....And then they mostly couldn't be bothered to actually get college degrees despite how cheap they were, yet still ended up with good careers capable of supporting entire households with only one person working anyway.
Despite his cynicism, even Bernie manages to understate the problem here!
Just throwing out there, this was one generation out of however many to the dawn of time that was able to do this. And they did it on the backs of the hundreds of thousands of people that fought, starved and died to get unions established. For the vast majority of history, if you could work you worked man, woman & child because if you didn't your family starved. Then people fought for generations to get unions established and they finally did it and one single generation got the advantages of it before the next generation decided they didn't need no stinking unions as they were working white collar jobs and here we are. We're not standing together so we're falling together.
It was the Democratic establishment and the corporate media that stole it. The biggest thing they fear is a candidate that puts the American people over corporate interests.
See the pattern? Combined with all the "left" side of democrats support for US imperialism.
Bernie and people like him ain't gonna change shit, not any more in the future that they did in a past decades. It's time to radicalise way beyond him and the lukewarm electoral socialdemocracy, the only thing that can change something for the better, and did in the past, is the organised working class.
As much as I hate to say it, Democrats would've just lost even harder if the vote was divided. He did the right thing at the time, the democrat party never would've backed down on Hillary back then.
That entire election was egos that overestimated how things would go.
Sorry, Bernie's full of crap. He's deliberately twisting facts to misinform. He's using today's highest minimum wage to calculate paying tuition at levels of 50 years ago, and trying to imply that people only needed to work 306 hours THEN to pay for college tuition THEN. That's just not true.
When I was working during high school / college, minimum wage was $1.50 / hr. That works out to $459 for 4 years of college education. Tuition at public institutions in the mid '70's was $1210 / year nces.ed.gov That's $4840 for 4 years at a time when my comfortably middle-class father was earning ~ $25 K / year. It was cheaper, but not by as much as Bernie claims.
Also, public colleges have always been subsidized by the state. You'd also need to look at the level of subsidy between then and now and whether we're choosing to subsidize less.
I guess my dads not A typical boomer, he openly emits that times were much easier for him. As this quote from Bernie implies, after taking to account inflation and everything around living your life, we work much harder and get much less than our parents or grandparents did.
Regarding getting off the gold standard, sure that might have some effect, and I'm not a finance major so I don't know all the details, but in the end, I think capitalists would have done whatever they needed to in order to suppress how much people make in compared to their productivity. Getting off of a standard was just the technique used at the time.
It's more cynicism than defeatism. People from the United States have pushed for these kinds of common sense reforms for our entire lives and we still have nothing to show for it.
Yes something needs to change and I feel you are seeing the real panic of the right as more and more younger people can now vote and are just pissed as everything they are doing.
People have been saying this since the 60s. Lots of young people are still conservative and many areas are still solidly red. I don't see a massive blue wave that garners a supermajority happening anytime soon.
Next is speculation on my part, but I imagine people are turning conservative more based on their wealth than their age. We saw a correlation between age and conservative sentiment because people tended to gather wealth as they got older.
But that link has been progressively eroded, so people are no longer switching.
Essentially the conservatives are killing the golden goose in their incessant pursuit of consolidating wealth.
Do you realize who tweeted that? Because I feel like asking Bernie Sanders to just "do it" is very unfair. He's been fucking trying for the past decade.
This is very smart of him to use generational terminology to engage with young voters. He's looking at trends on social media. Maybe it will work for him. His main obstacle is that most democrats are moderate and don't have a problem voting republican if they think the democrat is too far to the left. Maybe engaging with young voters in this way can help him get over that obstacle.
It's not minimum wage's fault, it's the government guaranteeing student loans. Tuition skyrocketed since then and has been out of control since.
Then with so many people being told "You have to go to college so you don't become a garbageman!" the requirements for most jobs increased as well. Manufacturing in pharma, for instance, I could take a kid out of middle school and teach him the job in an hour. Get fresh grads from college for a bachelor's degree and they still need an hour of teaching. But now the Bachelors is required for some reason.
Ironically, garbage man pays pretty decent for some minimal manual labor.
Sallie Mae wasn't even a thing until 1973. Literally not boomers LOL. Federal student loans were very uncommon back before the 90s even and applied to only a few different areas, not everything. It is incredibly clear that something happened in the early 2000s that caused the current fiasco, with both tuition and debt skyrocketing.
Except that's not the case. The GI bill alone (passed in 1944) put millions people through college who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to do so and did so for decades and the price didn't skyrocket. Once deregulation happened the prices began to skyrocket.
Except the government has been backing student loans since the GI bill passed in 1944. College tuition started growing in the 80s and really took off on the 90s and 2000s. So of the government backed loans didn't cause skyrocketing tuition for almost 2 generations, why did it start when millennials were just being born?