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Old 05-09-2017, 01:02 PM
 
9,355 posts, read 6,924,422 times
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The world woke up... We are now competing globally against 5.5 billion other people on an open market for goods and services. All of those benefits and quality of life opportunities in Murica in the 80's and 90's came at the expense of a whole lot of people living miserably. Today we have growing standards of living in the "developing" world while we have stagnated.

 
Old 05-09-2017, 01:32 PM
 
5,444 posts, read 6,962,048 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stan4 View Post
My take-home pay in the 1990s from minimum wage was like $2.90 ($4.25 an hour) and a Chili's burger was still nearly $10, so I'm not sure what these faboo high school jobs the op is talking about are all about. No one I knew had one.
This was me as well. Working minimum wage at McDonalds for 4.25 an hour in 1994. I eventually moved up to 4.75 before I quit. After paying for gas and insurance on my 87 Chevette, I didn't have much money to do anything at all except the occasional movie. Nowadays, my wife and I will go out to eat and we always seem to see a group of high school kids eating out or walking around with a Starbucks cup and I have to wonder how they are paying for all that stuff. My assumption is mommy and daddy, but who knows.
 
Old 05-09-2017, 05:05 PM
 
Location: Oregon, formerly Texas
10,026 posts, read 7,183,732 times
Reputation: 17121
Depends I guess.

I was born in the 80s so don't really remember them, but I do know from my parents that the 81-83 recession hit very hard in Texas where we lived. Texas suffered a dual shock of oil price declines that killed jobs and the Savings & Loan crisis which destroyed what was left of family farms. From what I understand, Texas suffered a mini-housing crisis during the early 1990s recession, the resulting banking issues it went through were actually one of the reasons it didn't suffer as much as other parts of the country from the 2008-09 crash.

I was a kid/high school student in the 90s so I don't really remember the jobs situation... but I remember my parents expressing that things in the mid-late 90s were a lot better than they had been in the 80s. By the late 90s the tech boom echo had come to Austin and some other areas, and NAFTA was fueling cross-border trade with Mexico & port traffic in Houston.
 
Old 05-09-2017, 05:15 PM
 
Location: Oregon, formerly Texas
10,026 posts, read 7,183,732 times
Reputation: 17121
Quote:
Originally Posted by headingtoDenver View Post
This was me as well. Working minimum wage at McDonalds for 4.25 an hour in 1994. I eventually moved up to 4.75 before I quit. After paying for gas and insurance on my 87 Chevette, I didn't have much money to do anything at all except the occasional movie. Nowadays, my wife and I will go out to eat and we always seem to see a group of high school kids eating out or walking around with a Starbucks cup and I have to wonder how they are paying for all that stuff. My assumption is mommy and daddy, but who knows.
But you're missing what they're NOT doing.

For example - spending on clothing has cratered. When I was a kid in the 1990sthere was heavy social pressure to by Gap shirts and Guess jeans or whatever at marked up prices. People aren't shelling out as many big bucks for brand-name clothes anymore.

When I was a kid we didn't buy $4.00 coffees, but we went to the movies every week or so, ie: kids in the 90s saw Titanic in the theaters something like 4 or 5 times. We hung out at the mall and would spend $5-10 a pop in quarters on arcade games, ask our parents to by us the new Air Jordan sneakers for $125 or Hilfiger shirt for $40 so we could look like Zack Morris (90s dollars -- so equivalent to more now) .

Kids now go to Starbucks but wear jeans from Target that cost $30... or from Goodwill that cost $15 (in 2010s dollars - LESS than we paid even in adjusted terms).

There was that hit song by Macklemore a few years ago that made rummaging through thrift shops cool again. 1 billion views on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK8mJJJvaes

The relevant lyric:

Quote:
They be like, "Oh, that Gucci. That's hella tight."
I'm like, "Yo, that's fifty dollars for a T-shirt."
Limited edition, let's do some simple addition
Fifty dollars for a T-shirt - that's just some ignorant b****. S***
I call that getting swindled and pimped. S***
I call that getting tricked by a business...
That shirt's hella dough
And having the same one as six other people in this club is a hella don't
Tryna get girls from a brand and you hella won't
Man you hella won't
So maybe you're out of touch with young people's values.

Last edited by redguard57; 05-09-2017 at 06:21 PM..
 
Old 05-10-2017, 07:53 AM
 
817 posts, read 750,185 times
Reputation: 810
The 90's were the current generational pinnacle of culture and wealth. I was a teenager in the 90's and they were the best of times. Jobs and cars everywhere.

But now I understand things have changed today. I don't personally like it or agree with that, but it's still happening. It happens every generation.

Today's kids have been dramatically transformed by the recession, laws, and technology. Big spending is no longer fashionable. Restricted drivers license is and high insurance costs make driving prohibitive. And the advent of smartphones, social media, and networked video games make staying at home and being social much easier.

My kids are millennials, and I've heard from other Millennials, that today's focus is on going out to eat and traveling. And then posting it. That's the big thing for the younger folks.
 
Old 05-10-2017, 09:08 AM
 
4,224 posts, read 2,998,039 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by djmilf View Post
The 1980-81 recession was engineered by Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. He raised the prime interest rate to 15% in response to inflation approaching 10%
The recession -- then the worst economic downturn since the Great Recession -- actually ran from July 1981 to November 1982. It by the way included ten straight months with unemployment above 10%. This was the result of Reagan's entirely misguided resolve to "wring inflation out of the economy." Volcker -- a policy servant to the President -- had been implementing Reagan's notions since the late summer of 1980 when polls began showing that Carter's re-election hopes were doomed.

There was no "Morning in America" except in the beguiled minds of partisans who needed only the passable portrayal of the kindly grandfather character in front of the TV cameras. Reagan was good at that, but very little else.

Quote:
Originally Posted by djmilf View Post
The S&L debacle was caused by...
...tolerance of the squeeze coming from an inexorable vise of interest rates, as S&L's had to pay more to attract depositors than they could earn on their typical portfolio holdings. Unaddressed, this problem caused S&L's to seek greater income by taking on greater risk. There is usually a price to pay for that in the long-run, and there certainly was in this case.

Quote:
Originally Posted by djmilf View Post
I've often thought that the S&L debacle was a warm up to the 2008 financial meltdown...
What they had in common was grossly inept oversight by laissez-faire, Republican administrations. Markets are NOT wise enough to regulate themselves. Surprise, surprise! Otherwise, the on-the-ground particulars of the two crises were very different from each other.
 
Old 05-10-2017, 09:57 AM
 
8,389 posts, read 7,352,634 times
Reputation: 8707
@Pub-911

My bad, I should have been more accurate about the dates of the recessions, or at least termed them the early 1980's recessions. I was typing just to get it out there, should have been a little more careful.

The thing about Paul Volcker being the policy servant to Ronald Reagan is debatable. Volcker became Fed chairman in August 1979, and implemented higher interest rates to combat inflation before Reagan was elected.
 
Old 05-10-2017, 12:29 PM
 
Location: Oregon, formerly Texas
10,026 posts, read 7,183,732 times
Reputation: 17121
Quote:
Originally Posted by 69Charger View Post
The 90's were the current generational pinnacle of culture and wealth. I was a teenager in the 90's and they were the best of times. Jobs and cars everywhere.

But now I understand things have changed today. I don't personally like it or agree with that, but it's still happening. It happens every generation.

Today's kids have been dramatically transformed by the recession, laws, and technology. Big spending is no longer fashionable. Restricted drivers license is and high insurance costs make driving prohibitive. And the advent of smartphones, social media, and networked video games make staying at home and being social much easier.

My kids are millennials, and I've heard from other Millennials, that today's focus is on going out to eat and traveling. And then posting it. That's the big thing for the younger folks.
Yup, and this is borne out by the marketing research... the Millennials value "experiences." I should have realized it when food selfies started to become a thing on facebook... I started to see it a lot starting about the time Obama got elected.

They love, love Love with a capital L, going out to eat and posting a picture of their food and/or drinks.
 
Old 05-10-2017, 12:37 PM
 
4,224 posts, read 2,998,039 times
Reputation: 3812
Quote:
Originally Posted by djmilf View Post
@Pub-911

My bad, I should have been more accurate about the dates of the recessions, or at least termed them the early 1980's recessions. I was typing just to get it out there, should have been a little more careful.

The thing about Paul Volcker being the policy servant to Ronald Reagan is debatable. Volcker became Fed chairman in August 1979, and implemented higher interest rates to combat inflation before Reagan was elected.
Not the killer rates that turned our NE manufacturing base into the Rust Belt. Inflation had been an issue sine the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo Carter had enjoyed good success in bringing down unemployment, but inflation had proved a tougher nut to crack even before the 1979-80 oil crisis. Unfortunately, Reagan and the desultory dimbulbs of the supply-side school of economics were not in tune with any actual economics and just went hog wild on the notion of high interest rates as a needed colonic cleansing mechanism. Disaster ensued.
 
Old 05-10-2017, 12:42 PM
 
4,224 posts, read 2,998,039 times
Reputation: 3812
Quote:
Originally Posted by redguard57 View Post
They love, love Love with a capital L, going out to eat and posting a picture of their food and/or drinks.
Perhaps just the equivalent of the "Wish you were here!" vacation postcards of the 1950's?
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