The Good Old Days

The 1950's were better. Yeah, I said it.

I can hear my progressive and liberal friends now: how can you possibly say that? How can you want to go back to a time when gay sex was illegal, none of the equal pay or sexual harrassment initiatives of the 1970s had yet occurred, and separate but equal was the law of the land (til 1954)? Well, first, the clothes were reall really cute. I mean think about Dior's New Look, with that gorgeous full skirt. It celebrates the return of peace and prosperity and the rise of American hegemony with every switch of the wearer's hips! The clothes were super hot, it's a fact.

But here's what I miss about the 1950s:
1. High top marginal tax rates.

2. Infrastructure investment.

3. Strict regulations for financial markets.

4. A robust American manufacturing economy: I consider an American manufacturing economy to be a national security issue as well as an economic issue. One of the reasons we were able to respond so quickly in WWII was because of our immense manufacturing capability as a nation: we just switched over the auto manufacturers to producing war materials. Without a manufacturing economy in this country we're not ableto replicate that in the future if we need to. However, more importantly, a manufacturing economy in this country helps bolster the middle class. Trades and factory work can provide a sustainable living for workers and their families without demanding a college education.

Domestic manufacturing is good from a human rights standpoint and an environmental standpoint as well. Goods made by cheap labor in China currently for sale in the US are not priced correctly, since the prices do not reflect the true cost of the exploitation of the Chinese worker. Goods from overseas need to be shipped here, and are also usually made in lax regulatory environments where byproducts of production are disposed of cheaply in an environmentally unsustainable manner. If the Chinese goods were priced to reflect both that exploitation and the environmental impact of the lax regulations for waste disposal and the shipping impacts, those goods would not be anywhere near as cheap for the American consumer. We could choose to revive our manufacturing economy in this country by agreeing to pay what looks like more for our goods, since they are prices to reflect a living wage for the workers that make them, environmentally responsible waste disposal and production,