Older Fluther folks, can you let me know what a good economy was like?

McDonalds Burgers 29 cents, Macs popsicle 29 cents, Domo Gas 29.9, gold $290/ounce, 10% interest on bank accounts, college $3000 per year. Easy mortgage’s. All in the 80’s in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Also $8 a barrel west Texas Crude Oil.

Other companies (or independent “head-hunters”) clandestinely calling me at work to ask if I would consider interviewing for a better opportunity elsewhere.

I always thought it was funny how some older people call younger people spoiled and lazy etc, but they could literally pay for college with a minimum wage job at that same age lol.

What-chu-mean by “older”?

Good or bad economy… I never pay much attention to that sort of thing.
Self employed for thirty five years. I do remember gasoline prices nearly doubling from the late seventies to the early eighties. That got my attention. I think my car got like six miles to the gallon.

I used to get jobs just walking in the door (mid-1980’s). “Hi I’d like to apply for a job.” Fill out the application (let’s say, hospital administration), can you start Monday?

Agree with @jca. Waiting for a job to call you up for employment only took days. There were times I would go in and apply and have the interview at the same time and be hired on the spot.
With 50 dollars I could buy several full paper bags worth of grocery.
The stores in downtown Manhattan was always bustling with customers. Theater lines were long and would wrap around the block when blockbusters came out. The concession stands were always busy.
The stores were overrunned with customers in December and the stores all had to stay open late. They couldn’t get shipments fast enough.
Even in the poor neighborhood, the windows were almost all covered in christmas lights and there was barely a home without a christmas tree.
Stores pulled out all the stops in decorating for xmas. The city was one great big mix of bright, blinking lights.
There was always someone you knew who was throwing a house party in december. I use to have several parties to go to.
Real food was served at these parties. Not these tiny nuggets of food with a bag of chips you have today. DJ’s were extremely busy.

Schools were all brand new or completely refurbished.
Every neighborhood had a library.
Museums were packed.
Everybody who wanted one has a job
Most Moms were home when the kids got off school.
Poor people had welfare and health benefits.

Anybody who wanted a job could get one. If you worked hard and kept your nose clean, you could keep that job, often for life. You got benefits, and with larger companies, a pension fund. We switched policies in a massive way in the 1980s under the “leadership” of Ronald Reagan. The theory was that if we change the rules so the “Job Creators” or Creators for short, get more and more money, they will create more and more jobs. To funnel more money to the rich, we had to begin to cut investment in things that actually grow the economy, and assistance to the poor, so the Creators could create millions more jobs.

We cut the top marginal tax rate from 70% in 1980 to 35% for most of the period since. We also added a bewildering array of tax breaks to reduce the real tax rate that very wealthy pay. Most of these new loopholes were designed so they were only available to taxpayers who earned enough to put them in the top 1%. We also amended corporate tax law so that really big corporations could make enormous profits and end up paying no taxes or even having the government owe them money. We made it so that, to do that, they needed to move much of their operation offshore. None of these rule changes benefited small business. You had to have sales in the billions before these rules helped you.

That Voodoo Economics BS Reagan sold Americans has become so deeply entrenched in the national psyche that as of yet, very few Americans seem to have noticed that we’ve been in a slow but steady decline since adopting it. The Creators can’t create jobs if none of what the GOP calls “Takers” has enough money to feed themselves. Why crank out millions of lovely living room sets when hardly anyone has enough money to buy their next meal? If you do crank them out, they’ll just rot in a warehouse somewhere.

There aren’t enough Creators to keep the economic cycle going all by themselves. Even if a Creator has 5 homes, they still only need 5 living room sets. And they are way, way less than 1% of the population. We’ve begun deconstructing the middle class to transfer ever more of the nation’s wealth to the very, very wealthy.The real goal of Voodoo Economics is wage slavery, a banana republic sort of society. A small but very dedicated group of rapaciously greedy billionaires like the Koch Brothers funded the development of the ideas and slogans to push it, and they pour billions per year into the campaign war chests of right wing politicians who, if elected, will deliver what they want, namely “Everything”.

Here’s two short videos that pretty much explain the plan.
George Carlin’s rant about our owners.
Nick Hanauer’s TED talk.

I feel ya. I feel like I have spent my life in a recession. The only good economic times I can remember were the mid-late 90’s. Then I move back to my country, which is supposed to be in a good economy. There is talk of a recession. Maybe they follow me around.

I’m 40, and am not sure whether that qualifies as old or not, but it’s old enough for me to answer with the following: Older Fluther folks, can you let me know what a good economy was like? No, because like anything else in life very few people realize how good they had it until it’s gone. There were always ups and downs pertaining to the economy, but money did go further in the 70’s and 80’s even though you made less of it.

17.9 cents for a gallon of gas when I was a young teen with my first car. Of course, $3.50 for a tankful was big money when I was a kid.

I’m not old except compared to teenagers and other immature people… But when I was growing up in the early-mid 90s, my dad had a job that supported our entire family. We all had full health insurance and dental. We could afford vacations. My dad was wined & dined by head-hunters who lured him to his next job. He left industry to join academia and immediately got placed in a tenure position (full professorship).

Now, even though I will have a PhD in a few years, I do not take it for granted that I will ever live ‘the good life’ in the middle class American way I grew up. A tenure track job is probably a pipe dream, no matter how prestigious my grants are or how good my work is. I may never own a house. I’ll be forced to take a job anywhere, even in the Bible Belt, which terrifies me, because I need money and health insurance to stay alive for more than a month or so.

My first job was so easy to get. My brother called me up and said “hey they are looking for help up here at Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Can you get up here to interview?” He was fixing their computer system for them, he didn’t work there.
I went up, interviewed for about an hour, they asked if I could start the next Monday and I was there for 30 years.
My first new car I bought was 18% interest, my first house was at 10% interest. But the interest rate on a savings account was about 7.5.

You could leave a job on Friday and have another by Monday morning. You could stay in a job for as long as you wanted, and never have to worry about getting laid off. You could have a low-paid job and still be able to afford to rent an apartment on your own. If you were in a relationship, it was possible for one parent to stay at home with the kids and the other parent could support the entire family on one salary. If you had a savings account, the interest you earned each year could double your capital in 7 years.

I totally agree with @ETpro‘s painful rant on the beastly reality of the beginning of the Reagan presidency…. which has led to the very painful reality that the average American is living thru today. Politicians ( Republicans, and far too many of the Democrats ) simply cannot be trusted. These politicians will gladly tell you one thing to your face & then turn around and do the exact opposite. Far too many of these politicians have become America’s version of the ‘Taliban’!

And it’s only going to get worse. We’re all fucked.

I normally love ET Pro, but a quick search pulls up statistics like the following:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-07/chart-day-jobs-additions-age-group-reveals-scariest-picture

I am not so sure it is the 1 percent who has kept job growth from my generation. When I look at the numbers by age groups, a very different story is being told about who Senior and Middle management is choosing to hire. Older Cohorts are blaiming the rich, but it really seems like from objective data analysis that older cohorts are hiring those in their own cohort, and if they can’t find somebody, outsourcing the job.

@Linda_Owl Thanks.

@FutureMemory I am sure that till we catch on, you are absolutely right.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought I’m looking at what’s been going on for 30 years, and you are refuting it by looking in a very microscopic way at a tiny dataset showing what happened in November of 2012.

I remember pulling away from a gas pump because it too expensive at $0.33/gal.