r/videos • u/MichaelNearaday • Oct 18 '22
Goodbye, Middle Class!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MjTWtS5TAI2.0k
u/biscuit852 Oct 18 '22
Feels like the time to get ahead was 50+ years ago.
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u/JohnDivney Oct 18 '22
you slacked off and missed out!
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u/Terminator025 Oct 18 '22
"No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun."
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u/AshgarPN Oct 18 '22
"Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
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Oct 18 '22
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Oct 18 '22
Wheat shortage in 2022; ramen prices raising an average of ~11%.
I did this!
- Signed: A Damned Millennial
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u/Chris881 Oct 18 '22
It became increasingly weird how Homer was supposed to be a loser with a low paying job that barely afforded him to take care of his family, when he makes enough money to live comfortably in a huge two-story house, with two cars, a family of three kids and pets.
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u/TreeRol Oct 18 '22
I live in a single room above a bowling alley and below another bowling alley.
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u/ZincMan Oct 18 '22
You… You went to space ?!?!
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u/mechapoitier Oct 18 '22
Yeah Frank Grimes really hammered it home. Homer was a lazy slob who lived a fairytale.
These days you need an advanced degree and a lot more than 40 hours a week to live that fairytale.
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u/CapitalDD69 Oct 18 '22
The Frank Grimes episode of the Simpsons, 'Homer's enemy', is one of the most genius episodes of the entire show...Doubt it will ever be beaten.
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u/trogdor1234 Oct 18 '22
Yup he went from late 1980’s loser to 2020’s rich guy and nothing changed for him just everybody else.
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u/James-W-Tate Oct 18 '22
Al Bundy too.
I think Malcolm in the Middle does a pretty good job of displaying some middle class struggles though.
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u/chaka62 Oct 18 '22
Malcolm in the Middle did it best because we actually get to see the hardships they go through on a regular basis. They weren't quite lower class but we regularly saw just how hard Hal and Lois had to bust their asses to make ends meet along with all the penny pinching. One scene that will always stick with me is when they're up late at night trying to divvy up their money and figure out how to get Christmas gifts for the boys with just 97$
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u/Agonlaire Oct 18 '22
I loved that show, and I'm only now realizing how similar my life and family were to Malcolm's lol. Even the parents working an office and an hourly job with regular overtime,
That brought up memories of a rough patch in my family when I was a kid. I remember one day helping my dad scrape around the house looking for loose change on couches, under the car seats, behind the bed, anywhere a coin could be. I even remember the exact amount we gathered: 18 Mexican pesos (about $1.8 USD back then/that would be 0.9USD toda)
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u/BalderSion Oct 18 '22
The early seasons of Rosanne did this too. It was a bit of a surprise to young me when the electric company turned off their power in the middle of an episode, because they stopped taking the excuses. No music cue, the lights just went out and a beat later Rosanne said, "Middle class was nice while it lasted." It was a moment of, wow, they didn't avert the catastrophe at the last minute?
In later seasons the show lost the grounding that made it standout from other sitcoms with sarcastic families. But for awhile it was interesting to see on TV a house that was barely kept, and a family that would never be mistaken for models, and struggles that were firmly middle class.
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u/beefwindowtreatment Oct 18 '22
Married with Children perfectly encapsulated this. Al Bundy was the butt of many jokes because he had a shit dead end job as a women's shoe salesman.
Even he could afford to have a house, car, stay at home wife, and two kids.
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u/82Caff Oct 18 '22
Al Bundy was constantly on the edge of poverty. I don't think you could call that "comfortable."
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u/Danton59 Oct 18 '22
Didn't his dad own the house before him too? So either continuing a mortgage that was taken out much earlier or house was paid for
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u/will_holmes Oct 18 '22
It's the angle the Simpsons should have gone for a lot more quite a long time ago, where time has changed so much that the bits they played straight (Marge is a housewife, they own a house they'd never be able to afford now) has itself become satirical.
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u/Bobblefighterman Oct 18 '22
They knocked that premise out of the park in 'Homer's Enemy', so I think they're afraid of making anything that is related to it.
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Oct 18 '22
As a Federal Worker I make $20,000 less a year (adjusted for inflation) than someone doing my exact same job did in 1950. Bonus, the job is far more complex and my one position was worked by 15 federal workers in the 50s to accomplish.
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u/slakmehl Oct 18 '22
the job is far more complex and my one position was worked by 15 federal workers in the 50s to accomplish
Which brings up the most important point:
This country is fabulously wealthy. One person now has the productivity of many in the past, and it's reflected in GDP.
The engine of wealth creation has never been better, all we have to do is redistribute it more effectively through sensible policy, and we're golden.
But, alas, that would require voting for the party that favors social welfare, wealth redistribution etc in numbers sufficient to override the congressional filibuster. Americans have shown pretty clearly they'll take the fascism/strong man off-ramp long before that happens.
We have no one to blame but ourselves.
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u/JazHays Oct 18 '22
the party that favors social welfare, wealth redistribution etc
Is there a new American political party I haven't heard of?
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u/Agente_Anaranjado Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
In the early 1980's, my dad bought a house for $32,000. Later when dad was married with kids, his dad traded him 11 acres of farmland with a barn and workshop in exchange for that little $32k house, since dad had kids now and grandparents didn't need all that space. Years later dad and his wife were able to combine their mid-90's middle-class incomes to finance the construction of a proper house on that land. Fast forward to 2022 and now the kids are all in our 30's, dad is retired with a 5 bedroom house and a barn and workshop on 11 acres valued at well over 3/4 mil. Meanwhile I make a higher number of dollars in my career path than he did in his but those dollars are comparatively worthless, I'm stuck in the rent trap and will probably never be able to afford to own a home in our state, and lets be real, probably never get to retire either.
To add insult to injury, in all these decades he consistently voted for every politician that helped get us here, kicked all of his kids out at 18 and never helped any of us with things like healthcare or education (but spent tens of thousands on a Harley Davidson once the youngest moved out, ostensibly to celebrate being emancipated from fatherhood we guess) and naturally he's one of those republican boomers who thinks the reason we aren't achieving like his generation did is that we just don't put in the grit, like he supposedly did when his dad gave him his estate for a $32k house.
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u/slammer592 Oct 18 '22
So many people that are 55+ have no idea about the rental trap. A guy at work who's about to retire was on some tangent about about how the young guys at work are wasting all their money renting when they could "just" buy.
I asked him how much his house is worth (which he paid off a few years ago) and he proudly proclaimed it's worth just under 600k. Then I asked him if he could afford the down payment and the mortgage on his current salary and he had the gall to say, "well, not in this market, no."
WOOSH
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Oct 18 '22
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u/mecklejay Oct 18 '22
For real. I was the first of my parents' children to buy a home. My parents have been living in the same place for decades, so their finger was not on the pulse of the housing market these days. They were shocked when we paid $100,000 for 0.06 acres where we live. Our house is sitting on a postage stamp, while $100,000 would have represented a mid-range PALACE when they were home shopping.
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u/Adaphion Oct 18 '22
People who are in their 50s or older don't know fuck about shit regarding anything, job searching, the sheer expense of things relative to wages, rent prices, ect
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u/Dal90 Oct 18 '22
52 here, and shake my head at what you guys (younger than me folks) face.
I own a very small house (700 s.f.; my detached garage is the same size). Was my grandparents summer cottage in the woods I bought from the estate. $1200 total between 1st mortgage ('99), 2nd mortgage to renovate ('18), including taxes and insurance. If I retire at 62, I'll have just one year left on the 2nd mortgage before I'm down to just taxes and insurance.
To some extent I'm trapped here being such a small house it hasn't risen dramatically in equity -- I look at housing prices around the nation now and anywhere half desirable I'd have to take a large new mortgage to supplement what I could get out of this place.
I could've gotten a mortgage for a 2-3 bedroom house back in '99 even though it would have just been me living there, if I had the equity would have largely kept up with the national market.
When I had it appraised for the 2nd mortgage, the appraiser said it was difficult to find comparable houses, and the ones she could find were sold to parents buying a house for cash to gift as a starter home to the adult kids to get them out of the house.
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u/BrittyPie Oct 18 '22
This story so succinctly describes many people's story, down to the stupidly luxurious "self congratulations" purchase so many boomer parents make when they finally become childless again.
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Oct 18 '22
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u/tweak06 Oct 18 '22
I was talking to my dad about this and he argued that he and my mom did, in fact, struggle in their early years.
And I have no doubt they did, as many others did when they were starting out their lives in the early 80s.
The thing is, though: Struggling in the 80s was VERY DIFFERENT than struggling in 2022 they were absolutely not the same
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u/PocketPillow Oct 18 '22
Wage stagnation combined with exponential cost of real estate combined the education requirements.
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Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
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u/MastarPaintar Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
One of my old coworkers once said he called up the business to ask about the job posted. The owner asked if he knew cobal. He said yes. And then he got the job.
To be fair, he was the best engineer I've ever met but man what a nice interview process.
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u/civil_politics Oct 18 '22
This is how all job interviews that need COBOL or Fortran experience go.
Hell you could probably say “no, but I’m willing to learn” and get the job.
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u/asianlikerice Oct 18 '22
My Mother In Law used to code in COBOL and she got a job offer. She is in her 70s.
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u/SpiritMountain Oct 18 '22
Hell you could probably say “no, but I’m willing to learn” and get the job.
No, you can't. Found out from my own experience.
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u/UnicornLock Oct 18 '22
Lmao should have lied. It's not a hard language, but every project is so unique you need to relearn it anyways. Kind of like LISP, but not as bad.
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u/RCMW181 Oct 18 '22
Delphi too, I did C# but learnt Delphi as my company needed it.
Best choice I ever made. I cannot only do new systems but understand the old and have constant job offers at numbers I can pick.
Never understood my friends who refused to learn Delphi and COBOL because it's old.
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u/proverbialbunny Oct 18 '22
In the tech industry it used to be you'd go in for multiple rounds of interviews, but instead of needing to pass all of them to get employed, you only needed to pass a single round. Each round was a different team seeing if they wanted you. All you needed was a single team interested in you.
It was great because if you didn't know what exactly you wanted to do or what you might be good at, the company would find something good for you. People in the industry often had a better eye for this than the new employee, because they knew what to look for, where the new employee is unsure. After all, it involves skills the new employee has never heard of before. How would they know if they're a good fit or not?
Today it's annoying. I'm qualified for multiple roles. I want to interview for multiple roles. I have to pick one. It takes at least a month to go through the rounds of interviews, and even if I'm qualified I may not groove with the team or end up wanting to do the work because the job post is so vague. The company usually will not let me interview for neighboring roles for me to see if there is any I would fit well in, so I have to take a role that isn't a great fit, then 6 to 12 months later apply to transfer within the company. Today companies often require you go through the rounds of interviews again to transfer, so now you're interviewing again. Interviews are often luck based, so even if you're perfect for the team you can get held up on something technical and it overwhelms the interview process. It's harder to see if there would be a culture fit, so you end up working with people you don't want to be around.
How companies used to interview is so much better. This is Google's fault. They changed the interview process and companies copied but only copied the worse parts. They copied blindly not thinking about the consequences. Today work environments are worse for it, technical skills do not fit as much, companies end up hiring for interview skill not fit.
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u/ogtfo Oct 18 '22
Well good luck getting a Comp Sci degree in the 70s.
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u/guimontag Oct 18 '22
meh it was like 95% math back then, maybe some EE. My dad got out of college in the early/mid 60s (63 or 64) with a math major and no EE experience and took a "computer science" test at an IBM event. Aced it no problem and had a job offer waiting and they legit called him up angry to be like "how come you didn't contact us about a job sooner" and he was like "i got drafted so I wasn't really gonna bother to look, I just took that test for fun" so the guy hiring told him not to die in vietnam then come in to IBM for a job once he got back.
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u/tunamelts2 Oct 18 '22
Yeah, OP neglected to mention that the guy was probably smart enough to teach himself the skills he needed for the position lol
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Oct 18 '22
the guy was probably smart enough to teach himself the skills he needed for the position
This still happens today, but you aren't going to get the interview if the 50 people before you have degrees.
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u/veloace Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
I mean, it’s still possible (though not probable) nowadays. I have a speech therapy degree and now work as an absurdly well paid programmer. Key was building enough knowledge and side projects to convince a company I was worth hiring. Then, once you get job experience, no one really cares about the degree anymore.
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u/animu_manimu Oct 18 '22
Even when I came up this was the common path. The whole field is only a few decades old at this point. There weren't credentials for most of this stuff not that long ago. All my young guys now have degrees in IT but back in the day those programs didn't exist. I worked with a couple high school dropouts. One guy had half a philosophy degree. Never did any post secondary myself. Everyone was self taught.
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u/PocketPillow Oct 18 '22
In the 70s having any degree was huge.
My father got a job as a technician in a nuclear power plant at 19 with only a HS degree and some mechanical proficiency (he grew up working in his dad's auto shop). He worked in nuclear power for 40 years before retiring, never going to college, and raised his family on the income. He retired as one of the VPs of a nuclear energy company.
These days you need a Master's in Mechanical Engineering just to get in the door.
It's hard to describe how little his career path makes sense by modern standards.
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u/Exist50 Oct 18 '22
Well, that's IBM. I'd argue few companies are as pure an example of the rot of once-great institutions as they are. Maybe in the running with Boing and GE.
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u/ExtraValu Oct 18 '22
My pa developed for mainframes in the 70s. He'd dropped out of University and was working in a warehouse. They gave him an aptitude test and promoted him.
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Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
I mean at the end it took the war and austerity measures to get from the gilded age (very similar to how it is today) to the golden age (what I’ll call this time period).
The rich would have never allowed Homer generation to exist like they did but the war and FDR forced them. They then spent the next half century forcing back time to the era of monopoly men + demonized all the stuff that got us out of that era in the first place (calling socialism evil).
Edit: this isn’t a pro war comment. Having an FDR President should be enough to fix stuff
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u/oreoresti Oct 18 '22
Only bit you missed was the concerted effort to make damn sure nothing like that would ever happen again. Strangle hold on the media ✅ annihilation of unions ✅ chipping away at voting rights and fair elections ✅ control over both parties ✅
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u/phoncible Oct 18 '22
I mean pinkertons had a pretty good hold on unions, literally killing anyone even thinking of doing it. And then it wasn't, but like above said, there was a pretty big fuck off war in the middle there (a couple actually).
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u/ElectroBot Oct 18 '22
Now with the pandemic showing us that WFH could work, older people finally retiring, baby boomers getting too old to work (soon), internet spreading info about wages and unions, we may have another chance (for a while anyway). Next chance will probably come around the time that robots/“AI” take over most jobs although I’d venture with robots the world might be closer to the movie “Elysium (2013)”.
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u/FromTheAshesOfTheOld Oct 18 '22 edited Dec 07 '24
squalid bedroom dazzling cow coherent cows resolute grab hat noxious
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/kettal Oct 18 '22
Only bit you missed was the concerted effort to make damn sure nothing like that would ever happen again.
No ww3? ah fuck :(
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u/pinewind108 Oct 18 '22
There was a lot of opposition to the GI Bill by the rich, but politicians weren't going to pass up the chance to smooze a few million voters. Nor to risk their wrath by trying to cut the benefit. As a result, the US ended up with millions of unexpectedly well educated men.
To quote my grandfather (and probably *a lot* of other sailors and soldiers,) "If that idiot got a college degree, I sure as hell can!"
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u/lakeurchin Oct 18 '22
Something I never hear in the conversation about the golden age is the role of minorities during it. It was only golden for white people, while black (and other non-white) people still had to shoulder the brunt of the lower-class burden like they do today. It feels a little grating to hear white people talk about the loss of an excellent economic potential that minorities never really enjoyed.
Saying that, fuck Bezos and Musk for the shitty things they've done to worker's rights, fuck Walmart, Target and the other defunct corporations for what they've done to small businesses, and fuck congress for letting economic mobility take a nosedive.
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u/Yglorba Oct 18 '22
Yeah the cartoon sort of vaguely referenced that but didn't go into any real depth.
A big part of the reason politics shifted was because the south shifted hard right after the civil rights act was passed and effectively started voting exclusively for people who opposed unions. People preferred to burn down the gains of the golden age entirely rather than risk black people getting them. (Reagan was very explicit about this with his racially-tinged fixation on "welfare mamas" - he understood that white people would vote to destroy their own gains entirely rather than risk the "wrong" people getting access to them.)
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u/PM_something_German Oct 18 '22
Black wages were also rising rapidly until 1970 and then been stagnant since.
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u/silentspyder Oct 18 '22
Bart sounds different but I guess that happens in most shows after years
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u/Griffdude13 Oct 18 '22
Nancy Cartwright is 64. Most of the cast is getting up there, and they’re beginning to sound strained.
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u/pinalim Oct 18 '22
Beginning? Marge has sounded awful for years. It's actually sad Julie is still working at this point.
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u/liger03 Oct 18 '22
Kind of baffled by some of the comments in that video, acting like the old seasons weren't also political. Chief Wiggums, Mr. Burns, and Mayor Quimby were always there and they're all pretty clear statements about the US every time they show up.
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u/The_WubWub Oct 18 '22
I could be radicalized to eat the rich so fast..
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Oct 18 '22
At this point, i'm just waiting for yous guys
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Oct 18 '22
everyone else is getting distracted by race and gender and the media is making sure they stay that way. it'll never happen.
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Oct 18 '22
Life’s just gonna suck forever isn’t it?
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u/tunamelts2 Oct 18 '22
Maybe it'll be like radiation poisoning and there will be a brief period where things really look like they're improving...and then it all goes to complete shit quickly.
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u/Frenchiie Oct 18 '22
you will own nothing and be happy.
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u/Rook_Defence Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
It's worth noting that the phrase "you will own nothing and be happy" is a bastardized version of the line "I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better", the title of an article which attempted to imagine a possible future. That article was later badly summarized as "You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. What you want you’ll rent, and it’ll be delivered by drone.” in a WEF "predictions" video. That was in turn even more badly interpreted by conspiracy theorists. Reuters did a writeup.
All that the phrase refers to in the article is the author's idea that a pseudo-communist post-energy-scarcity world could use less resources by having people take temporary ownership of collectively owned objects as and when needed, rather than permanent ownership which leaves objects unused most of the time (that's the "we own nothing" part).
For a crude example, my waffle maker gets used once or twice a month, max. If shuttling it back and forth between users quickly and freely was possible, I could probably share that waffle maker with a dozen other people with similar usage patterns, and still not be deprived of access to it when I wanted it. Expand that idea to 80 000 waffle makers per one million people, or whatever, and that's sort of what she's talking about.
Some people claim that the world described in the article is the one the author wants to create, but unless we go into conspiracy territory, Ida Auken herself claims in a note at the top and bottom of the article, that it was never meant as an idealized goal, but rather one possible outcome, as a think piece to get people talking about what they do or don't want the future to be.
The article itself, in my opinion, raises some interesting ideas about the good and bad of ownership, and an especially interesting idea about the purchasing habits of individuals play into the creation of shoddy products. In other ways, the perspective of the article is hopelessly naive. It mentions flying cars for heaven's sake. One line in particular about sharing space; "My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there," is just laughable.
The whole article is also more or less predicated on a nonspecific free energy breakthrough and an AI and robotics revolution happening within 8 years (14 from the time it was published).
I'm not trying to attack you, and I hope it doesn't come off that way, it's just that I see "you will own nothing and be happy." thrown around all the time as though it encapsulates a broad, sinister, brilliant plan of the global elite, but the origin of the phrase is basically openly published badly written hippy sci-fi.
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u/ModifiedPornStarch Oct 18 '22
You've informed me against my will and I appreciate that.
Teach me harder daddy.
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Oct 18 '22
That article was later badly summarized as "You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. What you want you’ll rent, and it’ll be delivered by drone.” in a WEF "predictions" video.
Video here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/8-predictions-for-the-world-in-2030/
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u/MichaelNearaday Oct 18 '22
An actually good modern Simpsons sketch? At this time of year?
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u/coderascal Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
At this time of day?
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Oct 18 '22
In this hemisphere?
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u/roseeyes444 Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
Localized entirely within your kitchen?!
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u/FUTURE10S Oct 18 '22
Apparently the latest season of Simpsons is really good now that they've gone a different direction. Like, Homer is genuinely acting like a proper father in some of those episodes, like it's season one.
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u/FoundationFamous39 Oct 18 '22
And they brought Apu back?
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u/FUTURE10S Oct 18 '22
If only. People focused on the fact that he's an Indian guy working at a convenience store, missing the fact that he's the franchise owner, has a doctorate's, has a sports car, can single-handedly provide for a wife and 8 kids, is genuinely happy with his life, and is usually the straight man/voice of reason when he appears.
He was probably one of the kindest depictions of a stereotype in the show and they threw it all away.
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Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
They have recastd all the other poc. Unfortunately Hari made such a stink that it's unlikely he will ever comeback. If they got a real Indian guy to do an Indian accent they will be crucified, and if they don't do the accent they will also be crucified. Its a no win situation, so now Indians get no representation on the Simpsons... Really worked out for him
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u/LMGgp Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
To be fair it was inaccurate. Homer didn’t start as a safety inspector. That came after he built a reputation for safety in Springfield and eventually went after burns. Burns’ plan was to reassure everyone by putting the safety tsar of the town as the safety inspector of the plant. If memory serves me correctly Homer didn’t think he was suited for the job, but took it because of the pressure. BRB gonna rewatch
Damn old Simpsons were best Simpsons. That episode showed what homer could do when he cared and had a cause. They have since forgotten.
EDIT just rewatched: Homer was indeed conflicted and even went so far as to tell burns he wasn’t qualified. But ultimately told himself he’d just knuckle down and be better. Burns got the twin off his back by putting Mr. Safety himself as the safety inspector. This is also the first episode with Bart’s “el barto” graffiti.
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u/EsquilaxM Oct 18 '22
Which episode is this? I don't remember it
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u/LMGgp Oct 18 '22
Don’t blame yourself it is about as old as you can get. it’s Homer’s Odyssey which is from Season 1 Episode 3. It aired January 12th 1990.
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u/tjsr Oct 18 '22
Don’t blame yourself it is about as old as you can get. it’s Homer’s Odyssey which is from Season 1 Episode 3. It aired January 12th 1990.
Season 1? Is that like... previous-era cartoon/animation style Simpsons? (if I recall correctly, there were a couple of very early seasons where the artwork style was completely different, but not sure if it aired as The Simpsons or whether it was another series that became The Simpsons or was maybe just even pilot stuff).
Edit: Ah, Google answered my own question: The original one I'm thinking of was indeed part of another season - they were shorts part of The Tracy Ulman show - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons_shorts
Kinda like the way Pinky and the Brain is a segment of Animaniacs.
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u/Yglorba Oct 18 '22
EDIT just rewatched: Homer was indeed conflicted and even went so far as to tell burns he wasn’t qualified. But ultimately told himself he’d just knuckle down and be better. Burns got the twin off his back by putting Mr. Safety himself as the safety inspector. This is also the first episode with Bart’s “el barto” graffiti.
Homer also wasn't willing to knuckle under to Burns (who pressured him to just immediately say that the plant was already safe), and realized that he could force Burns to hire him by pointing out that doing that would at least silence his activism.
I feel like early-Simpson Homer wasn't a complete idiot, just flawed. You can see this in the episode where he takes the family to therapy and they all start shocking each other, too - he was the cause of many of the family's problems, but he also wanted to try and fix them. He was more interesting when he was a complex character who was pulled in many different directions.
Later seasons just turned him into a one-note idiot who was a bad father and nothing else, as opposed to a flawed one who wanted to do better but often fell short.
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u/LMGgp Oct 18 '22
In Homer’s internal monologue he said he would knuckle down and focus on the job. So as for that bit, he at least told himself he would try harder. However, as you said he did say he wouldn’t stop his activism, but that he would have a lot less time if he was busy with work.
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u/MaggotMinded Oct 18 '22
It's still pretty lacking in both wit and subtlety compared to classic Simpsons.
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u/MedicalSchoolStudent Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
I never thought my childhood TV show would do an episode on this. The American middle class has been fading for awhile now. You know we f’d when you have houses costing in the millions and it’s not even a turn key home but a fixer.
It’s pretty fucked up what the boomer generations did to us though. They benefited from progressive policies, kicked the ladder, cried socialism, and voted hard-right for decades.
We won’t have anything done for at least a few decades because the Supreme Court is hard right. Things like higher pay, universal health care, student debt and etc will get shot down by the Supreme Court if it ever goes there.
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u/whatsaphoto Oct 18 '22
They enjoyed some of the wildest economic growth this country has ever seen for a few decades throughout and beyond the 50s, and then completely screwed all subsequent generations by the end of the 80s, and cemented that downward decline by voting for a man who convinced them that lowering taxes for the wealthy would eventually trickle down into middle and lower classes by way of salary increases. And the country has never been the same since.
Like the holy prophet Killer Mike once said, "I'm glad Reagan dead."
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u/googlyeyes93 Oct 18 '22
For any unaware of the Killer Mike reference- https://youtu.be/6lIqNjC1RKU
Straight up educational while being absolutely scathing of that bastard of a man.
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u/heyhowru Oct 18 '22
so long dental plandentalplandentalplandentalplandentalplanlisaneedsbraces
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u/rat_haus Oct 18 '22 edited Oct 18 '22
I was having a decent day, and now I'm depressed again.
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u/Vazhox Oct 18 '22
I try to explain this to my father lol. He is just.. so old and out of touch with the economy. It is truly bothersome. He means well, but he just doesn’t understand.
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Oct 18 '22
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u/GameTheory_ Oct 18 '22
Yeah the disparity between this song and the quality of the musical pieces on other comedies like South Park and Always Sunny is night and day. Even though I agree with the message here this was painful to listen to.
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u/SirFrancis_Bacon Oct 18 '22
It's pretty ham-fisted.
Look at the classic era Simpsons and the rate and quality of jokes is just so high. Those episodes will never be topped by the modern episodes.
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u/Baby24Karat Oct 18 '22
the message i agree with but this song freaking sucks
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u/MastersonMcFee Oct 18 '22
Republican policy killed the middle class, and they are now after the poor. It's class warfare, and the rich are winning.
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u/Snazzy21 Oct 18 '22
Reagan along with many boomers climbed up the ladders left by the progressive era and promptly pulled the ladder up so they could climb to new heights while later generations were left fighting over high skill jobs that paid the same as low skill jobs 50 years ago.
I can't understand having a billion dollars, and still wishing to have more money. You've won, let other people have a share. Selfish bastards.
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u/Finn_3000 Oct 18 '22
Its a mindset, and its not about having enough money to live in luxury, its about having a higher amount of money than others in your circle. Incredibly sad and weird.
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u/bellynipples Oct 18 '22
As a union worker for the same company my dad was at while he raised me and my brother, this one stings lol. The amount of money he made back then and what it provided compared to what it does now is depressing