[William Terrell]

Back then a man could work at an ordinary job, his wife could stay home and they could afford to raise kids, buy a house, a car and go on vacations. And that was the norm.

Today it is the rare exception. Whatever changed, something changed, and it is not good for the country or our quality of life. The media is burning up today with explanations, rationalizations and isolated statements of how that observable difference in life doesn't matter and how good we have things now.

The very fact that so much effort has to be turned toward explaining over and over again how every thing's fine makes me think everything is not fine. You may notice that the source of all the blue sky is the national government or individuals and groups that depend on the largess of the government to exist.

The maxim still applies: you don't take counsel about the benevolence of a thing from those whose livelihood depends on the existence that thing.

[Alberta's Child]

And that was the norm.

And that's really the heart of the problem here. People nowadays look back at a brief period of time in the late 1940s and 1950s and call that "the norm," when in fact it was really just an anomaly of the post-WW2 era when the United States was the only industrialized nation in the world that emerged from World War II with its industrial capacity unscathed. Add to that the growing suburbanization of this country that resulted from the most massive socialist program this country had ever implemented up to that point (the development of the Interstate Highway System), and you've got a "norm" that was anything but "normal" in any sense of the word.

I agree that everything is not quite right these days, but I think it has less to do with middle-class economics than with a general decline in our culture. In a nutshell, it is all about the way an annual trip to Disney World has become a God-given rightm, and carrying a firearm has become a crime.

[ninenot]

That Camelot-period was interrupted by LBJ's gift to Corporate America: EEOC.

While it is now a burden, at the time it encouraged women to join the workforce. Of course, they were "cheap labor," as time-in-grade had a good deal to do with compensation.

Now they are NOT so "cheap," and the work's going to China.

See the pattern?