FUCK YOU RAEGEN, you unamerican fucking scumbag. It was bad enough for it to drop from 70s to 50 but Ronny was so happy to push it down into the 30s.
Fucking piece of shit, not to mention drug wars to impact minorities and the like. Absolute trash
FUCK YOU RAEGEN, you unamerican fucking scumbag. It was bad enough for it to drop from 70s to 50 but Ronny was so happy to push it down into the 30s.
Fucking piece of shit, not to mention drug wars to impact minorities and the like. Absolute trash
Ooh! And don't forget his utter failure to address the AIDS crisis because it only affected "The Gays", until uh-oh, now white kids are getting it from blood transfusions.
Or how in his later term, he was propped up Weekend at Bernie's style to compensate for progressing Alzheimer's.
Really, the Reagan shit show could fill a book.
McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Apollo can all diaf
Diddle in a fiddle?
When the people with abundance use their vast resources to ensure the framework for society is adequately provided for the masses, everyone prospers.
When the people with vast wealth horde it and force the masses to pay for their own framework for society, society starts wondering why they put up with it.
The wealthy need to be reminded that they have nothing if the people aren't participating in their system.
So the tax in 1953 for a single filer was for 92% of income over $200,000, equivalent to about $2.2M in today's money.
Of course there would be deductions, and it notes there was a maximum effective tax rate of 90%.
Edit: This article says the standard deduction was introduced as being 10% in 1944, and kept that way for 20 years, so that would have applied at the time.
lol
NAFTA just accelerated what was already coming when it comes to manufacturing employment. Manufacturing output has been decoupled from employment numbers for a long time now.
For millions of white families maybe
This is what I was coming here to look for. That dream the meme refers to is mostly for a white family. There were still a lot of the country struggling, and it doesn’t help to gloss over that. The dream was indeed taken from everybody, but it was not an equality dreamland 100 years ago by a far stretch.
NPR had a segment yesterday about democracy itself being on the ballot in recent times and they were interviewing an expert on government systems and how democracies fail. He said that the US didn't actually have a proper democracy until the civil rights era of the 1960s.
It's so fucking true it hurts. Makes me want to smack anyone that suggests the founding fathers had everything just perfect at the beginning.
He said that the US didn’t actually have a proper democracy until the civil rights era of the 1960s.
Now even they don't have it though
Sure, but if we resolved these economic issues today and redirected wealth from the top to the bottom income brackets, even minorities could have a minimum standard quality of life like the rest of us.
And then they spent the 1980s complaining about "latchkey kids" who were supposedly being neglected by their terrible families because both parents work and moms should stay at home dontchaknow.
The same people who built an entire system based on siphoning money out of us with economic rent now banging on about how we need to produce more of the children we can’t afford to raise anymore.
It was the end result of thousands of generations of history. The anomaly is that for the first time in human history, you have generations of children that will be worse off than their parents. Our future was stolen.
First time in human history? Do you maybe mean US history?
You could probably make some arguments to that effect about Venice, Rome, and even earlier civilizations like Sumeria. But those are far enough away from us now to not really be meaningful.
Plus said parents left not only economic ruin to their children, they also leave a world that is rapidly getting worse at a level far bigger than their specific countries due to the constant desire to exploit and exterminate for personal leisure and comfort.
Thanks, old guys. Now go and die the fuck off so people can try fix your shit, k?
Worse: for the most part, middle class white families in the US do not invest in their children, at all. It's a completely different thing throughout Europe and South America, and non-whites in the US tend to be better about this too.
Really, a generation was brought up thinking that they could live the good life forever and that was that. They didn't care about those who came after them or the fact that the entire country was dismantled and rebuilt for their benefit.
I get the point this is trying to make, but please, lets not reminisce about 50's America with rose tinted glasses as if that's a time we want to go back to... Other things that were normal were segregation, forced sterilisation of queer and disabled folks, general sexism and lack of opportunity for women, and so on and so on...
Instead we should be aiming for a world we haven't had yet (in modernity) where what is good and "normal" applies to everyone...
It's also important to note that while middle class white people might have had an existence like the image states, it was only possible by pushing the failures of capitalism onto minorities, mostly Black people.
Yeah, I'd actually written pretty much exactly that but then edited to be a bit more broad, but yeah - it was still capitalism, and capitalism always makes some people comfortable at the expense of others.
Rich people: Why are we discriminating? If we shit on white people too, we can be even richer.
The search for infinite growth and power will always end up in self cannibalisation, you're only in the "in group" until you're not anymore.. ¯\(ツ)/¯
OOP's message honestly looks incredibly racist with this perspective. Personally i read it as those doing the stealing being corporations due to my personal predisposition, but i could EASILY see someone in the MAGA crowd echoing this sentiment, because they'd read this and immediately assume those doing the stealing refers to minorities.
Thats the issue with saying something like "it was stolen from you". People will always assume those who stole it from them as whatever they personally think is harming society; whatever they see as the big bad.
Or maybe my autism is showing and i cant grasp context over text again
I think you're spot on, but it could be both our autisms in tandem, so make of that what you will (in seriousness forget the autism, you're spot on and as other comments have shown, OP far too easily becomes "Make America Great Again")..
I'm fine where I am thanks. You not wanting to be confronted with the fact that the thing that was "stolen" from you was always coming at the expense of people more marginalised, doesn't change that..
Except white people can't afford that anymore either. No one can. Not everything is about racism. Sometimes it's classism. But no, everything must be white vs them. Get off your high horse.
Pretending that all peoples who weren’t white were marginalized is a fallacy, but it seems the chip on your shoulder won’t allow you to accept a statement that does nothing to romanticize a period but rather calls into sharp relief the very real way a generation used capitalism as a weapon to foment their own success.
I'm perfectly fine if we never get it that great. I'd like to just get to the point where I can live comfortably with my 3 person family. I shouldn't be struggling with 2 above average incomes for my area.
Samesies. Nearly 200k gross between my wife and I. Wouldn’t know it after taxes, insurance, 401k, and HSA get taken out.
At least I’m fortunate enough to have those things. I’m quickly realizing that our weekly grocery bill alone for a family of 4 is almost as much as what I was taking home every week just 12 years ago. What fucking happened? Like, yeah, more mouths to feed, and we’re eating “better” (less prepared food, more plant based, etc).
How the hell do families get by? We are double the median household income for our area and our savings has stayed flat since our last vacation 2 years ago. We live rather modestly, one car payment, don’t buy a lot for ourselves, no major vices. Everything goes on credit cards that get paid off every month. Seems life just started nickel-and-diming us nonstop for a decade.
FWIW a lot of people who have high salaries overestimate how far they can go and overextend themselves financially. You can absolutely make $500k a year and be broke because you have a big house with a mortgage plus a vacation property and you're funding your retirement and childrens' educations.
Boston suburb. Barely…outside the 495 belt. Closer to Providence.
The belt used to be the dividing line for commuters and where housing costs started to skyrocket. It slowly moved outside the belt until 2020. So everybody around me is a Boston commuter with Boston wages and costs of living reflect that. Nobody is moving in since everyone is WFH, so our house value stagnated while houses further outside the commuter zone went up.
We actually would love to live somewhere a bit cheaper, but with that shift in the market, and the higher rates (we refi’d near the bottom), it’d be cost prohibitive to say the least.
This is the generational divide. For the most part, elder millenials and older were very much in the "quality of life is dependent on prosperity" mindset while those younger tend to be in more of the "as long as I am fed and sheltered and have some things that make me happy I'm ok" mindset.
My boomer parents keep telling me that I need to get a house and that my retirement plan (I put in 15%) isn't a real form of retirement. No, you see, only a house can keep you stable. Yeah right--are you going to give me a down payment? Probably not.
It was also the product of a set of circumstances external to the US that aren’t going to be repeated- namely the rest of the economic competition bombing itself to crap. It wasn’t stolen, there was a failure to look beyond the now and build a robust future. But that’s true almost everywhere
…you have to be asleep to believe it.
I went to school for a job that I worked 70 hrs a week at and still never got past $52k a year in the North Jersey/NY area. I just want to make enough to make ends meet and have a little leftover in savings, I don't even need it to be to the extent of the meme
I'm in the same area and I literally would cry if I could find a one room shack to buy. I don't even want kids, I don't have a girlfriend/wife. I can't even have a place of my own for one person let alone 5 kids...
No I don't want random roommates for the rest of my life and I want a house so I can dream of retirement.
Stay with family as long as finances are tight and you get along with them of course, there's no shame in living with your family.
Unfortunately that ship sailed almost 20 years ago lol right as I was graduating my (verbally abusive) stepfather said I would immediately have to start paying market rate for rent to stay with them so I said fuck that and left ASAP.
I absolutely envy people who had the opportunity to stay at home with limited expenses... But yes that's true for anyone else, if you can stay, do it!
Was it ever realistic to be a lon-time thing though?
Not really. People forget that most of the rest of the industrialized world at the time was devastated by one of the most destructive wars in human history. Essentially the rest of the world was dependent on US manufacturing, which was virtually unscathed.
That being said, the current situation is absolutely unacceptable. We are fully in the late stages of capitalism, and wages have not be remotely linked to productivity. The only reason anyone in the United States is living in poverty is greed. (I can't speak of other places as I don't know enough about their economies to have an informed opinion).
We live in the richest nation in the world, and the shrinking/struggling economic middle class is a direct result of Reaganomics and under-regulated free market capitalism.
They used to call Reaganomics, Trickle-Down Economics, and before that Horse and Sparrow Economics. Horse and Sparrow is the accurate term. They're feeding us horseshit, and they've known it for over a century.
Yes.
It was never real, it was a group of people making a concerted effort to exploit the post-war situation, which was only viable for 30 - 40 years, leading to inevitable collapse. The reason you can't live off a single income is purely the end result of capitalism and short-term, 0-sum thinking.
I highly doubt that she would have followed "it was stolen from you" with "by capitalists".
My expectation is that's exactly what was implied. Do you know something I don't?
At least an em dash!
Gonna be some parentheses for me, dawg
American wealth is built on imperialism and world economic domination. Whether that stolen wealth is evenly divided in your country changes nothing for the nations that your country imperializes and exploits. The world does not accept America's imperialism and it is time that it ends.
Yeah... Sum zero economy and that bullshit. I love the smell of soviet propaganda in the morning.
The cost of housing is literally what your government wants it to be.
Housing costs are literally a function of supply and demand.
It's up to us to fix this mess
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
Everyone kindly forgets thats when we had a 90% tax rate on the upper elites
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/...
save