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This should be the norm for the average family again
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Maybe I didn't acknowledge strongly enough that you're 100% in saying that shit sucked back then. Shit sucks now, too. They just suck in different ways unique to each time.
The killing the unions comment was in reference to the idyllic income OP is nostalgic for, since they are part of the reason such a situation was possible. Sorry if that felt like "whatsboutism," it wasn't intended to be that way.
That makes sense.
I get frustrated at frequent oversimplifications. Reagan and the neocons certainly made things worse but they were a few out of many factors.
Even if we imagined a world where we have a bunch of Bernie Sanders all over government there are limits to what they can do. Strong unions in the US wouldn't have done anything to stop Asia from industrializing, Europe from rebuilding its economy or the rest of the developing world from trying to move out of agrarian economies. When the US car companies were the only game in town there was a lot of excess that could be spread around to workers. Once a bunch of other countries started offering cars it put more and more pressure on the US companies to spend more money on quality and charge less for finished products. Over here we got used to a war induced monopoly and convinced ourselves that's "normal" or that it's simply the result of democracy or American ingenuity.
If we actually want to improve the state of regular people we'll have much better success if we're honest with ourselves about both the present and history.
Yup, totally agree, and I think the improved standards of living in those areas are absolutely a good thing, even if it's changed the way the American economy works. It was never going to be static anyhow. China is starting to produce higher quality products and their standard of living is increasing, too. Their low-end labor has moved to Vietnam, among other places, and hopefully they develop their own mature economy in due time.
I don't think a highschool education is enough to have a high standard of living in the American economy, that fact was pretty much always going to be true with the way the economy has changed. Still, the bottom has fallen out and there's little reason it should have outside of the union busting.
I suppose, had the American unions stayed strong this whole time, this meme might still have been produced, with people still remembering a time when less education was enough to climb higher on the economic ladder.