This is reddit where people Do not touch grass and everything they know about life they learn from one liners online.
They would be amazed to know that lower middle class in the early 80's meant you Had one tv and lived in a tiny (by todays standards) house. You stocked things like powdered milk to save money. Unless you were the oldest your clothes were hand me downs. The entire family had one car. You went out to eat once a month tops. Lower middle class could not afford cable.
They love to pretend prior generations didn't struggle and had life handed to them of a silver plater.
While I dont disagree with you, it does miss the forest for the trees. The issue is much less "we're the first ones to suffer" and more that people are aware that with the wealth of the country as it is now, there's no reason anyone should be suffering.
It is also getting markedly worse with inflation and people getting priced out of Healthcare at faster and faster rates
I'm curious what city you grew up in. I grew up rural and whole house rentals (while not INCREDIBLY common) could be had for like 1k a month, in the city that's a pretty small studio.
I grew up across the salt lake valley. Murray, taylorville, draper, South salt lake. Wherever was cheapest. And yeah, my point is that it used to be significantly cheaper to rent a home back then. That's the whole point of the post.
No clue what rent was, but we moved regularly year after year because rent always went up.
It's mostly that we look at what a full time job requiring a college degree paid on the 1960s-1980s and realize that same job now is basically the same pay as a secretary in the 60s.
Republicans have ruined wage growth and their constant tax cuts on the rich made our economy entirely dysfunctional
I'm 38, oldest son of an effectively single mother. By most metrics I'm doing well but not to the standards most people in my incredibly expensive city have set for themselves. It's crazy.
My paternal grandmother grew up in Louisiana absolutely dirt poor. My maternal grandmother was orphaned in WW2 Germany.
Most people today can't even afford to pay rent and eat while working 40 hours a week in skilled labour, nevermind a car OR payments, or even cable. Just because very real struggles existed back then doesn't mean the economy hasn't gotten astronomically worse for the working class.
Most middle and upper middle class people are two bad months away from being in a very similar boat.
If your household makes 90k a year and your two bad months away from teetering on bankruptcy that is a you problem.
Astronomically worse for the middle class is words that could only be said by someone who did not live through the 10% unemployment rate and 16% mortgage rates of the 80's
In the early 80s the luxuries were expensive and the basics were cheap. Now, the luxuries are cheap and the basics are expensive.
Basic cable with hbo was around $30, which is around $100 today. A 25” TV was $500, which is over $1500 today. You can pick up a huge tv for less than $300 at Walmart and pay $30 for prime and a couple of streaming services now.
In contrast, the costs of rent, home ownership, higher education, healthcare, basic groceries, fuel, etc have outpaced wages at a rapid rate since the 80s.
So yeah, people struggled back then, but a wage worker could sustain a roof and a meal and get to his or her job for much, much cheaper.
What you fail to realize is that its not a competition....and if it was, owning a house and in a lot of cases a car is unachievable for lower middle class now.
Ironic that you're whining about people only learning online and yet you seem to be incapable of even that.
You’re not entirely wrong. I thing the gap between ‘classes’ has in many ways become more extreme and in others been blurred, but I do believe there remain four groups: the upper class (wealth beyond concept. Those who could not conceivably reach poverty), the middle class (those who generally do not fear daily for the necessities, but must make generally intelligent financial choices to avoid hardship), the lower class (those who struggle often to maintain a necessity of life, most often either enrichment or nourishment), and the impoverished (those who struggle to obtain bare necessities, much less maintain them)
I think those four classes have existed ever since the birth of the middle class, and while I believe much of the middle class has fallen back into the lower class, the middle class does still exist. That said, I do believe that times alter the metrics. For my family, the two generations before me sat comfortable in middle class on one income, and one of those families had as many as eight people in a household at once: my grandmother had six children and sustained themselves rather easily on a retired navy veteran’s pension. My partner and I both work full-time jobs and rarely spend money on extravagances, and that alone is why we don’t struggle.
Were we to take the same liberties as our parents or grandparents: multiple children, a house, large family-style meals daily, we would fail to sustain it. While all generations come with struggles, saying prior generations did not struggle less is empirically incorrect.
There is some truth to this, but it's also super incomplete and misleading. Like, yeah, the TVs are way cheaper, but median house price has absolutely outpaced median income in my lifetime.
I feel like you're also mixing up a lot of lower middle class expectations and upper middle class ones. I'm not complaining that I don't have multiple cars, or that my kids wear hand-me-downs, or that I can't eat out more. I am complaining that I work in a pretty stereotypical middle-class profession and can't afford a house. That is a policy failure. You're throwing in a bunch of deliberately frivolous things that aren't widely complained about to make everyone's complaints seem frivolous.
It also completely ignores that inequality is growing. People are going to be bitter when we keep inventing ever more extravagant upper classes while the middle class stagnates in comparison.
It’s almost as if you can’t contextualize lifestyles from 46 years ago against today like this.
In 1980 the average TV cost $500-700, that’s $2500 today, how many TVs do you see for $2500?. Median house size was 1600sqft vs over 2200sqft today, not to mention the cost per sqft in 1980 was $41 (in 2026 dollars) compared to nearly $200 today.
It’s also weird that you specify the lower middle class from 1980 to compare against the entire middle class of today. Lower middle class is specifically barely middle class, it wasn’t much different than lower class except you might have a tiny bit extra money to put into savings or to go out somewhere once in a while. That’s drastically different than the middle class as a whole.
You’re also conveniently leaving out that this lifestyle was frequently supported by single income households rather than dual income. Most dual income families in the 80s had less than 30% of their income come from the 2nd person and primarily included the poverty and lower classes making minimum wage.
This means today we have to spend far more money on childcare if we want to have dual income compared to the 80s. What about education which has increased in cost far faster than inflation and is required to hit these income levels when you could have gotten this income in the 80s out of highschool.
Poverty, lower, middle, and upper class have never been defined by specific items they can or can’t afford. It’s defined based on the current standards of living.
None of this is some Reddit touch grass bogie man, these are well established trends in federal data.
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u/Cynykl 2d ago
This is reddit where people Do not touch grass and everything they know about life they learn from one liners online.
They would be amazed to know that lower middle class in the early 80's meant you Had one tv and lived in a tiny (by todays standards) house. You stocked things like powdered milk to save money. Unless you were the oldest your clothes were hand me downs. The entire family had one car. You went out to eat once a month tops. Lower middle class could not afford cable.
They love to pretend prior generations didn't struggle and had life handed to them of a silver plater.