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I guess it’s a bit of cultural clash with a hint of arrogance.Europeans considered their continent as the craddle of the Western civilization while the USA would be their ersatz with an impoverish culture.Europeans see Americans as trouble makers and often consider their influences in the world negatively. The Middle-Eastern conflicts is a recent example (even if France and UK where totally involved too…) but also the American influence in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Central and South America, etc… are seen are imperialism and interventionism.Europe (and particularly Northern and Western/Central Europe) is more moderate than USA in terms of social rights, education, politcal views. Americans sounds too extreme when it comes to have political opinions.Europeans are also a bit jealous somehow because after WW2 USA basically fixed European economy and ensured political stability. For 21st century people it’s normal, but for mid-20th century Europeans it was probably degrading to be helped by a country “created” by Europeans migrants.Europe is mostly irreligious. Of course some countries such as Ireland, Poland, most of Eastern Europe, etc… are quite religious and Christianity is one of our common grounding, but still most of us completely dissociated state and church. Even if the US are secular, religion is a everyday life constant. I don’t know a single person in my life (friends and family) who ever went in the church on sunday morning.Europeans are generally attached to their traditions and Americans too but, Europeans sees American culture as postmodern, industrial and somehow unrefined… such as Junk food, Car culture, Gun culture, etc…Europe and above all Northern and Central Europe is known for its long lasting consideration for ecology. Even if some countries in Southern and Eastern Europe still needs improvment, American Way of Life with big cars, big houses, big plates, etc… is seen horrendously discordant for Europeans. Even if most of people recognized the strong efforts some states did for ecology such as Colorado, California, Washington, etc…Europeans can see Americans very gullible towards engineering and sciences as if they blindly trust anything coming out from a white coat person’s mouth. And at the same time there are a lot of misconceptions in American society about vaccines, GMO, etc… (in Europe as well though).I guess I tried to write an exhaustive list of all the points that divide Europeans and Americans. Of course I purposely chose slightly stereotypes points to show the most obvious reasons why Americans and Europeans don’t always understand each other and why Europeans can see Americans with arrogance. Even if once again there is a difference between Americans and the USA.

Question: “How was it possible that a family could be supported comfortably on a single income in, for example, the 1950s, yet today people struggle with two incomes?”OK. having actually lived in the 1950s and disagreeing with many of the posted answers I will have to answer this, giving real and verifiable examples. In particular, I must respond to an extremely inaccurate and misleading answer posted by Quora writer Heather Johnson.To put things in perspective, I grew up in southeastern and south central Wisconsin. My father was an engineer, i.e., he had a modest middle class income. My mother, although she had worked before marriage, was a housewife and parent without outside income. The family consisted of my parents and six children, all of whom went to college. Everything about our lives was normal mid-western, middle class.Johnson writes: “[A]ppliances were bought on 5yr hire purchase plans. Once you paid it off you kept it for 20 yrs”. NO. Just no!My parents paid cash for every appliance purchase, as did most people in the middle class. Credit cards, other than American Express and Diner’s Club, both for business use, did not exist. Consumer credit did not exist, other than time payments from Sears if you bought their Kenmore brand and small loans at bad terms from Household Finance stores which catered to the improvident. Sensible people never borrowed money. Other than gas cards, there were no non-business credit cards in the 1950s and ‘60s. No one had ever heard the term “Master Card” or the phrase “Minimum Monthly Payment”.Appliances, although well made and, unlike today, designed so that they could be serviced, seldom lasted for “20 years”. A heavily used automatic washing machine or dryer might last 5 to 7 years. A kitchen range might be kept for 10 years, after which maintenance issues involving heating elements, clocks, timers, and switches made replacement likely. Automatic dishwashers and garbage disposers and garage door openers all had limited life spans. Tube type televisions in the 1950s ran hot, needed frequent service, and lasted no more than 5 years before needing to be replaced.Johnson writes: “Houses were small…a kitchen resembling a walk-in closet.”NO. This is the house my family lived in in the 1950s.It had a very large kitchen, a separate formal dining room, a living room with masonry fireplace, 3 large bedrooms all with closets, a closed in porch, solid oak floors throughout, a full basement, a cedar shingle roof, and a separate garage, all on a large wooded lot on a quiet street. The quality throughout was far higher than that which one can buy today. There were two Bell System dial telephones, one in a telephone alcove in the dining room and one in my parent’s bedroom.It was a typical middle class home.In 1962 my father had this built.It had a large kitchen, with a dish washer (!), formal dining room, living room, two masonry fireplaces, family room, office, laundry room, four large bedrooms, 2 and ½ baths, hardwood floors, full finished basement (with a bar and a pool table), two car attached garage, patio, breezeway, all on a two acre wooded lot with a view. Again there were two dial telephones, one of which was in my parent’s bedroom. This was a very typical home for a middle class salaried employee. In the 1950s American middle class families did not live in tiny shacks.Johnson claims that Americans in the 1950s: “[B]ought one car and maintained it for decades.” NO! Cars did not last for “decades”.In the 1950s a car was considered old at 60,000 miles when it was traded in on a new model. It was unheard of to own a car whose odometer had turned over from 99,999 to 0. The odometers did not even have a 100,000 mile dial. Most people traded in their cars every 3 to at most 5 years. Many car guys had arrangements with their car dealer wherein they would trade in their car every 2 years for a new version of the same make and model for a fixed amount of money. These are some of the cars my father owned in the 1950s. Note the upward mobility shown by the car models over the years.And from 1958 on, like many middle class American families, we had two cars, one for my father and the other shared by my mother and the children. They always paid cash for their cars, regarding auto loans as wasteful.This was my mother’s car.Johnson writes: “You had a modest closet consisting of one Sunday best outfit, 2 work outfits and 2 casual outfits.NO! My father wore suits to work and casual slacks and golf shirts on the golf course. I never saw him in a t-shirt or a pair of jeans. My mother dressed nicely, owned a few outfits by Dior and Balenciaga and Chanel and had a seldom worn mink stole. Although she knew how to dress well, this was not unusual or extravagant for the wife of a salaried engineer. In the 1950s and ’60s one dressed up to go shopping downtown or out to dinner or take an airline flight.Johnson claimed: “You ate out infrequently”.Not exactly. Fast food joints did not exist. Nor did family casual restaurants, aside from Italian pizzerias or the Friday fish fry at the neighborhood bar. Families seldom went out to dinner with the children. But my father frequently took my mother out on Friday nights to a nice supper club with dancing afterwards.My family in the 1950s lived this way while my parents, after having struggled through the depression and war years, paid off a mortgage, paid for parochial school for the children, sent six children to college, had no debt, and invested enough money in the stock market to be well off in retirement. Unlike what Johnson implies, the American middle class in the 1950s did not live in some sort of austere deprived poverty.OK, how was that possible? The economic system of the post-war period was different.Unlike today where all of the gains in productivity in the economy are directed to the 1%, from 1945 to 1980 productivity gains were shared and enjoyed by all segments of the working classes.Employment was secure. If you were employed and did your job well you did not have to worry that you would lose your job to a KKR or Bain Capital leveraged buyout scheme or some balance sheet manipulator’s desire to create paper “share holder value” or enhance his own stock options. The term “down sizing” had not been thought of. Looting of pension funds, a standard tactic of leveraged buyouts today, would have been a criminal offense in the 1950s and 1960s..The forty hour week was the norm. Workers were not expected to either work when they were not being paid or take work home. Blue collar workers got overtime for anything beyond 8 hours per day or 40 hours per week. And that overtime was enough to allow my wife’s machinist father to pay off the mortgage of a new house in five years.Medical costs were reasonable. Hospitals were run by religious orders or owned by municipalities, not predatory corporations. The cost of having a baby, including days recovering in a pleasant sun lit room, was ~$250.Companies paid good wages and salaries and all good companies included medical insurance and defined benefit pensions.Employment included paid vacation time.Unions insured safe working conditions and good wages for working men. In the 1950s more than 30% of the jobs were unionized. (Today that figure is 11%, and most of those are public employees, i.e., cops and teachers.) Those union wages set a floor that kept up the wages of non-union workers and white collar employees.Union Pensions allowed comfortable retirements. I will describe for example the work and retirement history of a friend with whom we discussed work in the 1960s yesterday: Went to work in the late 1960s immediately after high school for an automobile manufacturer. Worked as a sweeper, i.e., a janitor. Retired after 30 years, and not yet 50 years old, on generous full pension. Pension includes excellent medial coverage from Kaiser-Permanente. Has been retired for 20 years. Owns, for personal use, a home in Florida and a condominium in Colorado, and farm land in Wisconsin. Travels.The public schools were good and staffed with good teachers. The courses included typing and secretarial skills and mechanical trades as well as academics. Thus, students graduated prepared either for college or for a trade.The cost of higher education was reasonable and a college education was easily affordable, especially at one of the excellent land grant universities, by anyone in the middle class or skilled blue collar class who qualified.Savings and Loan Associations and the post-war GI Bill offered affordable home mortgages while not lending either to speculators or those who were trying to live beyond their means, thus adding to both the growth and stability of home ownership. For a fixed rate 20 year mortgage the interest rate was ~4.5% in the 1950s and ~5.5% in the 1960s.Public transportation was better and far more extensive than today, offering an alternative to private cars.Work was closer to home seriously reducing commuting time and expenses for those who chose to drive to work.Americans who were adults in the 1950s had lived through the Great Depression. That taught those who were intelligent the value of savings and the danger of debt. Thus, they avoided consumer loans, paid cash for appliances and cars, put a large down payment on their homes, paid off mortgages quickly, lived within their means, and saved and/or invested.Finally, one must not forget that in the 1950s, because much of Europe had not yet recovered from the devastation of the war, American industry was given an extremely profitable decade and the American dollar was substantially overvalued making imports of goods to the United States, or travel by Americans to Europe, extremely inexpensive.The 1950s and 1960s were different. The American middle class in those decades did not live simple austere pleasureless lives. Nor did they lack nice things. But the difference was caused: 1) by a “Depression Mentality” which taught those who experienced the depression to avoid the debt trap, and 2) by structural differences in government regulations, differences in the tax system and who it was designed to serve, differences in business ethics, and differences in the economy. The different type of government in the 1950s and ’60s and different economy in that era allowed middle class families in the 1950s and 1960s to live nicely on one earner’s salary.As Quora writer Denis O’Sullivan said in the comments (see below): “ The old tradition of the poor getting poorer returned in the 1980′s. It was a good run from 1940 to about 1980 for both blue and white collar employees.”Note re wages and prices in the 1950s: In 1957 the Federal Minimum Wage was $1.00 per hour. Adjusted simply for inflation that would be $9.20 today. The Georgia State Minimum Wage today is $5.15…half of what adjusted for inflation the Federal Minimum Wage was in 1957. The median income for an engineer with 10 years experience in 1957 was $10,000. Beginning pharmacists earned $125 per week or $6,500 per year. In 1955 the median income of a physician in general practice was $15,000. In 1957 a classroom teacher in a city of 50,000 earned $4,500 per year. The hourly wage for an automobile assembly line worker worker was $2.27 per hour, for a tool and die worker $2.95 per hour or $118 for a 40 hour week. The price for the 1950 Ford Deluxe V8 shown in the above photos was ~ $1,100. The 1953 Nash Ambassador sold for $3,100, the 1958 Oldsmobile $4,200. The two story colonial house shown in the photos sold for $17,500 in 1957. It was originally built in 1937. The 1962 house with attached garage was built for $34,000. In 1950 an Admiral black and white console television with radio and phonograph cost $500. In 1954 a top-of-the-line Admiral Dual-Temp two door refrigerator-freezer cost ~$500.Note re union wages in the 1950s: In unionized plants workers were paid time and one-half for hours worked over 40 hours per week and double time for working on holidays. Overtime was available based on seniority. My wife’s father was a skilled machinist at an automobile plant. Having started his employment there as a young man before enlisting in WWII, he was one of the 6 most senior employees in a factory of thousands of workers. He, thus, could bid for and get well paid overtime work whenever he wanted. One year he worked every day of the week including Saturdays and Sundays and Holidays for at least 8 hours per day, taking off only for one day, Christmas. By doing so he paid off the mortgage on a new home in five years. The UAW Pension allowed one to retire after 30 years regardless of age at full pension. That pension included full medical coverage including eyeglasses and dental care.Note re charge plates: The embossed aluminum charge pates issued by some department stores,gasoline station charge plates, Diners’ Club cards, and American Express cards used in the 1950s and ’60s were not credit cards as we use the terms today. These cards had to be paid off in full monthly. Diners’ Club and American Express cards, which were printed on paper with typed in names and addresses, were for business, not personal, use and were only available to the trustworthy and wealthy.Note that the above card from 1955 is described as a CREDIT IDENTIFICATION CARD. It was a card that informed the merchant that the holder’s income and reputation for paying his bills had been verified. Merchants and restaurants who accepted charge card placed the sticker(s) for the card(s) they accepted on the entry door. But you could not trust that. Restaurant owners would terminate their contract with the credit card issuer without removing those stickers.Department store plates could only be used at one store or one association of stores. They were often limited to a relatively small amount, often $50 or less. These were in use into the 1970s. Gas station cards, of course, could only be used at named gas stations. Sears did offer a “Revolving Credit Account” to holders of its charge cards. But these, again, could only be used for purchases at Sears stores. The Sears Roebuck and Co. card eventually became the Discover Card. The first actual Credit Card was the Master Card. (known as Interbank from 1966–1969 and Master Charge from 1969–1979). The first Interbank Cards were issued in 1958 to a restricted group. Charge Cards were not widely distributed until well into the 1970s. And even in the ’70s one had to check with restaurant servers before ordering to determine if your card or any card was valid at that restaurant. Many businesses refused to accept charge card purchases below a set amount.As late as the 1970s women desiring a Department Store Charge Plate had to get it in their husband’s name and the application needed his approval and signature, regardless of the wife’s employment or income. My wife encountered this when she applied for an account at Charles A. Stevens, a woman’s fine clothing store in the Chicago Loop, and was told she needed my approval and signature although she had a better job and higher salary than I did!Note re Changes in Relative Costs: In the 1960s my best friend’s father was a factory worker at the big dirty, but unionized, Fairbanks-Morse plant. My blue collar family friend could afford to take flying lessons and, before he was allowed to drive a car, had a private pilot’s license and enough flying hours by the time we were in high school to have both an instrument rating and a dual engine rating.As teenagers we were allowed and could afford to rent and fly aircraft, usually a Cessna, over Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, sometimes taking our dates out for night flights. We were high school students, and we paid for those flights with our own earnings from part time or summer jobs. Today flying lessons and airplane rentals are only available to the rich.Life was very different in the 1950s and 1960s.

Completely and totally revamp our healthcare system. I would either go Nordic-style single-payer, or some mix of Singaporean personal healthcare account and Nordic-style single payer.Completely revamp our election system by doing the following: Scrap the Electoral College and replace it with a points-based runoff popular vote. Outlaw the gerrymander. Repeal Citizens United. No more private donations to candidates, replacing our current system with publicly-funded elections. Make Election Day a national holiday.Immediately implement a $12.00/hour minimum wage, and gradually escalate it to $15.00 an hour in $.75/hour increments over the course of my first term in office, and index it to inflation going forward.Implement stronger regulations on corporate mergers.Either strongly penalize or outright outlaw offshoring and outsourcing so that companies can’t use those practices to artificially lower wages and avoid taxes.Immediately end the trade war and replace it with selective tariffs under a context of free trade. I would only implement tariffs on imports that we are capable of producing ourselves.Reenter and then put higher standards on ourselves than what would be required with the Paris Accords.Completely and totally reinstate the protections that Trump gutted under the Endangered Species Act.Completely and totally reinstate the regulations that Trump gutted under the Clean Air and Water Act.Implement all of the changes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested in her Green New Deal regarding the environment, with a Just Transition Clause added in so that people living in petrol-producing states can have work studies implemented that will allow them to contribute towards building the green smart grid and won’t have those green energy jobs shipped out to the coasts. I would also start a Conservation Climate Corps as proposed by Jay Inslee.Legalize drugs, and retroactively release all prisoners incarcerated for non-violent drug related offenses, enrolling them in rehabilitative programs that will teach them trades, make them easy to hire, and prevent recidivism.Expand on the provisos of DACA for every immigrant into the country, with expanded vetting through eVerify to prevent under-the-table hiring. Implementing a dual citizenship proviso in this expansion for people who enroll in the military.Make Leopoldian land ethic law.Completely and totally revamp our tax code, replacing it with a Georgist-style land valuation tax, complete with a direct democracy form of line-item taxation that allows the people to set the budget, in combination with a 70 percent tax on margin for every dollar earned above $10,000,000/year if business owners, CEO’s, and COO’s don’t meet certain hiring, anti-trust, in-company investment, and R&D standards. Along with this, I would implement an amendment expressly forbidding using money for any purpose other than the way it is explicitly earmarked by the people via the line item. This serves two key purposes: (1) It ties the economy to sustainable practices and environmentalism, incentivizing clean behaviors; and (2) It decentralizes monetary power, giving it to the people instead of corporations, corrupt government officials, and oligarchs. (Can you tell yet that I’m BIG on environmental protection? If we do not start taking the preservation of our natural heritage far more seriously, we will kill ourselves before we reach 60).Reinstate Glass-Stegall.Put a Japanese-style cap on what CEO’s can make relative to their average paid worker.Declare all Native American lands, national and state parks and forests immediately off-limits to outside corporations and interests, and immune from eminent domain.Reparations to African-Americans, Native Americans, the Japanese, and Latinos. The time has come (actually, it’s far past time) to atone for past grievances (such as the numerous ways we killed off or forced acculturation on Native Americans, the injustices of slavery, Jim Crow, and non-representative convictions committed against African-Americans, Japanese internment, and the way we all but robbed Mexico of its territory via the starting of an unjust war that extended clear into the Rockies of central Colorado) that are still having an adverse impact on race relations to this day. Reparations are a necessary olive branch in at least attempting to repair the damage we have done. Nothing can completely atone for those grievances and sins, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make good-faith efforts to try.Using a combination of tiered grading systems and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (as proposed by Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg) to allow students to earn free college education, with allocated tax dollars, and free public education from pre-k to 12th grade.Worker-owned means of production in the workplace. (Not public-owned. Worker-owned.)Writing a law that mandates at least two weeks of paid time off, and up to 3 months of paid leave for pregnancy or sickness. Writing another law that would allow for company-paid babysitting or on-site care for children at workplaces. (Can you tell that I strongly believe that it’s time we got with the rest of the civilized world when it comes to how we view and treat our workforce? CEO’s and the banks would probably hate my guts. No, I don’t really care if they do or not. After the 2008 bailout, it’s high time that these folks paid the piper for the past 40 years of failed trickle down experimentation.)Heavy investment both in green energy and in creating a modernized, green infrastructure system and building modernization through retro-fitting.Cut military spending in half. We do not need to spend more money on the military than the next 20 countries combined to have the most modernized and powerful military in the world.Expansive work studies, partnerships between high schools and community colleges with companies involved in the trades, infrastructure, green energy, organic farming practices and cell-based meat to transition to far more sustainable and environmentally-friendly means of business and production of goods and services in agricultural and petrol-dependent parts of the country as part of AOC’s Green New Deal and the Leopoldian land ethic law I would instate.Tear down whatever part of the wall that Trump has built. In essence, I would basically undo pretty much 90 to 95 percent of what Agent Orange has done, and take it and run in trying to swing the pendulum way to the other side of things.Instate laws requiring licensure for a gun, which will be given only with a clean bill of mental health and passing a background check. This would just about cover it.