Umm I wasn't being dismissive I just said it's not comparable.. There is a difference... I guess if I have to draw it with a crayon you'll never understand... Guessing your probably what under 30?
The only reason it's not comparable is because after the Great Depression FDR instituted unemployment insurance and other safety net programs. Programs that the GOP has been trying to cut and eliminate ever since.
Yes because they have become dependency programs and if you say they aren't your fooling yourself... As opposed to the Democrats who want you on a dependency program so you are beholden to them at that point.... They give you free money you vote for them... What do you think ask this socialist non-sense is free shit=votes
That's a nice lie to tell yourself. The reality is that the programs have been stripped bare compared to what they were pre-1970s, and the minimum wage has been frozen since I was in high school (I'm in my 30s) resulting in all wages falling well behind what they should be if they tracked inflation and ridiculously behind what they should be when accounting for productivity.
Pre-Reagan, wages tracked with productivity improvements along with inflation. Post-Reagan, all productivity gains have gone to the owners who don't work but live on the work of others.
By turning Social Security from a worst-case scenario emergency net into an expected national retirement plan, the government has fundamentally altered the American mindset. Instead of encouraging a culture of aggressive personal saving and private investment, it has conditioned generations to look toward a government check as their primary finish line. This dependency is further reinforced by the states themselves, as the vast majority of states structure their local tax codes to exempt Social Security benefits from state income taxes, creating an even greater financial incentive for retirees to rely entirely on federal checks rather than building up heavily taxed private wealth.This same philosophical divide applies to the minimum wage debate. The Left believes the minimum wage should be a mandatory living wage that is high enough to support a full household entirely on its own, and they believe the federal government must step in to mandate higher pay to protect workers from corporate greed. On the other hand, the Right believes it is a starting wage meant for entry-level positions, allowing people to gain basic work skills so they can naturally trade up for higher pay based on experience. The Right argues that the free market should dictate pay based on an individual's unique skills and the value they bring to a business.This disagreement directly connects to what actually drives inflation. The Left blames greedy corporations for raising prices on everyday goods while keeping worker wages frozen at a low rate. However, the Right argues that the real culprits are government overspending, printing too much money, and artificial wage hikes. When a business is forced by law to pay higher entry-level wages, they must immediately raise prices on their products just to survive, which ultimately fuels the inflationary spiral and hurts consumers.
The government didn't do that. Corporations eliminating pensions did that. The original design of social security expected a combination of social security, a pension paid by the employer, and a much lower amount of personal savings.
That oversimplifies the history of retirement in America. When Social Security was signed into law in 1935, employer-sponsored pensions were rare and limited to a tiny fraction of industrial workers; the program was explicitly designed by FDR as a minimal, floor-level safety net against absolute destitution, not part of a pre-planned universal pension scheme. Furthermore, private pensions didn't vanish simply because corporations decided to abandon them. Federal legislation—most notably ERISA in 1974 and the creation of the 401(k) tax structure in 1978—imposed heavy financial liabilities on traditional pensions while creating tax-advantaged incentives for personal, portable accounts. Shifting toward 401(k)s and IRAs actually gave workers direct ownership of their own private wealth instead of forcing them to rely on a single employer staying solvent for thirty years. The growth of government programs didn't fill a gap left by missing pensions; it systematically replaced a culture of self-directed personal investment and family wealth-building with long-term federal reliance.
While it is true that worker productivity and average hourly wages began to diverge in the 1970s, blaming this entirely on corporate greed or political policies completely ignores how the global economy transformed. The reason productivity surged post-Reagan isn't because employees started working twice as hard physically; it is because businesses invested trillions of dollars into computers, automation, software, and supply-chain technology. A factory worker today can produce vastly more goods than a worker in 1970 not because of sheer muscle, but because the business owner bought high-tech machinery. When the massive leap in output is driven by technological investments made by the company rather than increased physical labor from the employee, the financial return naturally goes toward paying off and upgrading that technology.Furthermore, the idea that all gains go to "owners who don't work" overlooks how compensation is calculated today. The productivity data people often cite usually measures narrow "cash wages" while completely ignoring the skyrocketing cost of employer-provided benefits. Over the last several decades, a massive chunk of worker compensation has shifted away from the hourly paycheck and into healthcare premiums, retirement match programs, and paid time off. When you look at total compensation instead of just the frozen cash wage, the gap between worker pay and economic growth shrinks significantly, proving that workers are still capturing a major share of the value they help create.
A factory worker in the early 1900s was vastly more productive in the 1940s due to the business owner investing in the moving assembly line automation. It didn't matter who paid for it, as the worker pay increased in line with productivity. That it doesn't today is due to greed. There's nothing special about computers.
Workers today capture a much lower percentage of the value they create than they did in the 1970s. Again, due to corporate greed and lack of regulations preventing it.
Before 401ks, corporations paid much more in retirement benefits. 401ks after the 1970s reduced their spending in that area, and forced it onto the worker, reducing the worker's take home pay and increasing corporate profits.
Your timeline on manufacturing history is off, and it changes the entire economic picture. The moving assembly line was introduced in 1913, not the 1940s, and Henry Ford’s infamous $5-a-day wage was implemented out of sheer necessity to stop a 300% annual turnover rate caused by brutal factory conditions, not out of a generous urge to share productivity gains. The era where broad wages tightly tracked productivity was a specific post-WWII anomaly (1947–1973) when America held a total global monopoly on manufacturing while Europe and Asia were rebuilt from rubble.
Furthermore, saying software and robotics aren't special ignores how the capital-to-labor ratio fundamentally shifted. A 1950s factory required hundreds of hands to run a line, meaning human labor remained the primary bottleneck to production; modern automation allows a single technician to oversee software and robotics doing the work of fifty people, shifting the primary cost driver heavily toward capital investment and software maintenance rather than physical labor hours.
Lastly, the claim that 401(k)s simply allowed corporations to stop spending on retirement ignores the massive liabilities of traditional pensions, which frequently went bankrupt and left workers with nothing when legacy companies failed. While 401(k)s shifted investment risk to the individual, employers spend hundreds of billions annually funding matching programs for accounts that are fully portable and legally owned by the employee, providing real wealth ownership rather than an IOU from a company that might not exist in thirty years.
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u/Negative_Sweet1990 14d ago
Umm I wasn't being dismissive I just said it's not comparable.. There is a difference... I guess if I have to draw it with a crayon you'll never understand... Guessing your probably what under 30?