Has America gotten better or worse in the past 50 years for it's citizens?

Question

Remember that 50 years ago you didn't need a college degree (debt) to obtain an entry level job, the money that you spent was recycled into your community (not sent off to China (communist)by way of Wal Mart), your children would have been educated in the best school system in the world (now 19th, 55th in literacy), there were no speeding tickets, booming economy, the wealthy paid taxes, income equality existed(gini index was 55 now 75 now we mirror Russia, Mexico, Brazil). Nobody was afraid of terrorist.

Answer 1

I DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU GOT THE FACTS AT , BUT THAT WAS 1958 AND AMERICA WAS IN A WORSE RECESSION THAN NOW ------THERE WAS SPEEDING TICKETS ------INCOME EQUALITY HAS NEVER IN HISTORY EXISTED --------WE WERE IN THE COLD WAR AND EVERYONE WAS SCARED OF NUCLEAR WAR WITH RUSSIA -------RUSSIA HAD PUT SPUTNIK IN ORBIT THE YEAR BEFORE AND WE WERE BEHIND IN THE SPACE RACE IN ALL YOU ARE JUST ABOUT WRONG ON EVERYTHING  

Answer 2

well im 17 and i would say After 9-11, things have changed.

Answer 3

Is this a question or are you making an argument for an answer you've already settled on?

Sounds like the latter.

Okay, first off, since there is obviously a widening gap between different classes, you'd have to specify for whom you are asking.  

Also, you would have to consider that many of the factors that plague us today stem from having had that rosy yesteryear.

You still don't need a college degree to get an entry-level job, and if you did, it would mean that our standards have changed.  You can't confuse good/bad with more/less competitive.

Sending off money to China is also neither good nor bad (though our negative balance of trade can't be that great).  It merely testifies to a global community.  Money is never recycled - it's exchanged for goods and services.  There is nothing inherently better about money that never travels far from a community, it's still money, and certainly you'd prefer if other communities allowed you to recycle their cash.  having a large number of localized economies is never a good idea though - you lose the benefits of economies of scale, and your own economy will be limited by the size of that community.

Education: this issue requires that you be careful about identifying which era you are referring to.  50 years ago saw us begin a brand new age built on the relative prosperity we enjoyed after the war.  Europe was a shambles after the war, and the cold war kept the continent in some state of turmoil.  Obviously, had things in the US remained unchanged our global position would have slipped because many systems, like education, were forced to modernize elsewhere.  It's not clear that we had the best education system in the world (you really ought to provide citations if you're going to make sweeping claims like that) or that our system now provides a deficient standard of education compared to back then (you're only evidence compares it other contemporary systems).

"there were no speeding tickets,"

I bet there were no speeding-related highway deaths either, right? ;)

"booming economy"

I took economics in College, and I don't recall hearing "booming economy" as a bona-fide term of the science.  The term is pretty misleading because an economy is composed of many disparate and sometimes contrasting forces.  If the price of IBM goes up, it's a great day for IBM shareholders who bought long, a horrific day for short sellers and, if the price really spikes, a bad day for IBM itself when profit-taking begins.  High productivity sounds good, but it has its bad side - it can lead to inefficiency due to overcapacity.  A more efficient industrial base may actually be leaner and be characterized by lower productivity.  You get the idea - a guy sneezes in NY, we all catch colds, and the guys selling Triaminic make a mint.

Your question is also problematic because it assumes (quite wrongly) that the economy has followed a consistent trend in the past 50 years.  We actually had a booming economy a decade ago, one of the most expansive and improbably profitable (higher wages and consumer demand didn't spark inflation) in American history.  Obviously, there's more to the economic picture than the passage of a half-century.

"the wealthy paid taxes"

They still do.  There may be an issue as to whether they pay their fair share, but there's always an issue of that.  This is also a problematic question because it misses just why the wealthy are wealthy, and why they can't be taxed into our bracket.  the Wealthy aren't rich because they pay far less in taxes - they simply pass us the cost of paying for them by owning the means of producing goods and services.  The rich owe the safety of their wealth to factors other than death and taxes.  The widening gap of wealth is easily one of the clearest signs that we have the closest thing to an economic boom.  If we all had a comparable degree of wealth, we'd be sharing space on the bread line.

Now when was the last time you saw one of those?

"Nobody was afraid of terrorist."

No, we were too afraid of the Russians and the grip of world communism.  If you're ever near some tenemant building dating from WWII or not long afterwards, look at the ground floor for the fall-out shelter label.