I was thinking the other day about how my father got so much money -- so much that he could leave each of his kids enough to make us each wealthy in our own right.
He comes from a working class family. Only one of his siblings went to college. Most of his siblings and most of his nieces and nephews sell cars and trailers for a living. He went to a two-year college, and I think he paid his own tuition. He certainly expected his kids to be able to go to college while paying their own, though he did put enough money in 529s to pay for all of his grandchildren to go to college.
He married at 19 and had three kids by the time he was 23. We lived in a trailer that (I think) he bought from his father until I was four. Then he bought a house in the suburbs -- a four bedroom, two bathroom house. We were members of a 'community club,' which was two pools and some tennis courts, all through my childhood.
I remember endless fights about money between my parents, and by the time I was six I knew not to ask for money for things like field trips and book fairs at school. I always had terrible clothing -- I remember when I was eight wondering why my shoes always wore out so much faster than my friend's shoes, thinking I must just be a destructive kid. Our vacations were always visits to my grandparents (which I loved, since that was the only time I got to see my cousins) or overnights in Florida where my father liked to watch the car races.
My mother went to college when I was eleven, graduating with a degree in education, and from the time I was 14 (she had my youngest brother when I was 13, in the middle of getting her degree) she also worked. When we were little, though, she kept house. My father gave her an allowance of $50/week, out of which she had to buy groceries and all our clothing and all her own clothing. I think my father paid for his own clothing. I remember she needed dental work when I was about four, a thousand dollars worth, and after they fought about it for awhile, she had the teeth pulled instead. Similarly, I needed braces in the worst way, and did not get them until I was 20, when my youngest brother shamed my father into paying for them.
So part of the reason my father had so much money was he saved much of his salary. He was an engineer for NASA during much of my childhood. Then he took a job at Louisiana Off-Shore Oil Port as a VP, and he must have been paid a fortune there; and still saved most of it. The houses he bought, first in 1964 and then in 1974, he sold for triple or quadruple what he paid for them. So that's part of where the money came from. He also had a wealth manager starting when he was in his sixties, who advised him to start the family trust.
Mainly, though, I think the world was different from 1960 through 1980 than it is now.
I'm thinking also of Uncle Charger's family (the kid's fictive uncle), who -- like my father -- supported a family on one salary, had enough money to send all the kids to college, bought a four bedroom house, and left enough money behind to make all of his kids wealthy. He did this on his salary as a professor at a state university. No oil money in that story.
And my uncle, who never went to college, spending two years in Viet Nam instead, came home, lived with us briefly, and then got a job with Shell Oil, first as a mechanic (a job he learned in the military) and then as a foreman. He made enough money to buy a house and then another house, and to have (eventually) five kids, all of which were supported solely on his salary. I know at least some of those kids went to college, but they also could pay tuition with a summer job.
How was it possible?
(1) Houses cost so much less back then -- my father was paying $160/month for his mortgage in 1978, which is the only time I saw a statement.
(2) Health insurance and health care cost so much less. Reagan made health care into a for-profit scheme in the 1980s, and costs since then have continued to grow.
(3) Tuition at state universities was so cheap it was practically free. I could pay my own tuition with a summer job. If I'm remembering right, my tuition per semester was $225. I did live at home; if I'd been paying for a dorm and meal plan, the total cost would have been something around $3000/semester, as I recall. I rode my bike to school, most of the time, a distance of about 20 miles each way, but it was all level ground. No hills in New Orleans.
(4) Food was much cheaper. I remember when double-digit inflation hit, in the mid-1970s, how my mother quit buying sugar and coffee. But we still ate meat at every meal.
(5) Cars were cheaper, gas was cheaper. We would stop on the way back from church to buy gas, and it was 24 cents a gallon. Even adjusted for inflation, that's about two dollars a gallon.
I think also there weren't as many expenses, though I may be wrong about this. No one needed WiFi and the only phones were landlines, usually one per house. Because my mother didn't work, and my father could carpool (nearly everyone in our subdivision worked at NASA), we only needed one car. Almost everyone went to public school, except for the Catholic kids, who often went to Catholic school. We had bikes and skates, which my mother bought at garage sales; and we had a single black and white TV. Our neighbor got a color TV sooner than we did, and we would go over there to watch Star Trek and Lost in Space. Right up through college, turning in hand-written papers was acceptable. I didn't get a computer until my father-in-law gave me his old laptop, which would have been -- 1990? Somewhere around then.
So maybe in part the middle-class was possible because we needed fewer things. But mostly, I think, it was possible because wages of many, many people were sufficient to support a middle-class life.
This has been slowly stripped away from many of us, in order to create massive wealth for a very few. The tax rate on the upper income levels back then was 70%, for example -- 90% before 1963. Tax rates on the lowest bracket was 14%. Now we have half the nation living in precarity, barely able to afford rent, unable to afford medical or dental care or children, going into debt to buy gas and groceries, while about 400 families have billions.
This didn't happen by accident. This is the world the GOP wants.
