I can't stress this enough, Homer Simpson is a fictional character from a cartoon. I would not use him in an argument about economics any more than I would use the Roadrunner to argue for road safety.
A 2025 Homer is only plausible if he had some kind of supplemental income (like a military pension or a trust fund), if Marge had a job, if the house was in a depressed region, or he was a higher level supervisor. We can use the Simpsons as limited evidence of contemporary economic conditions in the same way that we could use the depictions of the characters in the Canterbury Tales for the same purpose.
This claim of "a single man could feed a whole family on one factory job" is misleading and untrue. It's usually the 1950s that people claim this was true and they wish we could go back to the 1950s. It's easy to show that that the 1950s were no picnic (https://archive.is/oH1Vx).
It's always some time in the past that the nation was great. They pick 1950s, you pick the 1990s. What you don't understand is that people are usually longing for a time when they weren't alive or when they were children. They want to go back to living the stress free life of a happy childhood, when your parents shielded you from all the vagaries of life.
You cite cartoons, they cite memes. If you ask them how a meme could possibly be used as evidence, they say much the same as you - anecdotes about their grandparents.
I would also trust 100 fictional cartoon characters before I would trust anything said in a pirated article written by Noah Smith about anything. If Noah Smith said that grass was green I would assume that it's blue.
Yeah, Homer Simpson is fictional, a unionised blue-collar worker with specialised skills, and he lives in a small town.
