Intro to Lack of Historic Memory On Current Events
Young (and Middle Aged) People Need to Know What Was Normal Back in the Day
There is a cliché about how politicians keep making the same mistake because they have not read history. The main impetus to starting my Substack was to attempt to demonstrate how things operating in the world today was not inevitable. It isn’t even logical. There are things that people today take as normal without realizing that they are actually aberrations.
To set the stage for future detailed articles, I present an overview of sorts. The United States used to have virtually no billionaires and, on the other extreme, a person could live on minimum wage. You might not live particularly well, but you weren't homeless and could feed yourself. I even had a clunker car when I made minimum wage in 1973.
Lets look at minimum wage. In 1973, it was $1.60/hr. Sounds pretty low, doesn't it? Using the official inflation calculator, the equivalent of $1.60 in 1973 is $10.05 today. If the inflation calculator was actually accurate (it way understates real inflation), that $10.05 would be higher. Currently, minimum wage is $7.25 (some states have higher, but $7.25 is the rate that applies to most folks. People in agriculture and jobs like restaurant servers, it is far less. The last time minimum wage was increased was in 2009, 13 years ago. That is crazy. Even then, the increase was pitiful, as it always has been.
The normal gnashing of teeth over the horrors of minimum wage, mainly from the right, is just so much smokescreen to ensure that employers today have workers they can pay slave wages. Leftist business owners are no different, they just tend to let the right speak for them on this one.
Take another case. Back in the post-World War II years and up until the 1980s when a lengthy decline started that is still getting worse, we had strong unions and the biggest middle class in the world. Back in the day, the appliance salesman at Sears and Montgomery Wards were often Teamsters union members. These people made enough to buy a house in suburbia and send their kids to college. They weren't rich, but they were firmly middle class and had discretionary spending money. They had vacation time and maybe even had a boat.
How are appliance salesmen doing these days? The average one works at Lowe's or Home Depot for a wage of $8 - $10 dollars an hour and they only get 18-20 hours of work a week. This is both a reduction in hourly pay that is significant and half of what used to be considered a normal work week, 40 hours with overtime over that. Pretty crazy to me. But, it is normal for those who were not around in the 1970s-1980s. So, for these people, the bar for improving things is far too low, given how things used to be. Anything less than a 40 hour work week to a guy my age is insane.
My last job before I totally bailed and quit was at $7.35 an hour. I have two advanced degrees, a shit ton of experience in various areas, including high level management, but I ran into age discrimination (a totally different issue, but real and one I won’t go into here). I was thankful I got hired. The main pitch for that job was I would get 40 hours a week, which was better that $10 an hour for 20 hours a week. I also got treated like the low wage shit I was at that job at a highly respected non-profit that Jimmy Carter loves. Do not ever give to those assholes a dime and I love Jimmy Carter. But, I couldn’t get hired for anything I was qualified for. Oh well, maybe a story for another time.
Up until Reagan, there was an understanding of sorts that businesses should share the wealth with the workers that provided the owners that wealth. That is how good people operate. Part of it was top tax rates from during World War II up until the reductions during the Reagan administration that have continued to be reduced by both parties. Reagan made greed fashionable and sharing so passé. But, he tapped into American greed in a way that both parties have done since. Makes Americans look as ugly as many really are.
Note that a top tax rate only affects earnings above a certain amount, meaning that the less you made, the lower your tax bracket was. But, the more you made, the more you paid. It was actually almost impossible to even become a billionaire and that was intentional. We now live with a system where the differences between the haves and have-nots are wider than we have ever had.
Just for fun, lets look at top tax rates over time (married filing jointly):
1944: 94% on income over $200,000
1954: 91% on income over $400,000
1964: 77% on income over $400,000
1974: 70% on income over $200,000
1984: 50% on income over $162,400
1994: 39.6% on incomes over $250,000
2004: 35% on incomes over $319,100
2014: 39.6% on incomes over $457,601
2021: 37% on incomes over $628,301
Data from https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/
There are a lot of nuances to this data, but you get the idea. We keep dropping the top tax rate and income inequality gets worse and worse. People who were born after 1980 or later have no idea how things used to be and just how good things could actually be for them. Both real and inflation adjusted wages have gone down. People really freak out that there are a lot of jobs where people made more 40 years ago than today, not even taking into account bullshit inflation based wage comparisons. I made more real money in the late 80s and 90s than I have ever made, let alone what the inflation calculator says I should be making. This is huge. A job that made, say $20 an hour in 1989, was paying $17 an hour in 2015, for a specific example (high skill help desk types of jobs).
People today are getting screwed royally on wages no matter how you look at it. Just for shits and giggles, in 2021, that $20 an hour job should be paying $44.97 today, yet actually pays less. Things like this is what people need to know and be angry about. People who weren't working in 1989 have absolutely no idea how truly screwed they have become. And no business owner wants you to find this out.
More coming later on these topics in more detail. This is just an Intro into this wide topic and really why I started this Substack. Please subscribe if you are interested. I would love to actually get paid for writing, but right now I need a few subscribers. It is not easy, let me tell you. It is a tough world out there right now for anyone who isn't a billionaire. And I am not even a thousandaire (is that a word?). Being retired Army and on social security is really not paying many bills. Yep, I am begging for free subscribers. If no one reads this stuff, what is the point?
Take care, all, and fight back every chance you get.
It really is wild, even for someone like myself born in 1991, things are VERY different. My single mom struggled, mightily, but she made enough to put food in my stomach a roof over our head and put herself through college. That was only 25 years ago in 1995/6