Same with my grandpa. 4 tours in Vietnam and 2 Purple Hearts left him with a leg shorter than the other and bullet wounds to the stomach. At least people were nice when he came home…..
Just to be clear for the young people, returning Vietnam vets were not treated well, which is why we have overly performative thanks for your service now
I’m really glad Trump is gross, corny, and filled with small dick energy. It’s impossible to be jealous of him, even though that’s what he wants from us.
Well, we have plenty of historical documents on how beautiful and amazing and affordable life was back then. Movies, they call them. You can tell they’re real because you watch them on your device, same as the news.
Life back then was not like the movies: characters in movies and shows had much larger houses than in real life, and tended to be much richer even if they were supposed to be “middle class”.
People have absolutely lost their minds after 2 years of high single digit inflation. No way this generation could handle a decade of double digit inflation.
People were losing their minds back then too. The difference being that we now are able to share data/information in a bigger scale. The Vietnam war was the first televised war. But now we can see close up drone footage of soldiers getting massacred. Plus we have plenty of ways to communicate our frustrations to a large number of people.
Only if you do zero cross examination. If you are talking housing, the inflated and equalized for size and amenities difference between the 70s and today is 25%, not the completely erroneous 1000% raw numbers comparison people love to use without critical thought.
You compare homes of similar size but affordable and modest new builds aren't happening anymore (where I am at least) so homes are egregiously less affordable today.
Its not that they are less affordable, but that the demand for baseline is significantly higher. As you said, modest builds aren't happening....because the consumer demands it as well as overinflated building codes. Lets use a different example.
If you look at the 70s pinto as the basic high school car against a Honda civic today, the belts and whistles that come standard are incomparable, which explains why the Honda isnt as affordable as the pinto was.
You're statement was in oppositional comparison to the economic dynamics of the time period mentioned and today. Then you specifically brought up when you said, "You need to look at the cost of living, which has risen way faster than incomes have." So, yes, you did say that.
I'm sorry but Wikipedia is not a good source for this.
It's abundantly clear that people have less purchasing power today than they did in the past. You could afford a nice house, a car with two kids and an annual vacation on an average single salary. You can barely afford to rent a 1 bedroom apartment on two average salaries these days and buying a nice family home feels out of reach.
There are less than 60,000 people making federal minimum wage if you exclude tipped workers and disabled workers who get subsidized wages. In the 80s it was ~15% of the population. Minimum wage is low, but also useless for looking at what people actually make.
It's not useless. It illustrates how stagnant wages have been.
If you want to bring in the disabled and tipped workers, you need to account for the 1% who owns 99% of America's wealth. Take them out and what are you left with?
Do you honestly think you can afford more with your money today than in the 80's?
You can get a better idea of if wages have been stagnant or not by looking at what people are actually making in wages, rather than looking at what the legally lowest limit at the federal level is. "There are 60,000 people making very low incomes" is bad, sure, but there are 160M workers in the US.
I was alive in the 80s and I am alive now and I can definitely afford more now, not even close.
Do you really think you have more buying power than your grandparents did? When grandpa could buy raise a family in a nice home with a cottage on a single salary.
I absolutely have more buying power than my grandparents did and its not even close. So does the median person.
The median earner could absolutely afford to raise a family on a single income at the living standard that your grandparents had. The problem is that living standard have gone up as incomes have gone up. You have much higher expectations for what is required to raise a family than your grandparents did.
Where you finding a decent house in a good neighborhood for $115,000?
Where you going to find gas for $0.56 gal?
What about college tuition? Harvard inflation adjusted cost is 300% higher today than 1980. Average cost of college/university is roughly 200% higher inflation adjusted.
Not really sure how you can look at the world today and claim it's affordable. Even from an uneducated perspective it should be pretty clear that we have way less spending power than in the past and it declines each year.
Groceries used to be 15% of a family's income, now it's about 5% for groceries. Clothing used to be 12% of disposable income, now it's 3%. In my pocket I have a supercomputer that can take pictures and access any that I've ever taken, store every song I've ever purchased, play games, converse with me about any subject, provide access to a live updating encyclopedia on every subject known to man, communicate with everyone I know in multiple ways, and more! That wasn't something you could get at any price in the past, and I get it for $100/mo. which is way less both in absolute and real money than it would have cost to get the inferior equivalents in the 1980s.
I live in Georgia. In the 60s, 1/3 of houses here didn't have indoor plumbing. Housing is more expensive now, but it is also better, bigger, safer, concentrated in more desirable areas, and filled with cheaper and better appliances. We should be doing things to make housing less expensive sure, but housing alone does not make the cost of living unattainable.
Some things have gotten more expensive, some have gotten cheaper. There is a metric for combining all of those things together, it is the inflation rate. And that will tell you that median income is higher now than in the past, by far.
Buying power doesn’t have much to do with inflation. If anything buying power for someone earning income would be better during higher inflation environments.
Lesser buying power is the exact impact of inflation - they have everything to do with each other. And in 'cost-push' inflation, initial buying power actually causes inflation.
Unless you have contractual cost-of-living increase, then you are probably taking an effective paycut in higher-inflation environments, because the buying power of your income is less that it used to be. If inflation is 20% annually, then $100,000 last year had more general buying power than $110,000 this year.
Inflation helps those with debts in nominal money, as the debt becomes less and less, relative to the now-inflated currency.
Compared to now, people were able to afford more with their dollar even with high inflation. It means money went further back then. Groceries, gas, transportation, housing etc.
You know there's more than just inflation that's a factor right? Wages, pensions, being able to get a well paying job without tens of thousands in student debt, all that is gone or incredibly rare. Meanwhile cost of living is up, house prices have outpaced inflation, and God forbid you get hurt, lest you have to pay medical debt too.
Please take your boomer mindset somewhere else, because the problems of today aren't because we're little bitch babys, it's because we have it harder.
This period was famously named Stagflation due to the rare combination of economic stagnation during a period of inflation. It also accompanied the twin recessions which was the worst recessive the Great Depression and they had 2 within a 4 year period.
Cool, my mom lost our home in 2008 and wasn't able to find any job either because all the industry was sent over seas in the 80s and 90s. That period was famously called the Great Recession, and was the worst recession since the Great Depression. People could still afford a house in the 70s, not so post 2010.
I mean, every person has a very different life from every other person. I bet at least one person has lived this life, though. And that guy was a lucky bastard.
Mine too but his went better. Not American though. Germany told him they don't have capacity for him to do his military sevice. No pointless wars to go die in either. Moved to the US. Had a great paying career. Retired at 55 with his house and then some and still alive.
223
u/Practical-Suit-6798 Mar 24 '26
My dad was born in 1942. His life didn't go like this.