Dragon
Senior Member
- Sep 16, 2011
- 5,481
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I am not that old but I've basically been self employed my entire adult life except for the first couple years. I do remember the cost of living being much lower in the 80's but wages were also crap then.
Actually compared to now they weren't.
I'm 55. I was born in 1956. The time when my father worked as a machinist was in the 1950s and 1960s. Take after-tax income from a typical 40-hour job, adjust for inflation, subtract the cost of health care, and you'd have to be making something like $50 or $60 an hour to match it today. The slide began in 1973 but really got underway in the 1980s, so by that time (the Reagan years) not much damage had been done yet, although the process was put in train then.
Obviously the economy of the last couple years is probably a larger hurdle but it is not representative of who we are as a whole. It will pass then what will the red herring be?
It's not just the past couple of years. It's something that's been building over thirty years. The rules of the game have changed to give more of the nation's wealth to the most successful at gaming the system, less to everyone else. And that's just wrong.
Really, this has nothing to do with self-reliance or personal initiative or anything like that. It has nothing to with having "sympathy" for someone else's problems; it will always be true that everyone could conceivably be better of if they did this or if they did that. Well, almost always. But that's irrelevant here. The truth is we produce wealth in a society, not alone in a wilderness, and we are always doing it in conjunction with others and there are rules of the game that determine how the wealth is divided up. For the past few decades, we've been living under a set of rules that were designed to maximize the rewards, not of work, but of ownership, and we're seeing the results right now.
This is not the way it should be.