I remember my first job. Selling Fuller brush door to door. $1.67 an hour in about 1970. I remember working for Chicken of the Sea for $3.15 in 1972. I could bring about $125 a week. Auto insurance was about $300 a year and I was 18. Now 50 years later I can't afford a car to insure.
I have quite a lot to say.
First. "Millennials." Born between about 1980 - about 1995. For some odd reason I never could, for the entire life of me, figure out why Fox News and the right wing media decided to all the sudden, wage a fake social war against "millennials."
The biggest argument was about how "lazy" and "entitled" we all were/are. Now here on this right wing conservative Christian forum, there are baby boomers admitting that times are much more financially difficult than when they were kids in the 50s and 60s.
Yes. They are a lot more difficult, and there is a really good reason as to why:
"Reaganomics." It. Does. Not. Work!
Or rather, a combination of Reaganomics and a rabid anti-tax, anti-union, and anti-socialism campaign over the course of 40 years. Eisenhower would be considered an outright communist by today's Republican standards.
Anyway, moving on....
While this major anti-worker movement has been going on, at the same time, they've been focusing on reporting corporate profits and the stock market. Evaluating presidents based on how the stock market performs, as if the president has ANYTHING to do with the stock market to begin with.
So. For the past 40 years, what's been happening was this:
Corporate profits and CEO/board of dorectors' pay has been rising faster than the CPI. (Consumer Price Index.)
Meanwhile, worker pay has not kept pace with the CPI!
This, right there, is proof that right wing Reaganomics does not work! Corporate profits do NOT "trickle-down" to the workforce! Yet, decade after decade, we keep pretending that it does, and that the president is some sort of magic magician that controls everything like a communist dictator.
What we need, is what my great-great grand parents, my great grand parents, and my grandparents fought for. (Basically, the adult generations between the years 1880 to 1950. Yes, that includes the WWII generation!):
Unions!
Worker rights! (Re-strengthening them)
High taxation on the upper income levels!
Reinvesting back into our country, with an emphasis on infrastructure and education!
All of these things resulted in a wide and strong middle class that the (white) baby boomers got to take full advantage of. (Remember: "whites only" signs did actually exist, and they existed up through the 1960s! As did housing discrimination when the interstate was built and jobs left the cities for the brand new suburbs, leaving black families jobless and in poverty in the inner cities.)