I hear it over and over… “The good old days,” everyone wants to return to the good old days! What exactly were the good old days? And, aside from the hope and promise that comes with youth, aside from the romantic nostalgia of time gone by, what made “the good old days” so good? For us boomers it was a brand new world. Our parents just survived a world war, our homeland was never directly threatened; everybody (almost everybody), pulled their own weight and pitched in for the greater good. The middle class was just getting started; people who, before the war couldn’t afford an education or to own a home, where now able to do both with the help of Uncle Sam; veteran’s benefits were actually benefiting veterans… and, at the end of the war there was a progressive tax rate of ninety-four percent (94%)… that’s right, 94%. During the ensuing years there was plenty of money to pay veterans their promised benefits for their service in the war; there was plenty of money to build the nations infrastructure; there was plenty of money to provide a good, and free, education for us and for our kids; banks loaned money at reasonable rates, not the usury rates that were illegal then but are sanctioned by our government today; our parents, and then us, we didn’t worry about our jobs… there was a loyalty between the workers and the employers (a loyalty created by a vibrant unionized work force). So the next time you hear someone say, “Oh how I yearn for the good old days.” Tell them, “Re-establish a fair tax rate, like the one that lead to the greatest expansion of the middle class in our nation’s history, and you can have ‘the good old days’ again.”
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 01:10:57 +0000
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