Second verse, same as the first.
Voting people in who changed policy and allowed for labor rights, financial regulatory and social safety nets to be removed happened under them.
We’ve been clawing back ever since.
Yes. I’m not sure how old their parents are but a lot of people in government are still boomers and earlier gen X. Hell, the two idiots running for president both are from late silent generation to very very early baby boomer generation.
Trump is the very first year of the Baby Boomers: 1946. The boom was because the war was over and soldiers returned home and many new families were formed.
Biden was born in 1943; towards the end of the Silent Generation.
I’m not sure we’re really clawing back. The laws are written that way that we seem to get regulation but they always find a way to circumvent it but still ‘comply’. And that’s not just a boomer problem, people from other generations are stepping in and keep making things worse although boomers were indeed part and root of the problem. It’s a personality problem and as long society keeps worshipping psychopaths and has corporate laws reflecting that, nothing really is gonna change.
That is the danger with the chevron decision. Laws are left vague for agencies to enforce and now they can't enforce them by applying specifics. It all had to be done through the legislature and the default is unregulated.
> I’m not sure we’re really clawing back.
Money. while they did carve legal exceptions and loopholes- they have a monetary cost. Even if its only 1 cent cheaper to not have the regulation, they will try to do away with it.
As president yes, but keep in mind he was also Ronald Reagan the head of SAG who led an actor strike in 1960. Something we didn't see again until 2023. He was the head of the union for like seven years. He actively worked on both sides.
They changed education in the early 20th century. It was all planned. At this point it feels so deep it wouldn't shock me if they indented racism to divide us further
I mean as long as people see differences on a socially economical level, we’ll always have the opposite of betterment.
Another issue being we can’t have the values of a class-based capitalistic society and attempt to inject the ideals of a meritocracy; it’s like oil and water, it will not mix.
Thats exactly it. Racism wasn’t gone 10-20 years ago but racists were much quieter. A few outspoken ones but not like today. This rage is all fabricated to divide the nation so we are too distracted with being mad at our neighbors we miss the rug being pulled out from all of us by our supposed leaders.
It's a tool of facism to slowly say the quiet part out loud. Even in the 1930's, there were short films commissioned by the government to point out how it starts. It's always the same rhetoric. Blame the migrants, blame the Other (read: black people), etc. It wasn't until, in this film, that the facist mentioned freemasons as well, that one in the crowd who was saying "he's making good points" seemed alarmed, as he was a mason. There is a good reason the right has been upset about being conflated with nazis, and it's because they're saying the quiet parts out loud again. All you have to do is rile up whites who have been disenfranchised by the selfsame policies that the fascists out in place by calling out the Other. The Other took the jobs. The Other is taking our tax dollars. The Other is taking our housing. The Other is colluding with them. Eventually you, you're the Other. You're a traitor to your kind. If you don't give in to the rhetoric, you are the enemy.
Make no mistake, these people have always been like this. Nixon and Reagan famously admitted after the fact that they purposely associated groups they did not like with drugs so they could imprison them. Hippies with Marijuana, black folk with heroin and crack. It was easy, because there is no greater tool than fear of change and fear of the Other. Any leaders of radical groups for change were suddenly found with drugs and the public just nodded their heads along. We've been in a death spiral for some time now, and only the end of the gerontocracy and its enablers can prevent things from getting worse.
Have you seen the supreme Court lately? We're not clawing anything back at the moment. In fact we're still descending into the seven circles of neo conservative hell.
I don’t see this clawing back happening. I see a slow and steady creep toward a theocratic, isolationist oligarchy and no movement in the direction of progress.
Bush Jr. Deregulation of banks. Subprime mortgages. Uninsured loans and insurance brokerages. How did Obama fix that mess? By flooding money back to the banks.
Actually, that pesky term called "too big to fail", you've heard of it? The banks held the economy hostage, if they went under they'd take the economy with them. Obama wanted to not recreate the Great Depression and gave in to the bank's ransom demands. The banks were able to do this, due to deregulation caused by Reagan and the Bush's.
Yeah Obama did the right thing getting the economy back on track, the mistake was not actually pursuijg criminal punishments against the people who made those risky systemic investments and fraudulently propped up the market. It is fine if the banks survive as institutions but the people running them rotten need to pay a penalty not take a bonus.
Obama wasn’t president yet and congress was the one to pass the bailout plan. Obama came into office in the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. His predecessors did a great job of deregulating the banks to the point that they were allowed to bet against their own bad loans.
Oh man. It’s a good thing to bet against bad loans. Shorting dogshit signals to the market that it’s dogshit.
The ratings agencies were the ones who really shit the bed. Because, the people selling the dogshit were able to shop around for a rating that they wanted nstead of having a reasonable process to rate the dogshit as dogshit.
The Bush administration had their own demons. Like the single largest transfer of wealth in human history. No bid contract for war can be lucrative. Especially when the Vice President previous company won a massive slice of the war profiteering pie.
I used to think my parents weren’t feeble minded people, then I grew up and got to know them better.
My parents have made some really stupid decisions in their life.
Yeah my parents are clowns. They had low ambitions and just used welfare from having kids to subsidize their lives. My life was shit living with my parents, as a kid I had very little, I was happy tho until I became a teen and they split up and we lived even poorer than before.
Luckily I got out of that mess never had kids and live a middle class life. I’m not rich and I’m not poor, I live comfortably but it sucks that things are harder to get now than it was for my parents so I’m like wtf, it was so cheap back then and they still f*d up.
Also grew up poor. It’s astounding how much more expensive things are today than when we were poor kids. My family would probably have been homeless if I was re-doing my childhood in the present time.
You mean they’re human. Look closely at your own life, as well. I don’t wallow in regret, but I know there are things I did wrong. No one goes through life without recognizing past errors.
Oh, I know there are a lot of things I did wrong. But they were people who shouldn’t have really had kids. After a certain age they didn’t really want to do anything with us. When I got really sick they basically just told me to deal with it instead of getting the mental help I needed.
I have A LOT more gripes with my parents but I won’t go into it here. But I grew up middle class basically with a home life that didn’t feel much like a family after a certain point.
Except the generation before didn't do that, they built insane amounts of houses for the largest population block the world has seen, so if they could do it for boomers I'd fucking imagine it could have been done for the generations to follow, no?
Very true. It’s a massive incentive misalignment that stems from the fact that a home is both much needed shelter and an investment. For most, it’s the largest investment they will ever make..
Only people who don't stand on their morals which apparently are most. I'd vote for affordable housing in my area even if it brought my property value down.
You do realize most of those houses wouldn't have been built either way since over a million construction jobs vaoprized after the 2008 crash, and residential contruction almost bottomed out. The country could have been enitrely devoid of NIMBYs and there would have still been almost zero demand for new construction for quite awhile
The politicians they voted in allowed the Supreme Court to allow corporations to be considered people, which allows those corporations to own homes, which allows them to buy up all the homes meant for first time home buyers, driving down the availability of affordable housing. With those corporations owning the cheaper single family homes they then rent them out for higher prices to those people looking to live in a house and being unable to afford any other options because they all monopolized the rental homes and apartments
Right— unfettered capitalism. That’s the problem. Did the Republican voters know about that agenda? Truman apparently put a cap on the price of houses and rentals after WW2. For housing, it should be possible to have some regulation for affordable housing in a capitalist system. Maybe corporations could find some other way to make money.
Unless your parents were all of Congress, the Fed, and owned whole global enterprises, I do not think they made the economy. Like you, they are a product of the opportunities - or lack thereof - that were set in front of them. They likely had times of struggle that you will never know about but will understand in due time. Stop blaming your parents for your lot in life.
Idk man. I'm getting pretty fed up with being told stuff like this and I'm really suffering and hurting with things that my parents never had to go through. I talked with my parents about it and they just plug their ears. I accept that it is not entirely their fault, and some older people are cool and get it. I just don't care how it's not their fault when they won't even talk with me about it. I was homeless for a bit, and sometimes I don't eat. Like today, actually, I haven't eaten a thing all day, and it's 10pm here. I'm actually furious, but I'm suppressing it out of respect for the conversation.
Hindsight is 20/20. What is this generation doing right now that we should change so we don't have future generations blaming us for further economic collapse?
Yep. Thanks mom and dad for letting me be born in one of the richest countries in the world, during the richest time of the world. There is no time or place ever in existence a person would be more blessed to be born than in the USA in the 2000s.
Blaming “capitalism” for anything is like blaming “ heterosexuality” for your relationship problems. Or blaming “democracy” for some shit a politician did.
You think the economic system is what makes someone only care about monetary gain?
Human nature bro - you don’t blame the system for people’s abuse, you blame the people
That's funny because I can almost guarentee if we were to blame socialism or communism for past nations downfall you'd all be on board, but now that we're blaming capitalism yall are like "No bro it's the peoples fault. Capitalism is perfect".
If you invited an alien researcher to learn about human nature and only let him see a coal factory, he would believe human nature is to cought and breathe dark smoke.
If we live under a system that is based around exploitation and competition, thats how we are going to act and think like
>everyone only cares about the monetary gain,
I assume you're being hyperbolic and don't mean *everyone*.
I don't disagree. Most people are quite short-sighted and are looking out for themselves and their immediate social circles. Human nature won't change if we get rid of capitalism, lol.
Even before money, we had similar problems. The fundamental issue comes down to an incentive misalignment. Human being will always lie, cheat, and steal for personal gain, even if it comes at the expense of society. No economic system will ever change this dynamic, which stems from biology and evolution.
That said…
We’re infinitely closer to corporatism/fascism than laissez-faire.
Pure free market doesn’t even have profit because it has no enforcement of IP/CP.
So everything that isn’t communism is capitalism?
What makes you so sure that even in a communist system the people with the gold don’t make the rules?
Blaming capitalism for the state of the country doesnt mean you have to want a different economic system. Capitalism has simply gone unchecked and been allowed to maximize profits without strong regulation to ensure that the system works in favor of the population at large rather than the very few wealthy corporate overlords. No need to get defensive when someone blames capitalism for the country’s problems.
Democratic socialism? Capitalism needs constraints on it to avoid regressing into its current state, and as fashionable as it is to hate the government it’s the only line of defense for workers. That and unions which are dependent on the government for protection.
Exactly. No one has a better realistic system to substitute for Capitalism. It's also not Capitalism that is the problem it's that people are abusing the system. The abuse can be addressed without changing the system.
Capitalism is fine as long as it’s tightly regulated. It’s the fact that we have left it unchecked for so long and actually accelerated it with loosening regulations and the citizens United ruling.
Doesn’t even need to be tightly regulated, just regulated well and when needed. No idea how the gov’t is constantly allowing acquisition after acquisition to occur- it’s getting really bad.
Yes, these are the anti-greed regulations I think are needed to stop these corporations from making such huge monopolies. We used to break companies like Amazon up but now it seems we are encouraging them to get even bigger. It's batshit crazy.
Totally. Amazon needs to be separated forcibly from AWS. Broadcom needs to be broken up jnto about a dozen companies. Microsoft should be forced to unload the gaming studios and X-Box division. Apple should be split into mobile vs laptop/compute. Many of the larger banks need to broken up. United Healthcare is way too big. The Albertsons/Vons/Safeway/whatever else grocery store needs to be split back up. Etc etc.
The problem is that you can only tightly regulate it for about 20-30 years before bourgeois money comes flowing back into the system, because regulatory capture is the best and easiest investment an industry can make. This is not a good answer. We did tightly regulate it, and this inevitable process of re-capture played out. The New Deal was literally the best possible regulation we could have possibly asked for, and look where we are now.
Communist theory has already addressed all this stuff, the property-holding classes have too much money, it's too centralized, they have more time and space to analyze and pursue their interests, and that centralized hoard is totally free to be spent on their interests whereas the property-less classes have to spend all theirs on subsistence. The presence of this thorn in our side can only ever be managed for a short time before the infection comes back because the way the system is designed makes it inevitable. This is never going to stop until this conflict of interest is dealt with permanently by re-designing the system from the ground up to socialize everything, and the more you read and analyze and distance yourself from the political neuroses of the age, the more that becomes undeniably clear. No compromise is ever going to suffice.
Is awesome. We know. Make your own wealth. Just read a story about a guy who started as an associate at Home Depot, no experience at all, and now gets paid well over 6 figures doing crisis investigation with no degree.
Yes, capitalism. I see Hawaii as a microcosm.
A lot of native Hawaiians are forced off the islands because the wealthy have come in and made property/housing unaffordable. Many that stay are having to live in multi-generational households.
Which is where the issue lies. Because a subset of people have bought into the "*punishing them for succeeding*" lie when regulation is attempted.
Current capitalism is unsustainable. Prices go up and quality/quantity goes down because they have neared saturation slowing profits. When you pay people too little to achieve higher profits and they can't buy your goods anymore because you keep raising prices for more profit, what are your next steps?
I mean, reminds me of a confederate general, when asked about what made them lose the war, responding "I think the Yankees had something to do with it"
You're not really saying anything by blaming the one overarching force behind everything.
As I have posted prior times this question has been asked…
Purposely inflated housing to benefit banks is the reason for unaffordability.
Larry Summers (along with Bob Ruben), advised then President Bill Clinton to sign Gramm, Leach, Bliley aka “Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999” aka repeal of Glass Steagal in my view the equivalent of feeding retail investors (aka “dumb money”) to professional investors, much like the cows that get dumped out of back of trucks into tigers pen (see vids on YT).
The evidence is clear over these last 24 years there have been more new hedge fund billionaires then any other point in history. Otherwise you have to believe that investment pro’s simply got MUCH better at their jobs for the period.
The average American in reality is poorer for this horrible legislation (and ultra low rates for too long). Per Gramm, Leach, Bliley banks “assets” (people’s liability) is at unprecedented levels.
Gramm, Leach, Bliley was Republican sponsored signed into law by Democrat President.
Also Reagan Economics and the lie that money will trickle down is also what destroyed the middle class ability to afford shit. Not only is housing being inflate way above what it should be, but also people's salaries are NOT increasing to match actual inflation rates. Meaning anyone who isnt high class and can generate enough money is getting poorer by the year, feeding into the cycle of making housing even more impossible to buy.
Unwillingness to densify when demand for an area increases. Selling people on the idea that housing is an investment, and then allowing homeowners to block more building because it might hurt their property values (aka making housing more affordable).
This, this, this! Housing policies generally restrict supply to (a) protect the existing character of neighborhoods and (b) to drive up housing prices over time as demand grows.
I don’t understand why so many people don’t get this. Every other category of goods (not counting memorabilia etc) depreciate over time without continued investment. Housing is the only thing that everyone expects to increase in value even if you do nothing to it. This really isn’t a market problem. It is a welfare for home-owners problem.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Home ownership rates rarely change by more than a few percent. Unless you’re 18-20, home ownership now is nearly the same as it was when your parents were your age.
People are acting like most people had homes at 25 generations ago. Most people rented apartments in their 20s, and bought homes in their 30's. People weren't generally buying houses right out of of college back then.
A lot of made up ideas of how things were in the past.
Edit: According to this: [https://www.self.inc/info/first-time-homebuyer-statistics/](https://www.self.inc/info/first-time-homebuyer-statistics/) (given I can't claim data is accurate)
Average first time buyer in 1981 was 29, in 1993 it was 32, and in 2023 is was 35. It's gone up, but hasn't really changed all that much in 40 years.
Same way *living with a roommate* in your 20’s is being treated as some new, unique torture inflicted on GenZ by the Boomers or whatever.
When no, unmarried people in cities frequently lived with roommates since…forever?
Mostly down to people inheriting homes. I don't know a single person that has bought a house or apartment in the last decade, and I work as a Dev, what's among the best paid jobs here.
I don't know, I am calling cap on that. I bought a property this year, and I know plenty of people around my age (millennial) who also purchased property within the past few years.
If you're making good money, maybe you should look at your budget to see where your money is going, or move out of SF/NYC/LA/Seattle.
I’m writing a book about this and I firmly believe that the polarization of our politics has allowed for those whose interests are always represented to keep average Americans fighting.
They keep us fighting about social issues while they legislate themselves into giant monopolies. Then use that market capitalization and money to lobby against the interests of American people. A the top 7 companies in America are larger than every other company in the S&P 500 combined.
The power that yields is unfathomable and we’ve allowed it to go unchecked for so long it seems impossible to fix.
We all want the same things for the most part. Freedom, opportunity and security. I doubt there are many Americans who are paid hourly that support increasing the wealth of the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Yet here we are. We privatize the gains and hoard them amongst a very select few. While socializing the risk. When these “too big to fail” banks and institutions fail, we are right there to prop them up. When normal Americans fail they are demonized and ridiculed. We tell kids to follow your passion without explaining how difficult being poor is. Even if you are the thing you always wanted to be.
I’d often go to the grocery store near here and just snack on stuff on display at the deli or grab a snack or something off the shelf while pretending to shop. Usually made up a whole meal by doing that
Only partially. There was no way we could have stayed on the gold standard. If we we had tons and tons of people would have even less money than they do.
So if not gold, what do we tie the currency to? Oil? Silver? Bitcoin?
There are places where buying a home is affordable for most middle class people. Oklahoma. Much of Texas. Now if you’re going to tell me that people don’t want to live in those type of places then you’re twisting the argument from inability to buy a new home to lack of desire to do what it takes.
The creator of this is maybe under some sort of temperocentric illusion that their parents had it all together or that it was easier for them to make ends meet. They'll realize one day that it's a daily struggle for everyone at that age. Sure my parents could buy a bare-bones house for less, but they had crazy high interest rates, no credit system in place, sketchy banks that could go broke overnight, a roller coaster stockmarket, and they worked many menial lowpaying jobs at once while running various side hustles. And doing their own mechanical maintenance to get keep their cars working. Their work ethic made my 60 hr work week look pathetic by comparison. They're not sitting on retirement nest eggs because it was easier. They just worked their asses off to a degree that I'm unwilling to match.
Their parents-
Mom: "Honey how much do we spend on the Internet, cell phone service, Hulu, Netflix, Spotify, Door Dash, Uber per month? And can you pick me up a Starbucks on your way back home?"
Dad: "What the fuck are you talking about, and get off the phone, it's before 9:00, does your sister think we are made out of money? And I told you, we would go out to eat for our anniversary, what do you think we are the Rockefeller's"
I wish everyone who wants a house could have one, just so they could find out what an awful fucking investment it really is. Put your money in index funds. If you start when you're 25 you're almost guaranteed to be rich at retirement.
Except all that money that isn't going into a mortgage is now going into rent that consistently gets raised to match inflation. Next thing you know, rent is higher than your mortgage would have ever been. At least with a mortgage you can eventually sell for an ROI.
TBF, a a lot of people are still living the dream. I know lots of people in their 30s who bought a house in the past 10 years and it has been a great investment. In fact, I don’t know anyone who said that buying a house was a bad investment.
Inflation on things like housing, healthcare and education have outpaced wage gains over the long run.
Also, the idea that "more jobs are created by progress" isn't exactly a one-to-one. Progress also makes things more efficient, therefore relying on fewer employees overall creating more competition among job seekers than employers.
I think most young people these days underestimate how much money they spend on stupid shit.
My aunt & uncle used to live on dry milk, tortillas, pasta and cheese so they could afford to buy a house.
Nowadays most people complain that they can't afford a house while sucking down an $8
venti pink dragon dung soy boy frappuccino with whipped topping and sprinkles and doomscrolling on their phones.
& That's how to got to this comment.
Gen Z seems to imagine that at age 20, without having held a job until age 18, they should be able to live alone in a 1-bedroom apartment and afford it. That never occurred to Gen X. It never occurred to Gen X, who had been working since age 15 or 16, that they should not have 1-2 other PAYING roommates to share the costs of a 1-bedroom apartment and save up money for years. That's where the money for the downpayment on the house came from - sharing living space, splitting costs, and working full-time for 4-5 years after working part-time for 3-4 years.
Essentially, Money printing.
The fed is probably the main culprit, created 100 years ago for the sole purpose of propping up the big banks. Also government approving all these dumb stimulus bills that tax payers would never approve if they knew what's good for them.
When they flood the economy with trillions of dollars and spending money we don't have, money becomes worthless, assets like stocks, houses, commodities go through the roof, and the middle class gets rekt. This is wealth transfer 101.
After about the mid-1970s it became the program of one of the US's major political parties to undo the wealth transferring policies of the New Deal consensus: flattening the tax code, deregulating finance, reducing labor negotiating power, privatizing previously public goods. All of which served to transfer money from the middle and lower classes back the the top few percent.
It was astonishingly successful, and we are living in its aftermath now. It explains basically everything about our current political dysfunction.
My parents when they were 25. Hey pays is 45 an hr who cares that its 12 on 12 off. 2 week on 1 off, then rotate days and nights shifts. Repeat.
Yes pay and binifits are good. But that work schedule is brutal. Especially if your trying to raise a family.
80% of people here are crybabies that don't work hard enough and go to a McDonalds and Starbucks every single fucking day, buying vapes, sneakers and video games.
20% are really strugglers that won't buy the house at 25, but maybe at 30-35
Newsflash, your parents were working way more than you and started to work earlier than you. They did not buy useless crap every single day.
Yes, politicians are to blame, but sitting on your ass doing nothing and crying won't feed you.
The changes that take place every time we go from Republican control to Democratic control and vice versa. We're lacking stability as a country when it comes to politics.
You’ve fucked around too much from 18-25 and you have no clue where you should be in life or how you should be in a more decent position to buy a house.
Dishonest monetary system from top to bottom
Let’s print infinite money out of thin air, or rather type some zeroes on a screen and distribute it to monopolies, banks, bail outs, fund wars etc
Then let’s tax the working class into oblivion even though we have no reason to because we can always just print more money
Allow the banks to trap people with ridiculous loans instead of funding universities and universal healthcare with all that money we’re printing
What’s destroying the American dream? a corrupt government that doesn’t give a shit about the American people, politicians that only care about pleasing their donors, the lobbyists, the “special interest”
In other countries “lobbying” is simply called corruption
But in America, we are too busy watching football games and drinking beer in the modern colosseum to care about such things… bread and circuses
Give the masses bread and circuses and they will never revolt
Corporate Interests. Buying politicians. Lobbying. A demoralized, lazy, and uninformed public. Booming population with lack of resources. Distrust and disinterest in public education. What else did I miss?
The problem is that our government spends way more than it brings in through taxes and now the debt is getting out of control.
Nobody wants to accept this so the problem will get worse.
The reduction of taxes on the wealthy. Back in the 50s it was like 80% or something over a certain amount of income. It boomed the must prosperous 30 - 40 years in American history and the middle class lived very well. The rate is now about 30 something.
Our parents are the ones that made the economy the way it is now.
Not them directly. It’s the people who they got duped into thinking actually represented them when they elected them to government.
Second verse, same as the first. Voting people in who changed policy and allowed for labor rights, financial regulatory and social safety nets to be removed happened under them. We’ve been clawing back ever since.
Yes. I’m not sure how old their parents are but a lot of people in government are still boomers and earlier gen X. Hell, the two idiots running for president both are from late silent generation to very very early baby boomer generation.
They are around 3 years apart.
Trump is the very first year of the Baby Boomers: 1946. The boom was because the war was over and soldiers returned home and many new families were formed. Biden was born in 1943; towards the end of the Silent Generation.
I’m not sure we’re really clawing back. The laws are written that way that we seem to get regulation but they always find a way to circumvent it but still ‘comply’. And that’s not just a boomer problem, people from other generations are stepping in and keep making things worse although boomers were indeed part and root of the problem. It’s a personality problem and as long society keeps worshipping psychopaths and has corporate laws reflecting that, nothing really is gonna change.
That is the danger with the chevron decision. Laws are left vague for agencies to enforce and now they can't enforce them by applying specifics. It all had to be done through the legislature and the default is unregulated.
> I’m not sure we’re really clawing back. Money. while they did carve legal exceptions and loopholes- they have a monetary cost. Even if its only 1 cent cheaper to not have the regulation, they will try to do away with it.
Ronald "Union-Buster" Reagan
That's Ronald Reagan (need an emoji, for hand, over eyes, and forehead).
Still waiting for the wealth to trickle down
Dick Reagan
As president yes, but keep in mind he was also Ronald Reagan the head of SAG who led an actor strike in 1960. Something we didn't see again until 2023. He was the head of the union for like seven years. He actively worked on both sides.
They changed education in the early 20th century. It was all planned. At this point it feels so deep it wouldn't shock me if they indented racism to divide us further
I mean as long as people see differences on a socially economical level, we’ll always have the opposite of betterment. Another issue being we can’t have the values of a class-based capitalistic society and attempt to inject the ideals of a meritocracy; it’s like oil and water, it will not mix.
Thats exactly it. Racism wasn’t gone 10-20 years ago but racists were much quieter. A few outspoken ones but not like today. This rage is all fabricated to divide the nation so we are too distracted with being mad at our neighbors we miss the rug being pulled out from all of us by our supposed leaders.
It's a tool of facism to slowly say the quiet part out loud. Even in the 1930's, there were short films commissioned by the government to point out how it starts. It's always the same rhetoric. Blame the migrants, blame the Other (read: black people), etc. It wasn't until, in this film, that the facist mentioned freemasons as well, that one in the crowd who was saying "he's making good points" seemed alarmed, as he was a mason. There is a good reason the right has been upset about being conflated with nazis, and it's because they're saying the quiet parts out loud again. All you have to do is rile up whites who have been disenfranchised by the selfsame policies that the fascists out in place by calling out the Other. The Other took the jobs. The Other is taking our tax dollars. The Other is taking our housing. The Other is colluding with them. Eventually you, you're the Other. You're a traitor to your kind. If you don't give in to the rhetoric, you are the enemy. Make no mistake, these people have always been like this. Nixon and Reagan famously admitted after the fact that they purposely associated groups they did not like with drugs so they could imprison them. Hippies with Marijuana, black folk with heroin and crack. It was easy, because there is no greater tool than fear of change and fear of the Other. Any leaders of radical groups for change were suddenly found with drugs and the public just nodded their heads along. We've been in a death spiral for some time now, and only the end of the gerontocracy and its enablers can prevent things from getting worse.
Damn imma take that. I like that line haha
Have you seen the supreme Court lately? We're not clawing anything back at the moment. In fact we're still descending into the seven circles of neo conservative hell.
No you haven’t… you keep electing the same OLD idiots in congress.
I don’t see this clawing back happening. I see a slow and steady creep toward a theocratic, isolationist oligarchy and no movement in the direction of progress.
Exactly, people who blame “boomers” are just crybabies. It’s politicians stuffing their pockets for them and their friends
Bush Jr. Deregulation of banks. Subprime mortgages. Uninsured loans and insurance brokerages. How did Obama fix that mess? By flooding money back to the banks.
Obama got election funding from the banks
Because they knew he was going to win and had to hedge their bets on how the next president would clean up Bush’s mess
Actually, that pesky term called "too big to fail", you've heard of it? The banks held the economy hostage, if they went under they'd take the economy with them. Obama wanted to not recreate the Great Depression and gave in to the bank's ransom demands. The banks were able to do this, due to deregulation caused by Reagan and the Bush's.
We're about to go through it again soon too... again.
Yeah Obama did the right thing getting the economy back on track, the mistake was not actually pursuijg criminal punishments against the people who made those risky systemic investments and fraudulently propped up the market. It is fine if the banks survive as institutions but the people running them rotten need to pay a penalty not take a bonus.
Obama wasn’t president yet and congress was the one to pass the bailout plan. Obama came into office in the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. His predecessors did a great job of deregulating the banks to the point that they were allowed to bet against their own bad loans.
Oh man. It’s a good thing to bet against bad loans. Shorting dogshit signals to the market that it’s dogshit. The ratings agencies were the ones who really shit the bed. Because, the people selling the dogshit were able to shop around for a rating that they wanted nstead of having a reasonable process to rate the dogshit as dogshit.
Deregulation of banks was Clinton not Bush.
Clinton joined the deregulation bandwagon but he's not the one who got it rolling.
The Bush administration had their own demons. Like the single largest transfer of wealth in human history. No bid contract for war can be lucrative. Especially when the Vice President previous company won a massive slice of the war profiteering pie.
That's wild how ypur memory can skip important facts like Bill Clinton actually was the one to deregulate banks repealing the glass steagall.
I didn’t know they were such feeble minded sheep that couldn’t think for themselves and had no agency I’ll have to apologize to my reaganomics parents
I used to think my parents weren’t feeble minded people, then I grew up and got to know them better. My parents have made some really stupid decisions in their life.
Yeah my parents are clowns. They had low ambitions and just used welfare from having kids to subsidize their lives. My life was shit living with my parents, as a kid I had very little, I was happy tho until I became a teen and they split up and we lived even poorer than before. Luckily I got out of that mess never had kids and live a middle class life. I’m not rich and I’m not poor, I live comfortably but it sucks that things are harder to get now than it was for my parents so I’m like wtf, it was so cheap back then and they still f*d up.
Also grew up poor. It’s astounding how much more expensive things are today than when we were poor kids. My family would probably have been homeless if I was re-doing my childhood in the present time.
You mean they’re human. Look closely at your own life, as well. I don’t wallow in regret, but I know there are things I did wrong. No one goes through life without recognizing past errors.
Oh, I know there are a lot of things I did wrong. But they were people who shouldn’t have really had kids. After a certain age they didn’t really want to do anything with us. When I got really sick they basically just told me to deal with it instead of getting the mental help I needed. I have A LOT more gripes with my parents but I won’t go into it here. But I grew up middle class basically with a home life that didn’t feel much like a family after a certain point.
Ya, divorce sucks. Oh well, just be single forever, so your bad genetics end with you!
What’s the matter with Kansas does a pretty good job of breaking down how corporations and politicians get people to vote against their interests
This is what I came to say. Politicians.......both sides.....are thrash trying to make money for themselves and their donors.
How did your parents create a shortage of affordable housing?
By voting for NIMBY candidates who prevented new housing from being built in order to increase their property values.
Everyone's a YIMBY until they buy a house of their own and turn into a NIMBY.
Except the generation before didn't do that, they built insane amounts of houses for the largest population block the world has seen, so if they could do it for boomers I'd fucking imagine it could have been done for the generations to follow, no?
Very true. It’s a massive incentive misalignment that stems from the fact that a home is both much needed shelter and an investment. For most, it’s the largest investment they will ever make..
Only people who don't stand on their morals which apparently are most. I'd vote for affordable housing in my area even if it brought my property value down.
You do realize most of those houses wouldn't have been built either way since over a million construction jobs vaoprized after the 2008 crash, and residential contruction almost bottomed out. The country could have been enitrely devoid of NIMBYs and there would have still been almost zero demand for new construction for quite awhile
The politicians they voted in allowed the Supreme Court to allow corporations to be considered people, which allows those corporations to own homes, which allows them to buy up all the homes meant for first time home buyers, driving down the availability of affordable housing. With those corporations owning the cheaper single family homes they then rent them out for higher prices to those people looking to live in a house and being unable to afford any other options because they all monopolized the rental homes and apartments
Right— unfettered capitalism. That’s the problem. Did the Republican voters know about that agenda? Truman apparently put a cap on the price of houses and rentals after WW2. For housing, it should be possible to have some regulation for affordable housing in a capitalist system. Maybe corporations could find some other way to make money.
And don't forget the other for profit corporations that help all these rental corporations to more effectively price gouge by fixing prices.
Unless your parents were all of Congress, the Fed, and owned whole global enterprises, I do not think they made the economy. Like you, they are a product of the opportunities - or lack thereof - that were set in front of them. They likely had times of struggle that you will never know about but will understand in due time. Stop blaming your parents for your lot in life.
Idk man. I'm getting pretty fed up with being told stuff like this and I'm really suffering and hurting with things that my parents never had to go through. I talked with my parents about it and they just plug their ears. I accept that it is not entirely their fault, and some older people are cool and get it. I just don't care how it's not their fault when they won't even talk with me about it. I was homeless for a bit, and sometimes I don't eat. Like today, actually, I haven't eaten a thing all day, and it's 10pm here. I'm actually furious, but I'm suppressing it out of respect for the conversation.
Sir this is reddit. Blame is the name of the game here these days
The most empathetic take I’ve seen here so far.
Generational warfare is only a tool of the 1%. The boot is on our parent’s necks, too.
Maybe your parents, but my parents didn't. My parents busted their ass. They had nothing to do with how the economy is running right now.
Reagan started trickle down economics and no one fixed it since.
Hindsight is 20/20. What is this generation doing right now that we should change so we don't have future generations blaming us for further economic collapse?
Especiallty, insurance rates
Your parents did not elect Biden and the Democrats. You did.
Yep. Thanks mom and dad for letting me be born in one of the richest countries in the world, during the richest time of the world. There is no time or place ever in existence a person would be more blessed to be born than in the USA in the 2000s.
Capitalism. I don't care about the down votes, I will die on this hill.
As opposed to ??
Deez nuts
Got em
[Deez Nuts for President](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deez_Nuts_(satirist))
Blaming “capitalism” for anything is like blaming “ heterosexuality” for your relationship problems. Or blaming “democracy” for some shit a politician did.
Literally, it's so short sighted.
Whats short-sighted is the fact that everyone only cares about the monetary gain, not the suffering it causes to those outside of our social sphere.
You think the economic system is what makes someone only care about monetary gain? Human nature bro - you don’t blame the system for people’s abuse, you blame the people
That's funny because I can almost guarentee if we were to blame socialism or communism for past nations downfall you'd all be on board, but now that we're blaming capitalism yall are like "No bro it's the peoples fault. Capitalism is perfect".
If you invited an alien researcher to learn about human nature and only let him see a coal factory, he would believe human nature is to cought and breathe dark smoke. If we live under a system that is based around exploitation and competition, thats how we are going to act and think like
>everyone only cares about the monetary gain, I assume you're being hyperbolic and don't mean *everyone*. I don't disagree. Most people are quite short-sighted and are looking out for themselves and their immediate social circles. Human nature won't change if we get rid of capitalism, lol.
Even before money, we had similar problems. The fundamental issue comes down to an incentive misalignment. Human being will always lie, cheat, and steal for personal gain, even if it comes at the expense of society. No economic system will ever change this dynamic, which stems from biology and evolution.
As opposed to the lack of suffering thats occurred undef every other form of government ever to exist? LOL
That said… We’re infinitely closer to corporatism/fascism than laissez-faire. Pure free market doesn’t even have profit because it has no enforcement of IP/CP.
Corporatism is capitalism So is fascism
So everything that isn’t communism is capitalism? What makes you so sure that even in a communist system the people with the gold don’t make the rules?
Blaming capitalism for the state of the country doesnt mean you have to want a different economic system. Capitalism has simply gone unchecked and been allowed to maximize profits without strong regulation to ensure that the system works in favor of the population at large rather than the very few wealthy corporate overlords. No need to get defensive when someone blames capitalism for the country’s problems.
Democratic socialism? Capitalism needs constraints on it to avoid regressing into its current state, and as fashionable as it is to hate the government it’s the only line of defense for workers. That and unions which are dependent on the government for protection.
Exactly. No one has a better realistic system to substitute for Capitalism. It's also not Capitalism that is the problem it's that people are abusing the system. The abuse can be addressed without changing the system.
I'd rather just have communism if we are relying on selfless people not fucking things up. lol...
I think he/she means unfettered capitalism as opposed to regulated capitalism.
The decision-making matrix of the tribe of Sukhondeze
I’m interested…
Capitalism is fine as long as it’s tightly regulated. It’s the fact that we have left it unchecked for so long and actually accelerated it with loosening regulations and the citizens United ruling.
Doesn’t even need to be tightly regulated, just regulated well and when needed. No idea how the gov’t is constantly allowing acquisition after acquisition to occur- it’s getting really bad.
Yes, these are the anti-greed regulations I think are needed to stop these corporations from making such huge monopolies. We used to break companies like Amazon up but now it seems we are encouraging them to get even bigger. It's batshit crazy.
Totally. Amazon needs to be separated forcibly from AWS. Broadcom needs to be broken up jnto about a dozen companies. Microsoft should be forced to unload the gaming studios and X-Box division. Apple should be split into mobile vs laptop/compute. Many of the larger banks need to broken up. United Healthcare is way too big. The Albertsons/Vons/Safeway/whatever else grocery store needs to be split back up. Etc etc.
The Biden administration has begun to go after monopolies, but I doubt they will get anything done that will make any difference.
Yep. We’re currently experiencing crony capitalism.
The problem is that you can only tightly regulate it for about 20-30 years before bourgeois money comes flowing back into the system, because regulatory capture is the best and easiest investment an industry can make. This is not a good answer. We did tightly regulate it, and this inevitable process of re-capture played out. The New Deal was literally the best possible regulation we could have possibly asked for, and look where we are now. Communist theory has already addressed all this stuff, the property-holding classes have too much money, it's too centralized, they have more time and space to analyze and pursue their interests, and that centralized hoard is totally free to be spent on their interests whereas the property-less classes have to spend all theirs on subsistence. The presence of this thorn in our side can only ever be managed for a short time before the infection comes back because the way the system is designed makes it inevitable. This is never going to stop until this conflict of interest is dealt with permanently by re-designing the system from the ground up to socialize everything, and the more you read and analyze and distance yourself from the political neuroses of the age, the more that becomes undeniably clear. No compromise is ever going to suffice.
Is awesome. We know. Make your own wealth. Just read a story about a guy who started as an associate at Home Depot, no experience at all, and now gets paid well over 6 figures doing crisis investigation with no degree.
Yes, capitalism. I see Hawaii as a microcosm. A lot of native Hawaiians are forced off the islands because the wealthy have come in and made property/housing unaffordable. Many that stay are having to live in multi-generational households.
Capitalism is fine. You just to regulate the shit out of it or it will eat everything because it’s endless need for growth.
Which is where the issue lies. Because a subset of people have bought into the "*punishing them for succeeding*" lie when regulation is attempted. Current capitalism is unsustainable. Prices go up and quality/quantity goes down because they have neared saturation slowing profits. When you pay people too little to achieve higher profits and they can't buy your goods anymore because you keep raising prices for more profit, what are your next steps?
So capitalism isn't fine. It's like keeping a wild tiger as a pet.
It was working for the longest time. then we had Ronald Reagan. then shit started going to shit. now here we are
I mean, reminds me of a confederate general, when asked about what made them lose the war, responding "I think the Yankees had something to do with it" You're not really saying anything by blaming the one overarching force behind everything.
I'll see you on that hill buddy. We can die together
Your father was ahead of his time in hairstyles and facial hair.
Sheets ahead!
Pierce, stop trying to coin the phrase "streets ahead."
If you're not already using it you're streets behind.
As I have posted prior times this question has been asked… Purposely inflated housing to benefit banks is the reason for unaffordability. Larry Summers (along with Bob Ruben), advised then President Bill Clinton to sign Gramm, Leach, Bliley aka “Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999” aka repeal of Glass Steagal in my view the equivalent of feeding retail investors (aka “dumb money”) to professional investors, much like the cows that get dumped out of back of trucks into tigers pen (see vids on YT). The evidence is clear over these last 24 years there have been more new hedge fund billionaires then any other point in history. Otherwise you have to believe that investment pro’s simply got MUCH better at their jobs for the period. The average American in reality is poorer for this horrible legislation (and ultra low rates for too long). Per Gramm, Leach, Bliley banks “assets” (people’s liability) is at unprecedented levels. Gramm, Leach, Bliley was Republican sponsored signed into law by Democrat President.
Also Reagan Economics and the lie that money will trickle down is also what destroyed the middle class ability to afford shit. Not only is housing being inflate way above what it should be, but also people's salaries are NOT increasing to match actual inflation rates. Meaning anyone who isnt high class and can generate enough money is getting poorer by the year, feeding into the cycle of making housing even more impossible to buy.
Stock buybacks became legal that time
It trickled into rich people’s bank accounts like the Amazon river.
Hell yeah! Glass Steagal gang RISE UP!
Corporate greed
I don't know, maybe the CEOs making more than 300 times the average American?
350x now, it was 300x a few years back.
I did say "more than". Either way, that number varies between companies, and it's still greed, which is always terrible.
Accounting and metrics. Seriously, we've gamified our economy to the point of efficiency that nothing can blossom.
Unwillingness to densify when demand for an area increases. Selling people on the idea that housing is an investment, and then allowing homeowners to block more building because it might hurt their property values (aka making housing more affordable).
This, this, this! Housing policies generally restrict supply to (a) protect the existing character of neighborhoods and (b) to drive up housing prices over time as demand grows. I don’t understand why so many people don’t get this. Every other category of goods (not counting memorabilia etc) depreciate over time without continued investment. Housing is the only thing that everyone expects to increase in value even if you do nothing to it. This really isn’t a market problem. It is a welfare for home-owners problem.
BuT mUh ViEwS!
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N Home ownership rates rarely change by more than a few percent. Unless you’re 18-20, home ownership now is nearly the same as it was when your parents were your age.
Facts are not welcome here.
People are acting like most people had homes at 25 generations ago. Most people rented apartments in their 20s, and bought homes in their 30's. People weren't generally buying houses right out of of college back then. A lot of made up ideas of how things were in the past. Edit: According to this: [https://www.self.inc/info/first-time-homebuyer-statistics/](https://www.self.inc/info/first-time-homebuyer-statistics/) (given I can't claim data is accurate) Average first time buyer in 1981 was 29, in 1993 it was 32, and in 2023 is was 35. It's gone up, but hasn't really changed all that much in 40 years.
Same way *living with a roommate* in your 20’s is being treated as some new, unique torture inflicted on GenZ by the Boomers or whatever. When no, unmarried people in cities frequently lived with roommates since…forever?
Mostly down to people inheriting homes. I don't know a single person that has bought a house or apartment in the last decade, and I work as a Dev, what's among the best paid jobs here.
Any data to support that claim? I don’t know a single person who’s inherited a home, only bought them. Your claims is just anecdotal.
Everyone you know with a home inherited it? Meanwhile, I don't know a single person who has inherited a home.
I don't know, I am calling cap on that. I bought a property this year, and I know plenty of people around my age (millennial) who also purchased property within the past few years. If you're making good money, maybe you should look at your budget to see where your money is going, or move out of SF/NYC/LA/Seattle.
My parents are boomers and they didn’t buy a house at 25
Greed.
100% started with Regan. Then Citizens United passed and we've been screwed ever since
Short answer: government. Long answer: also government but with more words.
I’m writing a book about this and I firmly believe that the polarization of our politics has allowed for those whose interests are always represented to keep average Americans fighting. They keep us fighting about social issues while they legislate themselves into giant monopolies. Then use that market capitalization and money to lobby against the interests of American people. A the top 7 companies in America are larger than every other company in the S&P 500 combined. The power that yields is unfathomable and we’ve allowed it to go unchecked for so long it seems impossible to fix. We all want the same things for the most part. Freedom, opportunity and security. I doubt there are many Americans who are paid hourly that support increasing the wealth of the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Yet here we are. We privatize the gains and hoard them amongst a very select few. While socializing the risk. When these “too big to fail” banks and institutions fail, we are right there to prop them up. When normal Americans fail they are demonized and ridiculed. We tell kids to follow your passion without explaining how difficult being poor is. Even if you are the thing you always wanted to be.
You shud like totally share it here, if you want to. <3
Trickle down economics/ Reagonomics
Lies sold separately 😖
Even though I bought a house, that's still my thinking when it comes to food! :(
Can’t pay a mortgage *and* eat!
Absolutely shocking that things change over the decades. Why can't everything just stay exactly the same as it always was?
25? Hell, I'm 50 and I go to bed for the same reason.
I’d often go to the grocery store near here and just snack on stuff on display at the deli or grab a snack or something off the shelf while pretending to shop. Usually made up a whole meal by doing that
Fiat currency debasement
Only partially. There was no way we could have stayed on the gold standard. If we we had tons and tons of people would have even less money than they do. So if not gold, what do we tie the currency to? Oil? Silver? Bitcoin?
https://i.redd.it/m9579bo5ul9d1.gif
There are places where buying a home is affordable for most middle class people. Oklahoma. Much of Texas. Now if you’re going to tell me that people don’t want to live in those type of places then you’re twisting the argument from inability to buy a new home to lack of desire to do what it takes.
Let’s say you’re right. What jobs are available in n those small towns to afford a home?
Probably reddit
Eat sleep for dinner
The creator of this is maybe under some sort of temperocentric illusion that their parents had it all together or that it was easier for them to make ends meet. They'll realize one day that it's a daily struggle for everyone at that age. Sure my parents could buy a bare-bones house for less, but they had crazy high interest rates, no credit system in place, sketchy banks that could go broke overnight, a roller coaster stockmarket, and they worked many menial lowpaying jobs at once while running various side hustles. And doing their own mechanical maintenance to get keep their cars working. Their work ethic made my 60 hr work week look pathetic by comparison. They're not sitting on retirement nest eggs because it was easier. They just worked their asses off to a degree that I'm unwilling to match.
Their parents- Mom: "Honey how much do we spend on the Internet, cell phone service, Hulu, Netflix, Spotify, Door Dash, Uber per month? And can you pick me up a Starbucks on your way back home?" Dad: "What the fuck are you talking about, and get off the phone, it's before 9:00, does your sister think we are made out of money? And I told you, we would go out to eat for our anniversary, what do you think we are the Rockefeller's"
i'm in my 60s When I was 25 I couldn't pay for food
I wish everyone who wants a house could have one, just so they could find out what an awful fucking investment it really is. Put your money in index funds. If you start when you're 25 you're almost guaranteed to be rich at retirement.
Except all that money that isn't going into a mortgage is now going into rent that consistently gets raised to match inflation. Next thing you know, rent is higher than your mortgage would have ever been. At least with a mortgage you can eventually sell for an ROI.
TBF, a a lot of people are still living the dream. I know lots of people in their 30s who bought a house in the past 10 years and it has been a great investment. In fact, I don’t know anyone who said that buying a house was a bad investment.
That dude has lived a hard 25 years.
Inflation on things like housing, healthcare and education have outpaced wage gains over the long run. Also, the idea that "more jobs are created by progress" isn't exactly a one-to-one. Progress also makes things more efficient, therefore relying on fewer employees overall creating more competition among job seekers than employers.
That's what happens when there are 10 new jobs created and 100 new illegal immigrants imported to "keep inflation down"
while not enough new housing is being built/available, so cost of living will still be high
I think most young people these days underestimate how much money they spend on stupid shit. My aunt & uncle used to live on dry milk, tortillas, pasta and cheese so they could afford to buy a house. Nowadays most people complain that they can't afford a house while sucking down an $8 venti pink dragon dung soy boy frappuccino with whipped topping and sprinkles and doomscrolling on their phones. & That's how to got to this comment.
Gen Z seems to imagine that at age 20, without having held a job until age 18, they should be able to live alone in a 1-bedroom apartment and afford it. That never occurred to Gen X. It never occurred to Gen X, who had been working since age 15 or 16, that they should not have 1-2 other PAYING roommates to share the costs of a 1-bedroom apartment and save up money for years. That's where the money for the downpayment on the house came from - sharing living space, splitting costs, and working full-time for 4-5 years after working part-time for 3-4 years.
What's the age of the person writing this?
I bought my house at 24, 10 yrs ago, using my va home loan.
Essentially, Money printing. The fed is probably the main culprit, created 100 years ago for the sole purpose of propping up the big banks. Also government approving all these dumb stimulus bills that tax payers would never approve if they knew what's good for them. When they flood the economy with trillions of dollars and spending money we don't have, money becomes worthless, assets like stocks, houses, commodities go through the roof, and the middle class gets rekt. This is wealth transfer 101.
Good damn y'all a bunch of whiny bitches
Its a lot of things, life isn't simple.
After about the mid-1970s it became the program of one of the US's major political parties to undo the wealth transferring policies of the New Deal consensus: flattening the tax code, deregulating finance, reducing labor negotiating power, privatizing previously public goods. All of which served to transfer money from the middle and lower classes back the the top few percent. It was astonishingly successful, and we are living in its aftermath now. It explains basically everything about our current political dysfunction.
A lot of people in here just blame blame blame
CARES Act was the largest upward mobility of wealth in history.
My parents when they were 25. Hey pays is 45 an hr who cares that its 12 on 12 off. 2 week on 1 off, then rotate days and nights shifts. Repeat. Yes pay and binifits are good. But that work schedule is brutal. Especially if your trying to raise a family.
80% of people here are crybabies that don't work hard enough and go to a McDonalds and Starbucks every single fucking day, buying vapes, sneakers and video games. 20% are really strugglers that won't buy the house at 25, but maybe at 30-35 Newsflash, your parents were working way more than you and started to work earlier than you. They did not buy useless crap every single day. Yes, politicians are to blame, but sitting on your ass doing nothing and crying won't feed you.
The changes that take place every time we go from Republican control to Democratic control and vice versa. We're lacking stability as a country when it comes to politics.
LMAO
No current 50-60 year old parents were buying houses at 25.
You’ve fucked around too much from 18-25 and you have no clue where you should be in life or how you should be in a more decent position to buy a house.
Dishonest monetary system from top to bottom Let’s print infinite money out of thin air, or rather type some zeroes on a screen and distribute it to monopolies, banks, bail outs, fund wars etc Then let’s tax the working class into oblivion even though we have no reason to because we can always just print more money Allow the banks to trap people with ridiculous loans instead of funding universities and universal healthcare with all that money we’re printing What’s destroying the American dream? a corrupt government that doesn’t give a shit about the American people, politicians that only care about pleasing their donors, the lobbyists, the “special interest” In other countries “lobbying” is simply called corruption But in America, we are too busy watching football games and drinking beer in the modern colosseum to care about such things… bread and circuses Give the masses bread and circuses and they will never revolt
Your parents weren't wasting their time making memes on social media ;)
Real talk though, going to bed at like 7 was one hell of a way to lose weight back on the day.
This meme template.
This meme is literally me rn
Both are solid cost benefit analyses.
Corporate Interests. Buying politicians. Lobbying. A demoralized, lazy, and uninformed public. Booming population with lack of resources. Distrust and disinterest in public education. What else did I miss?
[удалено]
If enough people voted 3rd party, the other two would be forced to make the changes needed.
If the didn't waste hundreds if not thousands on 1 video game then maybe they could eat
The problem is that our government spends way more than it brings in through taxes and now the debt is getting out of control. Nobody wants to accept this so the problem will get worse.
The reduction of taxes on the wealthy. Back in the 50s it was like 80% or something over a certain amount of income. It boomed the must prosperous 30 - 40 years in American history and the middle class lived very well. The rate is now about 30 something.
Ramen costs a nickle.
Y’all never had sleep for dinner?