And to make that happen:
- The gilded age made some robber barons insanely rich (though not as rich as the current American oligarchs)
- There was a huge economic crash, called the Great Depression, during which the excesses of the rich were incredibly unpopular and the rich felt in real danger
- To get out of the Great Depression, the US Government created all kinds of “socialist” programs to help people get back on their feet, strengthen unions, regulate business, make massive investments in US infrastructure, etc.
- Right as the Great Depression was ending, WWII began
- For a while the US was “neutral”, and was manufacturing war materiel for the various countries at war, though mostly for the Allied side. This involved huge amounts of government spending.
- Then, a few years after WWII began, the US entered the war, and spending ramped up even more.
- Virtually every other modern economy in the world had its infrastructure destroyed during the war. Britain was bombed relentlessly, Germany was flattened, Japan was nuked, France was turned into Rubble, the USSR’s factories were destroyed as Germany advanced and partially rebuilt in the middle of nowhere.
- The war ended and while every other country was rebuilding their shattered infrastructure, the US infrastructure was running hot and able to supply the world’s needs
- American workers were massively in demand because it was almost the only remaining industrialized country with intact factories
- American workers still retained the massive worker benefits and union membership that was the result of the New Deal economy
So, take that sequence, and for a brief moment a white, male worker in the US could support a family on a blue-collar salary in a way they hadn’t ever done before that. Once other countries rebuilt their infrastructure, the US lost that edge. Once American businesses pushed for the roll-back of worker protections, blue-collar workers lost that benefit. Bit, by bit, the world returned to the way it has normally been, where the lowest class barely survives and both parents work hard, while the rich benefit.
So the take away from what you’re saying is, we need to fast track WWIII, and sit out of it. Let the world nuke each other while we sit back and eat popcorn while we sell them even MORE bombs to blow each other up!
…oh my god. I was being dramatic, but that sounds exactly like Bidens plan with Ukraine. Sell them weapons, but not enough to end the war. Just prolong it. I am baffled that trump hasn’t gone the opposite route and sold russia nukes. I was fully expecting that.
And since then, productivity exploded. Machines and automation everywhere. We are in the age of overconsumption. And value is created at an always acceleratind pace.
But then things started to slow down. But wealth growth can’t slow down! It has to grow, always, and always faster. So when “produce more” stopped working, they turned to “produce for cheap”.
They started cutting spendings and benefits. But it wasn’t enough. And they told western workers that they were no longer competitive. Yes, that plant they’re shutting down was making money. But it would make MORE money in China and other third world countries.
And while plants were going away, salaries got stagnant. Wealth was growing again!
But then the growth slowed down again. So they bought governments to get huge subsidies they could funnel in their wealth growth again.
And now plants are “optimal”. Wages are low. Govs hand out money. Why is it not working?
Because they impoverished so much the working class that there is no one left to buy the goods they produce.
The problem is obvious to anyone looking: money is needed for the economy to run. If it’s all locked up by oligarchs, then it serves no purpose and the economy suffocates. And there is no remote way a handful of people can manage the world’s economy. “Trickle down economy” has failed everywhere and everytime it was attempted. So they’re terrified. Terrified of the working class, terrified of common good, terrified of common sense.
So to make sure they can keep hoarding whatever is left to get, they turned to fascists and propped them across the world, by controlling medias and flooding social networks.
And here we are: in the age of overproduction and mass poverty combined, with a class of scared oligarchs ready to take the world down with them as long as no one stops their wealth hoarding.
Nice breakdown.
Don’t leave out the part that after this American renaissance, where those returning soldiers became workers who reaped the rewards of that one in a million economic boon, their children started fabricating narratives about ‘hard work’ and ‘grit’ being the reason their inherited wealth was justified.
Then they shoved that narrative down the next three generations’ throats while exclaiming “kids these days are lazy” and “I worked a summer job to pay for college, why can’t you?”. All the while pulling up every ladder that had been constructed to put them in that position.
True enough. The men who had great jobs in the 50s had frequently been soldiers in the 40s. They’d been raised in the 30s during the great depression. They’d been through hardships. It was their kids who grew up in relative luxury. I’m sure some of it was pulling the ladder up after themselves. But, in addition they hadn’t had to fight to establish their union, it was just there when they joined the job. Because of that, they didn’t know how important it was, and so they didn’t know they should be fighting to keep it strong.
Yeah they just saw money coming out of their check for union dues and propaganda about how union reps were corrupt
And, to be fair, there was some corruption in unions. But, they could have rooted out that corruption and had a union that represented them. Instead they abandoned unions and embraced “rugged individualism”.
Yeah the position of privilege that America occupied globally for the last 75 years minus the last ten or twenty years is not something that’s talked about enough in “they” took the American dream from us
And what that position of privilege cost the rest of the world. For example, Eisenhower was president from '53-'61, is often seen as a great president by Americans, and that decade is seen as a golden age by plenty of Americans (especially boomers).
Outside the US, Eisenhower had Lumumba assassinated in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The replacement they helped install, Mobutu, basically continued the brutal rule and many of the atrocities that had occured in the Congo Free State (death toll as high as 10 million), so that minerals could continue to be extracted. Ultimately this would lead to the first and second congo war and an additional 5 million deaths. Fun fact: a few years ago Tesla/Musk signed a large contract with a company which was formed from a merger of companies including the successor of Compagnie du Katanga. The latter was a concession company that operated in the Congo Free State and is responsible for plenty of the worst atrocities committed during that time. Just in case anyone here thinks colonialism was a long time ago. There’s also stuff like the Guatamalan genocide which was a result of the CIA instigated coup of 1954, the 1953 Iranian coup which would ultimately result in Iran becoming an Islamic theocracy, and his signing a deal with Franco which arguably prolonged his rule.
Neat history that mostly erases billionaire actions.
You’re really great at underhanded billionaire propaganda. How much do they pay you?
Are you Malcolm gladwell?
Roseanne was a show in the 80s about a hard-working blue-collar family that was often struggling to get by.
They had a house with a detached garage and 3 kids.
Another example is Al Bundy in Married With Children. He was a shoe salesman with a stay at home wife and two kids but managed to own a nice home.
Malcolm in the Middle
Massive by today’s standards, though I think it was fairly typical house in the 2000s at the time
I’m only in my 30s. My dad supported our family on a high school education. I don’t have a college education but I did two different certification programs to work in my field. I’m single with no kids and live alone and I’m still struggling. I don’t know how anyone has a family right now. I can’t even afford me. I’m so mad that my dad raised an entire family and bought and paid off a house and I can barely pay my damn rent and buy groceries with a better education and job than what he had.
I was the first in my family to go to college. I lived an intensely frugal life to minimize my debt, which was successful: I graduated with $3 in my pocket and no debt.
All of that effort got me, after 3 years of job hunting while making minimum wage, a $20 hour job. Almost twice our minimum wage at the time and I didn’t even have the purchasing power my mother did at the start of her career, despite starting mine years later with an education and a whole stack of certificates.
This is the joke that capitalists think is acceptable.
Not to mention how much other stuff was stolen from young people, like how awesome the internet was in the mid-2000’s before it got absolutely destroyed by corporations - game consoles that didn’t require 35 accounts to play a game ONLINE ONLY and a subscription to EVERYTHING in your life. Sure, it’s always been bad (because capitalism) but not THIS bad. And it’ll only get worse as the population becomes less tech literate.
Kids just go with it now, and it’s really sad, they don’t know anything different.
Adjusted for inflation, an NES would cost $600 dollars today. An NES game would cost $150. You had to go to the mall to buy the games.
Thanks to spotify, youtube, and piracy music is now essentially free and available almost everywhere. Adjusted for inflation a CD/tape album you bought in 1985 would cost $30. You would had to travel to the mall, but an entire album just for that one song you liked, and listen to it on repeat for an entire month or stay up late to tape a particular song from the radio.
Don’t glorify the past too much. We have never had such easy and cheap access to such a wide variety of media and games. Napster and early torrenting worked well, but the quality was often shit for plenty of stuff.
For white people in the imperial core
Keep downvoting, sorry the truth hurts that your parents only had those privileges from raping the rest of the world
What are you calling the imperial core? No one uses that term in the US. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
You’re right but you’ve also framed this in the most inflammatory way possible.
The life being described by OP was very much a privilege of a vast global minority. Sure it’s something everyone should have but it’s not something that’s ever existed for most people.
Is it something that can be had again? Absolutely. But we can dream bigger than bringing it back for just Americans/Westerners (even if the West only got there via exploitation of others).
It is inflammatory because this conservative bullshit is fucking offensive as fuck to everyone on earth who were exploited by the US and its allies to make that life possible.
Is it something that can be had again? Absolutely.
No, it can’t, not in the way it happened. It happened by extreme exploitative capitalism and it ended in the exact way you are living now. Those same people are the ones who had their wealth transferred up. Those same people are the people who got foreclosed in 2008. There is no alternate ending to what happened then than the world you live in. To think you can go back to the past and live a way of life that doesn’t exist from an idealized past is conservative thought.
No one on earth will ever have that again, you need to dream much bigger where you aren’t profiting off the backs of my family with a better world for everyone that looks nothing like the regressive 1950s fantasy your boomer parents and grandparents lived in or you get the shit you have now.
You can blame Reagan for a large part of this, among many other issues.
The layup for Reagan effectively began the moment WW2 ended and it’s important to acknowledge that so we understand the villainy runs so much deeper than just him. Reagan was just the one in power when the time came to land the dunk with the help of the Chicago boys and a weakening socialist presence. Neoliberal economics would see many western nations begin to sell off their assets and begin an era of hyperindividualism completely alien to humans.
Some countries caught on to the damage earlier than others and have been struggling against the neoliberal world order being held up by the IMF, World Bank, World Economic Forum, etc… The anglosphere however is subject to America’s cultural exports as well and that has left us particularly weak.
The answer to why resides in the way wealth is allocated in society. If you look at the graph of the wealth of the 0.1%, the median income and the economical growth, those three numbers were growing at a steady pace up until the 70~80s. Now our economies are growing at a similar rate but median income plateaued/is decreasing while the wealth of people at the top has skyrocketed.
It’s not hard to figure out where all that growth went.
We could still afford such a lifestyle. Or we could learn to share more and end poverty and respect the Earth. But instead we’re allowing a small village of cunts to each have more money and power than entire countries.
The Rand Corp issued a report in 2019 on income inequality, and the situation is far worse than most people think. The median salary of $43K in 1975 had increased to only $50K in 2019, while they would have been making $92K if the tax code hadn’t been steadily re-written to enrich the wealthy at the cost of the middle class and poor.
In that same time period, the mean income for the top 1% went from $289K to $1.384 million, while they would have been making $630K under the old tax codes.
Thats a 17.4% increase in the lower median, and an increase of 321.6% in the 1% median. Clearly there has been an upwards distribution of wealth at the expense of the middle class since the tax codes started to be re-written in 1974 to favor the top economic tier. The Trickle Down Economics that everyone thought was Ronald Reagan’s great idea, was baked into the tax code in 1974.
In addition, the Federal minimum wage was last increased to $7.25 in 2009. Previous to that, it was raised to $5.15 in 1997. The Federal minimum wage was only increased twice in the last 28 years, for a total of a measly $2.10. And yet corporations and their owners SCREAM like their nuts are being carved out by a red hot, dull, rusty spoon at even the mention of a raise in the minimum wage.
When there are threats to raise it every 15 years or so, there are always two responses, as if they are the ONLY possible options - prices will have to go up, or jobs will have to be cut. There is never a mention of the third possible option - that corporations and their owners might have to make a slightly smaller profit. That option is absolutely unthinkable. Unmentionable.
“But less profit means the stock market would be impacted!” is the standard cry. Yes it would, but so what? The stock market hit its recent low in March of 2008, soon after Obama took over the presidency in the midst of a free fall caused by the Bush Economic Crash - about 7500. Today it is over 40,000. Corporations are clearly benefiting in today’s economy, even during a global pandemic when millions of American families were facing homelessness and food shortages through no fault of their own. They were the helpless victims of government edicts which forcibly and ruthlessly shut down their only ways to make a living, while doing NOTHING to help them survive because a few rich Republicans are upset that poor people might get more money than they deserve. So they fought to a stalemate over $400 or $600 per week, while their Sociopathic Oligarch slavemasters chuckled smugly while metaphorically lighting their cigars with $100 bills and demanding more corporate welfare.
So what if smaller profits (because workers got paid their value) meant the stock market was only at 20,000, or even 15,000? Those corporations and their stockholders would still be wealthy, but there would be enough money in the treasury to pay for health care for all, college or trade school for every qualified student, to forgive all student loan shark debts, to cover those whose jobs have been essentially declared illegal because of the pandemic, and more. Sure, corporations would have to live with less profit, but instead of that money being tied up in enormous stock portfolios or in offshore bank accounts, it would be in the hands of people who would buy houses, cars, furniture, vacations, retire to make room for the next generation, etc.
The Trickle Down Economic Theory never worked. As anyone could have predicted (and many did), instead of spending those tax profits on new factories or new opportunities or higher pay scales like we were promised, the Sociopathic Oligarchs only accumulated it at the top. When they did spend it, they spent it on political leverage to get more corporate welfare so they could accumulate even more wealth, at the expense of the working class, creating financial hoards which they sleep on like a Tolkienesque dragon.
Its time to give Trickle Up Economics a try. Make more money available to those at the bottom and middle, and see what happens. Raise wages, forgive student loans, offer free college and trade schools, give every citizen health care, etc. and it will create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. Sure, the Oligarchs appreciate the efficiency of transferring the money directly from the government to their savings accounts, but the money from the Trickle Up stimulus will eventually reach them anyway, they just have to be a little patient and wait for it to help American families and the American economy first.
If they don’t cooperate in this, then our society will spontaneously pivot to a Robin Hood Economy, and the Sociopathic Oligarchs won’t like that one bit. We’re already seeing the beginnings of it.
Read more about it :
New York Mag: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/09/rand-study-how-high-is-inequality-us.html
Fast Money: https://www.fastcompany.com/90550015/we-were-shocked-rand-study-uncovers-massive-income-shift-to-the-top-1
This was “middle class” and not everybody. The goalposts moved and middle class is now in the mid 500ks take home. Wages never kept up, so the classes shrank by default. It was and is all planned by those at the top to syphon off more and more so they can elevate themselves from us common plebs. Almost like cycles in nature? We fight and gain concessions, they slowly roll them back until we start again…
This is some white shit right here
I’m not racist you piece of shit.
You want to explain to me what you’re talking about?
You removed my comment and called me racist even though I’m not and my comment wasn’t even remotely racist.
All of this was only true of white families.
Edit: fuck this golden age remembrance propaganda.
What the actual fuck does that have to do with the post
Fine ill break it down into smaller pieces for you kid.
The idea that American families used to thrive on one adult income is propaganda aimed at the uninformed and easily swayed. It makes the 1950s look like a simpler, fairer time, but that’s misleading. That ideal mostly applied to white, middle-class families. Black and Hispanic families faced systemic racism like redlining and being denied GI Bill benefits, and women were expected to stay home, often earning far less if they worked at all. Poverty, social constraints, and inequality for most were ignored. Nostalgia for that era is a story sold to flatter the smaller minded.
This isn’t just the '50s and '60s. This lifestyle existed in the '80s and '90s, although presumably that was the beginning of the end.
I’m curious, are you suggesting it was crimes against women being taken seriously that brought about this economic downturn? Just trying to find a nexus between the post and your comment.
Ill feed your curiosity.
The idea that American families used to thrive on one adult income is propaganda aimed at the uninformed and easily swayed. It makes the 1950s look like a simpler, fairer time, but that’s misleading. That ideal mostly applied to white, middle-class families. Black and Hispanic families faced systemic racism like redlining and being denied GI Bill benefits, and women were expected to stay home, often earning far less if they worked at all. Poverty, social constraints, and inequality for most were ignored. Nostalgia for that era is a story sold to flatter the smaller minded.
If you were white*
Yuuge detail
Even if you weren’t. The economic boom of the 20th century gave birth to lots of prosperous minority communities.
Only problem was that if you ever got too prosperous, neighbors might come by to burn the place down.
But a lot of the so-called economic anxiety kicked off by mass migration to California, Texas, and Florida (and to London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersberg, Beijing, Tokyo, and Mexico City) was the result of war refugees, political dissidents, and victims of a shifting market economy finding real serious economic benefits to relocating inside the fence of one of the world’s premier powers. You didn’t need to be white to achieve a marked improvement in quality of life, you just needed to be within arm’s reach of all the advanced industrial capital and its benefits.
The Two Income Trap that began to rear its head in the 80s/90s was a consequence of housing, higher education debts, and child care costs that prior generations hadn’t historically dealt with. One could plausibly argue that the extended adolescence of college demonstrates an overall improved economy, as people are no longer joining the workforce in their teenage years and trying to outproduce a historically high infant mortality rate.
But the benefits of the economy have gone disproportionately to the leisure and professional managerial classes, while the working classes absorb higher debts/rents and defer accessing the industrial improvements until much later in life. It isn’t that non-white people never see them. It is simply that they are much older when they finally do and enjoy the benefits for less time, due to higher mortality rates.
The two income family came as a direct result of Nixon’s Vietnam spending.
Kennedy’s Vietnam policy was containment; we supplied ‘military advisors’ and propped up the South to appease the French. We were focused on the soviets and Vietnam was a sideshow.
LBJ wanted a massive knock out punch to wipe the Viet Cong out fast. Instead he got a quagmire. Johnson had to print money to pay for the war because he didn’t want to raise taxes. Nixon ran as a ‘peace candidate’ and then doubled down on Johnson’s spending. Remember, we were dropping something like a dozen Hiroshimas a day on jungle.
Inflation is getting bad, and then OPEC hits the US with the Oil Boycott. That devastates the US economy. All those cool loft buildings in places like New York’s TriBeCa and SoHo? Those were originally small factories. They emptied out because the owners couldn’t afford to runt them anymore.
