In 1957 the average cost of a single-family home in America was about 2.2 times the average annual wage. Today it’s more than 10 times the average wage.
When the Boomer generation was the same age as today’s Millennials, it owned about 22% of the nation’s wealth; Millennials today control about 4% of the country’s wealth (and it’s the same for Zoomers).
From the 1930s (after FDR amended the ultra-liberal excesses that led to the 1929 crisis) right up until the Reagan Revolution, it was possible for seniors to live comfortably on Social Security alone; Reagan undid that with his “reforms” so today that’s nearly impossible.
In the early 1970s, a comprehensive health insurance used to cost about $35/month per employee, and in most of the States hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be run as non-profits.
Today, health insurance can be as much as 20% of a company’s payroll expense, and the idea of running the health service as a non-profit is by many seen as an abomination that never belonged to America.
When Reagan came into office, a single wage earner could support a family with a middle-class lifestyle, and fully 65% of Americans were in the middle class (up from around 20% in the 1930s).
Today, after 44 years of cynical Reaganomics, it takes two full-time people to achieve the same status, which triggers huge childcare expenses, which is part of why only 43% of Americans are middle class.
No wonder then that:
- A majority of voters under 40 want a democratic socialist to win the White House in the next presidential election.
- 51% of likely US Voters ages 18 to 39 would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election (36% don’t want a democratic socialist to win in 2028, and 17% are not sure).
- Among the youngest cohort (ages 18-24) of voters, 57% want a democratic socialist to win the next presidential election.
- Among those who voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, 78% would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election.
And there's another demographic anomaly: as generations grow older they usually turn more conservative.
At some point they end up accumulating enough wealth, and their priority gradually shifts from their right to be given fair opportunities to gain wealth to their right of defending their wealth from any perceived external challenger.
Older Millennials are nowadays well in their 40s, and yet they don't show many signs of turning more conservative like their parents did.
And that's simply because the wealth from the previous generation never had a chance to trickle down to them.
No wonder that nowadays they're more scared of the unhinged excesses of the nefarious Friedman-Reagan-Thatcher economic school than by the idea of a socialist in the White House.
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/democratic-socialism/
