond heating this thing or spinning that thing needs to go.
  Imagine having a lucrative career as a comptometer operator.
- 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.

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

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.
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.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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 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).

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.

I dont think they’re talking about the late 80s.
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.

But line must go up!

Oh shit yeah sorry. I forgot.

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.
- Whoosh

sacrifice the quality of everything for maximum corporate profit

and those families used to take long road trips together for weeks as a vacation. and their clothes lasted decades.

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

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.

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.

Just like when Caesar had to promise land to his veterans to avoid a full scale revolt
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.
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.
- Okay before I go off on you how old are you?

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.

It never was, if you lived it. TV isn't a reliable history book

I lived it for a few brief years in the 70s then Reagan fucked us all
It was absolutely true. The only families not on single income were hard laborers or non-managerial retail/fast food and even then a carpenter could easily feed a family of 5.
- "It was true for me because I was from a moderately wealthy area and family therefore it was the norm"
Eh, I think it was, for a certain type of person:
A middle class white male. Now even working couples with no children can have trouble making ends meet.
So my parents didn't go to college for the wages of a job worked only during the summer?
They didn't walk straight into jobs?
My grandfathers didn't provide for 6 kids each on a solo income in the post war era?
Buddy. We have the history. The records, the paperwork, the video evidence.
- Nope. You have vague stories from two generations back of a generation noted for not mentioning the hard parts.

It was never going to be possible for the US to maintain that kind of standard of living forever. It worked out in the 1950s through to the 1970s because WWII left huge swaths of industry and agriculture in Europe and Asia devastated — it took decades^0 for affected countries to rebuild. Meanwhile, North American based manufacturing soared and became the envy of the world — everyone bought form North America, and anyone with no particular skill set who was looking for a job could get a good Union job in any number of factories.

But that couldn’t last forever. There was no policy the US Government could have taken (other than perpetual war against everyone else?) that would have kept the rest of the world from re-industrializing. Japan, China, Germany, Italy, France, and the UK (amongst others^1) were able to re-industrialize to a point where the US suddenly had competition again — and while the US could have some competitive advantage against some of its more Western allies due to size, they weren’t going to be able to keep that kind of lead forever against China, Taiwan, and Japan. The world wound up with more capacity than there was a market for, and so the winners were the ones that could do the job the cheapest (as is the way in a competitive marketplace).

It was an anomaly that brought the kind of prosperity the US experienced in the post-WWII years; you can’t recreate that today (as it’s only due to the limitations of the technologies at the time that North America was broadly spared any destruction during the war years — in the post WWII nuclear/ballistic missile era that wouldn’t be the case anymore).

^0 — there are still areas in Europe that are uninhabitable (and unfarmable) today due to WWI and WWII.
^1 — it did somewhat help that the Soviet Union re-industrialized under Communism; the generally closed nature of their economy, combined with the huge inefficiencies of most of its industries under centralized control didn’t really challenge or threaten the US’s economic might.

Considering how much wealth is hoarded but so few in the US alone, this kind of sounds like bullshit. It’s not that it couldn’t be maintained, it’s that the forces that ensured employers respected employees were weakened, so greed ran amok again.
If we ate the rich and divided their assets amongst us, we’d meet and exceed that “old timey” quality of life for everyone.
- I have as much problems with the hoarding of wealth as everyone else here does, but it’s not enough to change the calculus here.
  The top 0.1% in the United States hold approximately $20 trillion dollars in wealth. If you “ate the rich” and handed this over to the other 99.9% of citizens evenly, that would give everyone a one-time payment of about $58 000. And sure — we’d all love to have an extra $58 000 in our pockets, but when you divide that by 40 years of inequality you’re looking at less than $1500 per year per person — and that isn’t going to make up for the fact that a lot of high-paying jobs left the US in that time because they weren’t needed anymore.
  And you ignore the fact that the wealth that has been hoarded isn’t sitting in a Scrooge McDuck-like vault full of gold. Most of the wealth held by the top 0.1% is tied up in investments which back real, tangible industrial and civil infrastructure important to the US economy.
  None of which changes the fact that as the rest of the world (re)industrialized post WWII, those other countries didn’t need to do business with the US as much anymore. The US didn’t become the global financial powerhouse it was in the 50s and 60s and 70s because people inside the US were wealthy — they did it by selling stuff everywhere around the world, because much of the rest of the industrialized world had to rebuild their infrastructure to build their own stuff. But now the US gets to compete with China and Germany and Japan and Taiwan and France in ways they didn’t have to back in the middle of the 20th century, and other countries are buying from these countries instead of the US. And no amount of US regulation was ever going to change that.
  The US benefitted from a one-time bubble that can’t be repeated. No duh things changed for the worse.
You ignore the incredibly high cost of the Vietnam War. At the height, America was dropping three Hiroshimas a day on the jungle. US plants were working 24/7 to supply the steel, which meant German and Japan had to build their own plants. When the Arab Oil boycott hit, Detroit was doubly screwed, because Toyota and Volkswagen already had small gas sippers ready to go.
America could have regained it's edge after Vietnam ended, but Reagan's tax cuts and deregulation let the wealthiest build vast fortunes without doing anything to save the 'Rust Belt.'
- You accuse me of ignoring the high cost of Vietnam — but ultimately your own argument supports mine. Toyota and Volkswagen couldn’t have challenged the American automotive hegemony in the 1970s had it not been for the re-industrialization of Japan and Germany that allowed this to happen in the first place. The US got “stuck” in a 1950s mentality (cheap overseas oil, no significant international industrial competition), and re-industrialized countries that 20 years prior couldn’t compete had built up enough that they could.
  The US wouldn’t have regained its edge even without Vietnam. At best, it would have slowed the slide — but ultimately every other country on earth was also going to grow its economy, and the re-industrialization that happened in countries with much cheaper costs of living (and yes, in some cases with regressive political regimes that worked to keep costs down) was always going to happen anyway, and no amount of US protectionism was ever going to prevent it from happening. As I pointed out elsewhere in this post (as one example), Australia in the 1950s bought the vast majority of its automobiles from US companies — but now they buy primarily from Asian manufacturers. The US lost that business because those other manufacturers focuses on cost and quality — and it’s not likely getting it back anytime soon. Multiply that by virtually every industry in existence today, and it’s not hard to see that the 50s and 60s were a special economic anomaly that won’t likely ever happen again.
We could have had a better grip on what companies chose to do with their workforce, so instead of offshoring previously well paying manufacturing jobs they could have "forced" companies to hire Americans to make American goods. Instead we blindly accepted the "service economy" bullshit and ditched manufacturing almost completely :/
- I'm guessing those companies would have died of because they couldn't compete with cheap overseas labor
- And none of that would change the fact that other countries are now able to buy goods they once bought from US manufacturers from other countries.
  China, Japan, Germany, and other modern industrial powerhouses that were decimated after WWII are now competition for US manufacturers. Even if the US went full on protectionist and kept their own factories from offshoring, that wasn’t going to prevent China (or Germany, or France, or whomever) from pursuing its own industrialization, and then going after countries that were buying American in the mid 20th century to buy from them instead.
  A good example to look at right now is Australia — in the 1950s, they were dominated by American vehicles, either importing them directly from the US, or via locally built Holdens (which may have been manufactured locally, but the company was owned by General Motors — the profits flowed back to the United States), with some small British cars thrown in. But today only two American brands even make it into the Top 10 — Ford at #3, and Tesla at #8. All of the other brands are now primarily out of Asia (Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Kia, Hyundai, Isuzu).
  The US “not offshoring” manufacturing wouldn’t have changed this. And the story is the same across all of the rest of the world — back in the 1950s, the world was buying from the US (or to a lesser extent Canada and the UK). Today they don’t have to — and US protectionism was never going to change that. Forcing American companies to stay in the US and only hire Americans would have just made life for Americans more expensive, and wouldn’t have changed the fact that money that had been flowing into the US during the post-war era had more or less dried up once the major economies in Europe and Asia had re-industrialized.

I suspect affordable housing is the main thing here that has been stolen.

The whole mess of the economy is hanging on that one thing. It gobbles up every spare penny. There isn't enough of it, and the price is only being constrained by how much the highest bidder is prepared to pay. The highest bidders are professional couples, no kids. If that's not you, you ain't getting shit.

As a wise man once sang, "build fuckin' houses everywhere, millions of the cunts".

It's our obsession with personal profit. It doesn't matter what your economic model is called. When you maximize gain at the cost of everything else you weaken the integrity of the very foundation that it exploits.
What about Switzerland and Japan?
How are imperialism and healthcare related lol

Ha ha I have you all beat. I am living in the future with a three income household.

NFT's?
- Their kid is a burgeoning youtube star.
  All he does is unboxing videos

at least they found the time to ban tiktok today

This but unironically. Tiktok is contributing to the brain rot in our nation.
- I liked the OK Boomer dances.

From looking at jobs recently I would suggest getting into nursing or surgery tech at your local community college. Travel nurse jobs are paying $2500/ week.

Surgery tech has less dealing with asshole patients, but more dealing with asshole surgeons. Make of that what you will.

This was never the norm it's a myth that never actually existed even when it was supposedly the norm most people struggled

It was in NZ when I was a kid and I know the US had always had a higher standard of living than us

we can have the economic prosperity without the racism, in fact I'd argue if we recreated the economic effects of the 50s, high tax rate on the rich, local manufacturing and being a net exporter, that diversity would only make us more competitive.
edit: wow it looks like some cute little edgelad only wants their prosperity with extra helpings of racism.

there are a lot more yachts and compounds.. and private jets to get you from your yacht to your compound..

https://lemmy.ml/post/13140683

am i the only one to see a relation here to this one? i guess there was maybe more stolen than "only" the future

One major factor: women entered the workforce. Labor supply doubled, and two incomes per household became normalized. Our current economic system fails to account for the work of raising children which was implicitely built into the "traditional family" model.

That's a double whammy for workers. The value of labor is halved. Both partners are expected to work to achieve a similar standard of living. And, without one partner doing household and child-rearing labor, those costs are borne by the workers.

The value of labor was wrecked because Reagan crushed the unions and factory jobs were outsourced to third world countries, not because more women entered the workforce. That was a symptom, not a cause.
One major factor: women entered the workforce. Labor supply doubled, and two incomes per household became normalized.
I think that may be a case of putting the cart in front of the horse. For one, the labor supply did not double, and a significant amount of women have been in the workforce since the 40's.
In 48' a little over 30% of women worked, today it's only 58%. So, I really doubt a gradual 25% increase in labor supply spread over 60 years is really responsible for the rapid decrease in livable wages we saw from the late 80's on.
Also, an increase in labour supply only equates to a reduction in labour value if production value stagnates or decreases. This is the opposite of what happened post 80s, production has skyrocketed, but labour value has stagnated. This typically means that companies are transferring excess profits to shareholders rather than employees.
Wrong. Women in the US entered the workforce in great numbers because of the 1972 Arab Oil Boycott. The price of gas and energy in general tripled overnight, and families were struggling to maintain. No wages fell. If Dad was making $5,000.00 a year in 1971 he was making the same salary after the prices went up. It was just that $5,000.00 no longer covered the basic expenses.
Cite your sources on this economic theory of yours, that is if you can find any that didn't come out of some MRA's ass
- Yeah, the entire premise requires that women entering the workforce didn't cause any new jobs to come into existence.
  Childcare alone is a huge industry.
  Both working parents often means two vehicles, that's an increase in manufacturing.
  It also ignores that women were already part of the workforce but their options were restricted.
  Two household incomes exist because it's the only way to survive the past 40 years of wage stagflation. We have an increase in multi-generational households because two incomes is no longer enough.
- Obviously women should have the same labor opportunities as men, but do you really think doubling the pool of workers would have no impact on the labor market?
  It only becomes MRA bullshit when you stop there and say "see, feminism was a mistake!" instead of arguing for all workers to be better compensated.
- What part do you disagree with?

It wasn’t stolen as much as we willingly gave it up for modern convenience such as letting women work outside the home, prioritizing single family housing and car ownership in the suburbs, cutting taxes for the ultra wealthy and a plethora of other choices we made 70 years ago.

Yeah I didn't do any of those things. I was born after it happened and grew up being told how it was still possible and easy and how the world was a kind loving place.
So stolen sounds about right.

I get the point they are making but using 5 was stupid. There was never a time when any salary worker would be able to support a family of 5. This is unnecessary hyperbole.

Me, an intellectual, who makes less than the American minimum wage because I live in a third world country: You guys can't make ends meet with your inflated s Dollar salaries? 🧐

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but the more money people make in a country the more expensive things are. So that inflated salary you are talking about also comes with inflated costs of housing and food and clothes etc.
- Well, I am glad to know that the salary of a congressman in my country would mean poverty and awful living conditions in the US but that we are safe from that because everything is cheaper where I live. Damn
Americans make more in wages, but goods and services are generally more expensive as well. Many people work multiple jobs, but can barely afford their means, and/or are trapped in a cycle of debt. Idk your situation, or that of your country, so I won't say we're in as bad a situation as you. Poor Americans might be in a more preferable position overall.

For any country that has benefited from exploitation of foreign resources "stolen" is a bit rich.

So all nations?

https://media.tenor.com/53mO4htkMIYAAAAM/i-dont-believe-you-lies.gif