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 never was, if you lived it. TV isn't a reliable history book

Oddly enough both of my grandmothers had full time jobs along with their husbands. It's never been a thing for me, although I know this is odd.

It was never going to be possible for the US to maintain that kind of standard of living forever. It worked out in the 1950s through to the 1970s because WWII left huge swaths of industry and agriculture in Europe and Asia devastated — it took decades^0 for affected countries to rebuild. Meanwhile, North American based manufacturing soared and became the envy of the world — everyone bought form North America, and anyone with no particular skill set who was looking for a job could get a good Union job in any number of factories.

But that couldn’t last forever. There was no policy the US Government could have taken (other than perpetual war against everyone else?) that would have kept the rest of the world from re-industrializing. Japan, China, Germany, Italy, France, and the UK (amongst others^1) were able to re-industrialize to a point where the US suddenly had competition again — and while the US could have some competitive advantage against some of its more Western allies due to size, they weren’t going to be able to keep that kind of lead forever against China, Taiwan, and Japan. The world wound up with more capacity than there was a market for, and so the winners were the ones that could do the job the cheapest (as is the way in a competitive marketplace).

It was an anomaly that brought the kind of prosperity the US experienced in the post-WWII years; you can’t recreate that today (as it’s only due to the limitations of the technologies at the time that North America was broadly spared any destruction during the war years — in the post WWII nuclear/ballistic missile era that wouldn’t be the case anymore).

^0 — there are still areas in Europe that are uninhabitable (and unfarmable) today due to WWI and WWII.
^1 — it did somewhat help that the Soviet Union re-industrialized under Communism; the generally closed nature of their economy, combined with the huge inefficiencies of most of its industries under centralized control didn’t really challenge or threaten the US’s economic might.

I suspect affordable housing is the main thing here that has been stolen.

The whole mess of the economy is hanging on that one thing. It gobbles up every spare penny. There isn't enough of it, and the price is only being constrained by how much the highest bidder is prepared to pay. The highest bidders are professional couples, no kids. If that's not you, you ain't getting shit.

As a wise man once sang, "build fuckin' houses everywhere, millions of the cunts".

Ha ha I have you all beat. I am living in the future with a three income household.

at least they found the time to ban tiktok today