re: #422 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

We had to compete with Communism and to do so we had to put some limits on Capitalism. Once the opposing ideology was defeated, we stopped trying to rein in the excesses of rapacious capitalism.

I think part of it was a “living memory” thing. By the 1980s, how many people alive actually remembered the Great Depression? Not as a 10 year old with happy memories of playing in the streets with friends, but as a 20 something with no job prospects? Those people would have been in their 70s. Same thing happened with war policy, by 2000 we had very few people left who remembered WWII or even Korea; and nobody really likes to have a legitimate discussion of the red headed stepchild of American wars in Vietnam… so “sure, we can bomb the shit out of these countries, topple their governments and leave, I’m sure nothing bad will follow, they’ll figure things out on their own.”

We now have a generational divide on economics - Boomers who mostly managed to get while the getting was good vs GenXers and Millennials who are mostly screwed with stagnant wages and rising housing costs.