Dahum! It turns out Obama didn’t pay her mortgage after all

@Chicago, great comments. The “dawning of the age of Aquarius” was supposed to bring exactly that to man. I have my doubts.

She is just sad today, tomorrow another Demoncrat will step up to the podium and promises “to fix” what ails her, promise her more free cash (“better pay for nurses! the boon to the medical industry of O’care has to be shared with the nurses!”), more free schooling, more something she wants. Then she will be “hopeful again” and she will dutifully support the new guy/gal, believe and argue their talking points, squeal about how great is all is, while actually falling further into poverty and a smaller lifestyle.

Just to be disillusioned once again.

As long as the promises are mine, and the payments are theirs, I’ll believe anything you tell me too. This is the mantra of nearly the entire republic.

TE, we live in an Entitlement Society, and it began a long time even before LBJ, let alone Obama. But leaders like them were inevitable given the mentality that swept this country from the end of WW2 onward.

I remember the 50s and 60s well, though I was still a small child in the 50s, and turned 18 in 1970.

We were, I recall, quite drunk on our success as a nation, and our “special” status. We were insanely prosperous, especially when compared to the rest of the world, even though we could not know that we were already running on the fumes of the incredible industrial growth machine of 1880-1920. We also could not know that it is easy to be rich in a slightly underpopulated country occupying a massive amount of land richly endowed with mineral resources and some of the best farmland in the world.

We also could not know that Statism was already killing the bold, inventive industrial culture that turned those resources into the material bounty that was showered on almost everyone who had a job to some extent, and destroying the ethic of savings and work that financed the fantastic growth of the fifties and early 60s. You see, statism and the socialistic baggage was well-entrenched by the end of WW2. The population saw Roosevelt and his New Deal brain trust as our saviors, and public policy from the end of the great war forward, continued and extended his policies, elaborating on them extensively.

A house with a car in the driveway in the new auto suburbs for everyone, and highways to drive them on. Nice hi-rise warehouses for the poor. Guaranteed markets for the auto manufacturers. FHA and VA loans for those little ticky-tacky houses. Nice hi-speed roads to drive those cars on and make it easy to get out to the new burbs from the city. Good jobs for everyone.

And almost everyone approved, because we were so rich, it was thought, that we would never be not rich and could guarantee everyone cradle-to-grave security. Pundits and academics generated hundreds of books and articles and papers that stated that this richest country that ever existed ought to lift everyone out of poverty and guarantee everyone financial security, middle-class living conditions, recreation, health care, old age care, and education. One pundit went so far as to state that our prosperity was permanent and that there would soon be no reason for anyone to work.

Is it any wonder that by 1965, or thereabouts, all the people still left out were feeling as though they were cheated of their just due? The fact is, if people hear something repeated often enough, especially by people of prestige and standing, they will begin to believe it. It will begin to override even the doubters capable of critical thinking. How often have you heard, even on this very site, from people who ought to know better, the outrage at the kind of deterioration in most people’s fortunes and prospects that is happening now…. as though the kind of luxury most people have wallowed in in this country for the past 60 years is some sort of entitlement, an American birthright?

The fact is, absent the Statist interventions in the economy during the post-war period, many hundreds of thousands, or even millions of Americans, might not have enjoyed quite such generous paychecks and lavish lifestyles replete with new cars every three years and a “move up” to a larger, better-appointed house every 7 years or so. Forget about second homes, swimming pools, cars for teens, lavish out-of-town vacations, fine jewelry for middle class people.

If you doubt me, look no further than the economies of what where then extremely prosperous cities that were amply supplied with high-wage jobs. Southern California. St Louis. Chicago. Detroit.. and many other cities, and you will see that almost every job that paid high factory wages was either in the defense industry, or was union. Or both. The 50s and 60s were the heyday of both the labor unions and the aerospace and defense industries. Aerospace, autos, and weapons in St Louis, Detroit, and Chicago- almost everyone in my family had a job at McDonnell Douglas in St Louis, where that company was based (the McDonnell family is still very rich and on the St Louis social register); aerospace and shipbuilding in southern CA, Aerospace, appliances and weapons in Ohio. In the case of any company that was a defense contractor, cost was totally no object, so there was almost no ceiling on wages, which, for ordinary workers in non-professional jobs, was far higher than even that for UAW auto workers and AFL-CIO steelworkers.

That is why I maintain that the LUCKIEST generations were the GI gen and the Silents. The silents, especially, came of age in the late 40s-early 60s, in a time when there was a distinct shortage of labor and this country was at its prosperous peak. Supply & demand was very much in their favor, and any man who graduated high school and could fog a mirror could score an extremely good job.

That ended c. 1970, when we began to lose markets and jobs to the Asian countries- a development that was in the making since the mid-60s at least, something one of my mother’s former bosses attested to. He was in the metal-plating business and learned the score in 1965, which was that this industry was moving offshore and would be totally offshore within a decade. It took just about that much time for GM and the other doddering American car makers to discover that their markets were being taken away from them by the nimble Japanese car makers, and that industry lost tens of thousands of jobs by the time Carter was elected, and continued to hemorrhage jobs for the next decade, as did the steel industry and related industries, along with the formerly dense network of suppliers, jobbers, subcontractors, and minor manufacturers that both fed the large companies and relied on them. Young men no longer trained to become skilled machinists, pattern makers, mechanics, or even engineers, and the venture capital to start new businesses in these industries was of course not there. It was not there in 1965, even, which my mom’s boss discovered when he tried to get some for his own venture. No dice, he was told by every brokerage firm in town, it’s a sunset business in this country, you’ll never make it.

The disillusioned woman featured here is an extreme example of the entitlement mentality and extremely delusional, magical thinking that is so prevalent among all social classes in America. Everyone out here is furious because we aren’t back to “normal”, meaning jobs that can buy 2000 sq ft houses and 3 cars, and prices for necessities cheap enough to drive each of those cars 50 miles in each direction daily and leave money left over for regular spending binges on unnecessary crap, vacations abroad, and restaurant meals out twice a week. People are about to learn that there’s nothing “normal” about our anomalous prosperity, and that we’ve been faking it with credit since the 80s and you can fake it for only so long.