As an "elder millennial", I too, saw this happen. I grew up in a very middle class home. About the only thing we didn't regularly do from the list in the OP, was modest vacations.

My dad was a teacher.

We didn't have anything overly special, but we had what we needed and we were not struggling. I have two siblings, and the entire family was a family of five. My mother did not have a job throughout my childhood and well after my teenage years, and I'm the youngest.

Now, I can't fathom having a kid. I can barely pay to keep myself alive.

I'm a middle-aged american.

When I was a kid, my high school educated dad worked in a machine shop and I had a stay at home mom. There were 3 of us kids. Back in the late 80s my parents bought the 4-bedroom home with a 2-car garage on 1+ acre of land that they still live in today. The size is still great for hosting holiday gatherings and with the extra bedrooms they can have play rooms for the grand kids and an empty bed for when my brother visits from out of town.

Once I was in high school and could be home alone, I remember my mom getting a job for a few years.

Today, I have a small family and my wife is a stay at home mom and helps at our son's elementary school and stuff. But there are some differences!

My family is smaller, 1 kid vs 3.

My education and field of work are much higher up the percentiles. I have three university degrees from big schools and work in tech. He was a high school educated machinist that eventually worked his way up into management when I was older.

My house is smaller. I own a small single-floor home with no basement or garage, a standard 1/4 acre lot, and I live in a blue collar neighborhood that's sprinkled with elderly folks and young families.

We have two cars and they are both basic non-luxury brands and they are both over 10 years old.

I was intentionally being pretty conservative with my finances, and to be fair we were in a pretty good situation with an emergency fund and no non-mortgage debt and all that. But then in the past several years I've had three different financially cataclysmic events where any one of them would have obliterated the safety buffer. Two of them were thanks to covid.

Today I am in the same house and in much better health and mental state, and I even have a much better job, but our finances are a fucking nightmare.

Looks to have been brigaded by some fasc types with next to no post history tbh

Which is also why there's suddenly a lot of deleted comments, they were patently obvious and the mods deleted that shit

The Rand Corp issued a report in 2019 on income inequality, and the situation is far worse than most people think. The median salary of $43K in 1975 had increased to only $50K in 2019, while they would have been making $92K if the tax code hadn't been steadily re-written to enrich the wealthy at the cost of the middle class and poor.

In that same time period, the mean income for the top 1% went from $289K to $1.384 million, while they would have been making $630K under the old tax codes.

Thats a 17.4% increase in the lower median, and an increase of 321.6% in the 1% median. Clearly there has been an upwards distribution of wealth at the expense of the middle class since the tax codes started to be re-written in 1974 to favor the top economic tier. The Trickle Down Economics that everyone thought was Ronald Reagan's great idea, was baked into the tax code in 1974.

In addition, the Federal minimum wage was last increased to $7.25 in 2009. Previous to that, it was raised to $5.15 in 1997. The Federal minimum wage was only increased twice in the last 28 years, for a total of a measly $2.10. And yet corporations and their owners SCREAM like their nuts are being carved out by a red hot, dull, rusty spoon at even the mention of a raise in the minimum wage.

When there are threats to raise it every 15 years or so, there are always two responses, as if they are the ONLY possible options - prices will have to go up, or jobs will have to be cut. There is never a mention of the third possible option - that corporations and their owners might have to make a slightly smaller profit. That option is absolutely unthinkable. Unmentionable.

"But less profit means the stock market would be impacted!" is the standard cry. Yes it would, but so what? The stock market hit its recent low in March of 2008, soon after Obama took over the presidency in the midst of a free fall caused by the Bush Economic Crash - about 7500. Today it is over 40,000. Corporations are clearly benefiting in today's economy, even during a global pandemic when millions of American families were facing homelessness and food shortages through no fault of their own. They were the helpless victims of government edicts which forcibly and ruthlessly shut down their only ways to make a living, while doing NOTHING to help them survive because a few rich Republicans are upset that poor people might get more money than they deserve. So they fought to a stalemate over $400 or $600 per week, while their Sociopathic Oligarch slavemasters chuckled smugly while metaphorically lighting their cigars with $100 bills and demanding more corporate welfare.

So what if smaller profits (because workers got paid their value) meant the stock market was only at 20,000, or even 15,000? Those corporations and their stockholders would still be wealthy, but there would be enough money in the treasury to pay for health care for all, college or trade school for every qualified student, to forgive all student loan shark debts, to cover those whose jobs have been essentially declared illegal because of the pandemic, and more. Sure, corporations would have to live with less profit, but instead of that money being tied up in enormous stock portfolios or in offshore bank accounts, it would be in the hands of people who would buy houses, cars, furniture, vacations, retire to make room for the next generation, etc.

The Trickle Down Economic Theory never worked. As anyone could have predicted (and many did), instead of spending those tax profits on new factories or new opportunities or higher pay scales like we were promised, the Sociopathic Oligarchs only accumulated it at the top. When they did spend it, they spent it on political leverage to get more corporate welfare so they could accumulate even more wealth, at the expense of the working class, creating financial hoards which they sleep on like a Tolkienesque dragon.

Its time to give Trickle Up Economics a try. Make more money available to those at the bottom and middle, and see what happens. Raise wages, forgive student loans, offer free college and trade schools, give every citizen health care, etc. and it will create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. Sure, the Oligarchs appreciate the efficiency of transferring the money directly from the government to their savings accounts, but the money from the Trickle Up stimulus will eventually reach them anyway, they just have to be a little patient and wait for it to help American families and the American economy first.

If they don't cooperate in this, then our society will spontaneously pivot to a Robin Hood Economy, and the Sociopathic Oligarchs won't like that one bit. We're already seeing the beginnings of it.

Read more about it :

New York Mag: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/09/rand-study-how-high-is-inequality-us.html

Fast Money: https://www.fastcompany.com/90550015/we-were-shocked-rand-study-uncovers-massive-income-shift-to-the-top-1

The graphs on this page are always interesting to look at.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Intersectionality my dude, it can be both

Another example is Al Bundy in Married With Children. He was a shoe salesman with a stay at home wife and two kids but managed to own a nice home.

Yes but it wasn't white supremacy that upheld this standard of living, white supremacy was not the direct(*) reason that lower middle class families were able to live like this, it was the disciplining of capital by elements of a social democratic policies, high taxes and stronger unions.

So, you're describing correlation, not causation. The nostalgia here is for the disciplining of capital not for toothier white supremacy.

In other words, if you bring back the high tax regime, strong unions, and strong regulations today, there is nothing that will require you to also bring back the strong white supremacist policies.

(*) Indirectly, historically, sure. But for these classes of people during that period, the historic effect compared to disciplining of capital is marginal. We are not talking about rich white landowners, we are talking about people whose parents/grandparents were in deep poverty themselves.

I grew up in the 80s. I can’t think of a single minority family that had an income of one and did what was described in the posr. I also grew up in a large city, so this may also be referring to suburbs and more rural areas.