And since then, productivity exploded. Machines and automation everywhere. We are in the age of overconsumption. And value is created at an always acceleratind pace.

But then things started to slow down. But wealth growth can't slow down! It has to grow, always, and always faster. So when "produce more" stopped working, they turned to "produce for cheap".

They started cutting spendings and benefits. But it wasn't enough. And they told western workers that they were no longer competitive. Yes, that plant they're shutting down was making money. But it would make MORE money in China and other third world countries.

And while plants were going away, salaries got stagnant. Wealth was growing again!

But then the growth slowed down again. So they bought governments to get huge subsidies they could funnel in their wealth growth again.

And now plants are "optimal". Wages are low. Govs hand out money. Why is it not working?

Because they impoverished so much the working class that there is no one left to buy the goods they produce.

The problem is obvious to anyone looking: money is needed for the economy to run. If it's all locked up by oligarchs, then it serves no purpose and the economy suffocates. And there is no remote way a handful of people can manage the world's economy. "Trickle down economy" has failed everywhere and everytime it was attempted. So they're terrified. Terrified of the working class, terrified of common good, terrified of common sense.

So to make sure they can keep hoarding whatever is left to get, they turned to fascists and propped them across the world, by controlling medias and flooding social networks.

And here we are: in the age of overproduction and mass poverty combined, with a class of scared oligarchs ready to take the world down with them as long as no one stops their wealth hoarding.

Yeah the position of privilege that America occupied globally for the last 75 years minus the last ten or twenty years is not something that's talked about enough in "they" took the American dream from us

Even if you weren't. The economic boom of the 20th century gave birth to lots of prosperous minority communities.

Only problem was that if you ever got too prosperous, neighbors might come by to burn the place down.

But a lot of the so-called economic anxiety kicked off by mass migration to California, Texas, and Florida (and to London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersberg, Beijing, Tokyo, and Mexico City) was the result of war refugees, political dissidents, and victims of a shifting market economy finding real serious economic benefits to relocating inside the fence of one of the world's premier powers. You didn't need to be white to achieve a marked improvement in quality of life, you just needed to be within arm's reach of all the advanced industrial capital and its benefits.

The Two Income Trap that began to rear its head in the 80s/90s was a consequence of housing, higher education debts, and child care costs that prior generations hadn't historically dealt with. One could plausibly argue that the extended adolescence of college demonstrates an overall improved economy, as people are no longer joining the workforce in their teenage years and trying to outproduce a historically high infant mortality rate.

But the benefits of the economy have gone disproportionately to the leisure and professional managerial classes, while the working classes absorb higher debts/rents and defer accessing the industrial improvements until much later in life. It isn't that non-white people never see them. It is simply that they are much older when they finally do and enjoy the benefits for less time, due to higher mortality rates.

This is why the GOP hates Unions.

There were plenty of non-white people who got good jobs through Unions.

It's so frustrating, your coworkers will be (rightfully) complaining about how the job sucks and how your boss keeps screwing us but the second you ask if they've ever thought of unionization they look at you like you've grown two heads and start spewing bullshit about unions being useless and dues being a waste of money.

It would be one thing if they were apprehensive about it because of the risk of the company union busting and them losing their jobs but they're actively hostile to any suggestion of collective bargaining

Where's that unlabeled graph of a line going steadily up and then at a point marked "Reagan" everything falls off a cliff?

Another example is Al Bundy in Married With Children. He was a shoe salesman with a stay at home wife and two kids but managed to own a nice home.

As an "elder millennial", I too, saw this happen. I grew up in a very middle class home. About the only thing we didn't regularly do from the list in the OP, was modest vacations.

My dad was a teacher.

We didn't have anything overly special, but we had what we needed and we were not struggling. I have two siblings, and the entire family was a family of five. My mother did not have a job throughout my childhood and well after my teenage years, and I'm the youngest.

Now, I can't fathom having a kid. I can barely pay to keep myself alive.

Al Bundy supported a house full of degeneracy in a shoe salesman's salary.

I grew up in the 80s. I can’t think of a single minority family that had an income of one and did what was described in the posr. I also grew up in a large city, so this may also be referring to suburbs and more rural areas.

Why not? It was the fashion at the time.

The Rand Corp issued a report in 2019 on income inequality, and the situation is far worse than most people think. The median salary of $43K in 1975 had increased to only $50K in 2019, while they would have been making $92K if the tax code hadn't been steadily re-written to enrich the wealthy at the cost of the middle class and poor.

In that same time period, the mean income for the top 1% went from $289K to $1.384 million, while they would have been making $630K under the old tax codes.

Thats a 17.4% increase in the lower median, and an increase of 321.6% in the 1% median. Clearly there has been an upwards distribution of wealth at the expense of the middle class since the tax codes started to be re-written in 1974 to favor the top economic tier. The Trickle Down Economics that everyone thought was Ronald Reagan's great idea, was baked into the tax code in 1974.

In addition, the Federal minimum wage was last increased to $7.25 in 2009. Previous to that, it was raised to $5.15 in 1997. The Federal minimum wage was only increased twice in the last 28 years, for a total of a measly $2.10. And yet corporations and their owners SCREAM like their nuts are being carved out by a red hot, dull, rusty spoon at even the mention of a raise in the minimum wage.

When there are threats to raise it every 15 years or so, there are always two responses, as if they are the ONLY possible options - prices will have to go up, or jobs will have to be cut. There is never a mention of the third possible option - that corporations and their owners might have to make a slightly smaller profit. That option is absolutely unthinkable. Unmentionable.

"But less profit means the stock market would be impacted!" is the standard cry. Yes it would, but so what? The stock market hit its recent low in March of 2008, soon after Obama took over the presidency in the midst of a free fall caused by the Bush Economic Crash - about 7500. Today it is over 40,000. Corporations are clearly benefiting in today's economy, even during a global pandemic when millions of American families were facing homelessness and food shortages through no fault of their own. They were the helpless victims of government edicts which forcibly and ruthlessly shut down their only ways to make a living, while doing NOTHING to help them survive because a few rich Republicans are upset that poor people might get more money than they deserve. So they fought to a stalemate over $400 or $600 per week, while their Sociopathic Oligarch slavemasters chuckled smugly while metaphorically lighting their cigars with $100 bills and demanding more corporate welfare.

So what if smaller profits (because workers got paid their value) meant the stock market was only at 20,000, or even 15,000? Those corporations and their stockholders would still be wealthy, but there would be enough money in the treasury to pay for health care for all, college or trade school for every qualified student, to forgive all student loan shark debts, to cover those whose jobs have been essentially declared illegal because of the pandemic, and more. Sure, corporations would have to live with less profit, but instead of that money being tied up in enormous stock portfolios or in offshore bank accounts, it would be in the hands of people who would buy houses, cars, furniture, vacations, retire to make room for the next generation, etc.

The Trickle Down Economic Theory never worked. As anyone could have predicted (and many did), instead of spending those tax profits on new factories or new opportunities or higher pay scales like we were promised, the Sociopathic Oligarchs only accumulated it at the top. When they did spend it, they spent it on political leverage to get more corporate welfare so they could accumulate even more wealth, at the expense of the working class, creating financial hoards which they sleep on like a Tolkienesque dragon.

Its time to give Trickle Up Economics a try. Make more money available to those at the bottom and middle, and see what happens. Raise wages, forgive student loans, offer free college and trade schools, give every citizen health care, etc. and it will create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. Sure, the Oligarchs appreciate the efficiency of transferring the money directly from the government to their savings accounts, but the money from the Trickle Up stimulus will eventually reach them anyway, they just have to be a little patient and wait for it to help American families and the American economy first.

If they don't cooperate in this, then our society will spontaneously pivot to a Robin Hood Economy, and the Sociopathic Oligarchs won't like that one bit. We're already seeing the beginnings of it.

Read more about it :

New York Mag: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/09/rand-study-how-high-is-inequality-us.html

Fast Money: https://www.fastcompany.com/90550015/we-were-shocked-rand-study-uncovers-massive-income-shift-to-the-top-1