Monday, July 27, 2015

Parents Yoked to Their Children for Decades

I can't remember when my father was born - '32? 1933? I can't remember at all when my mother was born. Late '30s, I think.

I do remember he was (as was my mother) a high-school dropout, although later they got their GEDs. At that time the GEDs were worthless (as a high school diploma is worthless today, along with many college degrees).

He spent his life as a general contractor, building four houses a year (it takes three months to build a house). My mother worked as the night admitting clerk in the local ER.

My father once told me, "I could have been rich but it wasn't worth it." I knew what he meant. Enough is as good as a feast, if you can be grateful.

Still, my family had a nice middle-class existence and I never missed the Porsche and the Lear jet because we never had them, so how can you miss what you never had? I had a bike and that was good enough. (At 14 I had a $50 minibike and as far I was concerned it was a jet airplane.)

I also remember my father telling me, "If I tried to do today what I did then, I couldn't do it."

That was not the only time I've been told that recently. That's how bad the economy is - and it's going to stay that way for a long time.

My parents had two children, me and my sister. My father's parents had nine - and my paternal grandfather dropped out of school in the 8th-grade and had a "career" of installing and finishing wooden-strip floors. I barely remember him doing it just one time, when I was about five. He had one of those big orbital sanders.

My father didn't work all that hard, because I worked for him starting at 12. Get up, go to breakfast, go to work, take a 15-minute break, work, take a half-four lunch, work, take a 15-minute break, work, go home, take a bath, then be just fine.

Being a carpenter is mostly a semi-skilled job, although being a contractor is of a much high skill set. But it's not college-degree stuff.

My parents (especially my father) ended up yoked to me and my sister for at least 18 years, until I went away to college and became semi-self-supporting. I paid for my share of an apartment, my used car, the insurance, my food, my phone, gasoline, etc. My parents paid my tuition, which at that time was about $300 a semester and was pretty much still that when I graduated in '83.

Then, in January, 1974, wages stopped going up, which means the best times, economically, in the U.S. were after the end of WWII and that January of '74. There are several reasons wages stopped going up. One, Nixon went off the old standard in '71, allowing the Federal Reserve to have its merry way with inflating the money supply at will Then the federal government got so big it permanently stalled the economy. And then there is the trillions dollars we've sent to our enemies in the Midwest for oil.

Things have gotten better technologically - so we've stomping on the brake and accelerator at the same time. The free market and technology are advancing our standard of living and our bloated government is retarding it.

As an example, first my family went from no AC to a window unit (and I slept on the living-room floor, which I didn't mind at all) to central air. I never had AC in my car until I was 30, because before then I always had subcompacts that only didn't have AC, they didn't have power steering or power brakes). And the TVs we had as kids...I'm only going to say we had rabbit ears on top of the TV and I was not only the rabbit ear adjuster, I was also the remote.

But economically it's a different story, contrary to the lies of the government.

Because of the collapse of wages, due to the importation of Third World morons, inflated money, exportation of jobs, crushing debt and crushing regulations, many people cannot afford children anymore. Unless they want to live in a rural trailer (which I don't think it a bad idea, but that's just me).

The economy has at least doubled since 1980 and if wages had continued to raise at the same level as the 1950s, the mean salary would be about $100,000 a year. I have not only figured this myself but professional economists have figured it, too. And it's always the same figure: about $100,000 a year.

Those are some of the reasons we're not a replacement rate. Children are just too damn expensive, due to our permanently-stalled economy.

There are other problems, too, such as the problems between men and women - created by the government and its "laws" interfering in those relationships. Some women, for an example, think that men are supposed to be attracted to fat women or career women. They're not and never will be.

Women got those ideas from propaganda, propaganda encouraged by the government and oftentimes enforced by law. Such as Affirmative Action, which "White Men Need Not Apply" (I have seen this happen several times with friends).

Men are getting it from all angles. Very few high-paying jobs exist unless you have an in-demand degree, career women who think you're supposed to be attracted to them, fat disgusting women who delude themselves they are attractive...and there are lots more problems.

Women are getting it from all angles, too. If they get a high-paying career job, men aren't good enough for them. If they get some nothing job, they end up getting some sort of transfer payments for their blobby Wal-Mart asses and their low-IQ kids. So men are supporting them whether they want to or not, through taxation.

The whole bizarre thing is right out of Idiocracy - people who have somewhat of a middle-class existence taxed half-to-death to support obese misshapen women, their skinny drug-addict husbands, and their passel of retarded kids.

This is not good and appears to be getting worse. Because we're not at replacement level, the government is importing low-IQ Third Worlders, who aren't going anywhere except to cut my grass. Their kids are going to cut my grass, too, when they're not filling the prisons.

I used to know some retired men who came of age in the '50s. They told me at that time they'd walk into certain businesses and get hired on the spot. These were working-class jobs, but right from the beginning the pay was high enough to easily support themselves. And they got raises fast.

These days, most of the people who work for minimum-wage are about 35 years old.

When I was in high school, and for a few years after I graduated, all the high school graduates went straight to the steel mill. I'd estimate the starting salary at about $25,000 a year - with a high school diploma. And after several years, about $50,000. And right before retiring, about $70,000.

Minimum-wage was for high school kids working at fast-food places.

One or my father's friend did get a college degree in the '50s. He ended up working for Sears back when it was Sears and not K-Mart. Raises every year, new cars, a house in the suburbs with a two-car garage.

Those days are now gone.

The U.S. is already breaking up because of these problems. The inner cities are so far no-go except for the violent and stupid, the rich are living in gated communities high in the hills, and what's left of the middle-class are fleeing to ethnically non-diverse small towns.

The country breaking up means possibly heading toward Third World status. And it's gotten to the point when you have some kids the family's standard of living collapses and you are still yoked to them for a few decades. No wonder so many men are opting out. Why should they have kids when they drain you economically? Not just a little bit, but a lot, to the point it's crushing?

These problems are overwhelmingly caused by government interference in the economy and the culture for the last 40 to 50 years. So if you want to reverse these problems, get rid of the government interference!

That, however, is not going to happen until the collapse is well on its way. It's going to take a miracle to stop what's coming. Personally, I think once we come out the other side things will be just fine.

But until that time, just about all you can do is prepare for it the best you can.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

More on "Fat Acceptance":

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3151516/Plus-size-women-share-bikini-clad-pictures-videos-campaign-prove-no-right-wrong-kind-fat-body.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3048088/The-High-Street-shop-telling-girls-s-fashionable-FAT-years-ve-bullied-women-super-skinny-change-tactic-cynical-dangerous.html


If men are supposed to find obese women attractive now, then women should find short and unemployed or poor men attractive. Sounds fair.

Not gonna happen.

sth_txs said...

I'm genx, but I guess there was a day when employers would offer a consistent pay raise for those who did a good job or went beyond the call of duty.

Now, even the employers have become an entitled class as well. If you have a salary as opposed to hourly wage, they happily will abuse the professional courtesy of overtime if you let them.

Unknown said...

Roe V Wade was in 1973...that was the time when America decided children weren't important anymore.

Jim said...

I live in a Midwestern town that used to have several large manufacturing plants going 3 shifts a day/7 days week. Fortune 100 companies. All the floor workers who could hack the production lines jobs for enough years wound up with nice house, a vacation home on a lake/fishing boat, good retirement pay and benefits, could pay for their kids college out of pocket.

Now those factories are mostly closed or working at 30% capacity. Huge empty parking lots when you drive past. Lots of service jobs that pay a fraction of what the factory workers made, and the few new factory workers get paid a lot less than the older ones did.

Technology makes for fewer workers needed overall, not just low-skilled ones either. You don't need a department full of accountants when the software available will let a handful do the same amount of work.

I have two young boys. Both are bright, good-looking kids. I have no idea what the heck they are going to be able to do to support themselves in 20 years. I often think a buying a small farm so that at least they'll be able to grow their own food at some point, I'm that worried about it.

sth_txs said...

Plus, even if you make the current average wage or so, 50% of your work life is that of a slave for local, state, and federal government. I say 50% since I would imagine if you could count the costs of how much government is built in to everything you buy, that would be about right.

http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-you-are-slave-for-13-years.html

Glen Filthie said...

TIME Magazine does the coolest 'infographics'. They had a stylized illustration of an upper middle class exec sitting at his desk. The prices of all the stuff he had around him were shown in today's prices, corrected for inflation. This was way back in the 90's...I suspect it's worse now.

The house I have today is three times more expensive than my fathers. He had his first home at 23 years of age; I was ten years older. Booze is about 6 times more expensive now, as are smokes. Pens and stationary were about the same - clothing is a bit more pricey. Tickets for a trip to Hawaii came down by about 60% as had some other inconsequential that are mass produced today such as transistor radios.

My grandparents were upper-middle class for their day. They had a 700 sq. ft. home with a single car garage, with a huge yard with crab apple trees, manicured lawn and a flawless small picket fence. Today most people in the upper middle class would scoff at that.

I think the depression hit us up here in Canada much harder than it did you guys down south. People starved to death in those days. I learned to save and manage money at the knee of my Grandmother and today I am probably upper-middle class myself: no debts, about half a mill in the bank and possibly a comfortable retirement assuming the world doesn't implode.

The decline will continue until such time as somebody says 'enough'. Do not assume a dystopian future run by apes and savages...we are our parents children, and there is nothing they have done that we can't.

I see a reckoning coming with the progs. With all the liberal social experiments...at some point we will hopefully pull our heads out of our butts and correct. I would not write off civilization yet.

outsider said...

I hope they kill the liberal hipsters first.