▪️This incredible leap of logic is only possible if you ignore all context. The median income is only relevant if you have a job! In the Great Depression, unemployment reached nearly 25%, so a good portion of the country had no job to buy a house with. Kind of an important detail.
▪️Because of this, home prices plummeted. One estimate has home prices falling 67% from 1929-32, and hovering there for most of the GD. So if you were lucky enough to have a good job, housing was affordable, but obviously this wasn’t ideal. Housing was “affordable” because…so many couldn’t afford them.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=41283#:~:text=Abstract,most%20of%20the%20Great%20Depression.
▪️In 1932, 273K people lost their homes. The next year, 1,000 homes were being foreclosed on every day. By 1934, nearly half of all mortgages were delinquent. But hey, median pay to home cost was great!
https://www.atlantafed.org/blogs/real-estate-research/2010/11/15/mortgage-relief-in-the-great-depression
https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-and-education-magazines/housing-1929-1941
▪️Also, homes have changed substantially. In the 1930s, homes averaged around 1,000 sq ft. Today, they avg over 2,200 sq ft and come with many more amenities (air conditioning, refrigerator, washer/dryer, etc.) We live in bigger homes with fewer people, a substantial increase in standard of living.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/04/05/the-size-of-a-home-the-year-you-were-born-5/
▪️Today, median personal income is ~$42/yr. So that would equate to a $131K house using the meme’s 32% Great Depression standard. But more relevant, median household income is ~$80k/yr, equating to a $250K home. Guaranteed you’d rather find a home at that price today than the avg house in the 1930s.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
It’s funny to see the left use the same conspiratorial rhetoric as the right did a year ago regarding the jobs numbers being downwardly revised. So many on the right, who knew nothing of how the jobs numbers are calculated or why they revise them, were convinced the downward revisions were a conspiracy to help Biden win.
If people want to have a debate about the birth death model or the survey methods, ok, but that’s not what’s happening here. Most people are under the delusion that the BLS report is the govt reporting every job created and lost, and are thus easily swayed it’s rigged when it suits their political ends.
This is almost laughingly misleading, as it leaves out everything before the letter.
▪️After being repeatedly lampooned by the Smothers Brothers over Vietnam, Johnson finally had enough. One night at 3 am he called the head of CBS William Paley, demanding that he “get those bastards off my back.”
▪️Paley then asked the heads of CBS entertainment to get them to back off of LBJ. However, instead of backing off the Smothers Brothers doubled down, booking a folk musician performing “Waist Deep,” an anti-war song about a soldier being stuck in the mud while “the big fool says to push on,” clearly a dig at LBJ.
▪️At the last minute, CBS cut the song from the pre-taped show to the outrage of the Smothers. They continued to push the boundaries off and on for the rest of his presidency, with CBS sometimes cutting segments that they thought went too far. Basically, it was a soft form of censorship.
▪️It wasn’t until Johnson made his surprise announcement not to run in 1968 ...
