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.

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.

1. No executives can be paid with equity.

2. The maximum salary can not be more than 10x the lowest salary in a company.

3. Tax capital gains as regular income.

4. Bring back the 90% top income tax bracket

5. Introduce a wealth tax. Perhaps 3% for a networth over 1 billion.

I mostly blame Reagan and Nixon. They were the harbingers of modern republican governmental stupidity. Nixon courted the racists out of the democrat party and Regan push dumbass deregulation. Bigotry + being the whipping boys for rich people is basically the only principles republicans stand on today.

Civil Rights happened.

Once it became clear to racist whites that Black Americans would have full access to the social programs that they enjoyed, they decided that they'd rather burn all those social programs to the ground before they'd share them. This is the basis of the modern Republican party, so you weren't wrong.

Incidentally, the scenario in this original post was never true for almost all black Americans.

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.

Coats, and devices for that matter, used to be built to last and be repairable. But if your customer consumer never needs to buy another product from you now that wouldn't make much business sense would it?

I 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.

Back then there was this thing called the marginal tax rate which taxed the extremely wealthy 90%.

Current proposals for a marginal tax rate on anyone making over 10 million dollars is 70% and the billionaires of this country are using their wealth to convince the stupidest of the lower classes that such a thing will hurt them and not just the billionaires.

Sure we can, eat the rich. It's that simple.

Sounds like the reset we need /s

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.

Also anything electrical beyond heating this thing or spinning that thing needs to go.

Imagine having a lucrative career as a comptometer operator.

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.

I would happily buy a below average size house instead of living in a below average sized apartment if that were an option.

There were many many things that were worse about the "good old days".

Cars sucked, phones sucked, computers sucked, houses were smaller, appliances sucked (if you had them at all), clothes sucked (yes there were some cool outfits but they were expensive, uncomfortable and high maintenance).

It's not like work conditions were universally awesome either. Consider how many women were regularly getting raped as part of their job and we didn't prosecute the Cosbys and Weinsteins of the world until recently. Today, if your boss sends you a harassing text, you go public with it. Back then, if you complained about your boss calling you "sugartits" and copped a feel, your options were basically STFU or GTFO (because you almost certainly can't prove it).

If we want to strive for a better future, we're more likely to succeed if we avoid romanticizing the past.

This is the true answer none of these forum sliding wall of text class traitors will address.

The US didn’t get less productive per hour of labor between 1950 and 2024

The point is that post-WWII is not the "normal" state of things. It was largely the result of a war that devastated every other major economy in the world, reducing competition from other countries. That gave the US a huge advantage. In addition there were strong government reforms from the pre-war depression-era time and reforms from during the war that curbed the excesses of the ultra-rich. The depression-era policies and the war-time policies also had the government playing a much more active role in the economy. Finally, this happened in a period where the world was much less "globalized" and relied on exploiting developing countries to a much greater extent than today.

Unless there's another devastating war that destroys every other major economy in the world, the US is never going to get the post-WWII advantage back. That was a big part of the reason a guy with a high-school education could support a family of 5 immediately after WWII. (Also, that mostly was the case for white guys, because the US post-WWII was a very racist country where the things like the GI Bill, which allowed veterans to get very cheap houses, was unavailable to non-whites.

The post-war period was one when the United Fruit Company convinced US presidents to orchestrate a coup in Guatemala in 1954 to remove the democratically elected president and install one who was more friendly to US international businesses. This meant cheap bananas for the US, big profits to US companies, and political violence and instability for Guatemala. So, the high-school educated guy supporting a family of 5 on his own was partially made possible by the exploitation of other countries by US-based businesses. I don't think anybody on the left wants that era to come back again.

But, it's possible to get the government to play a more active role in the economy again. For instance, in 1946 the top tax bracket was effectively 91%. Today it's 37%. Then there's enforcing anti-competitive statutes, going after all the monopolies, duopolies and cartels currently squeezing every American resident. Ideally, there would also be reforms to copyright laws that removed power from the entertainment cartel and handed it back to artists, or shortened copyright terms handing the fruits of copyright to the people.

A (white) guy with a high school education supporting a family of 5 in reasonable comfort was a historical anomaly. It relied on some good things like the government acting in the interest of regular people, taxing the super rich, and regulating large businesses. It relied on some shitty things, like the government helping out US-based businesses by orchestrating coups in other countries and otherwise aiding in the exploitation of developing countries. And it relied on some historical quirks, like the US being the only major participant to escape from WWII unscathed.

That was probably a good period, though it could sustain only a few % of the current world population. Now that we have billions (due to tech development, though mostly of tech you would call very-very low tech, like plow), only mass production is capable of supporting the population. And that means all kinds of things, including the extreme wealth concentration, which is only getting worse with further tech advances. Inequality is quite likely to become the real reason of the new world war that would trim population to more sustainable levels, and a new "golden age" of recovering. For these who survived. Fucking cycles...

Exactly, I remember this from when I was a kid! We're not talking about pre-industrial America, pre-civil rights movement America, or even pre cell phones America.

This is relatively recent, and it's a tragedy that it's so normalized that younger gens would assume otherwise.

The Simpsons seemed realistic in the 90s, with one shlob working as a chair moistener able to maintain a family of 5 in a four-bedroom house.

The 90's were choke full of their own issues and weren't some ideallic past. You could still get fired from a job if they found out you were gay, violent crime was at an all time high, and the 90's was the peak of outsourcing away all of the jobs that used to be able to support a family. Hell, a lot if country clubs only started allowing Jews in as members 20 years ago. The days of single income homes were more or less gone by the 70's. Thats why we see a massive spike in women joining the workforce then, since they couldn't afford to be stay at home moms anymore.

Now women can't afford to work because childcare costs as much as they would make at a job.

The 90s was just the declining slope from the 50s-70s post war economic boom. But even at the height of that boom, minorities and women were totally excluded. The subtext of "it was stolen from you", the "you" is white men.

Not only were the "good old days" oppressive for minorities, women, and LGBT, but also massive environmental degradation; Monroe Doctrine military adventurism; a government murderously hostile to left politics; all under the threat of nuclear extinction. Frankly this nostalgia is the lefty version of MAGA, and it's frustrating to see progressives looking backward.

And there were successful blackmen in the US from 1820- segregation. American history is full of social classes based on race and ethnicity with white protestant men on top. Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics faced less discrimination than their black counter parts, but they still faced red lining, discrimination in jobs and getting loans and had a massive economic disadvantage. Obviously they managed to raise families, otherwise we wouldn't have those ethnic groups in America today.

America has always been built in inequality, its just that the WASP middle class used to have have an underclass to feel like they were better than. Now there isn't even a middle class because the wealthy have taken everything.

I don't get it how this post is behing downvoted: understating Offical Inflation mathematically yields bigger Official GDP numbers due to how the Offical Inflation is used to deflate Nominal GDP to produce the supposedly inflation-free Real GDP which is the official one.

It doesn't take much to find politicians boasting about growing GDP, so there is huge political pressure to make that number high in ways which aren't obvious (and tweaking the basket of good and services used to calculate inflation is quite a subtle way to do it). It's not by chance that some countries (for example the UK) some years ago - basically since the house price bubble in there started going - even started using and Inflation Index that doesn't include house prices (I'm not quite sure if that's the case in the US).

It also fits the observeable effects: a salary in the 2020s that can barelly pay for a small appartment and food, which using the inflation indexes is inflation adjusted to produce a supposedly equivalent salary in the 60s, yields something that back then paid for a house, a car and all the expenses of family of 5, something that can only be explained by the inflation adjustment being wrong (if it was right, it would roughly buy the same now and back then) hence the inflation indexes are wrong and over the years have been much more wrong on the side of understating inflation than on the other side (and always erring in the same direction cannot be explained by the normal error in the method).

Mind you, this is not massive rigging of inflation with 10%+ "adjustments", it's more 1% here, 0.5% there, which over decades adds up to a 100%+ cummulative error.

Corporate propaganda is a powerful thing. And one fairly subtle aspect of it is having television programs that normalize the 2 parent working household.

Whoosh

All those situations overlapped in that they were all things boomers had to deal with.

Okay before I go off on you how old are you?

Paternal side Grandmother worked in a factory, grandfather was a mechanic.

Maternal side Grandmother was a nurse, grandfather worked in a factory and farmed.

"It was true for me because I was from a moderately wealthy area and family therefore it was the norm"

Nope. You have vague stories from two generations back of a generation noted for not mentioning the hard parts.

I have as much problems with the hoarding of wealth as everyone else here does, but it’s not enough to change the calculus here.

The top 0.1% in the United States hold approximately $20 trillion dollars in wealth. If you “ate the rich” and handed this over to the other 99.9% of citizens evenly, that would give everyone a one-time payment of about $58 000. And sure — we’d all love to have an extra $58 000 in our pockets, but when you divide that by 40 years of inequality you’re looking at less than $1500 per year per person — and that isn’t going to make up for the fact that a lot of high-paying jobs left the US in that time because they weren’t needed anymore.

And you ignore the fact that the wealth that has been hoarded isn’t sitting in a Scrooge McDuck-like vault full of gold. Most of the wealth held by the top 0.1% is tied up in investments which back real, tangible industrial and civil infrastructure important to the US economy.

None of which changes the fact that as the rest of the world (re)industrialized post WWII, those other countries didn’t need to do business with the US as much anymore. The US didn’t become the global financial powerhouse it was in the 50s and 60s and 70s because people inside the US were wealthy — they did it by selling stuff everywhere around the world, because much of the rest of the industrialized world had to rebuild their infrastructure to build their own stuff. But now the US gets to compete with China and Germany and Japan and Taiwan and France in ways they didn’t have to back in the middle of the 20th century, and other countries are buying from these countries instead of the US. And no amount of US regulation was ever going to change that.

The US benefitted from a one-time bubble that can’t be repeated. No duh things changed for the worse.

You accuse me of ignoring the high cost of Vietnam — but ultimately your own argument supports mine. Toyota and Volkswagen couldn’t have challenged the American automotive hegemony in the 1970s had it not been for the re-industrialization of Japan and Germany that allowed this to happen in the first place. The US got “stuck” in a 1950s mentality (cheap overseas oil, no significant international industrial competition), and re-industrialized countries that 20 years prior couldn’t compete had built up enough that they could.

The US wouldn’t have regained its edge even without Vietnam. At best, it would have slowed the slide — but ultimately every other country on earth was also going to grow its economy, and the re-industrialization that happened in countries with much cheaper costs of living (and yes, in some cases with regressive political regimes that worked to keep costs down) was always going to happen anyway, and no amount of US protectionism was ever going to prevent it from happening. As I pointed out elsewhere in this post (as one example), Australia in the 1950s bought the vast majority of its automobiles from US companies — but now they buy primarily from Asian manufacturers. The US lost that business because those other manufacturers focuses on cost and quality — and it’s not likely getting it back anytime soon. Multiply that by virtually every industry in existence today, and it’s not hard to see that the 50s and 60s were a special economic anomaly that won’t likely ever happen again.

I'm guessing those companies would have died of because they couldn't compete with cheap overseas labor

And none of that would change the fact that other countries are now able to buy goods they once bought from US manufacturers from other countries.

China, Japan, Germany, and other modern industrial powerhouses that were decimated after WWII are now competition for US manufacturers. Even if the US went full on protectionist and kept their own factories from offshoring, that wasn’t going to prevent China (or Germany, or France, or whomever) from pursuing its own industrialization, and then going after countries that were buying American in the mid 20th century to buy from them instead.

A good example to look at right now is Australia — in the 1950s, they were dominated by American vehicles, either importing them directly from the US, or via locally built Holdens (which may have been manufactured locally, but the company was owned by General Motors — the profits flowed back to the United States), with some small British cars thrown in. But today only two American brands even make it into the Top 10 — Ford at #3, and Tesla at #8. All of the other brands are now primarily out of Asia (Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Kia, Hyundai, Isuzu).

The US “not offshoring” manufacturing wouldn’t have changed this. And the story is the same across all of the rest of the world — back in the 1950s, the world was buying from the US (or to a lesser extent Canada and the UK). Today they don’t have to — and US protectionism was never going to change that. Forcing American companies to stay in the US and only hire Americans would have just made life for Americans more expensive, and wouldn’t have changed the fact that money that had been flowing into the US during the post-war era had more or less dried up once the major economies in Europe and Asia had re-industrialized.

Their kid is a burgeoning youtube star.

All he does is unboxing videos

I liked the OK Boomer dances.

Yeah, the entire premise requires that women entering the workforce didn't cause any new jobs to come into existence.

Childcare alone is a huge industry.

Both working parents often means two vehicles, that's an increase in manufacturing.

It also ignores that women were already part of the workforce but their options were restricted.

Two household incomes exist because it's the only way to survive the past 40 years of wage stagflation. We have an increase in multi-generational households because two incomes is no longer enough.

Obviously women should have the same labor opportunities as men, but do you really think doubling the pool of workers would have no impact on the labor market?

It only becomes MRA bullshit when you stop there and say "see, feminism was a mistake!" instead of arguing for all workers to be better compensated.

What part do you disagree with?

Well, I am glad to know that the salary of a congressman in my country would mean poverty and awful living conditions in the US but that we are safe from that because everything is cheaper where I live. Damn