Here’s what’s changed
- The market has collapsed into a few companies. That means that monopolistic forces are in nearly full force
- Labor unions have been severely weekend. In the 60s almost out of fear companies were practicing “corporate charity” to try and keep employees from unionizing. They’ve lost that fear.
- Regulations around corporate stock price manipulation have been all but eliminated. Buybacks use to be illegal because they allow a company to artificially inflate their stock completely unrelated to the actual performance of the company.
- Social safety nets have been gutted or underfunded.
- Public education has been destroyed. We used to have a fairly robust public university system that’s been uber privatized with funding reduced to almost nothing.
- Hospital systems have consolidated as has insurance agencies which not only drives up the price of medical care, it drives down the wages of doctors and nurses while keeping them as minimally staffed as possible. This translates into terrible care that fucks you over when you need any medical work done.
We’re all sacrificing life experiences so that a very, very, very small percentage of people can live like kings.
Pretty much, it’s the very natural consequence of a deregulation and the an-cap philosophy. We’ve seen this before in america during the 1900s. It’s the whole reason Teddy and FDR ended up getting elected.
So we need another FDR. Can we do it without a preceding depression this time around?
First and foremost you should mention the corporate tax cuts. How can corporations afford consolidation and other malicious shit they do? Their tax bill was cut in half. And their executive income tax rate was cut dramatically.
Rather than paying their employees, they give massive bonuses to their executives and save the rest for buying out competitors or attracting suitors.
It’s not so much the corporate tax rate that did it, it’s capital gains tax (and especially how it’s implemented) that’s the big problem.
The fact that capital gains isn’t treated as regular income tax creates all sorts of really bad incentives. It means that executives are generally primarily paid in stock which means they are incentivized to push the value of that stock up. And since everyone making those decisions are also primarily paid in stock they’ll authorize things like stock buybacks to boost their own personal wealth.
5 regulations I’d make to fix this problem.
-
No executives can be paid with equity.
-
The maximum salary can not be more than 10x the lowest salary in a company.
-
Tax capital gains as regular income.
-
Bring back the 90% top income tax bracket
-
Introduce a wealth tax. Perhaps 3% for a networth over 1 billion.
So, republicans happened.
Edit- before you tar and feather me, democrats went along. But all of those have been articles of faith in the GOP.
I mostly blame Reagan and Nixon. They were the harbingers of modern republican governmental stupidity. Nixon courted the racists out of the democrat party and Regan push dumbass deregulation. Bigotry + being the whipping boys for rich people is basically the only principles republicans stand on today.
Civil Rights happened.
Once it became clear to racist whites that Black Americans would have full access to the social programs that they enjoyed, they decided that they’d rather burn all those social programs to the ground before they’d share them. This is the basis of the modern Republican party, so you weren’t wrong.
Incidentally, the scenario in this original post was never true for almost all black Americans.
While all of this is true, I’ll also add that this was an unrepeatable condition: WWII gutted Europe and the US was untouched. All of perks of the past society were part of an unsustainable economic bubble. USA citizens have never quite realized that.
The only part I would disagree with you on is that in the past 80 years productivity has grown by a huge margin, and if that translated into increased wages (as opposed to increased corporate profits) as it once did I think that quality of life would not be so unsustainable.
The richest 1% own almost half the world’s wealth. The hoarders have mostly dug in and ensured that their hoarding is legal, will stop at nothing, is easier than ever, and is well defended and unopposed.
We live in the joke where the billionaire takes 99 cookies from the table, leaves one and says “Careful, peon, the [member of the minority you dislike] is after your cookie”.
While I agree with all of that and more, the world has gotten much more complex over the years. It’s not a bad thing to try to raise the bar on minimum education for everyone.
Also, for the part of it due to global outsourcing … there’s only so much protectionism can give you without ruining importer/exporters. A better approach is to try to bring a more educated workforce than offered by cheap third world labor
Regulations around corporate stock price manipulation have been all but eliminated. Buybacks use to be illegal because they allow a company to artificially inflate their stock completely unrelated to the actual performance of the company.
In that case, once a company sold stock to investors, they could never recoup it then? The only way for that to happen would be a single person or group organized to buy up a lot to get a controlling stake?
Effects ofWW2
Immigration
Lack of training in general.
Offshoring.
People buying loads if crap. Like seriously how many coats did your grandparents have in their adult life. Probably about the same you have in your closet right now, maybe less. Not to mention TV, phones, exotic food.
The housing market is fucked because land is undervalued.
Oil? (I might be wrong on this)
Somethings need to change but there are some things missed here.
Coats, and devices for that matter, used to be built to last and be repairable. But if your customer consumer never needs to buy another product from you now that wouldn’t make much business sense would it?
It would if you stole everyone else’s business and that’s what businesses used to compete on.
But consumers want fast fashion. They want cheap clothing and it doesn’t matter if it only last 5 years instead of 30 because they are going to throw it out after 1 anyway.
Consumers have forced the hand of businesses in this case. People want cheap more than they want anything else.
I’ve pointed this out before-
On TV in the 1980s, Tom and Roseanne were out of work constantly, but they owned a house and they never lost it.
On TV in the 1980s, Al Bundy supported his housewife and two kids on a shoe salesman’s salary.
You know what the criticism was? It wasn’t that they owned a house. It was “their house is too big for what they make.”
I don’t remember anyone thinking it was ridiculous that Al Bundy was a homeowner. Because of course he would own a home.
Even renting and even in the 90s… no one said that it would be impossible to live in Manhattan and work in a cafe like on Friends. The criticism was that the apartment was too big. The idea that it was something you could do was not in question.
Yes, it’s all TV and it’s all fantasy, but the public reaction to it should show you something.
Simpsons did it too. That was part of Frank Grimes’ (Or Grimey, as he liked to be called) criticism of Homer.
I should hope that a technician at a nuclear power plant could afford that house. Sure, he was an idiot, but he still did the job.
This will sound ridiculous to most people:
I didn’t go to school after the 8th grade. I dropped out for several reasons, but even without lying, I talked my way into a very good career in IT. There was no database of schooling and I was hired on my personal merits, then I built a user experience department before that was actually a thing.
Within a few years, I was responsible for hiring but couldn’t hire anyone like myself. I wasn’t allowed to even consider anyone without a college degree, so I would have had to reject myself.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. That was 2002, and now in 2024, we’re rejecting people who might be awesome at their job (not to toot my horn, but I was very good at what I did and won industry awards) because they can’t afford to get a degree, as I couldn’t.
Most industries are pay to play now, and you can’t even break in by being exceptional nowadays. We’re trapping people out of what they’re great at and would love to do just because they were born into poverty.
Imagine the gifts we’re suppressing and squandering.
It’s more than “you need a degree” now. Some jobs require a undergraduate “business” degree, as if that means anything. This by definition excludes people who get harder degrees.
So you will see entry level financial roles going to people who have taken a few “leadership” (handshaking) courses and basic accounting. While someone with an English or Sociology degree (who might actually know how to write an email) is rejected.
Don’t get me started on internships. Getting coffee every day, handing out mail, and doing a 2 week office furniture inventory are not indicators of a promising future.
The main problem is, businesses literally don’t know how to hire. If you know what skills you need, you can find someone in a day. You can literally set up a folding table at the metro entrance and find 5 good interview candidates.
Yeah, I’ve noticed a shift. Even 5 years ago I hardly ever saw the college degree requirement for software development, and if it ever came up my yea experience nipped the question in the bud. These days, with over a decade of experience, I am getting automated rejections because I don’t have a diploma. I have been contacted and actively turned down over the phone after clarifying that I do not have a degree (many AI systems read my resume as having a degree in “degree” for some reason.)
I’ve put out hundreds of applications, and have had a handful of interviews.
The degree means nothing. Someone going to school for development doesn’t make them a good developer, it means they test well. My decade+ in the industry with multiple completed projects however…
Back when this was a real thing, billionaires didn’t exist. I say we try very hard to go back to this economic era.
We can’t. Unless you want another world war, kill tens of millions, and destroy most of Western Europe, have Nazis, and nuke a country. Not to mention billions less on the planet.
This is what eventually pushed for the Marshall Plan that did help Europe and fuel the reconstruction that followed in the USA and elsewhere. Like the boomers lived through a period of time that was quite far, far from ‘normal.’ Only because it happened it does not mean that it was historically normal, nor does the remove the nuances of the time period, both the so-called good along with the horrible.
Problem seems to be that the lady on OP’s post has the Historical knowledge and nuance of a toddler. Is that the average education system in the USA? Because if so, holy shit.
Back then there was this thing called the marginal tax rate which taxed the extremely wealthy 90%.
Current proposals for a marginal tax rate on anyone making over 10 million dollars is 70% and the billionaires of this country are using their wealth to convince the stupidest of the lower classes that such a thing will hurt them and not just the billionaires.
Sure. We’ll just have to make sure that women and minorities can’t get good jobs, and we’ve gotta get most of Europe leveled by war. Then we also need a wildly progressive president
But then it’s easy.
Also anything electrical beyond heating this thing or spinning that thing needs to go.
Imagine having a lucrative career as a comptometer operator.
This time it has to be China also, not only Europe (and mostly not Europe, actually). Then, if the retaliatory nuke does not destroy everyone, you can again have the privilege of feeding off the rest of the world for a decade or 2 with no competition. I wonder if any kind of tech breakthrough can lead to the same advantage that could be shared by a nation and not only a few rich. Seems the answer is no. And the minorities issue is unlikely to fly again, as white people are no longer the overwhelming majority, the mix is way more diverse.
We used to see these “good old days” posts from boomers. They mostly seem to have stopped since they mostly learned that this was a fantasy not shared by most people. It also ignores that most people today don’t actually want to live under the conditions above. In 1960 only about half of all households had washing machines. This idyllic fantasy ignores that some lucky ladies were making this possibly with hours of hard domestic labor per day. It also ignores that huge economic boost the US got after WWII for being the only country that still had intact industry.
edit: typo
And you’re ignoring that Regan et al went after the unions and undermined your ability to negotiate against your much more powerful employer.
But I do agree, a lot of people forget that, while stress and uncertainty are up for a lot of people, material wealth is also way up. The thing is, it’s an unnecessary trade-off. We could have an abundance of security in all areas of our lives.
As much as I think “whataboutism” is an overused word, this is a perfect example of it. It’s not germane to anything in my post. I pointed out that the “good old days” claim in OP is a myth. A claim of, “so and so made things worse” has nothing to do with my statement.
While Reagan was president, one of my grandparents was in a union. They still had to use a toilet in the hall that they shared with the neighbor. They couldn’t afford a car. They didn’t have a TV. None of those things were available because all the factories in their country got bombed. At the same time my other set of grandparents paid taxes but never got to vote. They lived in a colony of the democracy-loving British but since they were natives they were second class citizens.
Pretending that the world was some paradise until Reagan and the neocons showed up is just willful ignorance.
Maybe I didn’t acknowledge strongly enough that you’re 100% in saying that shit sucked back then. Shit sucks now, too. They just suck in different ways unique to each time.
The killing the unions comment was in reference to the idyllic income OP is nostalgic for, since they are part of the reason such a situation was possible. Sorry if that felt like “whatsboutism,” it wasn’t intended to be that way.
In 1960 only about half of all households had washing machines. This idyllic fantasy ignores that some lucky ladies were making this possibly with hours of hard domestic labor per day.
Being fair here, the absence of a washing machine in the home does not necessarily mean doing laundry by hand. Laundromats have been around since the 30s.
Also that the average house was like 1/3 the size of new homes today and a large portion of families had one car or fewer.
There were many many things that were worse about the “good old days”.
Cars sucked, phones sucked, computers sucked, houses were smaller, appliances sucked (if you had them at all), clothes sucked (yes there were some cool outfits but they were expensive, uncomfortable and high maintenance).
It’s not like work conditions were universally awesome either. Consider how many women were regularly getting raped as part of their job and we didn’t prosecute the Cosbys and Weinsteins of the world until recently. Today, if your boss sends you a harassing text, you go public with it. Back then, if you complained about your boss calling you “sugartits” and copped a feel, your options were basically STFU or GTFO (because you almost certainly can’t prove it).
If we want to strive for a better future, we’re more likely to succeed if we avoid romanticizing the past.
cars, phones, computers, and appliances were serviceable. that’s something we can lament changing.
