I’m not from the US. And I’m amazed how my dad put 4 of his kids through college during the late 80s and early 90s and here I am struggling with just 1 kid.
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:
- 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 is always going to be bigger than one.
Then came the real estate agent get rich craze. Those modern families with two working adults and positive cash flow just waiting to be … (oh wait, that’s the informercial sales pitch). There was money to made for no effort. Just buy a property, charge someone rent and make sure that you income was more than your expenses and boom, sit at home watching TV while your bank account gets rich. The two-earner family was now getting squeezed by competition from the small investor. This drove up the price of homes because the investor was willing to spend more if he could charge more for the rental. The two-earner families now had to shell out more to rent when they couldn’t afford to buy. Pretty cool business model where you can create your own customer base.
As is typical, it wasn’t long before corporations started to muscle in on the business as there was money to made; especially with the deep pockets of bankruptcy protected corporate entities that could speculate on property values going up. They also had local political and financial influence to ensure property values would go up. The small investors started to get pushed to the side and all the while, home price kept going up (and inventory going down).
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. Houses are unaffordable for everyone except the upper middle class and above because shareholder interests 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 finalcial 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
It wasn’t stolen as much as we willingly gave it up for modern convenience such as letting women work outside the home, prioritizing single family housing and car ownership in the suburbs, cutting taxes for the ultra wealthy and a plethora of other choices we made 70 years ago.
Yeah I didn’t do any of those things. I was born after it happened and grew up being told how it was still possible and easy and how the world was a kind loving place.
So stolen sounds about right.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Poverty in first world countries is a new phenomenon that has only emerged in the past 10 to 20 years.
Sarcasm aside… yes, the working class is still being exploited. It didn’t take Twitter tier propaganda to say it.
Poverty in first world countries is a new phenomenon
It’s not new, it just had been fought back considerably in the last century or so.
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
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.
I worked the factories in the late eighties, most had spouses that worked, most rented or bought a single wide, we all barely scraped by and were just a disaster away from being broke broke.
Sure you had a few, and I emphasize a few, guys who made decent bank, but they were specialists and most people were clamoring to be their right hand person to take over when they retired or quit.
That wasn’t the bulk of us.
We didn’t own that comparable sized house.
We didn’t take vacations, we visited family in another state.
We didn’t drive a nice or a lot of times even decent cars.
We on the line didn’t support a family of five comfortably, we all fucking struggled to make ends meet but we could keep modest for on the table and a roof over our heads.
That family of five on a high schoolers education was always a bit of a myth but I will say it was certainly better back then than today, at least there was abundant factory work that paid better than the minimum.
I would say a complete myth but they didn’t have cellphones, everyone didn’t have their own room, etc. it was a very different lifestyle.
Grandpa had five kids, the girls had one room, the boys had the other. Three in one room. Two in the other.
Everyone wore hand me downs and my grandpa worked a second job part time.
That’s because the meme references a time earlier than the 1980s. 1950-1970 or so would be the bubble of time where this was still possible. Union declines up to 1980 aided Reagonomics in thoroughly fucking everyone from middle incomes down.
I dont think they’re talking about the late 80s.
Ya, more like 50’s - 70’s. A huge amount of factory work in the US had already been offshored or started offshoring in the 80’s
Even back then, the average laborer wasn’t living in a 2,500 sqft house with two cars in the garage
I don’t think anyone promised 2500 square feet and 2 cars in the garage?
That said my parents were both government employees their entire career. Made it up into the gs 11-13 area which isn’t too hard to do. 2,500 square foot house, 2 cars, 2 kids playing travel sports, and a deck that was probably another 200 square feet. That was the early 90’s in Maryland, where all the civil servants live. Not some remote area of Montana. They’ve also said there’s no way they could buy that house with the gs pay charts and housing prices from about 2005 on.
So even your exaggerated example was not out of reach.
Yeah, things have always been tough on the working class no matter how you slice it.
It used to be when a man’s wife had a baby, all he got was a free beer after work with the boys before he went to see his wife in the hospital.
We’ve come a long way, but we’ve got much farther to go. The 50s-70s aren’t some kind of magical economic utopia. Backwards is not forwards.
Me, an intellectual, who makes less than the American minimum wage because I live in a third world country: You guys can’t make ends meet with your inflated s Dollar salaries? 🧐
Americans make more in wages, but goods and services are generally more expensive as well. Many people work multiple jobs, but can barely afford their means, and/or are trapped in a cycle of debt. Idk your situation, or that of your country, so I won’t say we’re in as bad a situation as you. Poor Americans might be in a more preferable position overall.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but the more money people make in a country the more expensive things are. So that inflated salary you are talking about also comes with inflated costs of housing and food and clothes etc.
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
sacrifice the quality of everything for maximum corporate profit
It never was, if you lived it. TV isn’t a reliable history book
Eh, I think it was, for a certain type of person:
A middle class white male. Now even working couples with no children can have trouble making ends meet.
Holy fuck, you mean it was true for people with money? No shit.
So my parents didn’t go to college for the wages of a job worked only during the summer?
They didn’t walk straight into jobs?
My grandfathers didn’t provide for 6 kids each on a solo income in the post war era?
Buddy. We have the history. The records, the paperwork, the video evidence.
Nope. You have vague stories from two generations back of a generation noted for not mentioning the hard parts.
Lmao. No. It really is all documented. This isn’t the dark ages where entire populations drop off the record and reappear 100 years later.
I lived it for a few brief years in the 70s then Reagan fucked us all
It was absolutely true. The only families not on single income were hard laborers or non-managerial retail/fast food and even then a carpenter could easily feed a family of 5.
“It was true for me because I was from a moderately wealthy area and family therefore it was the norm”
Lol no, not even close. My dad was a construction worker and my mom was a housewife until 1985, and we lived in the deep south. She took up data entry, and that’s how I got my start on computers.
Oh look. It thinks it was poor.
Did you have an iodine deficiency growing up? His whole fucking point is that he WASN’T POOR. Despite having only one parent working in manual labor.
Do you understand the context here? Don’t seem like it.
The context of you being a total dick for no apparent reason? Yeah, that context is loud and fucking clear. Maybe don’t refer to people as “it” in the future and people might take your argumentation a little better.
I would be content with not having the housing market cannibalized by AirBnB and real estate companies, a paycheck that isn’t eaten up by greedflation and a passable healthcare (I live in Europe, so we have public healthcare, at least nominally).
I’ve pointed this out before-
On TV in the 1980s, Tom and Roseanne were out of work constantly, but they owned a house and they never lost it.
On TV in the 1980s, Al Bundy supported his housewife and two kids on a shoe salesman’s salary.
You know what the criticism was? It wasn’t that they owned a house. It was “their house is too big for what they make.”
I don’t remember anyone thinking it was ridiculous that Al Bundy was a homeowner. Because of course he would own a home.
Even renting and even in the 90s… no one said that it would be impossible to live in Manhattan and work in a cafe like on Friends. The criticism was that the apartment was too big. The idea that it was something you could do was not in question.
Yes, it’s all TV and it’s all fantasy, but the public reaction to it should show you something.
Bundy was my first thought too, they were dirt poor with a clunker of a dodge, but they had a big house.
Because of course he would own a home
This hits hard. It was pretty much accepted that as long as you generally had your life together enough to work a full time job, you could save up and buy a home.
Simpsons did it too. That was part of Frank Grimes’ (Or Grimey, as he liked to be called) criticism of Homer.
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.
@┬──┬◡ﾉ(° -°ﾉ)depending on which episode you see grandpa either won the home in a crooked game show or he sold the farm to help Homer pay for it
Hey I know a nuke and he does have a house. He’s had it for at least 40 years but yeah…
Okay look this needs to stop.
First, the economic success has become overstated at this point. There was a relatively brief period in US history where this could happen. Being an adult during that period required living through both the great depression and WW2. The only people who truly got a free lunch were boomers born before 1955.
These times were also marked by extreme bigotry. Anyone who wasn’t a straight white neurotypical cisgendered man faced comical levels of oppression.
Even for that subgroup, life could have a million difficulties. You know how a lot of seemingly successful boomers talk about how money isn’t everything? There’s a reason for that. All but the most privileged had to deal with shit like this:
- A culture where it was not acceptable to show emotion as a result of millions of men trying to collectively repress their massive PTSD
- Marrying (for life) the first woman you date.
- Having kids by 22
- having all the stress and responsibility that comes with being the sole provider with that, again at an extremely young age
- Coming home every day (until you get married) with the knowledge that there might be a Vietnam draft card in the mailbox
It feels like 90 percent of online discourse revolves around oppression, trauma, and marginilized groups. Yet everyone still pretends that the boomers all lived some super easy life.
“It feels like 90 percent of online discourse revolves around oppression, trauma, and marginilized groups. Yet everyone still pretends that the boomers all lived some super easy life”
Ding Ding
Nearly all of those situations didn’t overlap.
Housing wasn’t cheap because people were racist, housing was cheap because the American dollar was strong from a well developed manufacturing base, net exports, and wartime technology innovations.
All those situations overlapped in that they were all things boomers had to deal with.
That’s why you will never come to a meaningful answer, the assumption that because a and b existed at the same time, that they were interrelated.
informal fallacy.
My point was in regards to general online discourse around Boomers having it easy. As such, I listed the struggles they had.
That being said the ability to support a family on one income probably had a lot to do with taboos about women in the workforce.
Just stop
Man this place is really worse than reddit.
Yeah, were a lot less nice to people who obstinately refuse to understand basic logic
“Oh but boomers had hard lives in other ways” isn’t the point at all and those things have nothing to do with the post.
Baby boomers are exclusively those born between 1946 to 1964. 55% of the living boomers are presumably females safe from the draft and 45% are male. 95% of the draft was over by 1971 whereas only 38% of boomers were of draft age by then. Of the draft pool about 8% were drafted.
On net 1.3% of boomers were drafted for Viatnam. 0% went through the great depression 0% went through WW2.
These times were also marked by extreme bigotry. Anyone who wasn’t a straight white neurotypical cisgendered man faced comical levels of oppression.
In case you hadn’t noticed 99.99% of the whining is from straight white neurotypical cisgendered men. Comical levels of oppression or not they on average came out of it with houses that ballooned in value 8x over and now enjoy the same degree of freedom from oppression as you and I along with their money and house and are steady trying to reinstate that comical level of oppression at the hands of the dictator they intend to give our democracy to.
Okay before I go off on you how old are you?
I’m 43. Statistically the people that are whining are themselves extremely privileged who on average came of age after Vietnam. They don’t get to use other people’s suffering as a fuckin excuse.
You sound like a petulant teenager.
So you look at people today demanding more and say “this has got to stop” and launch into some malarkey about how the worst generation actually honest had a real hard time and you believe other people are petulant. Alrighty then.
You have extremely limited empathy for boomers because they were the authority figures growing up. You still treat them like a teenager would treat their parents, as opposed to how an adult would approach the situation.
This tweet is alluding to some golden era of America that never really existed in the way that the Internet implies
Lol, why would you want the system of the past? You know how it turned out
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.
Not sure what you are talking about with the edit. This meme is conservative thinking. My point is simple “The millions of US families” who had this, which was never a majority and never non-whites, their kids are us. Well not me, these people who enjoyed this prosperity actually destroyed Iran where I’m from. We know how that system turned out, thus I don’t want to go back to the system that enabled that. I’d like to go to a new system.
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.
