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According to https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/propublica/, yes, they "lean to the left" but in terms of factual reporting they are rated "high". Though they may focus more on topics of interest to the left, they aren't bending all the facts. Just for reference, FOX News is "extreme right" and "mixed" for factual reporting.
Oh I agree. They, also, are not a credible source.
A couple of points y'all might want to consider, esp in light of the era I believe your parents would have grown up/started work.
The way of thinking/behavior toward a lot of financial knowledge you're describing have less to do with a public bubble or "government functionary" than the era they grew up and began work. 401Ks didn't come about until the late 70s and didn't start to become common until the mid to late 80s. Many other financial instruments didn't really become popular either before that time. Sure, there were always some who invested in the market for example, but the typical Joe Sixpack worker didn't or only superficially.
For most workers prior to that era, the most complicated finance they'd do was buying a home, through a typical local bank, at simple interest. The investment tool of choice was a savings account, also at the local bank. Many/most were still paid by check or even cash on Friday afternoon and went to the bank to deposit it. Banks actually did give out toasters to open an account. And a Christmas club was often the first account a kid opened to learn about saving. And that's how they thought -- saving and checking. Investing was some strange beast for the wealthy, not something they worried about.
Workwise, many jobs were structured just how y'all think government jobs were structured. That wasn't unique to the government; government copied it from industry. People got a job at the plant. The roles were very structured. Movement up and down the pyramid was very controlled. Someone (didn't call them HR back then but things like Personnel) did indeed decide what a particular job code was worth and that's what it paid. In many places it was almost a "command economy." The company commanded and the employees obeyed. Not long before your dads, perhaps even after they were born, the company would own many of the houses employees lived in and deducted from their pay for the "rent." The employees shopped in the company store.
A few years ago, I was at an investment seminar where the speaker said, "if you had invested $500 per month in the stock market starting in 1980, you'd have ...." Well, first of all, in 1980 I was still in school and wasn't even making $500 a month, much less have it as disposable income. Second, the financial advice being given back then was get a corporate job, stay with the same company 30 years and they'll take care of you, and put your saving into a back that has FDIC on the door. Very different than today's advice.
It was simply a different financial world back then.
Your description of the 1970s was true to a certain extent, but not as uniform as you suggest. I recall TV commercials for Mutual Funds such as the Oppenheimer Fund - and that was back in the 1960s. I remember my grandfather invested in and followed the stock market since the 1930s; he was an uneducated immigrant who came through Ellis Island to the US when he was 12, along with his 14-year-old brother and no adult supervision, spoke no English, and was a barber his whole life ultimately affording a comfortable but not lavish middle-class retirement. He learned about Wall Street because some of his customers were stock brokers.
Speaking of stock brokers, the "discount brokerage" revolution was started when Charles Schwab was founded in 1971 along with deregulation of the price of executing a trade on the NY Stock Exchange, and it was staffed by employees had left other stock brokerages (they had no loyalty to their former employers).
Technical innovation in the 1950s and 1960s led to the creation of new and innovative companies, ultimately disrupting old established companies that followed the "lifer" model you describe, and those new companies were themselves disrupted by yet new companies in the 1970s and 1980s. Names such as Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which launched the mini-computer revolution, Data General, Amdhal, Cray Research, and many others come to mind.
Those new companies had been enabled based on even earlier technical innovation at Shockley Semiconductor Labs in 1957; William Shockley was a professor at Stanford and had won the Nobel Prize in Physics and had invented the transistor. He recruited young PhDs to create a company that could actually manufacture and commercialize semiconductor chips, leading to the famous Traitorous Eight who left Shockley to found Fairchild Semiconductor. The Traitorous Eight left to found Fairchild Semiconductor (mostly because William Shockley was an a-hole), and ultimately each went on to found or revolutionize companies including National Semiconductor, Intel Corporation, AMD, Xicor, Intersil, Identronix, Escort Memory, Amelco (now Teledyne), Union Carbide Electronics, Kleiner Perkins and dozens of other companies.
The company culture developed in the 1960s at Fairchild included no-lifers mentality, mobility of employees and managers from one company to another with no ill-will, no loyalty to a company but rather loyalty to managers and other employees, stock option compensation for all employees, pay-for-performance rather than seniority, etc.; they are now commonplace. And, of course, all this led to the creation of a famous California-based fruit company named Apple, Microsoft, and so many other famous and successful (and unsuccessful) companies considered "Silicon Valley companies" even if they are not based in Silicon Valley.
True, although we do see conservatives like Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, and Bill O'Reilly getting advanced degrees from the Ivy's.
I suspect many of the ivy league conservatives are moderate Republicans or even possibly closet-liberals, but they know that they'll make 10x more money if they go full populist.
Recent media reports of government proposed student loan debt forgiveness in my opinion seem to have unleashed a lot of antipathy toward college educated people collectively.
When I have written persuasive letters in the past quoting professors and subject matter experts with higher education degrees, those with no college education would sometimes respond with a "What do they know?" attitude" or "I don't need a professor" to tell me what to think" remark.
Has there for many years been an underlying antipathy toward the college educated from the non-college educated that was aggravated by the recently announced debt forgiveness plan?
My go to line is "When your toilet overflows are you going to call a college professor?" and I have a college degree. Another favorite, "In apocalyptic times, would you have a better chance of survival being with a white collar or blue collar guy?" I choose blue collar guy.
My go to line is "When your toilet overflows are you going to call a college professor?" and I have a college degree. Another favorite, "In apocalyptic times, would you have a better chance of survival being with a white collar or blue collar guy?" I choose blue collar guy.
That depends on what they know about survival. Blue collar or white collar really isn't an indication of survival knowledge. Personally, I want the Professor off Gilligan's Island.
I oppose college loan forgiveness. I have an advanced degree.
A lot of the K-12 education system and the college education system in the United States is messed up. It needs serious reform. I would start with massive across the board cuts to public education funding. I'm talking 50%+. So much waste and bureaucratic nonsense. I would like to send a large portion of K-12 teachers and college professors to the unemployment line.
This nation spends way too much on education and we're not seeing results from our spending. Besides, the population is aging, Millennials are having fewer kids on a per person basis. An aging population doesn't need education spending.
We need to be more efficient and more effective with less money.
The vast majority of bachelor's degrees are useless. We learned that in the late 2000s recession with the rise of the college educated Starbucks barista.
I just encountered a guy this weekend who has multiple degrees and makes something like 130k as some kind of cyber-security IT guy. But he has the debt from 2 past cars rolled over into his current car payment so is paying over $800/mo for a Toyota SUV, owes 14k to his 2nd ex-wife in back spousal and child support, is being sued by his first ex-wife for something else I think along the same lines, and never seems to have extra money available. He also buys old cars and "fixes them up" - these are NEVER worth more than what he pays for them no matter what upgrades he does. They look to me like money-sinks. Oh and his credit score is trash, so skipping child support is not the only bill he misses.
No amount of personal finance class is going to fix stupid.
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