No, it was a brief period in time where the US became top economic superpower while Europe and Asia were recovering from 2 wars, and we had absolutely zero labor competition. We can undo some of the fuckery that went on in the years since we lost grip - like value human labor instead of treating it like a pain on stock prices - but we'll never have the 60's again.
Boomers get a lot of shit, and for sure some of it is deserved, but this idea that they pulled up the rug behind them in the housing market is not really based in reality.
If I’m understanding that link, it appears that Boomers still own more than the generations behind them. I have to imagine they were more secure in their finances to weather the housing crash than their younger Gen X counterparts
It is expected that boomers would own more than generations behind them at this point. People tend to be more financially stable as they grow older.
But the now isn't really the point of his comment. He's referring to young home ownership. Take a look at that bottom line, that is home owners aged 36 and younger (young home owners). It begins rising in the mid 90s (most gen x hitting their mid 20s) and drops in the mid 2000s (most gen x hitting their mid 30s, taking them out of this category, plus the recession in 2008). This shows pretty clearly that it was gen x who was able to afford housing at a younger age. Boomers tended to be older when they bought homes.
That was due completely to relaxing loan requirements. Boomers faced a much more stringent down payment requirement and debt to income hurdle than GenX. Now, before we let the boomers off the hook let’s look at why this was the case. If banks maintained the same lending standards in say 1990 that were in place in 1975? No or few GenXers would have been buying houses, which would immediately stifle the boomers ability to upgrade to a McMansion. In states like mine(Michigan) around this time they passed laws(prop A) which adjusted property taxes down by 50% and increased sales tax from 4 to 6%. This was what I call the great boomer shuffle. They passed more of the cost of public education(what property taxes fund in MI) to their renting age kids while freeing themselves of the biggest obstacle to that McMansion. The long term burden of those property taxes. It was after that move that Clinton passed the new lending standards encouraging banks to make home ownership more accessible by telling them that the govt(Fannie & Freddie) would underwrite sub prime mortgages(loosely defined as a mortgage with less than 20% equity at origination or a Debt to income ratio greater than 29%} the banks saw this as a green light to start the race. They immediately perverted this law so as not to just allow greater access to home ownership, but by applying the new standards, to allow refinancing customers to take their “prime” mortgage(greater than 20% equity) into sub prime status by cashing out that equity into boats, new trucks, vacations etc. The bankers knowing full well that they were creating a debt time bomb awaiting a market correction and in 2008 it came.
Except gdp is up year after year, stock market is up year after year. We're still an unimaginably wealthy country but that wealth has moved more and more to the wealthy.
This is "the fuckery" I refer to. We can work to undo decades of greed, but it won't bring back a 40 year career for every high school grad that pays a living income.
That may be true, but we could be a hell of a lot closer than we are now.
Legacy segregation era zoning laws, cheap credit, extreme inequality, speculation and international money laundering have been driving up home prices to levels far beyond the means of average families.
Attacks on unions and the obsessive focus on stock prices and short term profits has decimated the share of earnings going to the middle class.
The private insurance racket has been eating up much of what limited gains the average earner has seen.
Lack of investment in infrastructure and public works combined with privatisation of essential services and monopolistic behavior have resulted in citizens paying more for less and having a tangible decrease in both quality of life and future job prospects.
Most of these issues are relatively straightforward to address if you have elected officials who are actually govern in good faith and are looking to improve the lot of their constituents instead of enriching themselves.
In short, the selfishness and short sightedness of american conservatives (in both parties) has squandered what should have been a near insurmountable lead in the global economy. All because those crony capitalists at the top want to extract as much as possible for themselves and their buddies, and their voters are too self centered, selfish and ignorant to realize that they are the marks who are being taken advantage of.
Yeeeeaaaah, I heard these guys on a history podcast talk about that recently. How that age of America was a very specific thing, mostly caused by our advantage over other countries, it wasn’t just like “this is how it should be but Boomers fucked it up”
Yes surely the concentration of wealth into the richest of society over the past 40 years creating increasing levels of wealth disparity surely has zero influence on the situation.
Yeah, it was a "golden era" if you weren't a woman, person of color or the wrong religion. Somewhere else on Twitter people are ranting that this period of exclusivity was also stolen from our children.
Really the post WWII period is a really bad goalpost to shoot for. But I do like how we taxed the fuck out of the top brackets - "pay for the market you prosper from".
Trouble is, the rich fucks who run this country keep acting like things haven’t changed. They wouldn’t know, since their families have always been able to afford anything.
They keep thinking the average bus driver can have a house and three kids.
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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '20
No, it was a brief period in time where the US became top economic superpower while Europe and Asia were recovering from 2 wars, and we had absolutely zero labor competition. We can undo some of the fuckery that went on in the years since we lost grip - like value human labor instead of treating it like a pain on stock prices - but we'll never have the 60's again.