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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Cloudsweeper99, post: 1124645, member: 3011&quot;]In the 70s, there was higher unemployment than now, higher inflation, double digit mortgage rates, gas lines, crashing stock and bond markets, and most of the other stuff that people are afraid of now.&nbsp; The US lost the war in Vietnam [but pretended we didn&#039;t] and Communism was winning everywhere.&nbsp; Every time you went to the supermarket, every item was marked up 10 cents or more.&nbsp; Sometimes the same item on the shelf had 4 or 5 price stickers on top of each other, and you could get a bargain by peeling a few off to find a lower price [if you didn&#039;t get caught].&nbsp; More than once I went down to the local gas station at 3:00AM to line up to get gas when the station opened at 6 o&#039;clock.&nbsp; So did everyone else and there was a crowd of people in Dunkin Donuts waiting until morning.&nbsp; Ceasar&#039;s World common stock went from $2 to $100 and back to $2 again pretty quickly after they opened a casino in Atlantic City.&nbsp; The music industry tried to get rid of the rock bands because they wanted too large of a cut of the profits, so they created disco.&nbsp; Music really never recovered after that.&nbsp; Computer input was primarily done with 80 column punch cards that were processed in overnight batch runs on mainframe computers with less power than a digital watch has today.&nbsp; There were no PCs, but many offices had nice electronic adding machines and typewriters.&nbsp; There was a brief toilet paper shortage that caused a lot of panic for a few weeks.&nbsp; The draft lottery was pretty terrifying when I was 18 [I got 280!!!].&nbsp; Company Presidents [there were no CEOs] made about ten times the salary of an entry level college position.&nbsp; And even though the economy was bad, companies would try to keep as many people as they could on the payroll as long as they were still profitable so recent college grads probably had it a bit easier than they do now.&nbsp; My friend from college made a pretty good living closing down bank branches for the FDIC.&nbsp; So things were pretty bad, but people adjust better than you might think.&nbsp; If the economy gets worse, we will adjust again.&nbsp; The biggest difference that I see now is that corporations and the people who run them don&#039;t care at all about employees, the communities where they reside, or even the nation.&nbsp; There are no Sam Walton&#039;s or Lee Iacoca&#039;s in American business anymore.</p><p><br /></p><p>Edit: The casino stock might have been Resorts Internationa, not Ceasars.&nbsp; I don&#039;t recall.&nbsp; And I met Bill Bradley at the train station one morning when he was running for Senate.&nbsp; It was early and nobody else was around so we talked for about 10 minutes.&nbsp; I also [almost] got to shake hands with Richard Nixon at Yankee Stadium one day, but a NYC police officer hit me when I got too close.&nbsp; My cousin and I would go to hockey games, buy the cheapest tickets, then go downstairs and pay the usher a small &quot;fee&quot; to put us in empty seats behind the bench.&nbsp; Those were the days![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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