I’m at least relieved to not have lead poisoning, for my gay brother to be safely out, and for my interracial marriage to not be scorned by the community.
Yet.
Kind of shows that time is a circle
I see it more as a muddy hill. Only in the US some people have now shat upon that hill with the greasiest, nastiest shit so the slide is even worse on this length.
Honestly, at this point I’m just waiting for trump to bring back leaded gas.
Spend all of their own parents inheritance, leave nothing for their own kids, talk about how they had to work their way up from nothing.
They should be called generation G for hitting that sweet spot.
What about Korea, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and the fact that ptsd was treated with electrical shocks or drilling holes in your brain
Also lead in the air
Apparently hurt people also disappoint people
Absolutely. It’s no coincidence that many of the people who committed atrocities in WW2 had lived through the trench wars of WW1.
Also constant threat of global nuclear annihilation
That hasn’t gone anywhere though although the media doesn’t keep drumming about it as much I guess
I don’t blame old people, they lived the best of times, their lives were comfortable because they were in a boom. They had high hopes, had kids with a bright future in mind for them, but things change, some see it, others are oblivious to it.
It’s still fair to blame them. Old people blame young people for everything afterall.
it’s not “things change” all the current mess was created by them in the decades after the time period of the op tweet
I 100% blame them for pulling the ladder up behind them.
If the roles switched we’d probably do the same.
We’re a 1950’s 91% top-tier tax rate away from the same.
It’s amazing how often this gets mentioned. In truth almost nobody paid that tax rate because it applied only to salaries. Rich people have always gotten most of their income from capital gains (which were taxed at a low rate in the 1950s, just like today).
It applies to income, not salaries, and it applies to corporate income as well as personal income. Nobody needs to pay it for it to achieve its purpose. Indeed, nobody should be paying it, ever.
You have a choice. I’ll give you $900 for you to do anything you want with. Alternatively, I’ll give you $10,000, but you can only spend it on something that you can convince me is something you need for your business.
You can buy $900 of GOOG, or you can spend $10,000 on a bunch of electronics. You can buy $900 of AAPL, or spend $10,000 “entertaining clients” at a strip club.
You can buy $900 worth of stocks, or purchase goods and services produced by workers.
Nobody is taking the $900 here. Everyone is taking the $10,000. Nobody is paying 91% on $10,000 over the line. You can get much more value from your large “business” spending than you can get from your small investment.
Now, if the numbers are $6300 on anything, or $10,000 on business, a lot of people are going to take the $6300. This is a top-tier of 37%.
$7500 on anything, or $10,000 on business, most people are going to take the $7500. This is a top-tier of 25%.
The 91% tax rate isn’t for the government to spend more money. The 91% tax rate is to ensure the richest among us get greater value from hiring workers than they do from buying securities.
You frame it like those are the only two choices. They aren’t. The third choice is capital flight.
People constantly forget that governments don’t have godlike tax enforcement powers. In the real world people avoid taxes via a million different avenues. Absconding with their money for greener pastures is a last resort but it happens constantly.
Take China for example. Taxes are way lower than the US yet capital flight is such a huge problem that the government has enacted Capital controls. Yet capital flight from China continues largely unabated.
So what this means in practice is that if you want to have a 91% top corporate tax rate in the US without a gargantuan capital flight problem you’re going to need a government that is way more powerful and draconian than either the US or China is right now.
Now you might say “what if I just let everyone go and get the money back when they try to sell things to the US?” Well that’s basically what the US under Trump is doing right now, via tariffs. But then you tack on the capital flight beforehand and that means all the big companies, all the great jobs, leave the country before prices skyrocket. This is how you impoverish the US to third world status.
A third choice is capital flight. there are even more choices, including but are not limited to creative accounting to hide revenue and assets, or bribing -er I mean supporting politicians in exchange for writing loopholes into the tax code.
Do you have an alternative suggestion to tackle the issues that such a high tax rate tries to address? I’m just genuinely curious.
If by issues you mean wealth distribution and the existence of an ultra-rich, powerful class, no. I don’t have a solution to that. The fundamental problem is that wealth brings power and the concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands brings other benefits, namely: coordination.
Smaller groups nearly always have an easier time coordinating their efforts than larger groups, so smaller groups tend to have a disadvantage unless they’re on the battlefield (and even then, wealthy well-supplied small groups of soldiers easily defeat large groups of poorly-equipped, poorly-trained peasants).
The big problem with the high-tax approach is that it’s a class warfare strategy. Apart from the communist revolutions of the 20th century, the history of class warfare has not gone well for the non-rich side. I think that moment in history was a unique one and unlikely to be repeated, barring the unforeseen appearance of some new decentralized warfare technology.
So where does that leave us? We can try non-class-warfare strategies. We want to align the interests of everyone, rich and poor, towards a common goal: peace, prosperity, and sustainability. Why would the rich want this? Because life is better that way! It’s much nicer to live in a safe, walkable, integrated, and prosperous community than it is to live in a walled compound surrounded by ghettos.
Because life is better that way! It’s much nicer to live in a safe, walkable, integrated, and prosperous community than it is to live in a walled compound surrounded by ghettos.
💯
Selfish rich people should be properly selfish and make the world better so they don’t have to be grossed out by poors. Or worry about heli skiing becoming impossible one day. Be selfish richies!
Hey economists love VAT I hear?
I’m reminded by the story I once read about Eritrea, a country with wealthy enclaves for the royal family plus foreign petro-engineers. The enclaves have these walls along the road with vast ghettos on the other side.
It’s a miserable place. The engineers tend not to stay long. Just make a lot of money in a short time period and then leave.
You frame it like those are the only two choices. They aren’t.
No, I provided a simplistic, informal explanation, not a conclusive evaluation.
The third choice is capital flight.
Let the parasites leave. That’s the point. They are sucking the working class dry, and we would be better off without them.
Your argument operates under the assumption that a member of the current ownership class needs to be involved for a business to be successful. That is simply untrue. They aren’t the component enabling employment. They are the parasite leeching our productivity.
The reality is that the most prosperous era of American history was made under a 91% tax rate, specifically because such a tax rate drives capital into the control of the working class.
EXACTLY! I found something so defeated and defeatist about this thread UNTIL I read your comment.
This was once a reality!
Why do we not have it now?
Obviously an extremely nuanced question but clearly part of that is that even the obscenely wealthy were forced to realize that obscene wealth destroys more than it builds.
Would have been nice if younger folks had voted in their own interests.
Why should they vote? No one is actually representing them.
Because they don’t vote…
If your demographic is (correctly) viewed as being made up of nonvoters, then politicians are never going to pander to you no matter how much you whine online.
it’s a hard truth so many fail to realize. small inconvenience to clam your views.
Wonder why that is
Two party system. One party is neoliberal ultracapitalists, the other is racist mysoginist neoliberal ultracapitalists.
Always someone else’s fault, never yours
And then bitch and moan when anything doesn’t go absolutely perfectly in their favor.
What I like about this is that it doesn’t pretend boomers are uniquely evil, just the generation that got lucky.
Except that’s not really the full truth either. The generation got lucky AND systemically burned every thing down so that they were the only ones left with all the benefits that luck provided.
Any other people would have done that. Boomers are no different than anyone before or since. It is 100% Random Chance and anyone who disagrees is a liability.
Any other people would have done that.
What a load of bullshit. Major self-report my friend.
Before boomers, every subsequent generation was more well-off than the previous.
Yes, it is a “self report” of me correctly understanding the world and you being too stupid to, which means you are doomed to fuck the world up even further. Congrats on your bottom of the barrel right wing idiocy!
Speaking in absolutes not only makes you a sith, it makes you ignorant too.
It is important to understand why people are the way they are in order to prevent future repeats. In the case of Boomers, I don’t blame them 100% nor am I going to just chalk it up to just random chance.
If you look at the generation as a whole, the predominant qualities they have are entitlement, arrogance, narrow mindedness, and a deep lack of empathy. Those attributes are what lead them to do the things that they did with the benefits that the luck of their circumstances gave them. But where did those attributes come from? I believe again you have to blame the parents.
I believe that the root of the problems come from the Boomers’ parents. After the war, they were so happy to be alive and living in relative peace, that the popped out a bunch of kids and then showered them with all the benefits that the post-war prosperity brought while also not really paying that much attention to them (who has time to work and be fully involved in the lives of 5 kids?). What did that lead to? A generation that was spoiled and had no boundaries set, so they grew up to do a bunch of drugs, have a bunch of sex, and generally think that every thing is owed to them and everyone else is wrong because they are the best.
Boomers are spoiled children.
You’re so close to getting it lmao. It is indeed important to understand why people are the way they are, which is why anyone who misunderstands boomers—such as you—is a liability. Damn, y’all right wing dumbfucks are so close no matter how far.
Yet, you are so far from figuring out what is wrong with yourself or how you interact with others. For instance, I’m am about as left leaning as one can possibly be. Yet somehow you pegged me as right wing nut job. You convinced yourself that only you are right and therefore everyone is wrong and dumbfucks.
Arrogance breeds ignorance.
I mean, sustainability would have raised all ships
The future looks less bleak when the goal is not to live the life of that generation. There is AI, there are mobile phones, there is solar power and many more things.
When things are expensive, it means that few resources are used. This is good for the environment.
The big difference is that communication is free. We can talk to almost anybody in the world. This is still a huge untapped potential. That generation had a good life, but ours can be better.
Communication is not free. Check your privilege.
Fuck LLMs and mainstream phones OSes
I would still take my life over my mom’s. Things were not good for women back then.
Did she starve to death? Because that’s our current timeline
It’s getting comparable… women are being charged with murder for totally natural miscarriages. Imagine ending up in prison for decades for something you had absolutely no control over.
And women are also dying from preventable issues with pregnancy, because it is illegal for doctors to remove fetuses even when they are a direct threat to the mother’s life (ectopic) or even totally dead in the first place.
America is becoming exceedingly hostile to anyone not white, cis, and male.
If it makes you feel any better it still feels pretty hostile to me as well.
Well she was around before birth control was legal or widely available, and before abortion was legal. Yeah I agree the US is getting more hostile but nobody at my work is asking me to get the coffee, or saying women can’t do the job. And raised 4 kids while doing a dissertation, widowed when the youngest was not even a teen yet.
I don’t think now is great but it’s better in a lot of ways.
There’s a lot of people who resent that things ever changed for women, and have spent every moment since trying to put things back to the way they were. I’ve worked for a lot of them. I’ve definitely been expected to get coffee, been told not to speak to male coworkers unless absolutely necessary, been told that I dressed too well and it was tempting male coworkers to sin, been told there was something mentally wrong with me because I didn’t “take care of myself” by wearing more makeup, been blamed for work conflicts I wasn’t involved in because I should’ve been the peacemaker. All in the last 10 years. But, yeah, I’m glad I can use birth control legally.
Holy crap! That is dreadful. I have not worked anywhere that backwards. “Not to speak to male coworkers?”. Did you work for the Mike Pence campaign or something? What did the other women in the workplace think?
I did get paid less than the guys I worked with in the early 1990s, literally because they were men. But not since. We have female VP of Finance, female Financial Controller, I’d say it’s 75/25 still in the top so not equal, but about half our operational managers are women, and I work in sports, that doesn’t seem a wildly progressive industry.
It was a legal office that was part of a well-known insurance company. The manager was a conservative Catholic. He believed that a man and a woman speaking to each other too much was “basically the same as sex”. He told me it was acceptable to speak to men if I absolutely had to, but I needed to say what was necessary and then stop talking. He accused me of having sexual affairs with multiple coworkers, literally for speaking to them too often, conversations going on for too long, going out for lunch together, etc. Normal coworkerly behavior.
Since interacting with them would be “infidelity”, he ignored the female attorneys in the office. He’d invite all the male attorneys out to a nice restaurant for lunch while all the women ate a bag lunch in their offices, etc. They couldn’t stand him. He was nice to the support staff, but I think in his eyes, they were “good women”: married with kids, Catholic, subservient towards him.
He thought I was horrible because I lived with a boyfriend, didn’t want kids, wasn’t religious, etc. I tried to have an adult conversation about it where I told him I respected his beliefs, but I didn’t share them, and it wasn’t his place as a manager to punish me for not sharing his religious beliefs. But, he insisted it had nothing to do with religion.
The company’s attitude was that he was the manager, so I had to do what he told me to do. 🙄
I agree that things were bad back then but my point is things are about to become much much worse. We will all be looking back wishing we could go back in time. Our future is bleak and you’ll be lucky to not starve to death in the coming years.
America alone is going to be in immense economic pain starting some time within the next 3-9 months. Shipping into America from China is dropping off a cliff, with a nearly 40% all sources drop in port activity on the west coast at this time. Seattle alone has seen a 60+% drop in Chinese shipping.
2025 is going to be an absolute economic bloodbath for most any American citizen inside America.
Things can always backslide
Some people are taller, smarter or better looking than me. It’s not fair!!!
Is it wrong to highlight that society in the west has gotten worse.
Sure you can’t blame boomers for just being born at the right time, but you can certainly blame them from pulling up the ladder and voting against anything that will affect them.
Take near me in the UK, plenty of home owners protesting against adding more houses along the green belt as it might devalue their properties. Utterly selfish behaviour, yet there are some home owners in these areas that support more houses because they care about more people than just themselves.
If you think giving more people a better chance at life is a threat to your existence then you’re a shitty person.
Yes. He’s really saying that about the generation who was factually proven to have been mentally affected by leaded gasoline.
That’s it. You’re so smart. Go take your statins and nap.
Ok, boomer
Shoutout to our parents for hitting an absolute timeline sweet-spot. Drop in right after a world war, have a bunch of weird sex before HIV, buy a house for like 20.000€, start a family, retire young and peace out right before the ocean kills us.
Stating the raw value of the house will only make naysayers throw inflation into your face.
The better way of saying that would be,
buy a detached SFH for only 4× annual minimum wage
Like, really drive it home how absolutely unaffordable homes are these days. In my corner of Canada, the median detached SFH is going for 28× minimum wage, and it’s 32× if it’s new construction. My own 1972 split level sold brand-new for only 4× the 1972 minimum wage.
Just shows you how low minimum wage is.
It’s not just low minimum wage, although BC’s is currently the third highest in Canada.
No, the problem is also “investors” that buy on spec only to sell at a much higher price just before completion, as well as “investors” that buy up 5, 10, 15 or even more homes for rental income. Both of these goose home values into the stratosphere and massively constrain the supply of homes that are affordable to those wanting to stop being renters.
Were it not for “investors”, homes would likely be half or even less than what they currently are.
Then rent is also twice as expensive as needed.
The supply has to increase. Since politicians won’t organize public housing, renters could organize it on their own.
“single family home” means more than “detached sfh”
You can throw the inflation right back at them. Boomers were born into the Bretton Woods system, started borrowing from us in the 1970s, and then kept voting for lower taxes on the wealthy.
Old people used to complain about inflation frequently because they experienced a stable dollar for decades… until the Nixon Shock.
Jesus in today money that’s 60k for a house. For a nice hours our parents bought
A quick way of estimating annual wage for a full-time position is to take hourly, double it, then move the decimal point to the right by three spots.
So for example, the BC minimum wage is $17.40. Double that is $34.80. Annually in a full-time job, that’s about $34,800 before taxes.
And 4× that is $139,200. Current median SFH prices for used homes sit at just under $1M in my podunk tourist town. All detached SFH, $1,200,000. New construction, $1,500,000.
I mean, really - who under 50 can actually afford those prices without intergenerational wealth to give them a leg up in life?
SFH should be outrageously expensive. They are an unsustainable model with huge externalities. They were artificially cheaper for previous generations due to the tax shell game they run on us all. They are a part of the reason the current generation is under water.
And it pisses me off that “externality” is STILL not in my spelling dict in 2025.
Also median detached sfh in the 70s was probably closer to 1200 sq ft. No builder is going to do anything less than a McMansion these days
My own home was 2,000ft² when built. In 1972. That was the Canadian average at the time, as most homes built by developers were made with the same 15 (or so) floor plans with slight variations.
You’re thinking of the 50s. Those homes were indeed around 1,200ft², and there is even a pair in my neighbourhood the next block over
That’s grandparents now, this meme is old.
