You posted: Yeah, the economy is great? When they have a Wal-mart open they have 25,000 people apply for 250 jobs. That is a great economy. It was not uncommon for a man with a high school education to have a house, a wife that didn’t work, three kids or more, to live simple but well. Now it takes two people with degrees in most place to have a home. I don’t want to hear about how efficient it is to have the Chinese doing all our manufacturing and illegals doing all the construction and service jobs, and Chinese and Indians doing all the computer and high tech stuff.
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I am not sure I have ever heard of 25,000 people trying for 250 Wal-Mart jobs, but I guess that could be. Nationwide our unemployment rate is around 5%, which is generally considered full employment. I am sure there are depressed areas in the country (Detroit comes to mind), but that is not the general state of the economy.
You are right that most families used to have one earner, while the wife would stay home with the kids. I grew up in that era. The family home was usually much smaller than a typical house today. The family would own one car. There were no cell phones, cable tv (or even color tv at my house!), yearly trips to Disneyworld, etc. etc. The main reasons wives starting getting jobs were: 1)feminism (aka women’s lib, a misnomer); and 2) the desire to live a lifestyle more like those who had more.
You may not want to hear about the global economy, but it is now pretty much in place. There is also more and more mechanization of work, with robots doing much of what humans (often unionized, by the way) demanded much more to do.
No one owes any of us a living, and certainly not a living like the people in this clip are living. You makes your choices and you lives with them.
Tell me some of the great jobs that came about from doing business with China? Capitalist believe in competition unless it is competing for labor. How do wages improve when the government lets them bring in people from overseas every time the labor market gets tight. The idea is to get educated so you have skills that others don’t so your wages go up. You pay for college, but the college you go to gives scholarships to people from other countries and then use them to keep your wages down.
You are right that most families used to have one earner, while the wife would stay home with the kids. I grew up in that era.
I grew up in that era too and the statistics tell us something important. The majority of married women with children did not work outside the home than yet the unemployment rates were usually much higher than today. In the 50s, unemployment was very much different and jobs very much harder to find for the unemployed.
Today, the vast majority of women with children work outside the home which means a far higher percentage of the population are in the workforce, yet over the last 25 years, unemployment has been lower than in the 50s or 60s. Even the nature of unemployment is different today. Some people now treat it as an extended vacation because they are two income families and are in no big hurry to find another job. Others will take the time to find the job they really want rather than taking the first one offered. When my dad was unemployed in the late 50s, he did not have the luxury of waiting for his ideal job. He had to take whatever he could get and he had to do it before his benefits ran out.