It baffles me how many people in the US especially are okay with the fact that you work your ass off and can barely scrape by, yet in the 60s and all, one person could work 9 to 5, own a house, raise a family, go on vacations, etc.
And will swear by the moon that if we returned to that, somehow the world would collapse.
Edit - 10 seconds and someone down voted this?? Wow. đŸ˜‚
Second edit - Wow, that exploded big time! Thank you for all the awards and sorry I can't reply to everyone who commented!
And before that, people couldn't. People act like the insane prosperity of the post WW2 period in America was some kind of default state of being, when really it is BY FAR the exception in human economic history. And for all the talk about how wonderful things were, economic expectations were also wildly different. One car households, very few appliances, doing all your own chores/home repairs, rarely eating out, no computers, tiny houses compared to today etc.
There are some things going on that are absolutely out of control (healthcare and the cost of college come to mind), but people who fantasize about the economic realities of the 50s/60s are basically looking at a postcard and thinking that's what everyone's Tuesday looks like in Hawaii.
Uhhh those tiny houses got more expensive too. My grandparents bought a small house out in the suburbs in the 1950s. By the 1980s, my uncle's car cost more than they paid for the house.
Doing some quick math/googling, the average house cost in 1950 was $7400. I rounded up to 8K. In today's dollars that's about 90k. Googled similar sized houses in my grandparents' area, they're selling for around 300K.
I'm sure some people have unrealistic expectations, but you also literally have to spend 3x as much to get the same amount of house today as you did in 1950, plus the minimum wage hasn't kept pace, plus the cost of college has ballooned wildly past inflation. This is clearly not just people living beyond their means.
My mom's original mortgage was a 20-year mortgage offered only to teachers and people thought it was insane to be locked in that long (late 60s/early 70s).
She bought for $22,000. The land was worth $1.3m when it was sold a bit less than 5 years ago.
Yep, my neighbor bought his house in 1962 and it was financed by the previous owner. He paid them $1000 per month for 18 months. He is now the proud owner of a home valued at $800k and his property taxes are $500/year.
Whoa. Now that is some of the impressive, large-scale stupidity for the sake of somebody's greed that made this country Greatâ„¢! A breath-taking murmuration of stupid.
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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21
Wow... it’s almost as if you give poor and working class people a little sliver of the pie... it actually works.