You can thank american imperialism ;).
There are NO first-world countries without paid public healthcare.
How are imperialism and healthcare related lol
Out of the thousands of examples… let’s pick one close to (your) home
Johnson & Johnson to pay $5bn in landmark $26bn US opioid settlement
Where did they get the opium?
Afghanistan: How much opium is produced and what’s the Taliban’s record?
Why did you invade Afghanistan? Hint, it starts with an I.
Are you dense? Do you think publicly funded heath care would reduce this? The two aren’t connected directly
And I’m Australian lmao
Not gunna argue w/ a throwaway lol
If you’re asking in good faith, consider picking up a book.
Nice dodge. Recommend any books or do you just say that so you don’t have to articulate your own points?
What about Switzerland and Japan?
I stand by my statement. If you are paying out-of-pocket, it’s a 3rd world country that is siphoning you for literal blood money.
It’s our obsession with personal profit. It doesn’t matter what your economic model is called. When you maximize gain at the cost of everything else you weaken the integrity of the very foundation that it exploits.
But line must go up!
Oh shit yeah sorry. I forgot.
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we can have the economic prosperity without the racism, in fact I’d argue if we recreated the economic effects of the 50s, high tax rate on the rich, local manufacturing and being a net exporter, that diversity would only make us more competitive.
edit: wow it looks like some cute little edgelad only wants their prosperity with extra helpings of racism.
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Agreed, that’s why I’ve spent the last few years working on a different economic system that turns attention into currency, and makes manufacturing a race to the top powered by people who love what they do.
I suspect affordable housing is the main thing here that has been stolen.
The whole mess of the economy is hanging on that one thing. It gobbles up every spare penny. There isn’t enough of it, and the price is only being constrained by how much the highest bidder is prepared to pay. The highest bidders are professional couples, no kids. If that’s not you, you ain’t getting shit.
As a wise man once sang, “build fuckin’ houses everywhere, millions of the cunts”.
I get the point they are making but using 5 was stupid. There was never a time when any salary worker would be able to support a family of 5. This is unnecessary hyperbole.
The message was lost with the example chosen.
TL;DR - the world sucks for most people nowadays who want to buy a house.
The idea was that at one point in America, a single earner could afford to buy a home and upgrade the quality of their life if they:
- work hard
- had a decent job
- saved money
- did not procreate themselves into poverty
Now, even with two-earner families, it is not enough to afford even a basic starter home without being house poor and in debt for the entirety of your life without ever really “owning” anything (other than the payments). The reason for this change in home ownership experience is what is always hotly debated.
Those with general wealth or an entrepreneurial spirit will argue that it is still possible. The working class who just wants to do a job, earn a paycheck and leave work behind at the end of the day will disagree. The poor worry more about how to pay their bills at the end of the month and still feed themselves to worry about a house.
There are a lot of factors in my opinion on what has changed to make it so hard today but no reason greater to me than when a house became an investment instrument instead of a place to raise a family. Something left to your heirs to give them a leg up in their future and that was how upward mobility worked. However, now that a house is not just a home but an investment tool, more and more people are finding the “American dream” is no longer achievable.
How the value of a house was derived hasn’t really changed all that much. What has changed is how much that value is. It used to be that a single earner making 100k a year in a big city could afford to buy a home and with more kids (aka tax breaks) could afford to upgrade homes from the starter home to one in the suburbs. Then came the two-earner households. People could afford more so the real estate industry started charging more for the same things and people paid it … because they could. The single earner was left behind because two incomes will always be more than one.
Then came the real estate get rich craze. Those modern families with two working adults and positive cash flow just waiting to be … (oh wait, that’s the infomercial sales pitch). There was money to be made for little to no effort. Just buy a property, charge someone rent and make sure that your income was greater than your expenses. Boom! That’s it. Sit at home watching TV while your bank account gets rich. The two-earner family was now getting squeezed out by competition from the small investor. This also drove up the price of homes because the investor was willing to spend more if they thought they could charge more for the rental. The two-earner families now had to shell out more to buy or stay a renter because they could no longer afford to buy. Pretty cool business model where you can create your own customer base.
As is typical, it wasn’t long before real estate corporations started to muscle in on the business as there was money to be made; especially with the deep pockets of bankruptcy protected corporate entities that could speculate on property values going up without worrying about losses. They also started exercising local political and financial influence over zoning and construction laws to ensure opportunity and property values would go their way. The small investors started to get pushed to the side and all the while, home prices kept going up (and inventory going down). Since profits must always go up, these so called developers started to decrease the actual size of the living space to squeeze more profits from the same properties. The original shrinkflation. That’s how you ended up with shoebox sized apartments in big cities.
Finally, we come to modern day times, where publicly traded companies like the Zillow and Redfins of the world buy up whole markets in an effort to control supply and pricing. Real estate is unaffordable to most and the rich buy properties with no intention of using it for living. Instead, they use them as tax shelters for their wealth (tax deductible real estate investment trusts (REITs), 1031 exchanges, depreciation, and mortgage interest payments). Corporate shareholder interests also demand that housing costs keep rising regardless of the impact. What impact is that you say?
People are forced to rent, delay starting a family and find other ways to make money besides working for a living. Some try to do it through investments in the stock market where there are always more individual investor losers than there are winners. The same place the Zillows and Redfins of the world go to get their money so they can afford to try and manipulate said markets you can no longer afford to buy in. If you ask me, this is capitalism at its finest so long as you are on the right side of the financial wall. If your main focus in life is not to make money, then you will be supporting someone who does make it their focus. Welcome to modern serfdom.
“Serfdom, condition in medieval Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord.” - Encyclopedia Brittanica
This was never the norm it’s a myth that never actually existed even when it was supposedly the norm most people struggled
It was in NZ when I was a kid and I know the US had always had a higher standard of living than us
This will sound ridiculous to most people:
I didn’t go to school after the 8th grade. I dropped out for several reasons, but even without lying, I talked my way into a very good career in IT. There was no database of schooling and I was hired on my personal merits, then I built a user experience department before that was actually a thing.
Within a few years, I was responsible for hiring but couldn’t hire anyone like myself. I wasn’t allowed to even consider anyone without a college degree, so I would have had to reject myself.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. That was 2002, and now in 2024, we’re rejecting people who might be awesome at their job (not to toot my horn, but I was very good at what I did and won industry awards) because they can’t afford to get a degree, as I couldn’t.
Most industries are pay to play now, and you can’t even break in by being exceptional nowadays. We’re trapping people out of what they’re great at and would love to do just because they were born into poverty.
Imagine the gifts we’re suppressing and squandering.
Thank you for sharing :)
I think many will agree the bureaucracy and corporate life is killing a lot of things, because of absolute assholes in management positions. But without written out experiences like yours, it is just unsubstantiated ideological hate.
It’s more than “you need a degree” now. Some jobs require a undergraduate “business” degree, as if that means anything. This by definition excludes people who get harder degrees.
So you will see entry level financial roles going to people who have taken a few “leadership” (handshaking) courses and basic accounting. While someone with an English or Sociology degree (who might actually know how to write an email) is rejected.
Don’t get me started on internships. Getting coffee every day, handing out mail, and doing a 2 week office furniture inventory are not indicators of a promising future.
The main problem is, businesses literally don’t know how to hire. If you know what skills you need, you can find someone in a day. You can literally set up a folding table at the metro entrance and find 5 good interview candidates.
Yeah, I’ve noticed a shift. Even 5 years ago I hardly ever saw the college degree requirement for software development, and if it ever came up my yea experience nipped the question in the bud. These days, with over a decade of experience, I am getting automated rejections because I don’t have a diploma. I have been contacted and actively turned down over the phone after clarifying that I do not have a degree (many AI systems read my resume as having a degree in “degree” for some reason.)
I’ve put out hundreds of applications, and have had a handful of interviews.
The degree means nothing. Someone going to school for development doesn’t make them a good developer, it means they test well. My decade+ in the industry with multiple completed projects however…
They supported a family of 5 and a whole additional secret family in the city, somehow!
Wait…we are supposed to support our secret families? Shit, I thought you just got married had kids, and then moved to another state and changed your name when it got too hard lol.
To be clear, this was for white (Irish and Italians don’t count) men, and many black, hispanic, and native families could not afford to live the American dream.
I think you don’t realize how recent OP is talking about…
Fuck man, even the 1990s a single income household with 3 kids could be comfortable.
You’re talking about Irish and Italian Americans like you think it was the 1890s…
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.
Mate…
They were explicitly talking about economics, and nothing else.
I think the reason you’re so upset, is you don’t understand what people are talking about about.
Like, if I saw you on the beach and said “weather’s nice today isn’t it?”
And you started screaming at me about how pandas are endangered.
You’re not wrong, just not relevant to the conversation.
At no point has anyone said that a single point of time was 100% perfect.
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Naw.
Institutional racism exists still.
But in 2024 economically speaking it worse for all of us, regardless of race.
Like, if you were just making a dumb joke. Fine, whatever.
But if you honestly don’t understand this, I can spare some time to help you
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They said Irish and Italians weren’t considered “white” at the time…
That isn’t the 1990s which is the period referred to in OPs post.
But whatever racial/ethnic group you’re talking about, they were better off economically in the 1990s than the 2020s.
So whatever they were saying, was wrong. It’s just a matter of how they’re wrong depending on what they meant. We won’t know what they meant till they clarify.
So I have no idea why you rushed to make an uninformed “joke” like you did.
But the more you type, the less productive this looks like it’ll be.
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.
My father dropped out of high school, got a job a HP as a line worker (manufacturing oscilloscopes), got married, had 6 kids, 3-4 cars (depending on needs), and a house to fit all those kids. This was in the late 70s-90s (when the last kid graduated high school). Mother didn’t work. We lived comfortably (not wealthy by any means).
My wife and I have 4 degrees between us, both work full time, have a single kid. We live about as well as my parents did.
The middle class dream! It absolutely feels like the bar to clear to be able to achieve this is significantly higher now.
Unless you’re already wealthy, you have to pick one or more from the following:
- delay starting a family until more secure
- both parents work
- multi-generational household
- living farther from major cities
- having fewer kids than you might otherwise
add
- College Degree/s (even when many/most jobs don’t really need it) with likely student loans
I supported a family of 4 on a single income from being a grunt in an autobody shop in 1999. We didn’t live the high life, but we had a house, a paid off car, and took in-country vacations at least once a year.
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.
My great grandfather came to America from Ireland and supported a family of 9 with a single income
And there were successful blackmen in the US from 1820- segregation. American history is full of social classes based on race and ethnicity with white protestant men on top. Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics faced less discrimination than their black counter parts, but they still faced red lining, discrimination in jobs and getting loans and had a massive economic disadvantage. Obviously they managed to raise families, otherwise we wouldn’t have those ethnic groups in America today.
America has always been built in inequality, its just that the WASP middle class used to have have an underclass to feel like they were better than. Now there isn’t even a middle class because the wealthy have taken everything.
So your original statement is wrong:
To be clear, this was for white (Irish and Italians don’t count) men, and many black, hispanic, and native families could not afford to live the American dream.
Because my Irish great grandfather very much lived the American dream. That is because this statement you made is also wrong:
America has always been built in inequality
The richest Americans had a tax rate of 91% in the 1960s. That number has plummeted since and income inequality has gotten to where it is today as a result.
My mother worked to avoid boredom when my sister and I were at school. Good thing too, since it put her in a good position when everything but wages and computers got enormously more expensive starting in the '90s
and those families used to take long road trips together for weeks as a vacation. and their clothes lasted decades.
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.
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.
Has the way capital gains tax works changed over the years?
Not really, it’s mostly the rates that have changed. It used to be much higher.
100 percent for every dollar over a billion, at least for individuals. No single person needs that much wealth.
-
Great summary of how things suck. Also, Severely Weekend would make a great band name.
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”.
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
customerconsumer 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.
Personally I don’t feel that way, but my personal experience isn’t a particularly large sample size.
Consumers may want various things, but those wants aren’t created in a vacuum. Otherwise advertising would be pointless.
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
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.
Aren’t there a lot more social programs today than there were in the period the OP refers to?
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?
We can’t because we have corporate
propagandanews outlets that will work tirelessly to frame this “new FDR” as a fascist communist racist woke elite conman.Pick your outlet and that will determine the words chosen to disparage them.
Hell just look at the supposed “liberal media” treating Bernie Sanders when he looked to be taking the lead in the primaries, suddenly every story was “Bernie loves Castro! Bernie loves Cuba! Be afraid! He likes communist stuff! Boo! Ahhh! Oh no it’s Bernie!”
In addition to this, the government is working to ban any news outlet that disagrees with them. They’re starting with “foreign” outlets like RT and TikTok, but they’ll soon move to anything that doesn’t toe the party line.
Democracy is dead.
I can understand literal propaganda outlets, government run news from countries we know have their orgs run with specific orders to run whatever stories would be an obvious thing to want to curtail here. I used to check into RT and all I’d see are anti-american stories or even using Americans to tell an anti-american government story from someone like Abby Martin. I can’t imagine we’d be getting any news from say North Korean news outlets that isn’t specifically meant to manipulate foreign countries citizens.
Tiktoc isn’t really news, it’s more like YouTube. If anything I’d say assholes like Zuckerberg lobby the government to kill foreign competitors in our market which is a whole nother issue that also sucks :(
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews literally said if Bernie was elected him and his rich buddies would be executed in Central Park.
Chris Matthews’ Wild Rant Connects a Bernie Sanders Win With Public Executions. The MSNBC host talked about socialist-led “executions in Central Park” while tying those fears to Bernie Sanders
Don’t forget the low blow campaign tactic of the “Bernie Bros” - and how I cannot be a feminist if I don’t cast my vote for Clinton. I couldn’t believe how biased NPR was in their coverage and framing of that primary. It caused me to stop being a supporter.
I’m still proud to be considered a 21 year old russian man named Vladimer online!!! (I am not even close to any of those but my twitter replies insist i’m wrong about that actually)
You’re about to elect Trump again. I shouldn’t worry about there not being enough bad economic news.
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?
For any country that has benefited from exploitation of foreign resources “stolen” is a bit rich.
So all nations?
It was never going to be possible for the US to maintain that kind of standard of living forever. It worked out in the 1950s through to the 1970s because WWII left huge swaths of industry and agriculture in Europe and Asia devastated — it took decades^0 for affected countries to rebuild. Meanwhile, North American based manufacturing soared and became the envy of the world — everyone bought form North America, and anyone with no particular skill set who was looking for a job could get a good Union job in any number of factories.
But that couldn’t last forever. There was no policy the US Government could have taken (other than perpetual war against everyone else?) that would have kept the rest of the world from re-industrializing. Japan, China, Germany, Italy, France, and the UK (amongst others^1) were able to re-industrialize to a point where the US suddenly had competition again — and while the US could have some competitive advantage against some of its more Western allies due to size, they weren’t going to be able to keep that kind of lead forever against China, Taiwan, and Japan. The world wound up with more capacity than there was a market for, and so the winners were the ones that could do the job the cheapest (as is the way in a competitive marketplace).
It was an anomaly that brought the kind of prosperity the US experienced in the post-WWII years; you can’t recreate that today (as it’s only due to the limitations of the technologies at the time that North America was broadly spared any destruction during the war years — in the post WWII nuclear/ballistic missile era that wouldn’t be the case anymore).
^0 — there are still areas in Europe that are uninhabitable (and unfarmable) today due to WWI and WWII.
^1 — it did somewhat help that the Soviet Union re-industrialized under Communism; the generally closed nature of their economy, combined with the huge inefficiencies of most of its industries under centralized control didn’t really challenge or threaten the US’s economic might.We could have had a better grip on what companies chose to do with their workforce, so instead of offshoring previously well paying manufacturing jobs they could have “forced” companies to hire Americans to make American goods. Instead we blindly accepted the “service economy” bullshit and ditched manufacturing almost completely :/
And none of that would change the fact that other countries are now able to buy goods they once bought from US manufacturers from other countries.
China, Japan, Germany, and other modern industrial powerhouses that were decimated after WWII are now competition for US manufacturers. Even if the US went full on protectionist and kept their own factories from offshoring, that wasn’t going to prevent China (or Germany, or France, or whomever) from pursuing its own industrialization, and then going after countries that were buying American in the mid 20th century to buy from them instead.
A good example to look at right now is Australia — in the 1950s, they were dominated by American vehicles, either importing them directly from the US, or via locally built Holdens (which may have been manufactured locally, but the company was owned by General Motors — the profits flowed back to the United States), with some small British cars thrown in. But today only two American brands even make it into the Top 10 — Ford at #3, and Tesla at #8. All of the other brands are now primarily out of Asia (Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Kia, Hyundai, Isuzu).
The US “not offshoring” manufacturing wouldn’t have changed this. And the story is the same across all of the rest of the world — back in the 1950s, the world was buying from the US (or to a lesser extent Canada and the UK). Today they don’t have to — and US protectionism was never going to change that. Forcing American companies to stay in the US and only hire Americans would have just made life for Americans more expensive, and wouldn’t have changed the fact that money that had been flowing into the US during the post-war era had more or less dried up once the major economies in Europe and Asia had re-industrialized.
I’m guessing those companies would have died of because they couldn’t compete with cheap overseas labor
You ignore the incredibly high cost of the Vietnam War. At the height, America was dropping three Hiroshimas a day on the jungle. US plants were working 24/7 to supply the steel, which meant German and Japan had to build their own plants. When the Arab Oil boycott hit, Detroit was doubly screwed, because Toyota and Volkswagen already had small gas sippers ready to go.
America could have regained it’s edge after Vietnam ended, but Reagan’s tax cuts and deregulation let the wealthiest build vast fortunes without doing anything to save the ‘Rust Belt.’
You accuse me of ignoring the high cost of Vietnam — but ultimately your own argument supports mine. Toyota and Volkswagen couldn’t have challenged the American automotive hegemony in the 1970s had it not been for the re-industrialization of Japan and Germany that allowed this to happen in the first place. The US got “stuck” in a 1950s mentality (cheap overseas oil, no significant international industrial competition), and re-industrialized countries that 20 years prior couldn’t compete had built up enough that they could.
The US wouldn’t have regained its edge even without Vietnam. At best, it would have slowed the slide — but ultimately every other country on earth was also going to grow its economy, and the re-industrialization that happened in countries with much cheaper costs of living (and yes, in some cases with regressive political regimes that worked to keep costs down) was always going to happen anyway, and no amount of US protectionism was ever going to prevent it from happening. As I pointed out elsewhere in this post (as one example), Australia in the 1950s bought the vast majority of its automobiles from US companies — but now they buy primarily from Asian manufacturers. The US lost that business because those other manufacturers focuses on cost and quality — and it’s not likely getting it back anytime soon. Multiply that by virtually every industry in existence today, and it’s not hard to see that the 50s and 60s were a special economic anomaly that won’t likely ever happen again.
The US wouldn’t have regained its edge even without Vietnam.
We can’t say exactly what would or wouldn’t have happened. What we can say for certain is that the war build up allowed the steel industry to make a lot of money off of old plants.
Jimmy Carter wanted to end America’s oil dependency in 1976. He installed solar panels on the White House as a symbolic way of saying we were going to get off the oil addiction. Reagan tore those things down and kept us dependant on oil.
We can say, because the things you list are almost completely independent of the fact that Germany, Japan, France (to a certain extent), and later China all made major advancements in their industrial capabilities post-war, and they (along with countries within their geographic and political spheres of influence) didn’t have to buy from the US anymore.
Would a 1970s and 1980s green energy revolution in the US have been a good thing that would have benefitted the United States? Most likely yes (and everyone else for that matter) — but again, that doesn’t change the fact that the countries left with minimal industrial output post WWII were going to rebuild that output. Individually many of them my not have surpassed the US (and may never do so), but in aggregate they (especially China) have reduced the US’s near sole-source influence they had on the supply chain for manufactured goods in the 50s and 60s. This was always going to be outside the US’s control and ability to change in any significant manner — they were always going to go from “virtually no competition” to “competition with virtually everyone” in the post-war years.
So, you’re telling me you know exactly what would have happened if Humphrey had won in 1968 and had pushed for a massive increase in NASA’s budget, resulting in a vast leap ahead in US technology?
The US ceding manufacturing to China et al was a political choice by Reagan and the GOP. They wanted to destroy the Unions, and were happy to let cities like Detroit implode.
Considering how much wealth is hoarded but so few in the US alone, this kind of sounds like bullshit. It’s not that it couldn’t be maintained, it’s that the forces that ensured employers respected employees were weakened, so greed ran amok again.
If we ate the rich and divided their assets amongst us, we’d meet and exceed that “old timey” quality of life for everyone.
I have as much problems with the hoarding of wealth as everyone else here does, but it’s not enough to change the calculus here.
The top 0.1% in the United States hold approximately $20 trillion dollars in wealth. If you “ate the rich” and handed this over to the other 99.9% of citizens evenly, that would give everyone a one-time payment of about $58 000. And sure — we’d all love to have an extra $58 000 in our pockets, but when you divide that by 40 years of inequality you’re looking at less than $1500 per year per person — and that isn’t going to make up for the fact that a lot of high-paying jobs left the US in that time because they weren’t needed anymore.
And you ignore the fact that the wealth that has been hoarded isn’t sitting in a Scrooge McDuck-like vault full of gold. Most of the wealth held by the top 0.1% is tied up in investments which back real, tangible industrial and civil infrastructure important to the US economy.
None of which changes the fact that as the rest of the world (re)industrialized post WWII, those other countries didn’t need to do business with the US as much anymore. The US didn’t become the global financial powerhouse it was in the 50s and 60s and 70s because people inside the US were wealthy — they did it by selling stuff everywhere around the world, because much of the rest of the industrialized world had to rebuild their infrastructure to build their own stuff. But now the US gets to compete with China and Germany and Japan and Taiwan and France in ways they didn’t have to back in the middle of the 20th century, and other countries are buying from these countries instead of the US. And no amount of US regulation was ever going to change that.
The US benefitted from a one-time bubble that can’t be repeated. No duh things changed for the worse.
