Ah the good old days. I do miss stagflation, the SNL crisis and the boot of Reagonomics on my neck. Fun times.
Millennial here. I don’t remember that either. I feel like my life has been in survival mode from one once in a lifetime crisis to the next and my dad died from issues from agent orange exposure in Vietnam and my mom died from early onset Alzheimer’s after she worked hard her entire life and lost everything after 2008 not because she didn’t work hard and save but because she was layed off at the height of the Great Recession and burned through her deflated 401k and then began to get sick and lost her home and moved in with me but I couldn’t access healthcare for her in this evil system and her slow horrible death was beyond traumatic for my small family. Things keep getting more expensive and corrupt everyday. When is it time to burn this mother down? And hold the pedofile parasite class accountable and take our power back? I don’t think we want much just the ability to live in a system with integrity and to not have to worry about being cast on the streets to die in squalid conditions
“Good old days”
Terms and conditions apply. Mainly that you were a white cis-het male and were christian or at least willing to go along with the charade. And didn’t get drafted into war. And didn’t have to work in a coal mine or some other dangerous line of work.
Not necessarily. I’m a millennial. My dad bought our family home when I was a baby and was able to support our family of 6 and pay off the mortgage before I finished my GCSEs. We lived off supermarket budget brands, hand me downs and clearance goods, but we never went hungry or cold. We’re ethnic and religious minority. My dad immigrated to the UK when he married my mum and he worked as a bus conductor for most of his life. My parents’ siblings here were all able to get council flats or houses. So I’m able to remember a time where things were a lot better. Never mind buying a house in London, I can’t even afford to rent and there are no council homes. Especially given that the UK is heading back to the racism levels of the 80s again :(
Those “good old days” were propped up by strong unions, excellent public education, high taxes on the ultra-wealthy, and not much regulation beyond not letting another stock market crash happen (See also: rivers literally on fire in Ohio and elsewhere).
So, 3 Good Things, and 1 really Bad Thing (that makes a lot of money). We’re currently speed running back towards the Bad Thing, we’ve effectively killed unions, public education has long since been gutted, and taxing the ultra-wealthy at all is basically un-American. So…
Growing up, I didn’t even know how powerful unions were.
My mom worked at a factory and hurt herself when I was a kid. She couldn’t work for months. The union was why I was able to still get food and do hospital visits. She healed up and went right back to work.
With my first kid, my wife’s job decided her pregnancy was interfering with their need for labor so they fired her. They made it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR it wasn’t a pregnancy-related firing over and over again, but that she wasn’t meeting expectations… Because her body hurts from being pregnant. No legal protection either.
What gets me is that the vast majority of Americans actually believe they still have these protections when they don’t. Like, they aren’t even AWARE of the problem.
Go to any work related discussion and you’ll hear people going on and on about how you can’t get fired for this or that or you’re entitled to one thing or another and 90% if the time they are totally incorrect.
The worst thing capitalism did was convince us we didn’t need unions.
They’re close to getting reminded that unions are the compromise.
The ultra wealthy weren’t even really taxed that much back then due to loopholes. There’s a reason why many 20th century oligarchs have their names on libraries, public university buildings, and hospitals.
You’re confusing means for ends.
What you’re focusing on was that the rich never actually ended up paying those 90% marginal tax rates on their income. But the point of those taxes wasn’t to raise revenue; it was to force changes in behavior. Them donating to all those big hospitals and universities wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. The goal was to force rich people to spend or give away their money instead of hoarding it. Which is ultimately the goal. I ultimately would rather have someone make and spend a billion in a year than make and save a billion in a year. I actually don’t mind if the rich have extravagant homes and yachts, as they have to hire a hell of a lot of people to build and maintain those luxuries.
High marginal taxes also encouraged companies to give better pay and bonuses to their workers. That was actually the origin of the large end-of-year bonus corporate America traditionally gave out. If your company is sitting on a large pile of extra profits at the end of the year, rather than paying the high marginal tax rate, it made sense to give the extra cash out as a large Christmas bonus to employees.
What you’re talking about wasn’t a loophole. It was the entire purpose for having those high rates.
I am GenX and in my 20s lived stuffed into houses with 2 other couples so that we could make rent, I am not sure why people think we were skating on minimum wage, it was shit. If you put 6 wage earners in a house you can make it today too.
On college cost, that is absolutely true I do agree, it’s gotten so expensive it is not an automatic choice among my kids. Those who went straight out of school mostly didn’t have to borrow, nor did I pay much, they got scholarships to cover it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
Millennials and zoomers are essentially the “hard times make good men” crowd like the greatest generation.
Unfortunately, I’m not too confident on “good men make good times” this time around.
I’m late 30s myself. Here is how I see the generational situations:
My parents’ generation: if you got any college degree or went into any skilled trade, you would have no problem purchasing a home.
My generation: if you picked certain well-paying majors or trades, you would be able to own a home.
The generation currently coming out of school: you will not afford a home without inherited wealth/family assistance.
It went from nearly anyone could get a home, to those who made just the optimal choices could get a home, to basically no one can get a home. I work with people who graduated with the same degree I have, yet because they happened to be born a 10-15 year later, they’re locked out of home ownership. I look at the cost of housing and compare it to their salary, and there’s just no way to make it work. To buy a home around here as a young person, you either need family money or you need to be a married couple, both working full time in high-paying STEM fields.
This is a super accurate general breakdown, maybe the clearest I’ve seen honestly. Completely matches what I’ve witnessed through life (with all the acknowledgements that it doesn’t portray everyone’s experience of course, and lots of the rest of my words here suffer from the same).
What I’m realizing more and more, and want to expand on your points with - is how badly we all misunderstand the “family money” thing. I was slow to grasp it, because when/where/how I grew up, that sounded like opulence.
These days it’s table stakes. A lot of us have it, built-in, a lot of us don’t. I never had that help, scraped and scrapped to take my family to stability. Now that I’m here, I can see - no one here is like me. Roughly everyone I meet, in the world I fought to enter, is somewhat at ease. They don’t have especially high income jobs. They didn’t fight and struggle and strategize to own a home here. They typically can’t even be convinced it’s not roughly this easy for most. And they didn’t inherit huge wealth, either - they have no idea they’re “special”.
The degree to which one’s parents had stability themselves is becoming a stark dividing line in the US. I expect that line grows sharper and wider in the near term.
Edit - the troubling thing I’m trying to point out, is the vast communities of families all across the US who had just enough of a boost to make their lives feel, in every (shallow) way, like the stable affluent days of decades prior - the thoroughly taught “American Dream”. The people with money to spend live in a cloistered fiction, accidentally (from their perspective), and this seems super bad news for the current state of affairs.
Some misconceptions here. The good old days that still existed in the ‘80s and early ‘90s were kinda still there, but the signs of economic retreat were there too. We were offshoring a lot of manufacturing, bankruptcies were tools to get rid of pensions and union strength, and then everything Reagan did to fuck us that just wasn’t apparent yet. They weren’t the good old days that the Boomers had, but they were far better than today.
You could still rent a place for a few hundred bucks on a single job, community college was ~$50/semester not including textbooks. A cheap house in a not so great area was ~$100k, often a lot less. People didn’t use credit cards the way they do now so debt wasn’t as common, it was harder to spend money you didn’t have. You could still claw your way ahead or at least tread water.
2000 was a turning point. The dot com bust, 9/11, offshoring of even more jobs in tech, multiple recessions, endless war, and corporations running out of ideas other than finding ways to extract more and more from the consumer while offering less in return. Every generation since has had to deal with more things being put out of reach.
Even in the 2010s it was still possible in some areas. I bought my first home in 2012, right at the bottom of the market. I bought a townhouse in a half-built development in a rough neighborhood. This was in Houston. The developer had gone under halfway through building the place. It was weird, but the place only cost $92k for a 3 bedroom 1800 ft^2 townhouse. I put 3% down on an FHA mortgage. I literally got into home ownership for less than people pay to get into an apartment lease today. Oh, and the mortgage was small enough that for several years I paid the entire mortgage by renting out the two spare bedrooms. The coastal areas were pretty unaffordable even back in the early 2010s. But at least then if you lived there and wanted to, you could move to a lower cost of living city elsewhere in the US and get established. Now? Everywhere is unaffordable.
Capatilism is only possible when you steal value from someone or somewhere else.
The US financially raped the rest of the world to generate it’s vast wealth.
China saw the opportunity to steal this wealth back itself by convincing US companies to abandon their manufacturing capabilities. Now we are watching the slow decline of the world’s default nobility as they scramble to justify their value.
Tech bros running scared that America is going to collapse so they cling to AI because the only thing that could save this continent would be a fucking miracle tech breakthrough.
Ugh it all makes sense. I hate it when it makes sense. Occam’s razor has not been kind lately.
The world would be do different if the western world had a kill pigs list in the 50’s.
Capatilism is only possible when you steal value from someone or somewhere else.
I don’t know about “Capatalism” but “Capitalism” doesn’t require stealing value. All capitalism requires is private ownership of the means of production and using it to generate profit. If you’re a painter and buy paint, an easel and some canvas, and use that to sell portraits, you’re doing capitalism.
Most zoomers are anti-capitalist because they don’t actually know what capitalism is, and can’t really picture what it would actually be like in a different kind of economic system. Anybody who grew up after 1989 hasn’t actually seen a world where any other economic system exists. Capitalism was an attempt to improve a world dominated by monopolies, with big tariffs and trade barriers, where workers had no freedom to change jobs and had to fight over the scraps left over from the wealthy. If that sounds like the current world, it’s because we’re backsliding from capitalism back towards mercantilism and feudalism. Not because capitalism sucks.
I don’t know about “Capatalism” but “Capitalism” doesn’t require stealing value. All capitalism requires is private ownership of the means of production and using it to generate profit. If you’re a painter and buy paint, an easel and some canvas, and use that to sell portraits, you’re doing capitalism.
Private ownership of the means of production is theft. What you described with the painter is personal - not private - ownership of the means of production. Personal ownership is when someone owns something and uses it for their own benefit. Private ownership is when someone owns something that they do not use themselves, instead hiring others to use it for them to generate a profit. The painter isn’t doing capitalism when they paint and sell portraits, they’re doing productive labor and participating in a market economy, which is not exclusive to capitalism. If the painter hired other painters to paint portraits using equipment and a studio that belongs to the original painter and kept the profits for themselves, that’s capitalism.
Now, if the hired painters decided they didn’t like this arrangement and claimed the equipment and studio for themselves collectively (seizing the means of production), that would be socialism. The original painter - the capitalist - would consider this theft, as those things were their private property. The hired painters - the socialists - would consider what the capitalist was doing theft and they are taking what is rightfully their collective personal property because they are the ones using it to produce value. To the capitalist, the value is produced by their capital (the means of production) and the labor is just another kind of capital which they have already paid for with wages. To the socialist, the value is produced by their labor and the means of production is being rented to them by the capitalist for their excess labor value, whose only claim to it is that they paid the upfront cost.
The owner of a company is like a landlord except instead of gatekeeping land/housing they are gatekeeping the means of production. Instead of paying rent, those who want access to the means of production sign away their excess labor value by agreeing to a set wage.
You steal value by creating monopolies. You steal it by artificial controlling resources, your “capital” so that no one else can benifit. You price gouge, manipulate, spread propaganda, and lie. Make dirty deals behind closed doors. Undercut your competition.
Pro capitalist always leave out all the awful tactics capatilism employs to do things that require you to buy from them. That’s the theft. Gaming the system to put people in hard places. Baiting the general populace to bad behaviors all for the means of profit.
We shouldn’t be required to play a game of literal monopoly to survive.
Free market capatilism is a joke. Capatilism only drives invitation of the business model and freedom for the owning class at the expense of the people.
What’s the difference between feudalism and capatilism when corporations own ever piece of property on this spec of dust and you’re required to rent? Still playing the rules of capital, but without any of the rewards. Think about it. I doubt you own your house. The bank probably owns it just like it owns a majority of peoples. Probably the same thing with your car. Your education. Hell even your life depending on how your health is. People who have to pay 1000s to insurance companies every year just to stay alive. For insulin treatment that was sold for a 1$ by its creator for the good of humanity. Monopolized. You aren’t a capitalst if you own nothing.
Most people own nothing because that’s the goal of capatilism.
The perfect company has no employees, sells no product, carries no debts, yet takes from everyone it can. It is the nature of capatilism to shuffle towards this structure.
The US in the 1989s had Europe and the rest of the world by the balls by being the global reserve currency. A system put in place after world war 2 where Europe basically sold itself to the United States. Everyone had to spend money and buy it in debt while the US had the keys to the printing press.
When you take out a loan why do they charge you interest? If you don’t pay your loan back they will simply toss you in prison or reposes what meager property you have. Garnish your wages? What incitive does interest serve? It’s just their to keep you paying, to keep you under your feudal lord.
Somethings just shouldn’t have a price tag and should be owned by the people.
If you’re going to post these screeds, you should at least learn how to spell capitalism.
Capitalism != free market.
Under a free market, a painter buys paint, an easel and some canvas at prices set by supply and demand, and then paints and sells portraits again at a price set by supply and demand.
Under capitalism, an artist wants to start a painting business, so he goes to a rich person or group of rich people and says “If you give me some money to start my painting business, I will give you a share in ownership of the business and its profits.” with this so-called capital, the artist rents or buys a building and supplies and operates the business to effectively pay back that loan. The working class make a living and the rich get richer for having been rich.
Under a free market, a painter buys paint, an easel and some canvas at prices set by supply and demand, and then paints and sells portraits again at a price set by supply and demand.
That’s capitalism, my dude:
- Private ownership of the means of production: the worker owns the paint, easel and canvas
- Used for obtaining a profit: the worker uses the capital to transform inputs (the blank canvas) to outputs (painted canvas) which they sell at a markup to generate profit.
What you’re describing as capitalism is also capitalism, but it adds unnecessary steps. Capitalism isn’t about selling shares in companies, although that can happen under capitalism (it also happens under mercantilism). It’s not about loans (but of course they can happen under capitalism, just like under any other economic system).
Your misunderstanding of capitalism is why people hate capitalism. They think it’s about the rich getting richer. But capitalism is merely about private ownership of the means of production, and selling the results using that capital for a profit. That’s it.
In the middle ages you could buy art supplies and do art, but if you wanted to sell your art, you needed to be in the right guild. For example, if you lived in London you couldn’t sell playing cards unless you were a member of the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards. And, whether or not you made a profit wasn’t a matter for the free market, rates were determined by the guild. The guild determined who could own the means of production for the arts they controlled, and the guild determined prices.
Similarly, under communism, there was no private ownership of the means of production, so there was no selling things for profit after making them. Everything belonged to the state. Until the 1960s in the USSR there was an exception for small production cooperatives owned by groups of artists. But, those were liquidated and transferred to the state because they really weren’t in line with communism.
If you want to be able to sell things on the free market, and to buy and own the tools you use to make those things, then you want capitalism. If you don’t want wealth concentration, then you still want capitalism, you just want it to be regulated in the way that the early thinkers like Adam Smith thought capitalism should be regulated.
The term capitalism was coined by socialists to describe existing systems where wealth accumulated into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Only later did the supporters of the existing system attempt to “reclaim” capitalism and change the meaning to this nonsense. Capitalism is not “an attempt to improve a world dominated by monopolies,” monopolies are the bread and butter of capitalism.
Painters owned their own paint supplies under feudalism. Were they “doing capitalism?” No, capitalism is not something you “do” on an individual level, it is a system that exists, and which has only existed for a few hundred years. Capitalism does not mean simply trading or owning tools.
Monopolies are the bread and butter of mercantilism. Capitalism was seen as a way to break up those monopolies.
We are At War now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this War might last for “a very long time.”
Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history – which is no doubt true – but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a war-time economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed.
That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now. The party’s over, folks. The time has come for loyal Americans to Sacrifice. … Sacrifice. … Sacrifice. That is the new buzz-word in Washington. But what it means is not entirely clear.From Hunter S Thompson: https://www.espn.com/page2/s/thompson/010918.html
Still wild to me that he was publishing stuff like that for ESPN. Can you imagine ESPN putting something like that about Trump on the page today?
You know what’s even funnier/saddening? When people who never experienced “the good old times” will still defend inequality and conservative values because those promise a full blown lie of “we actually bring prosperity” while accusing the left of “defending their elites’ privileges”
In order to have a middle class, you need government subsidies for the working class and regulations on the robber baron class.
FDR started to do that. And do it went for a couple decades. Hence the booming 50s with a house and car got everyone on a single income.
Then, in 1981, Reagan happened. The subsidization of the working class was slowly peeled back. More was given to the robber baron class.
Which brings us to where we are now. + Dictator voted into office on top of that. So, no help there.
I find it amazing how so many bad things in America can be traced back to Reagan.
If I could erase one person from history it would not be Adolf Hitler. It would not be any other dictator alive or otherwise. It would be Reagan. The amount of harm he caused not to just the US but the entire world is astronomical and has caused the suffering of hundreds of millions of people and the death of tens of millions.
I mean both are horrible, but the problem with Reagan is that he knew how to hide his atrocities. People don’t really grapple with how bad what he did was because he wasn’t overthrown by the Allies in a Great War, there was no purpose-built death camps, he didn’t make rambling speeches declaring entire races as vermin.
He just quietly let AIDS happen, pretending it’s not a real thing. He deregulated banks for the sake of “competition”. He fucked with the Middle East.
We compare Trump to Hitler a lot, but he’s like a more outwardly fascist Reagan.
Hitler vs Reagan in a steel cage match. You’ll never believe who they’re rooting for.
It’s all a game of 6 degrees of Ronald Reagan.
I wish zoomers were anti-capitalist because they understood that the “good old days” were only “good” because of the exploitation of the global South.
Many early zoomers (1993 to 2006) may remember something of the world before 2008 crisis and before neoliberalism fucked the ideas of the American left. We had the opportunity to experience a slower way of life and peace of mind. Many of us also had the opportunity to witness the very few last years when traditional family was still a thing. Late zoomers and Gen alpha have never experienced nothing like that
Aye, I still try to emulate that shit sometimes. As annoying as it is to have my music knocked out at times it’s nice to go through a cellular dead zone ya know? Now if only 07 and 06 weren’t some of the worst years of my life due to my physically and sexually abusive father combined with the shit fest that was foster “care”.
i’m 36. i have young coworkers and i try telling them that even 10-15 years ago it was not like this.
Maybe not in the “developed” countries, but capitalism been fucking the rest of the world for a long while.
Also, are you forgetting the economic recession in 2008? That also wasn’t terribly fun. Millenials haven’t had a great go at this “good old days” either. Maybe when we were children, but it’s not like we were out buying houses then.
Also, 10 years ago was 2016, which is when all this awful really dove off a cliff for those in the “developed” world.
it’s difficult to explain concisely, it boils down to this; ten years ago i could rent an apartment while serving tables, today i cannot.
That’s fair enough. Today I can barely rent an apartment on a double income with a union job.
My impression is that Zoomers in the USA have been told that the abysmal, violently upward-distributing societal scheme prevalent in America in the 21st century is “Capitalism” and everything else is “Socialism” which “doesn’t work.”
That is not so. The world has a vast spread of free market capitalist countries, and none of the other ones have a model similar to America’s. What is most telling is that other countries kept the model that America came up with after World War 2, while America destroyed it and refashioned is as corporatism starting in the 80s.
It’s as if someone had replaced “We The People” with “We The Corporations.” It’s telling that a lot of people measure the welfare of the commonwealth by stock market indices, because those measure the welfare of corporations.
