Although I think the headline "gotcha" statement is pretty ridiculous, his point about the 50s is not. For a combination of reasons, it was possible at that tim

Although I think the headline "gotcha" statement is pretty ridiculous, his point about the 50s is not. For a combination of reasons, it was possible at that time to get a job straight out of high school at a place like Ford and make a very comfortable living. The circumstances that enabled this were 1) High domestic consumer demand for goods as a result of the baby boom and following the low-demand period of the Depression and the constrained-supply period of the war. 2) Negligible competition from imports, in part because most of the likely suspects were still a long way from recovering from the war. 3) A tight labor market resulting from the high level of growth. Growth -- particularly population growth -- as a driver of wages was noted way back in the 18th century by Adam Smith. None of these are true in the United States today.