Maggie Thatcher says "*****, please". They damn near had an insurrection over there.
Median boomer retirement account $144,000
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Maggie Thatcher says "*****, please". They damn near had an insurrection over there.
Do you really think the average person had a higher standard of living in 1972?
No. Of course they did not. It is an asinine point. The wage statistics you cite overestimate inflation and make people in the past look richer than they were.
Trying to make 1:1 comparisons over decades when the type and quality of goods out there changes so much is inherently fraught. Those numbers you cite should be taken with a grain of salt, not used with such absolute and triumphant certainty.
I said unionization as a share of the labor force. That peaked in the mid-1950s.
Long before Reagan.
Keep blastin' your Camaro around, Boomer.
Maybe try learning how to read in the meantime instead of insulting my grandmother.
Reagan wished that he could have been 1/10th the union-buster that Thatcher was.
Do you really think the average person had a higher standard of living in 1972?
No. Of course they did not. It is an asinine point.
I said unionization as a share of the labor force. That peaked in the mid-1950s.
Long before Reagan.
Keep blastin' your Camaro around, Boomer.
Maybe try learning how to read in the meantime instead of insulting my grandmother.
Keep trying,
The percentage of workers belonging to a union (or "density") in the United States peaked in 1954 at almost 35% (citation needed) and the total number of union members peaked in 1979 at an estimated 21.0 million.
What happened in 1980? Reagan was elected, and that was all she wrote.
Maybe another Grandma story, or just an another DUMB rating.
Still waiting on the link to show the causation between decimation and wages by the way.
When you change the goal line, like you keep doing, almost anything is possible.
I really hope you have an unlimited number of those DUMB ratings, because you are really using them up fast today. All on me, I should feel special.
Pretty please, one more grandma story.
Why would you look at the # of union members and not the unionization rate?
Why would you not adjust for the size of the base of a growing labor force?
If you want a data source, it is on p. CRS-11 of this document --
https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell....tpsredir=1&article=1176&context=key_workplace
Are you really as sexist as to willfully ignore the implications of what my grandmother's life story revealed about the state of the American labor market in the 1950s?
Young women barred from a professional career because she was a woman -- and your response is to gloat about laughing at it? What kind of a monster are you?
Oh wait, I forgot, you had a Camaro as a teenager in the early 1970s and all the White guys in your family had good jobs so that means nothing was wrong!
Get with this century.
This is some A+ tier Boomer right now.
The enthusiastic sexism without even realizing it puts it over the top.
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Unions have weakened for many reasons, too numerous to list in order here.
If you want to talk wages being reduced for the "middle class"; the biggest driver is likely the entry of tens (hundreds?) of millions of people into the labor market globally over the past 50 years or so. Indonesians, Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, etc etc etc. More supply (of labor) leads to lower price (wages). I don't think 100% union membership could have prevented that.
If you want to talk wages being reduced for the "middle class"; the biggest driver is likely the entry of tens (hundreds?) of millions of people into the labor market globally over the past 50 years or so. Indonesians, Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, etc etc etc. More supply (of labor) leads to lower price (wages). I don't think 100% union membership could have prevented that.
Look I am not gloating over anything, you bring up the story of your grandmother, as some type of proof that sexism was the reason that wages were high.
Then you turn around and insult me.
Did I stop your grandmother from going to Med School in the 40s. No, so take your anger some place else. Along with the rest of the crap you are selling.
Wages were high because of decimation, that has to be the silliest idea that I have seen posted in months.
So you are saying that business, could hire minorities and save money, but would rather pay higher salaries to white people, but today, they have decided to instead of continuing to hire Americans, both white and black, they send it off shore to be produced. Are they saving money there by paying higher labor costs? You know they were racist's before, but now they are capitalist, trying to get the best deal on labor.
Before that it was health insurance companies are struggling to make 1% profit.
The story of my grandmother is relevant because it is a humanizing example of the rampant sexism (to the benefit of White men) that distinguished the labor market of the time. Women and non-Whites were formally and informally barred from opportunities, which reserved them for White men and made their average wages look so good.
And yes, I am upset and ashamed of the rampant sexism of this country in the 1950s and the 1960s. I am a firm believer that we have made progress on this front thankfully, and I find your inability to acknowledge the importance of that sexism in your analysis of that era as somehow "irrelevant" at least naive if not sexist yourself.
You seem not to understand the fundamentals of how wage rates were and are set. They are not arbitrarily chosen by businesses. They are based on supply and demand and what each side can negotiate from each other, which heavily depends on the leverage that the two sides can bring to the table. Guess what with slavery -- when you have people literally in chains, they have very little leverage against you.
Women, non-White workers, and immigrants were kept out of the supply of labor. How and why? "Traditional gender roles" for women (such as my grandmother) and widespread racism throughout society. Jim Crow was still the law of southern states until the mid-1960s, and it was not like the switch on 350+ years of slavery and Jim Crow was just flipped and switch completely overnight. We still struggle with that now.
Why did companies do this? Because they were made up of White men who were, like most men of their time, racist and sexist. They saw high-wage and professional work as rightfully the domain of other White men like themselves, so they were more than happy to expect wives to stay home and not to hire non-Whites to work with them.
At the same time, unions had leverage because large industrial firms had a lot of power on their individual markets to set prices and product quality (or a lack thereof). Unions could demand a lot, and companies could afford what they asked for because they could always pass those costs along to customers with no other choices.
Then, to use cars as just one example, the Germans and the Japanese showed. Foreign producers could beat Ford, GM, and Chrysler on quality and price. The Big Three all the sudden had real competition, so they could not pass their high costs along or get away with making cruddy cars anymore, and the gravy train for both the union and management ended as their market shares eroded and the Big Three shrank.
Look, I grew up in a union household. My father was a local union president for 30+ years. Sounds like you are a (public) sector union guy yourself, so I understand your mentality that "the union is everything" is your dislike of Reagan. I definitely grew up around that, and I grew up around the sense your fellow union members are your brothers, and you take care of each other outside of work. There is a lot to like there. That mentality demands that you ignore these complicating factors and things that may say something bad about the union. After all, the union is everything. Don't give the other side leverage.
But I also could not happen but notice that said union was made up of 100% White men. It being Iowa, I can forgive the lack of non-White workers, but there were no women around. I also could not happen to notice the virulent sexism and racism -- which was quite explicit at times -- of the members of both my father's union and the management of the companies that they worked for. It was the way of the world for them.
They were the types to be quite explicit that "this is not women's work" and "we don't want no [insert your favorite racial slur] working around here." This goes both for the union members and the management on the other side of the table.
You say unions might be an answer for the middle class generally, but I just do not see it. The particular circumstances where unions had leverage because labor supply was so restricted and companies could afford to give into their demands because they had little competition are long gone. We would not want to bring that kind of sexism and racism back in the workplace, and if unions could not survive Toyota and VW intact, I doubt they are somehow going to work out against 1.6 billion Chinese workers and another 2+ billion coming online in Southeast Asia, India, and Sub-Saharan Africa as we speak.
A union demanding more money in 1960 had a heck of a lot more leverage than one would now. Demanding more money now for unskilled White dudes in the Midwest is going to sound pretty funny when a few billion people overseas are willing to do the job for a fraction of the wage. Sounds more like a joke than a serious solution.
The White men in your family were just born in the right place at the right time with the right skin color and chromosomes. But the world is different from that now.
I never said that.
I clearly stated (with a data source that you provided) that health insurance companies made a few percent (the highest was 3.4%) relative to their revenues, which is roughly ~1% or <1% of total U.S. healthcare spending. And if you are serious about reducing American healthcare costs relative to OECD peers, then insurance profits are too small to make a significant dent in the difference that you promise to eliminate with M4A.
Stop trying to gaslight me that I did otherwise. Otherwise, all you are doing is showing off your bad faith or inability to understand a simple point.
I get what you are doing -- if insurance profits are the ultimate problem, then M4A is the obvious solution. You are committed to that formulation. It is just not true that insurance profits are really the problem, though, and acknowledging that means having to rethink this whole thing for you, and you do not want to do that.
Saying you need to kick the butts of greedy insurance misers is easy and sounds like a winning political proposition. Realizing that reality would demand you have to significantly cut the incomes of middle class healthcare workers is a much more unsettling moral and political prospect, so you are just choosing to ignore that difficult reality.
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The spike of cheap labor overseas affected wages and prices in America, but that would not have been possible without the labor agreements that American entered into - agreements that, at the time, were backed by majorities of both parties. It is interesting that today, international trade openness is an issue that cuts through both parties (Trump vs. Chamber of Commerce Republicans; Bernie vs. establishment Democrats).
Open trade agreements result in more sales to and from emerging nations, but the vast majority of the benefits of that new trade are captured by corporations, and blue-collar workers in America take on most of the costs of those agreements.
Consumers get huge benefits from trade too: lower prices, wider selection of goods, and improved quality of domestic goods due to competitive forces. That's one big reason standards of living are higher even though wages not so much.
Create a retirement planning thread and we can move this one to the cave.
Reading your responses it is abundantly clear that you want to Make America Great Again. Do you really realize what arguments you are actually making?
Why should you or I be ashamed of something we did not do, and do not do now? We really have to end this white guilt way of thinking. I am not excusing racism or sexism, but to blame me, for something I am not doing, just because of what occurred in the past is not right either.
That does not make me a Trump supporter or anything like it.
Look at the statues currently being taken down, I have no problem with CSA statues being taken down, those people were traitors to the country, and should have never been celebrated in first place. But now they are turning to taking down statues of Washington and other leaders that also held slaves.
The moment we allow our current moral attitudes and judgements, as a way to measure those from the past, is the day we step over the line of freedom and into fascism.
Do you really think that is happening today here in America? There is no basis what so ever that racism was the reason for high wages jobs in the 60's and early 70's. None.
Nearly all of those high-wage union and management jobs of yore went to White men, but no no no, racism and sexism had nothing to do with it. Even though the union and corporate culture of the time was explicitly racist and sexist. Just trust you here.
You sound pretty ridiculous.
Show me a link that shows the reason for high salaries during the 60's and early 70's was directly related to racism and sexisms. You can't because there is no correlation between the two factors. Now was both racism and sexism present during the time period, sure it was, not one is doubting that nor saying it was not.
Just because a white male is running a business does not make him a racist.
which is what you are implying, they were all racist and sexist and willing to pay higher wages to keep minorities out of the field. That is not true at all. Many minorities were in unions during this time.
Just because you saw it on Mad Man, does not make it real life.
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