One needs to compare apples to apples.
Often times, when discussing this issue, people takes stats, which are nothing more really than snapshots.
They don’t give you the whole picture.
Like you said, the percentage of single income homes since 1970 has changed.
But so has single parent homes.
In 1970 the US population was 205 million
In 2017 the US population was 325 million
A 59% change
In 1970 8.2 million kids lived in single parent homes
In 2017 that number was 20 million
A 144% change
(all the while the number of kids per family has dropped)
Look at how many people are now 3-4 generations into welfare,
Versus how many were just first time welfare recipients in the 60’s into 1970.
What also has changed is the business landscape in the US.
In 1970, there were 30,000 people working in northern Indiana at all the steel mills.
Today, maybe about 20% of that.
Many good paying manufacturing jobs are gone.
But what has also changed is the global reach of many businesses.
Walmart, the largest employer in the US, employs about 1% of the entire US labor force.
And yet an entire 1/3 of Walmarts entire labor force, is overseas.
And yet we figure the CEO’s pay against just US labor force.
Kind of hard to compare the pay of Walmarts CEO in 1970 to that of today.
Did Walmart even have any business outside the US in 1970?
Likewise companies like Ford or GM.
Over half of Fords sales are outside the US
Since so much of the companys business and labor is in other countries, but the CEO is in the US, it’s impossible to compare the CEO’s pay now to 1970 and to strictly US wages.
Also, in 1970,
There was no Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc.
GE was one of the original companies on the Dow Jones Industrial.
It has been on there for 110 years.
It was just removed this year.
GE does some of the same things it did in 1970,
But so much has changed, that a snapshot of the company then and now, you’d never know it was the same company.
These are whole new industries, that reach all over the world, that weren’t even around in 1970.
Mcdonalds last year had sales WORLDWIDE of 22.8 Billion
Only 8 Billion was in the US.
How does one take ALL this information
and create a TRUE picture?
——Many good paying manufacturing jobs are gone.——
Unions are also largely gone.
Perhaps the reason the jobs and their unions are gone is because they paid too well and were no longer competative.
The unions raised wages beyond economic viability