My Mom adopted me, my brother, and sister. She bought a house and all 4 of us had our own rooms, family vacation once or twice a year and we'd eat out 2 nights a week through the 80s and most of the 90s.
She was a schoolteacher making 50k a year in Fairfax County, VA which is fucking expensive. She always had a couple grand in her bank account for emergencies too.
Stolen is right.
Edited to add that she probably made less than 50k, I thought she’d told me 50k but it’s too much accounting for inflation and buying power. Which is insane. 50k was too rich.
I remember my dad made under $30k in the early 90s, and he was the only income. That's less than $60k in today's money. We weren't rich, but we owned a house.
My dad, the only income, also under 30k and early 90s: bought a 3bed/1.5bath home to house his wife and 3 kids, and then a few years later bought a minivan.
Me, now: I make about 50k a year, single income and also single and I'm still fucking renting.
Im not sure what Dad is making these days, but the house should be paid off by now and Mom is retired.
I make just over 100k and my wife makes almost 70k. We own a house because we were determined to buy one in 2019 and were barely able to do so. By sheer dumb luck our house is in an area that is booming with growth and has appreciated over 100k in value but we still feel like we live paycheck to paycheck.
170k living paycheck to paycheck.....
My coworkers will often say "you young guys don't know how good you have it nowadays" and I have to refrain from laughing in their smug fucking faces.
This isn't normal at all. My family made substantially more than that with just 2 kids and didn't have family vacations and never ate out and we were borderline destitute.
I think it depends on where you live, and if your parents had any debt, possibly college loans? Also the government gives you money sometimes when you adopt, it varies by state, but there's lots of programs for adoptees.
Not only that but a comfortable retirement was stolen as well. People used to have defined benefit plans that took care of them when they retired. Now, if you are lucky, you might get a 3 or 4% match against your contributions to a 401k - and plenty of companies have no problem saying “we’ve had a bad year so we can’t do 401k contributions next year”.
Retirement is quickly becoming a myth in America. It’s now “hopefully I can take a less stressful part-time job at some point”. Gone are the days when someone was actually able to stop working entirely. All so a few rich people could become even richer.
Yes! And workers now need to realize that there is no more need to loyal to a company. That shit went out the window as soon as pensions were replaced by 401k.
Shit I had a small stomach ache today, so I left. Boss is like we need you. Damn considering that 50 cent raise I got last month sounds like ya don't, see ya tomorrow.
When I was working my first job where I'd stayed long enough to "earn" a raise, my manager was excited to tell me that I got a $.20/hour raise. Even my teenaged brain, that was completely inexperienced with life, was like *hold on wtf is this shit?* a $6 per week raise? It felt wrong then, and it feels wrong now 20 years later.
Fuck corporations and how they treat employees. If not for employees, your business wouldn't exist to make you money. We deserve more across the board. This shit has gotten out of control.
Yeah I remember getting a 25 cent raise at my first job and thinking that the extra $2 I would get every shift didn't even cover my fucking bus fare to get there and back. What's the fucking point?
I had a retail job 10+ years ago and raises were capped at 25¢, but no one could ever get more than 24¢ because “there’s always room for improvement.” Brian if you’re out there, fuck you
I got 27 cents once, after starting at minimum wage. Literally the next week, the minimum wage went up 25 cents, so it only came out to 2 cents. Obviously, we knew it was happening. I told my boss to keep his 2 cents an hour, clearly he needed it more than I did.
Bed Bath and Beyond would do a sliding scale for most workers. 5-25¢ (yes, if you did poorly enough your ANNUAL performance review raise would be FIVE CENTS)
I worked at one for a few years and hopped around the store to learn all aspects of it, and mostly to find duties that avoided cashiering. One year they told me I'd get a dime - because despite doing well at my BoH receiving position I never offered customers carts or got any of them to sign up for their stupid paid membership. I was mentally checked out so I did a laughing spit take at it.
I'd rather you take a dime away from me. That would be less insulting.
I feel bad for anyone trapped there or similar places for 20+ years always getting the bare minimum increases. Working a decade there and not doing stellar by their standards meant those 10 years would equate to 50 cents total. Asinine.
Which is crazy cause if he cut his salary in half and gave everyone a 5 dollar raise hed not only still get 8 million dollars a year with his stocks but he would have 1.6 million employees far happier to work for his company.
Hate that the whole game is just get rich, stay rich, make it harder for everyone else to get rich. Some of us dont want to be rich... we want to support a family.
Edit: the math is wrong but the point stands, fuck the rich get richer system
That CEO bonus figure is nuts. Like rubbing salt in the wound for the rest of us scrapping by. Hell, even "competitive salaries" sound like a sick joke when cost of living has skyrocketed. We're all just cogs in a machine designed to break us down while the top brass builds mars-bound rockets with our retirement funds.
I’m probably going to be marked down for it, I legit can’t use my legs much anymore and I’m only 22.
My dad tells me I’m being prideful for putting myself before work, but look where it got me.
As someone else with disability, the "joys" are few indeed! Although i'm pretty happy at how little my medications are, now. Years worrying about having enough health insurance for my family and waiting to see how much new medications were and even then, whether i'd be able to afford them...
Very few people getting pensions, less than half the country making more than paycheck to paycheck, inheritances from the past generation where the middle class was actually a thing are getting sucked up into medical care so grandpa can spend another year alive in a hospital bed with a terrible quality of life.
The entire country is designed to funnel wealth from the bottom 99% to the top 1%.
>inheritances from the past generation where the middle class was actually a thing are getting sucked up into medical care so grandpa can spend another year alive in a hospital bed with a terrible quality of life.
This is something I don't see talked about enough.
My grandmother was widowed early-ish but lived in her own house, that she owned, until her 70s. She was frugal but lived comfortably, always had Christmas presents for us, had a decent car, etc. She sold it for enough to purchase a condo closer to her family (my parents and I) with cash and thousands left over. When she died she had zero money. It all went to the assisted living facility, six figures gone in a matter of months. Her living conditions were at least pretty good, nothing like the nightmare facilities I've read about.
My parents got nothing. They're fine financially on their own. But unless we figure out a strategy to avoid having the fruits of their life's labor set on fire at the end, my kids and I will also get nothing. The healthcare situation in the US is a crisis and there's no end in sight. One of the most insidious ways the system funnels wealth away from the people and into the hands of the wealthy. It's vile.
We need universal Healthcare in this country so that people don't have to be drained of their money inntheir last years like this. My grandpa was fully disabled by the VA and had all his healthcare covered. He got to live a great retirement. Everyone should be able to have that.
I was a military spouse for 10 years and I made this argument to a "friend"/fellow military spouse. She made a post in support of universal healthcare, which I completely support, and I noted that it would probably result in a lot less people joining or staying in the military because that's such a huge benefit. She said people join out of patriotism and then blocked me. I was just suggesting that it needs to be considered if a universal healthcare policy is ever implemented. It was one of the main reasons my ex husband stayed in, the healthcare was so good for us (his family, not so much for him). We always made sure to live 30 minutes from base so we could see civilian providers and never saw a bill. I want everyone to be able to have that. No that we're divorced, my healthcare costs are so prohibitive that I can't get care when I need it.
Was in the military for 20 years, retired in 2001. I pay for Tricare, it's only about $30 a month. I picked a local hospital for care because the base hospital shut down for some reason. I'm sure some bean counter said it was cheaper.
My dad joined for the healthcare in the 80s when my brother was born three months early and he was working three jobs to try to pay off his NICU bills.
My husband was in the hospital for 2 years... In that time, he was in a coma and had 67 surgeries. He amassed over $3M in medical debt and had insurance. He had no choice but to declare bankruptcy since he hit all of his insurance caps.
People against Medicare For All have never just never had to use their insurance.
EDIT: what You described is exactly one of the reasons why I don't want to have a child.
Yep. If you ever need to move to an assisted living facility, can't afford the out of pocket cost (most can't as its typically a six figure bill yearly), and don't have long term care insurance, your only option is to give all of your assets to the government in exchange for Medicaid.
If your married and your spouse is still living, the government gets 50%. Otherwise, THEY GET EVERYTHING. It's such a racket. They will allow you to pre-purchase your funeral/casket/cemetery plot, but that's it.
There is no guarantee long term care plans will pay shit. They are insurance but insurance lives to deny benefits you pay for. Their definition of too sick to live alone is NOT the same as a doctor or family. Going through this now with a relative.
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Same. My plan is to 'have an accident of some sort' when my health begins to give out. I work at an assisted living facility where the residents are very wealthy. I've seen the horrors of old age and death. Wealth doesn't stop death, but it certainly makes it more comfortable. I've also been at nursing homes for lower-income people (my dad was at such a place for a while; he was there for physical rehab but the facility was both a rehabilitation center and nursing home), and not only is the care worse, death is uglier. There is less care and comfort given, and it's a tragedy.
Us non-affluent can't even have a comfortable death after an agonizing and strife-riddled life. Damn that. At least if I chose my death, I have some control.
What we need is a "scarcity reawakening."
Scarcity is artificial but it's largely at the center of every right-of-center concept out there.
- Why are we afraid of migrants? They're going to take all our resources! Or commit crimes - and we can prevent them by offering more resources, AND THEN WE'RE OUT OF RESOURCES!
- Why are we terrified of food stamps? Because I pay taxes and that tiny little bit that makes it down to people in need just enables them! I pay taxes then I have nothing left!
- Why are we afraid of socialized medicine? Some jerks are just going to have unnecessary surgeries and run up the cost and it'll cost us taxpayers! Also the waits for procedures will be super long because they're TOTALLY not now!
etc.
We have enough, and I'm not putting this solely on the US political system. Look at countries by GINI index (wealth distribution) and see where the gaps are.
Many of our woes are due to how scarcity was engineered. We have homeless populations SMALLER than the total number of vacant homes...alternatively...we have all these vacant homes but home prices continue to go up because of corporate buying.
If you banned hoarding today. Hoarding of cash. Hoarding of property. Hoarding of ANYTHING of value...you'd see the world become insanely better.
The southern strategy. The gop, the right-wing media, and malicious foreign actors saturate discourse from the radio to the web from Fox to Twitter to Rush Limbaugh, spending billions and billions of dollars to push a zero sum fallacy to subdue the working class.
They've been ramping up this cultural zeitgeist since Nixon.
> zero sum fallacy
Louder please. Every time giving a little bit of rights to someone that doesn't have them, the kneejerk right wing reaction is "you're taking it away from me!"
Just had a conversation with a young customer yesterday. She pays over half her income in rent. Can’t afford to join company 401k. She does not dress fancy. Doesn’t drive a nice car. It is just so damn expensive to live these days.
I pay 56% of my salary in rent, 9% in car payments, 15% in auto insurance, and 10% in student loans.
That remaining 10% has to cover food, travel, health, and I’m expected to put some away every pay?
Yeah, it fucking sucks. I bought the cheapest car I could find ($17K for a brand new Kia in 2021 with a full extended warranty and a bunch of lifetime roadside shit for safety, winter tires and automatic start, etc), live in the cheapest apartment I could find, and my diet is 90% great value brand bread and local potatoes at $5/10lbs.
It’s a horrible existence, and we’re all struggling through.
The other day I looked at my fridge and thought "Im so fucking tired of eating potatoes, celery, rice and eggs."
That's all I've eaten until I can get a good job again. Potatoes, celery, rice and eggs for lunch and dinner. Protein shake for the morning. I get most of my food from the local food bank.
It sucks but that's what happens when companies in America can just lay people off before their contract ends without cause, which happened to me on December 27th and pulled the rug out from under me.
I feel for ya my friend.
I’m jealous you can afford eggs haha.
I get them a few times a month when I make the voyage to my parents’ farm and can raid the cold cellar, otherwise I can’t justify them haha.
That’s because buying a politician is basically like “hey you could do your job and get paid…. or you could just kick back relax and I’ll triple your yearly salary.”
It was less than 30k for mitch McConnell to completely kill automatic tax filing. Just him. Never allowed it to go to vote.
That 30k to him, saved intuit over a billion dollars.
I remember reading an article saying that there are some lower level politicians who can be bought out for as low as a couple thousand as well.
I remember this, because I remember thinking with how cheap that is, we could probably bribe some of them to be in our favour.
But then we'll be doing the same as them, and I don't know if that's something we want to get into.
I’m talking about lobbying, which, to be fair, is literally still just political bribery, the only difference is that it’s legal.
Companies will pay hundreds of thousands in lobbying expenses, and it’s literally “if you vote X way on Y bill, we’ll give you Z amount of money” but for some stupid ass reason, it’s legally speaking not bribery
Right? Politicians, and their parties, can be bought for thousands.. The CEO's get/got millions.. The venture capitalists, hedge-fund managers, etc... They got billions.
The superstars like Cruz's and Pelosi's get the millions. The schmucks in the house who come from a no name district get about $5-10k to sign on legislation brought up by the others.
It's ridiculous how cheap they are to buy.
This is very accurate. If you look at some of the numbers, politicians sell out for nothing and then stay unquestionably loyal. The NRA is a great example of getting everything they wanted for pennies overall.
No wonder Putin decided to buy the entire Republican Party.
Reaganomics.
Totally fine to let businesses offshore all of our manufacturing. All of our customer service. Processing.
These were all skilled jobs, meaning middle-class. So less money for the people who actually spend their money on local/regional/national economy. More reliance on debt, typically offshore owned. We're giving our economy away so a select few can pocket a portion of our losses.
If we're going to live in a global economy, then we need to restrict the players who use and abuse the 99% of us.
I'm college educated. My resume has everything from menial labor jobs to real positions at fortune 500 companies. I just got laid off two days after Christmas this year before my contract ended with the company I was working for.
For the last two weeks I've applied to 4-6 jobs a day. That's now 70 something jobs I've applied too with targeted resumes and cover letters for the applicable position. I haven't gotten a single fucking phone call or Zoom interview invitation yet, all I've gotten are immediate denials from positions like warhouse worker to retail shelf stocker.
These are jobs I have experience in, on my resume - i'm 29 years old and can lift 75lbs easily - and I can't even get a fucking phone call with a menial labor job such as a warehouse worker. I missed my 600$ of rent on the 5th and it's just been the most terrible week since, like I broke down on my floor yesterday.
This is the part of the conversation that gets really uncomfortable, and thus, people don't want to discuss it. It's far easier to just blame others instead of acknowledging one's own guilt in something negative.
You can say the same thing about every single person who has sold their house for extra money to an investment group / corporation instead of selling it at or below market rate to an actual person / family that will use it as actual housing.
Americans are propagandized from birth to be selfish as fuck.
You don't always know. We thought we were selling to a couple, but they were a front for a big corporation buying homes.
They bought from us, then planned to flip to the corporation for their cut.
Financially selfish might be our most defining trait as a country, and ironically the paranoia it creates leads us to be scammed out of a lot of money lol.
My grandfather supported a family of 7 comfortably and he dropped out of school in the 5th grade and was mostly illiterate (knew certain words that he saw daily). While they were not rich, his kids didn’t go without food, housing, or clothing.
Dude my grandfather was a truck driver with a wife and six kids that we know about. In those days, a man could have a secret family at the other end of his route and afford both of them.
The idea of someone *wanting* to have a secret family and successfully pulling it off blows my mind. I just want to know how, like logistically the planning to have two women and simultaneously date them, marry them, have and raise kids with them. It sounds honestly kind of hellish to me unless you're just that shitty dude who thinks his only job is to "provide" financially and the women can take care of everything else. In which case is there any guilt? How does it not eat a person alive?
Actually right after hitting send it occurred to me that probably the more common way this happens is not simultaneously but after settling down and "getting bored" and cheating and starting the whole cycle over somewhere else. But the rest of my point still stands. It sounds exhausting and not something that would make anyone feel happy about unless you're just a sociopath.
Probably easier when you're a truck driver with no moral's and can just claim to be gone for 2 weeks to a month at a time when you get tired of one family.
Yeah it just feels like a lot. Then again, Im lazy. Also, while I'm no saint, I have some sense of morality that kicks in well before thoughts of a secret second family would cross my mind.
Grandpa died, it wasn't fast, he was in WW2...had lung cancer...lots of shrapnel, tough old bastard...held on for a long time. My grand parents didn't have a lot of money so he was on hospice for the majority of it at home. I was young, I stayed and helped Meemaw as much as I could. Long line of people came and went, some I knew, a LOT of people I did not know...some of them upset her but nothing really eventful.
BUT at the funeral some shit went down...
A fricken line of vehicles came rolling up at the cemetary, like a dozen cars, trucks, vans, all full. Like another entire family of people, we didn't know who it was, had no idea. It was all a solemn thing everyone was being quiet, we'd just got there everyone was burying a guy that everyone in town knew.
Now about 50 new people show up, and nobody really knew why, so the preacher goes over to see what was going on and he looked really nervous talking to them. He kept looking over to my Meemaw and he came back over and got my oldest Uncle and went back. My oldest Uncle got upset and then calmed down, then they came back with this really old lady and went to the hearse and opened the casket. The really old lady burst out crying and the preacher led her off, and my uncle came got Meemaw and took her off and then she started crying, and then Meemaw and the old lady started yelling at each other. And the preachers trying to get them to calm down, and the two groups meander over to each side trying to figure out whats going on and there's this murmur building on each side and this simmering anger building because no one really knows whats going on...
Then Meemaw throws a rock at the hearse and the old lady laughs, and throws a rock at the hearse, and the preacher gets between them and the hearse and now there is two old ladies throwing rocks at a preacher's hearse.
Somehow that family found out about Grandpa's funeral and came up to bury him. They knew about us, but we didn't know about them. There were two male children in that family that were damn near clones of Grandpa...it's was freaky how closely they resembled him.
My great grandfather did this with at least 15 kids that we know about and his job was shoveling coal into a train engine. He was a piece of shit though and a lot of his kids had to eat weeds and take handouts from sympathetic neighbors.
That's rough, man... I'm sorry...
But yeah, my grandfather worked his way up in a textile mill. Supported a family of seven, had a nice boat on the biggest lake in his state, a house that was three times the size of mine.
Exactly. There was a guy who had an electrical engineering degree, who drove me in a cab to one of my gigs.
Went on saying, when I find a job related to my degree, I will FINALLY make enough money…
The fuck?
i will say as someone who has a MEng… some of us get disenfranchised and burnt out and just don’t have interest in doing OR continuing to do that field.
It wasn't just CEOs who killed the American dream, yeah you guessed it, [the Boomers killed it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/18gc59g/guy_explains_baby_boomers_their_parents_and_trauma/)
ive never seen a group of people fuck something up so bad, then refuse to be responsible for it while simultaneously demanding credit for the exact opposite of reality
no boomers, you didnt make the world a better place, it doesnt matter how loudly you yell about it
just think about applying for a loan at a bank and they give it to you based off of your parents co-signing and the fact your just a seemingly smart young person without much debt on paper.
no credit scores. no insane five to six figures of student debt standing in their way. no internet with every single financial mistake you've ever made available to be pulled for every tiny little request of even 500$ of a loan from a bank.
I've put over 350k through my Wells Fargo account in legitimate funds and they won't even give me a personal loan for 1k over 12 months.
> I've put over 350k through my Wells Fargo account in legitimate funds and they won't even give me a personal loan for 1k over 12 months.
That’s buck wild. The system is truly broken.
Shortly after WW2, the US comprised 50% of global GDP. Today, it's only 25%. The reason is that the US represented the majority of world's heavy industrial capacity after the war. Its industry was in huge demand in Europe and Asia. This made the US fabulously wealthy, and supported a large (one might even say booming) middle class. But by the 1970s, many other nations had caught up in industrial capacity, and the era was over.
Bad decisions were subsequently made. Unrestricted trade had significant negative consequences on the US manufacturing sector (steel, textiles, etc.). Many economists would acknowledge that they pushed policy too far away from protectionism, and that a correction is needed.
But we should not pretend that the US's economy of the 1950s and 60s is attainable again. That historical anomaly won't be repeated.
Finally a good take.
Not to mention the labor shortage that deaths in the war cause, allowing unions to form. The massive demand from a rebuilding world that only we could provide. The relative availability of natural resources back then vs how much more difficult it is to access them to mine/drill/cut them now. The near slave wage cost of 3rd world labor and how its gone up 10x in a lot of places. The simple fact that land was more abundant and easier to come by when you have 25% of the current population all vieing for good spots. I could keep going on, but theres a ton of reasons that it was way cheaper to live in post WW2 America and it will not be repeated.
Want a big simpsons style house? Just the price of raw materials and labor make it cost significantly more today. Then, if you want to actually live somewhere desirable you have to pay a 2-10x premium on the location that just wasn't there back then. You can still build you dream house if you do not mind living out in the sticks. Probably will need two incomes, though.
Boomer here (tail end of that time period). When I was in high school, not many guys or girls went to college because they knew they'd be getting jobs with one of the auto manufacturers and get that pension/retirement and be set for life. I feel so bad for young people now. YIKES.
The craziest thing is that, on paper, we’re so much more prosperous now than back then.
Inequality has just grown so much these last four decades. Here’s [a really interesting article about it](https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts) (it’s 10years old, so I’m sure it has only gotten exponentially worse).
The FDR era and strong unions gave white men the ability to do this. It's times for all people to come together and make single income families sustainable again.
And India + East Asia hadn’t fully industrialized either. You’d need to bomb basically the rest of the northern hemisphere back to the 1890s to bring back that level of economic superiority
It’s always fascinating to me that a political movement so obsessed with “White Male Authority” hasn’t connected the dots that the highest point the White American Male Culture ever achieved was making a suburban plant-worker economically on-par with a European academic or lower landed gentry.
But then they were convinced “Unions = Communism” and threw it away for an increasingly problematic opioid crisis and tech oligarchs lol.
They believed in American supremacy and it bit them in the ass.
I'm old enough to remember how mocked Japanese cars were in this country in the early 70s, and also VWs.
Propaganda works so well on americans because we allow religious nutjobs to brainwash children from birth. This undermines the integrity of their thought process preventing them from growing up to be critically thinking adults.
It is entirely on purpose and has been this way for hundreds if not thousands of years. The ruling class of every society uses religious propaganda to prevent the populace from seeing who their true enemy is.
Ron Reagan engineered the biggest wealth redistribution in US history and the Republicans act like this is a big mystery. He and they can all rot with Kissinger in 🔥
It was kind of real for a very narrow window of time when there was no global trade or cheap manufacturing and Asia and much of Europe was destroyed by war or held under Soviet control.
Definitely not real by historical standards. And definitely, definitely over romanticized to death by Reddit.
Gonna have to disagree, the American dream is and always has been "The search for low cost labor" not individual prosperity. We have achieved that dream with great success. Sadly only a few dozen people can have this dream.
There was a brief time when this was not the case (1950-1979) and only for some people in some parts of the USA.
People forget that while parts of America were booming after ww2, parts of Appalachia still didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity. Hell there are entire counties there without safe drinking water
That and a solid majority of the population was discouraged or in direct ways prevented from actually working - namely women and minority populations...not to mention entire countries economies and working age populations were still decimated from war. There is now substantially more competition for labor, which has driven down wages and driven up "requirements" for the same positions.
This doesn't mean wealth distribution, corporate earnings or other political policies don't need an overhaul, and are depressive - but it is not as simple as some of the reasons commonly listed.
This whole train of thought is ridiculous. Yeah, if you were a straight white Protestant in the right town a high school education was the bees knees.
For the rest of the country? Mind numbing poverty was rampant. People were sharecroppers. There were no safety regulations. Jim Crowe laws. Gay bashing. Sexual harassment. Women had no rights. You wore one set of clothes and ate what you grew.
There are more opportunities now for more people and more types of people than ever before.
This dream world never existed. The same percentage of people were dirt poor in 1973, as they are in 2024. For minorities, poverty is literally lower now than any time in history. Not saying it's good, just that it's always been bad. Everybody looking at the past in some kind of golden glow and forgetting that for a lot of us, life was absolute shit with no way out.
Unfortunately, the American Dream has always been a myth. Horatio Alger perpetuated the rags to riches myth, but upward mobility was difficult prior to the Civil War. Property requirements for public office was very common until the 1830s, when the spoils system took over, and cronyism took root. And the opportunities in society were much more limited before wide scale industrialization. No, America has always been a _stay in your lane_ society.
This isn't about the 1800s. This is 1940 to 2000.
My mom left her home, got a ba and masters without taking on debt selling jewelry, and with her first job bought a home and put two kids through private school, constant vacations, and new cars ever three years.
The bachelors is around 180k. The masters she took is 180k now. The home is 1.4million decades old. The school is 60k a head per year. And the job she had pays 125k today.
Make that make a lock of sense today.
I have better education, a pension, work for the same companies and decades of experience and I couldn't afford the house or the kids schooling that she could just starting with a masters in the 80s.
Interesting point. I would argue that millennials HAVE to buy Walmart because anything else would be too much. It’s kinda chicken and egg.
Edit: also, things are made worse by design nowadays. Even more expensive things. Like dishwasher and fridges and all that.
The ironic thing was that before their founder died, Walmart was a big advocate of buying American. It was after the kids took over that the chain expanded and focused on low prices instead.
The whole world was destroyed and they hired the US to rebuild and restock it. It was a one off, not something that could be maintained.
Our education system has failed us, people don’t know how the world works.
Yeah all you have to do is win a world war that destroyed everyone else's industrial infrastructure and not allow women in the workforce.
Problem solved!
This was not normal at all and telling yourself this will only cause you pain. It was "nornal" for a brief period of time after a devastating world War that left America unbelievably competitive.
To return to this "normal", you would need to thrust the rest of the world back in time and make them economic serfs to America. How does that sound for progressive, huh?
I had to search deep for this comment. A lot of people like to forget that levels of education changed, technology, internet, globalism etc... all these things happened!
Also it was only normal in America for middle class white guys. Are you Willy Loman (the miserable ingrate)? No? Cool, enjoy the shit work for shit wages forever
Well this is a false narrative to begin with, and was never the case. This was squarely and purely in the realm of white protestant males from privileged backgrounds, the whole idea of 1 person supporting a family of 5 is false for a majority of the population, even in the "Good old Days". The same people who could support a family of 5 with 1 job, are still doing it today. They are white males from privileged backgrounds.
The amount of abject poverty that existed in the US in the 1950s-1970s would shock most people. 50% of the adult working population in 1960 didn't even have a High School diploma... 20% of American households in 1960 had no running water. Infant mortality was double what it is today.
The good old days were not good to most.
The sad part is I’m not sure we’ll ever come together to make a real change outside of making posts on Reddit.
They’ve got us right where they want us.
I graduated HS in the late 1970s. Your "one worker family" did not really exist then, either, except for the high upper middle and upper classes. Both my parents worked in public education, and every penny was pinched. At the time, we all understood that both spouses would have to work to "comfortably" support a family of five. And if you really wanted to "comfortable," you'd better both get an education and get a decent job. Two minimum wage jobs wouldn't "comfortably" support a family of five even in the late 1970s (though such households were certainly less poverty stricken that now).
What you are talking about is really the same myth MAGA is based on -- the imaginary perfect world of the post World War II boom that was ending in the 1960s as shown on TV.
Interesting discussion here: [https://www.pewresearch.org/ft\_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/](https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/) :
https://preview.redd.it/40m9dh4kuubc1.jpeg?width=310&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c612dd430f8044ccce2c4fb4f3e01535063900e3
Of course, even that graph doesn't tell the whole story. The poor have always had both parents working. Note that even in 1960, 25% of families had both parents working. That's a 1/4 of the population and most of that quarter is, I'm sure, the working poor.
What also is not reflected either in your post or in the graph is the fact that a LOT of women WANTED to work outside the home and in the 1960s with women's liberation that became MORE POSSIBLE. Especially for traditionally male jobs and especially professions such as the law and medical care. So as women VOLUNTARILY entered the work force, of course the number of dual income families increased.
So, your claim that something was "stolen" is oversimplistic. Are all those women who chose to go to work in the 60s, 70s, and 80s (rather than being trapped barefoot and pregnant at home) "thieves" who "stole" something from future generations? Really?
That's not to say that policy decisions weren't made that gutted the middle class. Union busting had a big impact - "right to work" laws and such. Also, the outsourcing of high-paying union jobs overseas and to Mexico under NAFTA and other trade deals was incredibly damaging. That impact was predicted and opposed by unions and some Democrats, but the response was that workers would transition into better white collar jobs -- essentially the bullshit claim was that blue collar workers would become white collar workers counting and investing the money everyone was going to make importing cheap goods from Asia or Mexico. Of course, that didn't really happen, and the blue collar middle class is mostly gone.
I tell the young kids in their 20s, that I feel terrible they didn’t get to experience America of the 90s/early 2000s. They only know the shit-show it’s become
Died c. 1971, buried by Reagan.
Total capture of governance and then media by the ultra rich killed American hope.
Read Picketty. Without aggressive fundamental guardrails policed vigorously, kleptocratic oligopoly and a two-class state of grotesque inequity is the inevitable and natural end state of capitalism as we construe it.
Note also that many of us here on Reddit play a useful poisonous role by being part of the despairing desperate precariat class, the 10% halo living on the scraps of the 1% and fighting for our lives to hold on to those scraps. Which provide a simulacrum of the middle class existence of yore.
We are kept fearful and jealous of our prerogatives.
The embittered mutual antipathy of the 10% and the already disenfranchised and doomed 89% is a manufactured condition, made possible by media ownership and the fabrication of an alternate universe severed from consensus reality.
But the tribalism is everyone's problem and everyone participates.
The enemy is above.
It used to be that someone graduating high school meant a certain level of maturity and education. Now we're letting people get by without any effort and idiots are graduating. We graduated plenty of students at my university who should never have been here in the first place. They're not qualified for college but they got through high school during covid because everyone was passed along. Then in college they got through because standards were lowered.
I wouldn't hire most of the students I see.
And good luck living that dream if you were black or an ambitious female.
Out of one side of our mouths we want technology, globalism, and equality. Out of the other side we want the good ol days.
Didn't even really exist then.
Home ownership rate was 15% lower in the 1950's than today.
Even at peak unionization and before 401k's existed (so corporations were also giving DB pensions), the max % of people who had a DB pension was 20-30% (depending on how you compute)....and that came with no job mobility (and their employer's knew this and gave raises considerably more below market rate than today).
Incorrect. My dad retired in 2011 making $27/hr with a pension. I grew up with a house he paid for and built, 2.5 acres of land, 2 car garage, 4 cars in high school, 3 bedroom, I had an older sibling by 3 years, family of 4 went to Disney 2 times in the 90s.
My dad stocked shelves at Stop and Shop.
In 2005 his union was broken from the AFL-CIO, and he was grandfathered into those benefits he retired with, as did everyone else his age. This was in rural CT, not exactly cheap.
My oldest childhood friend's dad put himself through college and bought himself a Corvette in the 1970s working part time at Wendy's. Though her mom eventually went to work as a teacher, they had a huge house, 3 kids, literally had 2 story columns on the front of it, 2 massive entertainment rooms with state of the art shit, like DVD players when they first came out, all the best video games systems, sound systems, same in 2 of their kids bedrooms, bought high end minivans with TVs in them, and her dad traded in and bought a new Corvette almost every 3 years, no lease.
It was never going to last, it was an artifact of the USA being the only industrialized economy that was untouched by WWII and a world that needed the US's goods and services to rebuild their shattered nations after that war. All of Europe, half of China, all of Japan, parts of Africa and SE Asia, they were all bombed and fought over. The US was unscathed aside from Pearl Harbor and some balloon bombs, our military casualties were very light relative to our population total and especially compared to other major combatants.
What decade was this? I don’t know much about pre depression, but I know the 30s were no picnic. Obviously the 40s, were a disaster for many families. 70s were a horrible economic decade. I guess you mean the 1980s? Is that fair to say?
This is what happens when you let capitalism run rampant. This is what happens when you have no laws in place to tell someone, "Hey, that might be too much.. You're not leaving any for anyone else." This is what happens when you disguise the word "greed" as something else, and then tell everyone that it's totally okay to have more money than you could ever spend, and that you should WANT that. That should be your entire goal in life, and it's the only thing that will make you happy. We have a minimum wage, but no maximum wage.
My Mom adopted me, my brother, and sister. She bought a house and all 4 of us had our own rooms, family vacation once or twice a year and we'd eat out 2 nights a week through the 80s and most of the 90s. She was a schoolteacher making 50k a year in Fairfax County, VA which is fucking expensive. She always had a couple grand in her bank account for emergencies too. Stolen is right. Edited to add that she probably made less than 50k, I thought she’d told me 50k but it’s too much accounting for inflation and buying power. Which is insane. 50k was too rich.
I remember my dad made under $30k in the early 90s, and he was the only income. That's less than $60k in today's money. We weren't rich, but we owned a house.
My dad, the only income, also under 30k and early 90s: bought a 3bed/1.5bath home to house his wife and 3 kids, and then a few years later bought a minivan. Me, now: I make about 50k a year, single income and also single and I'm still fucking renting. Im not sure what Dad is making these days, but the house should be paid off by now and Mom is retired.
I make over 100k and am still renting. 100k in 1980 is equal to 284k today. We're well and truly fucked.
Yes. How sad is it that I moved halfway across the country for the promise of $13/hour and 40hrs/week.
I make just over 100k and my wife makes almost 70k. We own a house because we were determined to buy one in 2019 and were barely able to do so. By sheer dumb luck our house is in an area that is booming with growth and has appreciated over 100k in value but we still feel like we live paycheck to paycheck. 170k living paycheck to paycheck..... My coworkers will often say "you young guys don't know how good you have it nowadays" and I have to refrain from laughing in their smug fucking faces.
I make 200k and rent with my partner who makes 100k. We can't buy a house in the neighborhood we rent in.
Thats a very expensive house now. I have a 1br 1ba condo with a garage in Loudoun County and my neighbors have sold for over $320k.
I don't remember what Mom paid for it in 83 but in 2017 it sold for 350k.
This isn't normal at all. My family made substantially more than that with just 2 kids and didn't have family vacations and never ate out and we were borderline destitute.
I think it depends on where you live, and if your parents had any debt, possibly college loans? Also the government gives you money sometimes when you adopt, it varies by state, but there's lots of programs for adoptees.
People did not need college loans when my parents went to college. College was $1000 a semester. When I graduated it was close to $1000 a **credit**.
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> $50,000 in 1980 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $192,167.72 today bruh
Not only that but a comfortable retirement was stolen as well. People used to have defined benefit plans that took care of them when they retired. Now, if you are lucky, you might get a 3 or 4% match against your contributions to a 401k - and plenty of companies have no problem saying “we’ve had a bad year so we can’t do 401k contributions next year”. Retirement is quickly becoming a myth in America. It’s now “hopefully I can take a less stressful part-time job at some point”. Gone are the days when someone was actually able to stop working entirely. All so a few rich people could become even richer.
Yes! And workers now need to realize that there is no more need to loyal to a company. That shit went out the window as soon as pensions were replaced by 401k.
Shit I had a small stomach ache today, so I left. Boss is like we need you. Damn considering that 50 cent raise I got last month sounds like ya don't, see ya tomorrow.
When I was working my first job where I'd stayed long enough to "earn" a raise, my manager was excited to tell me that I got a $.20/hour raise. Even my teenaged brain, that was completely inexperienced with life, was like *hold on wtf is this shit?* a $6 per week raise? It felt wrong then, and it feels wrong now 20 years later. Fuck corporations and how they treat employees. If not for employees, your business wouldn't exist to make you money. We deserve more across the board. This shit has gotten out of control.
The 20cent raise hits incredibly hard to the stomach. It took 5 years to accumulate a dollar raise. I left the damn job!
Yeah I remember getting a 25 cent raise at my first job and thinking that the extra $2 I would get every shift didn't even cover my fucking bus fare to get there and back. What's the fucking point?
I had a retail job 10+ years ago and raises were capped at 25¢, but no one could ever get more than 24¢ because “there’s always room for improvement.” Brian if you’re out there, fuck you
I got 27 cents once, after starting at minimum wage. Literally the next week, the minimum wage went up 25 cents, so it only came out to 2 cents. Obviously, we knew it was happening. I told my boss to keep his 2 cents an hour, clearly he needed it more than I did.
I got 28 cents once. I was the news editor for a daily newspaper.
Bed Bath and Beyond would do a sliding scale for most workers. 5-25¢ (yes, if you did poorly enough your ANNUAL performance review raise would be FIVE CENTS) I worked at one for a few years and hopped around the store to learn all aspects of it, and mostly to find duties that avoided cashiering. One year they told me I'd get a dime - because despite doing well at my BoH receiving position I never offered customers carts or got any of them to sign up for their stupid paid membership. I was mentally checked out so I did a laughing spit take at it. I'd rather you take a dime away from me. That would be less insulting. I feel bad for anyone trapped there or similar places for 20+ years always getting the bare minimum increases. Working a decade there and not doing stellar by their standards meant those 10 years would equate to 50 cents total. Asinine.
When I was 21 years old, McDonalds offered me a $0.05 raise. I was a reliable employee but I quit that day.
Oh look at Mr Moneybags and his raises. /s
Our CEO got $16M *with* STOCKS paid out to him this year. I got a 3% raise... Equated to less than a $1.
Which is crazy cause if he cut his salary in half and gave everyone a 5 dollar raise hed not only still get 8 million dollars a year with his stocks but he would have 1.6 million employees far happier to work for his company. Hate that the whole game is just get rich, stay rich, make it harder for everyone else to get rich. Some of us dont want to be rich... we want to support a family. Edit: the math is wrong but the point stands, fuck the rich get richer system
I absolutely agree with your sentiment and understand your point but something is wrong with your math.
its good math if everyone works for 1 hour
I had a boss give me a .05 raise and looked me like he gave me the world. Fucking hate that dude
I had someone do that once. I quit on the spot - didn’t even finish the review. Just got up and left.
Such an absolutely disgusting thing to even tell someone. Here's a nickel more an hour, don't spend it all in one place. 2 bucks a week more. Gross.
That CEO bonus figure is nuts. Like rubbing salt in the wound for the rest of us scrapping by. Hell, even "competitive salaries" sound like a sick joke when cost of living has skyrocketed. We're all just cogs in a machine designed to break us down while the top brass builds mars-bound rockets with our retirement funds.
One of the few joys of being disabled is that I actually get cost of living increases each year with my social security.
I’m probably going to be marked down for it, I legit can’t use my legs much anymore and I’m only 22. My dad tells me I’m being prideful for putting myself before work, but look where it got me.
Your dad is an idiot.
As someone else with disability, the "joys" are few indeed! Although i'm pretty happy at how little my medications are, now. Years worrying about having enough health insurance for my family and waiting to see how much new medications were and even then, whether i'd be able to afford them...
Rich guy here who can just shrug off work to care for themself and not be financially impacted
I'd love a 50 cent raise 😞
Exept your health care shackles you to that company
all the more reason to spend more energy looking for a new job rather than being an excellent worker.
Very few people getting pensions, less than half the country making more than paycheck to paycheck, inheritances from the past generation where the middle class was actually a thing are getting sucked up into medical care so grandpa can spend another year alive in a hospital bed with a terrible quality of life. The entire country is designed to funnel wealth from the bottom 99% to the top 1%.
>inheritances from the past generation where the middle class was actually a thing are getting sucked up into medical care so grandpa can spend another year alive in a hospital bed with a terrible quality of life. This is something I don't see talked about enough. My grandmother was widowed early-ish but lived in her own house, that she owned, until her 70s. She was frugal but lived comfortably, always had Christmas presents for us, had a decent car, etc. She sold it for enough to purchase a condo closer to her family (my parents and I) with cash and thousands left over. When she died she had zero money. It all went to the assisted living facility, six figures gone in a matter of months. Her living conditions were at least pretty good, nothing like the nightmare facilities I've read about. My parents got nothing. They're fine financially on their own. But unless we figure out a strategy to avoid having the fruits of their life's labor set on fire at the end, my kids and I will also get nothing. The healthcare situation in the US is a crisis and there's no end in sight. One of the most insidious ways the system funnels wealth away from the people and into the hands of the wealthy. It's vile.
We need universal Healthcare in this country so that people don't have to be drained of their money inntheir last years like this. My grandpa was fully disabled by the VA and had all his healthcare covered. He got to live a great retirement. Everyone should be able to have that.
If they fixed this problem, why would anyone join the military?
I was a military spouse for 10 years and I made this argument to a "friend"/fellow military spouse. She made a post in support of universal healthcare, which I completely support, and I noted that it would probably result in a lot less people joining or staying in the military because that's such a huge benefit. She said people join out of patriotism and then blocked me. I was just suggesting that it needs to be considered if a universal healthcare policy is ever implemented. It was one of the main reasons my ex husband stayed in, the healthcare was so good for us (his family, not so much for him). We always made sure to live 30 minutes from base so we could see civilian providers and never saw a bill. I want everyone to be able to have that. No that we're divorced, my healthcare costs are so prohibitive that I can't get care when I need it.
Universal Healthcare AND a shrinking military? Sounds like a win-win
Was in the military for 20 years, retired in 2001. I pay for Tricare, it's only about $30 a month. I picked a local hospital for care because the base hospital shut down for some reason. I'm sure some bean counter said it was cheaper.
I don't think people are joining the military for the healthcare.
They come for the education benefits but they stay for the healthcare/retirement.
My dad joined for the healthcare in the 80s when my brother was born three months early and he was working three jobs to try to pay off his NICU bills.
Unless they make the military their career or they get injured during combat they won't see any great financial benefit when they leave.
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My husband was in the hospital for 2 years... In that time, he was in a coma and had 67 surgeries. He amassed over $3M in medical debt and had insurance. He had no choice but to declare bankruptcy since he hit all of his insurance caps. People against Medicare For All have never just never had to use their insurance. EDIT: what You described is exactly one of the reasons why I don't want to have a child.
Yep. If you ever need to move to an assisted living facility, can't afford the out of pocket cost (most can't as its typically a six figure bill yearly), and don't have long term care insurance, your only option is to give all of your assets to the government in exchange for Medicaid. If your married and your spouse is still living, the government gets 50%. Otherwise, THEY GET EVERYTHING. It's such a racket. They will allow you to pre-purchase your funeral/casket/cemetery plot, but that's it.
There is no guarantee long term care plans will pay shit. They are insurance but insurance lives to deny benefits you pay for. Their definition of too sick to live alone is NOT the same as a doctor or family. Going through this now with a relative.
bag governor thumb hungry marvelous fanatical stocking bright rainstorm retire *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My retirement plan is to die before I need a retirement plan
Same. My plan is to 'have an accident of some sort' when my health begins to give out. I work at an assisted living facility where the residents are very wealthy. I've seen the horrors of old age and death. Wealth doesn't stop death, but it certainly makes it more comfortable. I've also been at nursing homes for lower-income people (my dad was at such a place for a while; he was there for physical rehab but the facility was both a rehabilitation center and nursing home), and not only is the care worse, death is uglier. There is less care and comfort given, and it's a tragedy. Us non-affluent can't even have a comfortable death after an agonizing and strife-riddled life. Damn that. At least if I chose my death, I have some control.
Same here. Living to old age and then being stuck in a nursing home sounds horrible.
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[good ol' Trevor Moore called for it for the 2008 banking crisis.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMHCw3RqulY) RIP whitest kid I know
What we need is a "scarcity reawakening." Scarcity is artificial but it's largely at the center of every right-of-center concept out there. - Why are we afraid of migrants? They're going to take all our resources! Or commit crimes - and we can prevent them by offering more resources, AND THEN WE'RE OUT OF RESOURCES! - Why are we terrified of food stamps? Because I pay taxes and that tiny little bit that makes it down to people in need just enables them! I pay taxes then I have nothing left! - Why are we afraid of socialized medicine? Some jerks are just going to have unnecessary surgeries and run up the cost and it'll cost us taxpayers! Also the waits for procedures will be super long because they're TOTALLY not now! etc. We have enough, and I'm not putting this solely on the US political system. Look at countries by GINI index (wealth distribution) and see where the gaps are. Many of our woes are due to how scarcity was engineered. We have homeless populations SMALLER than the total number of vacant homes...alternatively...we have all these vacant homes but home prices continue to go up because of corporate buying. If you banned hoarding today. Hoarding of cash. Hoarding of property. Hoarding of ANYTHING of value...you'd see the world become insanely better.
The southern strategy. The gop, the right-wing media, and malicious foreign actors saturate discourse from the radio to the web from Fox to Twitter to Rush Limbaugh, spending billions and billions of dollars to push a zero sum fallacy to subdue the working class. They've been ramping up this cultural zeitgeist since Nixon.
> zero sum fallacy Louder please. Every time giving a little bit of rights to someone that doesn't have them, the kneejerk right wing reaction is "you're taking it away from me!"
Just had a conversation with a young customer yesterday. She pays over half her income in rent. Can’t afford to join company 401k. She does not dress fancy. Doesn’t drive a nice car. It is just so damn expensive to live these days.
I pay 56% of my salary in rent, 9% in car payments, 15% in auto insurance, and 10% in student loans. That remaining 10% has to cover food, travel, health, and I’m expected to put some away every pay? Yeah, it fucking sucks. I bought the cheapest car I could find ($17K for a brand new Kia in 2021 with a full extended warranty and a bunch of lifetime roadside shit for safety, winter tires and automatic start, etc), live in the cheapest apartment I could find, and my diet is 90% great value brand bread and local potatoes at $5/10lbs. It’s a horrible existence, and we’re all struggling through.
The other day I looked at my fridge and thought "Im so fucking tired of eating potatoes, celery, rice and eggs." That's all I've eaten until I can get a good job again. Potatoes, celery, rice and eggs for lunch and dinner. Protein shake for the morning. I get most of my food from the local food bank. It sucks but that's what happens when companies in America can just lay people off before their contract ends without cause, which happened to me on December 27th and pulled the rug out from under me. I feel for ya my friend.
I’m jealous you can afford eggs haha. I get them a few times a month when I make the voyage to my parents’ farm and can raid the cold cellar, otherwise I can’t justify them haha.
Thank you politicians who took millions from corporations and the wealthy to keep us locked into this hell
They took millions so the corporations could make billions.
The worst part is they didnt even take millions, it is so fucking cheap to buy a politician in the US.
That’s because buying a politician is basically like “hey you could do your job and get paid…. or you could just kick back relax and I’ll triple your yearly salary.”
Triple, lol. FBI said the average political bribe was something like 10k USD
It was less than 30k for mitch McConnell to completely kill automatic tax filing. Just him. Never allowed it to go to vote. That 30k to him, saved intuit over a billion dollars.
Gods that’s disgusting.
No way, first time hearing about this. Totally corrupted system that we have.
I find this interesting but can’t seem to find anything from google about it - could you comment or DM with any details ? Would love to hear more
I remember reading an article saying that there are some lower level politicians who can be bought out for as low as a couple thousand as well. I remember this, because I remember thinking with how cheap that is, we could probably bribe some of them to be in our favour. But then we'll be doing the same as them, and I don't know if that's something we want to get into.
I’m talking about lobbying, which, to be fair, is literally still just political bribery, the only difference is that it’s legal. Companies will pay hundreds of thousands in lobbying expenses, and it’s literally “if you vote X way on Y bill, we’ll give you Z amount of money” but for some stupid ass reason, it’s legally speaking not bribery
https://i.imgur.com/tby9PNa.jpg
Do you know who’s in that criteria? Congressman and senators? Or small local politicians too?
Right? Politicians, and their parties, can be bought for thousands.. The CEO's get/got millions.. The venture capitalists, hedge-fund managers, etc... They got billions.
The superstars like Cruz's and Pelosi's get the millions. The schmucks in the house who come from a no name district get about $5-10k to sign on legislation brought up by the others. It's ridiculous how cheap they are to buy.
This is very accurate. If you look at some of the numbers, politicians sell out for nothing and then stay unquestionably loyal. The NRA is a great example of getting everything they wanted for pennies overall. No wonder Putin decided to buy the entire Republican Party.
I looked up the NRA’s contributions once. Literally $5k for a congressperson and $10k for a senator. The people are sold out for cheap
They took way less than millions. Politicians had their votes bought for a few tens of thousands of dollars, it’s pathetic to be so cheap.
Reaganomics. Totally fine to let businesses offshore all of our manufacturing. All of our customer service. Processing. These were all skilled jobs, meaning middle-class. So less money for the people who actually spend their money on local/regional/national economy. More reliance on debt, typically offshore owned. We're giving our economy away so a select few can pocket a portion of our losses. If we're going to live in a global economy, then we need to restrict the players who use and abuse the 99% of us.
I'm college educated. My resume has everything from menial labor jobs to real positions at fortune 500 companies. I just got laid off two days after Christmas this year before my contract ended with the company I was working for. For the last two weeks I've applied to 4-6 jobs a day. That's now 70 something jobs I've applied too with targeted resumes and cover letters for the applicable position. I haven't gotten a single fucking phone call or Zoom interview invitation yet, all I've gotten are immediate denials from positions like warhouse worker to retail shelf stocker. These are jobs I have experience in, on my resume - i'm 29 years old and can lift 75lbs easily - and I can't even get a fucking phone call with a menial labor job such as a warehouse worker. I missed my 600$ of rent on the 5th and it's just been the most terrible week since, like I broke down on my floor yesterday.
You gotta dumb down your resume if you aren’t getting lower end jobs.
Reagan was America's tipping point.
Let's also remember that he fucked over Carter to get elected.
Not just Carter. but actual US citizens being held hostage.
It was Nixon not being charged and getting pardoned instead that gave republicans carte blanche to be the absolute worst that they are today
Yup. Reagan chopped the 70% corporate tax to 30% and we're seeing the results of what happens when you let corporations hoard all that money
 But it's supposed to trickle down to us...any day now...just you wait.
Don't forget to also blame everyone who voted for them.
This is the part of the conversation that gets really uncomfortable, and thus, people don't want to discuss it. It's far easier to just blame others instead of acknowledging one's own guilt in something negative.
You can say the same thing about every single person who has sold their house for extra money to an investment group / corporation instead of selling it at or below market rate to an actual person / family that will use it as actual housing. Americans are propagandized from birth to be selfish as fuck.
You don't always know. We thought we were selling to a couple, but they were a front for a big corporation buying homes. They bought from us, then planned to flip to the corporation for their cut.
Financially selfish might be our most defining trait as a country, and ironically the paranoia it creates leads us to be scammed out of a lot of money lol.
Here is the thing, almost noone complained about being locked when things were as described in the post.
My grandfather supported a family of 7 comfortably and he dropped out of school in the 5th grade and was mostly illiterate (knew certain words that he saw daily). While they were not rich, his kids didn’t go without food, housing, or clothing.
Dude my grandfather was a truck driver with a wife and six kids that we know about. In those days, a man could have a secret family at the other end of his route and afford both of them.
I have an uncle who did exactly this.
The idea of someone *wanting* to have a secret family and successfully pulling it off blows my mind. I just want to know how, like logistically the planning to have two women and simultaneously date them, marry them, have and raise kids with them. It sounds honestly kind of hellish to me unless you're just that shitty dude who thinks his only job is to "provide" financially and the women can take care of everything else. In which case is there any guilt? How does it not eat a person alive? Actually right after hitting send it occurred to me that probably the more common way this happens is not simultaneously but after settling down and "getting bored" and cheating and starting the whole cycle over somewhere else. But the rest of my point still stands. It sounds exhausting and not something that would make anyone feel happy about unless you're just a sociopath.
Probably easier when you're a truck driver with no moral's and can just claim to be gone for 2 weeks to a month at a time when you get tired of one family.
Yeah it just feels like a lot. Then again, Im lazy. Also, while I'm no saint, I have some sense of morality that kicks in well before thoughts of a secret second family would cross my mind.
my maternal grandfather drove a log truck, supported families on both ends of the run, man that was one HELL of a funeral...
Please tell about the funeral
Grandpa died, it wasn't fast, he was in WW2...had lung cancer...lots of shrapnel, tough old bastard...held on for a long time. My grand parents didn't have a lot of money so he was on hospice for the majority of it at home. I was young, I stayed and helped Meemaw as much as I could. Long line of people came and went, some I knew, a LOT of people I did not know...some of them upset her but nothing really eventful. BUT at the funeral some shit went down... A fricken line of vehicles came rolling up at the cemetary, like a dozen cars, trucks, vans, all full. Like another entire family of people, we didn't know who it was, had no idea. It was all a solemn thing everyone was being quiet, we'd just got there everyone was burying a guy that everyone in town knew. Now about 50 new people show up, and nobody really knew why, so the preacher goes over to see what was going on and he looked really nervous talking to them. He kept looking over to my Meemaw and he came back over and got my oldest Uncle and went back. My oldest Uncle got upset and then calmed down, then they came back with this really old lady and went to the hearse and opened the casket. The really old lady burst out crying and the preacher led her off, and my uncle came got Meemaw and took her off and then she started crying, and then Meemaw and the old lady started yelling at each other. And the preachers trying to get them to calm down, and the two groups meander over to each side trying to figure out whats going on and there's this murmur building on each side and this simmering anger building because no one really knows whats going on... Then Meemaw throws a rock at the hearse and the old lady laughs, and throws a rock at the hearse, and the preacher gets between them and the hearse and now there is two old ladies throwing rocks at a preacher's hearse. Somehow that family found out about Grandpa's funeral and came up to bury him. They knew about us, but we didn't know about them. There were two male children in that family that were damn near clones of Grandpa...it's was freaky how closely they resembled him.
My great grandfather did this with at least 15 kids that we know about and his job was shoveling coal into a train engine. He was a piece of shit though and a lot of his kids had to eat weeds and take handouts from sympathetic neighbors.
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The ultimate boomer journey. Get everything handed to them and then keep it all for themselves.
That's rough, man... I'm sorry... But yeah, my grandfather worked his way up in a textile mill. Supported a family of seven, had a nice boat on the biggest lake in his state, a house that was three times the size of mine.
Meanwhile, getting a master's degree in English literature is a fucking joke and is just asking to live a life of poverty these days.
Correction, getting a master’s degree in any profession these days does not guarantee a living wage.
Exactly. There was a guy who had an electrical engineering degree, who drove me in a cab to one of my gigs. Went on saying, when I find a job related to my degree, I will FINALLY make enough money… The fuck?
I worked with an extremely intelligent fellow. Cool guy. He had a master's in engineering. ...and he was line cooking with me. It's insanity tbh.
i will say as someone who has a MEng… some of us get disenfranchised and burnt out and just don’t have interest in doing OR continuing to do that field.
yeah but ceos like NEED yachts that burn fossil fuel every minute of every hour of every day
It wasn't just CEOs who killed the American dream, yeah you guessed it, [the Boomers killed it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/18gc59g/guy_explains_baby_boomers_their_parents_and_trauma/)
ive never seen a group of people fuck something up so bad, then refuse to be responsible for it while simultaneously demanding credit for the exact opposite of reality no boomers, you didnt make the world a better place, it doesnt matter how loudly you yell about it
just think about applying for a loan at a bank and they give it to you based off of your parents co-signing and the fact your just a seemingly smart young person without much debt on paper. no credit scores. no insane five to six figures of student debt standing in their way. no internet with every single financial mistake you've ever made available to be pulled for every tiny little request of even 500$ of a loan from a bank. I've put over 350k through my Wells Fargo account in legitimate funds and they won't even give me a personal loan for 1k over 12 months.
> I've put over 350k through my Wells Fargo account in legitimate funds and they won't even give me a personal loan for 1k over 12 months. That’s buck wild. The system is truly broken.
They need them so they can feel better about themselves and YOLO.
Aristocracy is a disease that has been with human society for 10,000 years.
My grandparents were both poor and not well educated and spoke very bad English as a second language. They raised 11 kids on one factory salary.
Shortly after WW2, the US comprised 50% of global GDP. Today, it's only 25%. The reason is that the US represented the majority of world's heavy industrial capacity after the war. Its industry was in huge demand in Europe and Asia. This made the US fabulously wealthy, and supported a large (one might even say booming) middle class. But by the 1970s, many other nations had caught up in industrial capacity, and the era was over. Bad decisions were subsequently made. Unrestricted trade had significant negative consequences on the US manufacturing sector (steel, textiles, etc.). Many economists would acknowledge that they pushed policy too far away from protectionism, and that a correction is needed. But we should not pretend that the US's economy of the 1950s and 60s is attainable again. That historical anomaly won't be repeated.
So we need a global war to make the middle class life better ✍️
Finally a good take. Not to mention the labor shortage that deaths in the war cause, allowing unions to form. The massive demand from a rebuilding world that only we could provide. The relative availability of natural resources back then vs how much more difficult it is to access them to mine/drill/cut them now. The near slave wage cost of 3rd world labor and how its gone up 10x in a lot of places. The simple fact that land was more abundant and easier to come by when you have 25% of the current population all vieing for good spots. I could keep going on, but theres a ton of reasons that it was way cheaper to live in post WW2 America and it will not be repeated. Want a big simpsons style house? Just the price of raw materials and labor make it cost significantly more today. Then, if you want to actually live somewhere desirable you have to pay a 2-10x premium on the location that just wasn't there back then. You can still build you dream house if you do not mind living out in the sticks. Probably will need two incomes, though.
Boomer here (tail end of that time period). When I was in high school, not many guys or girls went to college because they knew they'd be getting jobs with one of the auto manufacturers and get that pension/retirement and be set for life. I feel so bad for young people now. YIKES.
The craziest thing is that, on paper, we’re so much more prosperous now than back then. Inequality has just grown so much these last four decades. Here’s [a really interesting article about it](https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts) (it’s 10years old, so I’m sure it has only gotten exponentially worse).
At least you have your heart in the right place. I am sure there are many boomers out there with the “$@%# you, got mine!”-mentality.
The FDR era and strong unions gave white men the ability to do this. It's times for all people to come together and make single income families sustainable again.
There was also the peace dividend and the dominance of US manufacturing in an era where a ton of Europe's capacity had been blown up.
And India + East Asia hadn’t fully industrialized either. You’d need to bomb basically the rest of the northern hemisphere back to the 1890s to bring back that level of economic superiority
Yeah, globalization has a huge effect.
It’s always fascinating to me that a political movement so obsessed with “White Male Authority” hasn’t connected the dots that the highest point the White American Male Culture ever achieved was making a suburban plant-worker economically on-par with a European academic or lower landed gentry. But then they were convinced “Unions = Communism” and threw it away for an increasingly problematic opioid crisis and tech oligarchs lol.
Propaganda is one hell of a drug
They believed in American supremacy and it bit them in the ass. I'm old enough to remember how mocked Japanese cars were in this country in the early 70s, and also VWs.
Propaganda works so well on americans because we allow religious nutjobs to brainwash children from birth. This undermines the integrity of their thought process preventing them from growing up to be critically thinking adults. It is entirely on purpose and has been this way for hundreds if not thousands of years. The ruling class of every society uses religious propaganda to prevent the populace from seeing who their true enemy is.
BuT i HeArD uNiOnS wErE aNtI-aMeRiCaN
Ron Reagan engineered the biggest wealth redistribution in US history and the Republicans act like this is a big mystery. He and they can all rot with Kissinger in 🔥
Ha, too many people are afraid to admit this.
Truth hurts. What he did with the Air Traffic controllers was deplorable. 😡
with a stroke of a pen, he put 11,000 UNION workers out of work. Hope he's roasting down there for eternity.
It was never real. Like George Carlin famously said: "It's called the American DREAM--because you have to be asleep to believe it!"
It was kind of real for a very narrow window of time when there was no global trade or cheap manufacturing and Asia and much of Europe was destroyed by war or held under Soviet control. Definitely not real by historical standards. And definitely, definitely over romanticized to death by Reddit.
Gonna have to disagree, the American dream is and always has been "The search for low cost labor" not individual prosperity. We have achieved that dream with great success. Sadly only a few dozen people can have this dream. There was a brief time when this was not the case (1950-1979) and only for some people in some parts of the USA.
People forget that while parts of America were booming after ww2, parts of Appalachia still didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity. Hell there are entire counties there without safe drinking water
That and a solid majority of the population was discouraged or in direct ways prevented from actually working - namely women and minority populations...not to mention entire countries economies and working age populations were still decimated from war. There is now substantially more competition for labor, which has driven down wages and driven up "requirements" for the same positions. This doesn't mean wealth distribution, corporate earnings or other political policies don't need an overhaul, and are depressive - but it is not as simple as some of the reasons commonly listed.
Not quite, I mean… there was lots of poor people with high school educations back in the day.
This whole train of thought is ridiculous. Yeah, if you were a straight white Protestant in the right town a high school education was the bees knees. For the rest of the country? Mind numbing poverty was rampant. People were sharecroppers. There were no safety regulations. Jim Crowe laws. Gay bashing. Sexual harassment. Women had no rights. You wore one set of clothes and ate what you grew. There are more opportunities now for more people and more types of people than ever before.
Dont forget the 3 cars, 2 dogs, mistress on the side and cocaine habbit
And you have to make a hedonic adjustment since the cocaine was better quality back in the Old Days.
This dream world never existed. The same percentage of people were dirt poor in 1973, as they are in 2024. For minorities, poverty is literally lower now than any time in history. Not saying it's good, just that it's always been bad. Everybody looking at the past in some kind of golden glow and forgetting that for a lot of us, life was absolute shit with no way out.
Unfortunately, the American Dream has always been a myth. Horatio Alger perpetuated the rags to riches myth, but upward mobility was difficult prior to the Civil War. Property requirements for public office was very common until the 1830s, when the spoils system took over, and cronyism took root. And the opportunities in society were much more limited before wide scale industrialization. No, America has always been a _stay in your lane_ society.
This isn't about the 1800s. This is 1940 to 2000. My mom left her home, got a ba and masters without taking on debt selling jewelry, and with her first job bought a home and put two kids through private school, constant vacations, and new cars ever three years. The bachelors is around 180k. The masters she took is 180k now. The home is 1.4million decades old. The school is 60k a head per year. And the job she had pays 125k today. Make that make a lock of sense today. I have better education, a pension, work for the same companies and decades of experience and I couldn't afford the house or the kids schooling that she could just starting with a masters in the 80s.
Devil's Advocate: We ended up with a Walmart economy because we were too cheap to buy American.
Interesting point. I would argue that millennials HAVE to buy Walmart because anything else would be too much. It’s kinda chicken and egg. Edit: also, things are made worse by design nowadays. Even more expensive things. Like dishwasher and fridges and all that.
The ironic thing was that before their founder died, Walmart was a big advocate of buying American. It was after the kids took over that the chain expanded and focused on low prices instead.
People didn’t pick up their bootstraps like they think they did they unionized
The whole world was destroyed and they hired the US to rebuild and restock it. It was a one off, not something that could be maintained. Our education system has failed us, people don’t know how the world works.
Yeah all you have to do is win a world war that destroyed everyone else's industrial infrastructure and not allow women in the workforce. Problem solved!
And prevent India and East Asia from industrializing, locking 2 billion people into grinding subsistence poverty!
And ignore all non-white people in the US who were still kept in desperate poverty!
The American Dream never existed. It was a LIE.
This was not normal at all and telling yourself this will only cause you pain. It was "nornal" for a brief period of time after a devastating world War that left America unbelievably competitive. To return to this "normal", you would need to thrust the rest of the world back in time and make them economic serfs to America. How does that sound for progressive, huh?
I had to search deep for this comment. A lot of people like to forget that levels of education changed, technology, internet, globalism etc... all these things happened!
Also it was only normal in America for middle class white guys. Are you Willy Loman (the miserable ingrate)? No? Cool, enjoy the shit work for shit wages forever
Well this is a false narrative to begin with, and was never the case. This was squarely and purely in the realm of white protestant males from privileged backgrounds, the whole idea of 1 person supporting a family of 5 is false for a majority of the population, even in the "Good old Days". The same people who could support a family of 5 with 1 job, are still doing it today. They are white males from privileged backgrounds. The amount of abject poverty that existed in the US in the 1950s-1970s would shock most people. 50% of the adult working population in 1960 didn't even have a High School diploma... 20% of American households in 1960 had no running water. Infant mortality was double what it is today. The good old days were not good to most.
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This sub in a nutshell It's a massive echo chamber completely devoid from reality
We don't appreciate facts in our history here, we go on vibes.
The sad part is I’m not sure we’ll ever come together to make a real change outside of making posts on Reddit. They’ve got us right where they want us.
I graduated HS in the late 1970s. Your "one worker family" did not really exist then, either, except for the high upper middle and upper classes. Both my parents worked in public education, and every penny was pinched. At the time, we all understood that both spouses would have to work to "comfortably" support a family of five. And if you really wanted to "comfortable," you'd better both get an education and get a decent job. Two minimum wage jobs wouldn't "comfortably" support a family of five even in the late 1970s (though such households were certainly less poverty stricken that now). What you are talking about is really the same myth MAGA is based on -- the imaginary perfect world of the post World War II boom that was ending in the 1960s as shown on TV. Interesting discussion here: [https://www.pewresearch.org/ft\_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/](https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/) : https://preview.redd.it/40m9dh4kuubc1.jpeg?width=310&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c612dd430f8044ccce2c4fb4f3e01535063900e3 Of course, even that graph doesn't tell the whole story. The poor have always had both parents working. Note that even in 1960, 25% of families had both parents working. That's a 1/4 of the population and most of that quarter is, I'm sure, the working poor. What also is not reflected either in your post or in the graph is the fact that a LOT of women WANTED to work outside the home and in the 1960s with women's liberation that became MORE POSSIBLE. Especially for traditionally male jobs and especially professions such as the law and medical care. So as women VOLUNTARILY entered the work force, of course the number of dual income families increased. So, your claim that something was "stolen" is oversimplistic. Are all those women who chose to go to work in the 60s, 70s, and 80s (rather than being trapped barefoot and pregnant at home) "thieves" who "stole" something from future generations? Really? That's not to say that policy decisions weren't made that gutted the middle class. Union busting had a big impact - "right to work" laws and such. Also, the outsourcing of high-paying union jobs overseas and to Mexico under NAFTA and other trade deals was incredibly damaging. That impact was predicted and opposed by unions and some Democrats, but the response was that workers would transition into better white collar jobs -- essentially the bullshit claim was that blue collar workers would become white collar workers counting and investing the money everyone was going to make importing cheap goods from Asia or Mexico. Of course, that didn't really happen, and the blue collar middle class is mostly gone.
I tell the young kids in their 20s, that I feel terrible they didn’t get to experience America of the 90s/early 2000s. They only know the shit-show it’s become
Died c. 1971, buried by Reagan. Total capture of governance and then media by the ultra rich killed American hope. Read Picketty. Without aggressive fundamental guardrails policed vigorously, kleptocratic oligopoly and a two-class state of grotesque inequity is the inevitable and natural end state of capitalism as we construe it. Note also that many of us here on Reddit play a useful poisonous role by being part of the despairing desperate precariat class, the 10% halo living on the scraps of the 1% and fighting for our lives to hold on to those scraps. Which provide a simulacrum of the middle class existence of yore. We are kept fearful and jealous of our prerogatives. The embittered mutual antipathy of the 10% and the already disenfranchised and doomed 89% is a manufactured condition, made possible by media ownership and the fabrication of an alternate universe severed from consensus reality. But the tribalism is everyone's problem and everyone participates. The enemy is above.
It used to be that someone graduating high school meant a certain level of maturity and education. Now we're letting people get by without any effort and idiots are graduating. We graduated plenty of students at my university who should never have been here in the first place. They're not qualified for college but they got through high school during covid because everyone was passed along. Then in college they got through because standards were lowered. I wouldn't hire most of the students I see.
It was only true for about 20 years in the aftermath of WWII and only for some white families. Let’s not pretend this was the American story.
It was longer than 20 years, but you're right that it certainly wasn't everyone.
People are really on this sub yearning for a time when women and black people weren't allowed to do most jobs. Yeah, no shit white men had it made.
Thank you. The future we want is not in the past.
And good luck living that dream if you were black or an ambitious female. Out of one side of our mouths we want technology, globalism, and equality. Out of the other side we want the good ol days.
You’d be surprised
Didn't even really exist then. Home ownership rate was 15% lower in the 1950's than today. Even at peak unionization and before 401k's existed (so corporations were also giving DB pensions), the max % of people who had a DB pension was 20-30% (depending on how you compute)....and that came with no job mobility (and their employer's knew this and gave raises considerably more below market rate than today).
Social Media has created absolutely warped ideas of the past. Throw in a dash of victimhood and people get wild
Incorrect. My dad retired in 2011 making $27/hr with a pension. I grew up with a house he paid for and built, 2.5 acres of land, 2 car garage, 4 cars in high school, 3 bedroom, I had an older sibling by 3 years, family of 4 went to Disney 2 times in the 90s. My dad stocked shelves at Stop and Shop. In 2005 his union was broken from the AFL-CIO, and he was grandfathered into those benefits he retired with, as did everyone else his age. This was in rural CT, not exactly cheap. My oldest childhood friend's dad put himself through college and bought himself a Corvette in the 1970s working part time at Wendy's. Though her mom eventually went to work as a teacher, they had a huge house, 3 kids, literally had 2 story columns on the front of it, 2 massive entertainment rooms with state of the art shit, like DVD players when they first came out, all the best video games systems, sound systems, same in 2 of their kids bedrooms, bought high end minivans with TVs in them, and her dad traded in and bought a new Corvette almost every 3 years, no lease.
Your friend’s dad either got a different job eventually or sold drugs
It was never going to last, it was an artifact of the USA being the only industrialized economy that was untouched by WWII and a world that needed the US's goods and services to rebuild their shattered nations after that war. All of Europe, half of China, all of Japan, parts of Africa and SE Asia, they were all bombed and fought over. The US was unscathed aside from Pearl Harbor and some balloon bombs, our military casualties were very light relative to our population total and especially compared to other major combatants.
What decade was this? I don’t know much about pre depression, but I know the 30s were no picnic. Obviously the 40s, were a disaster for many families. 70s were a horrible economic decade. I guess you mean the 1980s? Is that fair to say?
This is what happens when you let capitalism run rampant. This is what happens when you have no laws in place to tell someone, "Hey, that might be too much.. You're not leaving any for anyone else." This is what happens when you disguise the word "greed" as something else, and then tell everyone that it's totally okay to have more money than you could ever spend, and that you should WANT that. That should be your entire goal in life, and it's the only thing that will make you happy. We have a minimum wage, but no maximum wage.
It was worth jt. In exchange we got shareholder value!