When America was Great.

Great Debates
1

I believe this rested on four pillars:

Get good grades in school and you would accepted to college. (and there was some mechanism to pay for it).

You had access ti Healthcare for life.

If you worked hard and saved; you could buy a home and raise a family.

Then, you could retire.
A few questions then:

When, if ever, was this possible for most Americans?

What percentage of Americans can reasonably achieve these four goals now?

What percentage of Americans have enough money to retire, even at a subsistence level?

2

Sorry, I missed the edit window.

The Big Question lies with non-Americans;*** Are these things achievable where you live? ***

3

I think that second one, access to healthcare for life, was “never.” Ronald Reagan told us that socialized medicine would take away our freedom.

4

Most people don’t go to college (that is, fewer than one-third of Americans over 25 have a four-year college degree). And back when college was genuinely affordable, at least for middle-class people, very few people (under 5%) went to college.

The enrollment boom that happened in the '50s and '60s was funded partly by the government (GI Bill etc.) and partly by colleges themselves. But in the 1970s costs started to rise significantly, and borrowing to cover tuition costs became common.

So I don’t think you can use college costs as an index of general “Greatness” in American society as a whole. Historically, they’ve always been an issue only for a minority of Americans.

5

There is a homonym gap here. Everyone misunderstood what was said. The word he obviously has been using is “grate”.

6

Most Americans own their own homes and have for decades.

“Own” includes a home with a mortgage.

7

It’s easier to look great when other major powers are bombed out ruins, suffering from political instability, or before competitors like the Asian tigers show up.

8

By most of the indicators mentioned: access to college education, health insurance, retirement security etc. the best time to be American is right now. It’s true that wages have been stagnant for decades but a lot of that that has to do with the choice of inflation measure and there are good reasons to believe that these wage numbers don’t take into account the benefits of new and improved technologies of which there have been many over the last 40 years. The average American has a higher standard of living today than they have ever had in their history and that’s before we even get into the greater opportunities for women, blacks etc.

What is true is that there is a significant minority for whom things have gotten worse, particularly working-class white males in the Rust Belt who used to get the kind of stable manufacturing jobs that are no longer available. However that is probably less than 10% of the overall workforce. That is big enough to help explain the Trump phenomenon in a tightly polarized polity but it’s not huge by itself.

9

I’m in the UK.

Yes, we have UHC. No, it’s not perfect, but there’s insurance available for that.
There are loans available for university education.
House-buying is problematic and has affected the number of children people have, but depends where you live - prices in London and the SE are eye-watering. But yes, if you work hard and work your way up the greasy pole, yes, you can buy a house.

10

Norwegian here.

College: You don’t need good grades just to be accepted to college. Many degrees are open to everyone who passed their High School (equivalent) exams. However, there are a number of degrees with a limited number of spaces such as medicine, engineering, law, nursing etc. Generally vocational ones. Entrance for these are competitive, so if you want to be a physician, you better believe you need good grades.
College is practically free, as long as you don’t fail too much you get a grant for living expenses which probably don’t cover them. A loan at very good terms is also available for living expenses.

Short version: You can go to college as long as you pass high school, but for in-demand degrees you may need good and competitive graders.

Healthcare for life: Yes.

Buying a home and raising a family: Generally yes, this is available to everyone in permanent employment, even lower-status jobs like cleaner or cashier. However, all countries have cheap and expensive places to live, and the most expensive places and houses will require more than a single low income.

**Retire: **Yes. Everyone should be able to retire at 67. Some earlier. However, since the pension rules have been changed a couple of times and such changes can’t really be made too retroactive, exactly which rules apply may depend on your year of birth.

So generally, all those things are available with a minimum of effort, like passing exams and not spending a lot of time unemployed. Also it may be difficult or unachievable for people with some permanent disabilities.

In general, I feel that the period that America looks back on as “Great” or the golden age were caused mostly by the rest of the world being shattered by WW2 and buying American to recover.

11

There are many colleges that are open enrollment. This means that they will accept anyone who finished high school.

12

Since this thread is inspired by the kerfuffle of Trump’s infamous campaign soundbite, I suggest that the only valid question is, what the hell did Trump mean by “America Great?”

He has never answered that directly, no doubt because of what and who he has always been: a promoter. Not a true leader.

Whether you talk politically or commercially, the idea of a country being “great” is just an emotional fantasy. Not a measurable fact.

So perhaps the question should be "what was the world like the last time most Americans THOUGHT the country was “great?” And of course, if you are honest, you will answer as well, the sub-question of “were we ACTUALLY great, or just (as usual) living a puffed up self-delusion?”

We can only guess, since Trump doesn’t say ANYTHING truly honest (he doesn’t always lie, but he never allows anyone to hold him responsible for anything he does say).

I would guess that what Trump is PLAYING ON, is the fantasy version of what America was supposedly like, in the 1950’s and early 60’s.

During that time, most Americans THOUGHT we were the greatest nation ever, because we’d been on the winning side of WW2, and because our propagandists had no competition, we didn’t realize that actually the USSR did the most to defeat Hitler; and because all the other industrial nations had been bombed into dust, and we had the only intact world-class factories, our economy took off like a ballistic missile; labor unions were successfully forcing wealth to be shared with laborers more reasonably; the idea of benefits and happy retirement was just getting started;

… and more than anything else, Americans luxuriated in the wonderful new era of TV entertainment, all of which was censored like crazy, so as to eliminate any HINT that the US was anything but fabulously and magically, God’s gift to planet Earth.

The reality was, we know now, decidedly different.

But I think all in all, that the key to the whole "American Greatness" thing, is understanding the desire to relive the  ILLUSION.  And since trying to bring an illusion to life is invariably "problematic,"  I anticipate Trump's efforts to result in, shall we say, "untoward difficulties."
13

“Make America Great Again” was a slogan from Reagan’s 1980 campaign, presumably in response to stagflation, the perceived weakening of American military might after Vietnam, the march of LBJ’s great society programs, and the cynicism of post-Nixon America.

14

The genius of the slogan is that a person can ascribe any meaning at all to it. If you think it means “like it was in the 50s when the coloreds knew their place,” that’s what you get out of it. If you think it means “Five years ago when I had a job” then you get that out of it. If you think it means “like it was when I was a kid in the 70s” (people tend to remember their childhoods as better times than their adulthoods) then you will get that out of it. It’s pure advertising.

15

As a child of the Golden Era (the 1950s) I remember it a little differently.

Get good grades in school and you would accepted to college. (and there was some mechanism to pay for it).

Actually, it was more like “work hard and get a job for life. Get good grades and go to college, and you’ll get a job that doesn’t require physical labor.”

You had access to Healthcare for life.

Sure. The union made sure the workers had it, and the company obviously made sure management got what the rank and file got.

If you worked hard and saved; you could buy a home and raise a family.

Buy a home, take a vacation once a year (the mountains or the ocean, or to your little cabin on the lake), and you could send the smartest of your kids to college.

Then, you could retire.

After 30 years, you got a party and a pension paid for by the company. And if you worked for an automaker, for instance, you got the employee discount for the rest of your life.

Was it a realistic dream? Maybe, if you were lucky enough to get a job at a place like General Motors, avoid getting laid off and be happy working on the assembly line for 30 years. On the other hand, if you wanted to start your own business, worked on the family farm, didn’t work for a company with a strong union, were a woman, black, disabled in some way, or had the misfortune to work at a place likeStudebaker – not so much.

16

In general, three of the four -college, healthcare and retirement- are as far as I know taken for granted today in the parts of Europe I am familiar with. There are variations on when and what. Might not necessarily get to retire at 60 or 62, might have to wait till 67.

But in general, these are things that were accepted as part of the social contract by the middle of last century.
The odd man out is buying your own house. Single-parent household, living in the capital city, disabled, persistently unemployed and unable to get your foot on the experience/references ladder, etc, these are things that can short-circuit home ownership for you.

17

Well, the best answer was given by the Trump supporters in this survey:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/upshot/when-was-america-greatest.html

The most common answer of when America was great? The year 2000.

As Sparky in the This Modern World comic remarked:

http://www.thismodernworld.com/weekly/TMW2016-06-15colorLARGE.jpg

18

Here’s an article comparing the middle class in the US versus Canada, and I found the following quote interesting:
According to the Times, the discrepancy can be linked to growing income inequality in the U.S. based on three major factors: a substandard U.S primary education system churning out a lower skilled workforce, U.S companies not sharing the wealth with their employees and countries like Canada redistributing income more aggressively.

Note that this is aside from the other big matter of guaranteed universal health care, which is a significant factor not just for the working middle class but for the feasibility and security of retirement.

What I find interesting about the factors that have made the middle class better off in Canada is that they are the exact opposite of the policies being advocated by Trump and his lunatic Cabinet appointees and by the Republicans currently in charge of Congress.

19

But the “most common” answer was only 8% of the vote, so not very meaningful. The answers were pretty evenly spread out over 7-8 decades. And this is one of those metrics where it doesn’t make much sense to take an average or show the mean.

20

Actually, way over 9%

At a glance it looks like a big chuck among the republicans choices include the Reagan years and then the end of the Clinton years. Not that it really helps the Trump defenders, more than once I pointed out that a lot of the talk about making America great again was referring to the days when America was also intervening in other nations or defending dictatorships in Latin American countries.