something i have noticed here is that all of the posters think things are getting worse. both economically and socially. it makes me think back to my child hood and when i thought that things started to get bad. for me i would say around the turn of the century. this is when i noticed government services and taxes and the cost of living rose significantly. it was also the time society became worse. would you agree this is when things started to really get bad? also i am quite young and remember the eighties a little but mainly the nineties and how things got worse from there. i was wondering if the seventies and before were even nicer, due to being young i am unaware of what that was like. can any of you tell me was it better then than in the eighties and after. also what was it like i gather from older people popularity at schools didn't really exist and people didn't think that they had to own certain things to be liked or wear certain clothes or listen to set music. is that true.
After Bretton-woods of course the purchasing power of the US was kept artifically high, and a dramatic increase of spending occured. It wasn't until the US had to "default" on the gold standard that this bubble economy become clearly evident. From the S&L crisis, crash of 87 to the tech bubble, housing bubble, and now the bailout bubble. Even during the bretton-woods gold standard, gold was used externally with foreign countries for trade, however internally in the US gold was abandoned very shortly as a means of exchange. The fact of the matter is that there was not a huge influx of foreigners doing the work for Americans. Americans, not Mexicans had to work in the fields, they did not have an option. There was no subsidized education, social services, welfare etc. Many Americans did not even complete grade school, they went straight to work. This situation was exacerbated post-71.