One of the most memorable books I have read is The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They argue that the happiest societies are the ones with the most equality. If this is true, and the authors persuaded me that it is, then our economic policies should aim to reduce income inequality and wealth inequality. But we have gone in the other direction, with government policy increasing inequality. Lobbyists for the 1% have funded political campaigns to lower their taxes, gut unions, and protect inherited wealth. Their campaigns on the surface are about culture war issues (abortion, drugs, race, gay rights), but what they are really promoting are tax cuts for the rich.
Thom Hartmann posted this chapter from his book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream.
As productivity continued to rise, due to increasing automation and better technology, so too would everyone’s wages. Or so went the theory.
The glue holding this logic together was the then-top marginal income tax rate. In 1963, just before the Time article was written, the top marginal income tax rate was 90%. What that did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses: to invest in new technology, to pay their workers more, to hire new workers and expand.
After all, what’s the point of sucking millions and millions of dollars out of your business if it’s going to be taxed at 90% (or even the 74% that President Lyndon Johnson lowered it to in 1966)?
According to this line of reasoning, if businesses were suddenly to become way more profitable and efficient thanks to automation, then that money would flow throughout the business—raising everyone’s standard of living and increasing everyone’s leisure time, from the CEO to the janitor.
But when Reagan dropped that top tax rate down to 28%, everything changed. Now, as businesses became far more profitable, there was a far greater incentive for CEOs to pull those profits out of the company and pocket them, because they were suddenly paying an incredibly low tax rate.
And that’s exactly what they did.
All those new profits, thanks to automation, that were supposed to go to everyone, giving us all bigger paychecks and more time off, went to the top.
Suddenly, the symmetry in the productivity/wages chart broke down. Productivity continued increasing, since technology continued improving, and revenues and profits kept increasing with it.
But wages stayed flat.
And, again, since greater and greater profits could be sucked out of the company and taxed at lower levels, there was no incentive to reduce the number of hours everyone had to work.
In the 1950s, before that Time magazine article predicting the Leisure Society was written, the average American working in manufacturing put in about 42 hours of work a week. Today, the average American working in manufacturing puts in about 40 hours of work a week. This means that even though productivity has increased 400% since 1950, Americans in manufacturing are working, on average, only two fewer hours a week.
If productivity is four times higher today than in 1950, then Americans should be able to work four times less, or just 10 hours a week, to afford the same 1950s lifestyle when a family of four could get by on just one paycheck, own a home, own a car, put their kids through school, take a vacation every now and then, and retire comfortably.
That’s the definition of the Leisure Society: 10 hours of work a week, and the rest of the time spent with family, with travel, with creativity, with whatever you want. And if our tax laws and our corporate anti-monopoly laws that restrained the worst corporate bad behavior had stayed the same as they were in 1966, we might well be either working 10 hours a week for around $50,000 a year in income, or working 40-hour weeks for over $200,000 a year.
But all of this was washed away by the Reagan tax cuts. Those trillions of dollars that would have gone to workers? They went into the estates and stock portfolios of the top 1%. Combine this with Reagan’s brutal crackdown on striking PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) members that kicked off a three-decades-long assault on another substantial pillar of the middle class—organized labor—and life today is anything but leisurely for working people in America.
More Unequal than Rome
Instead of leisure, working people got feudalism.
From 1947 to 1981, all classes of Americans saw their incomes grow together; as a result of the Reagan tax cuts, that era ended and a new era of Reaganomics began. Since then, only the wealthiest among us have gotten rich from economic boom times.
Today, workers’ wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low. Yet, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high.
The top 1% of Americans own 40% of the nation’s wealth. In fact, just 4 Americans own more wealth than 150 million other Americans combined, and they pay lower taxes than anybody in the bottom half of American families economically.30
Walmart, Inc., the world’s largest private employer, personifies this inequality best. It’s a corporation that in 2011 gained more revenue than any other corporation in America. It raked in $16.4 billion in profits. It pays its employees minimum wage.
And the Walmart heirs, the Walton family, who occupy positions six through nine on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list, own roughly $100 billion in wealth, which is more than the bottom 40% of Americans combined. The average Walmart employee would have to work 76 million 40-hour weeks to have as much wealth as one Walmart heir.
Through some interesting historical analysis, historians Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen calculated that inequality in America today is worse than what was seen during the Roman era.31 Thus the top 1%, just like the Roman emperors, got their Leisure Society, and they’ve used their financial power to capture the US government to protect their Leisure Society.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
THIS.
LikeLike
Couldn’t have said it better.
LikeLike
Prior to the Reagan administration it was illegal for companies to do anything to manipulate the price of its stock. Under Reagan companies were allowed to use stock buybacks to increase their profits, a practice which continues today and contributes to economic inequality. Instead of raising wages, companies keep wages low in order to increase share holder value which results in massive bonuses for CEOs. It is less expensive for companies to pay lobbyists to push corporate friendly legislation instead of paying workers what they are worth. In the absence of any worker friendly legislation, the only legal recourse for workers is to organize and demand better wages.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes. Sadly, tax cuts and platitudes have been the mainstay of the Republican Party–with some exceptions–since William Howard Taft took over from Theodore Roosevelt. Reagan was just a better salesman, against a weakening Democratic Party. Part of how and why it happened was that Republicans were able to field more “heroic” or “personable” candidates–such as Eisenhower and Reagan. Part of it was having more money to spend on campaigns and advertising. In that regard, there was a moment in the ’56 Democratic campaign where the presidential candidate’s drivers had to “pass the hat” to get enough money to cross a toll bridge. The Republicans, mostly dedicated to serving the wealthy, always had more money to spend on campaigns.
Then, Reagan and his supporters tipped the scales heavily in their favor when they did away with the “Fairness Doctrine” at the FCC, allowing the rise of Fox News and other media almost totally one-sided. They also packed the NLRB labor board, further busting the union movement–which, most folks probably don’t appreciate–has its own internal communications. So, with the near demised of unions, not only did workers have less say and less clout, but millions of folks were also less informed because they had no union newspaper or labor union radio broadcasts as they had had. Fox–all conservative Republican all the time–took the place of labor newspapers and radio.
In the midst of all this, we had the “Southernization” of the Democrats–Carter, Clinton, Gore, etc.–candidates not close to unions and not raised in union, multi-ethnic environments. Finally, the further we get chronologically from the successes of the New Deal and the Great Society–and the more our news is dominated by our latest wars, the more urban Americans are turned off by the Democrats.
LikeLike
I remember that despicable GOP toad, Tom DeLay, saying that the most important thing to do during a time of war would be to lower taxes (on the rich and powerful). The man was and is a totally amoral and nasty human hyena.
From wikipedia: DeLay was convicted in January 2011 and sentenced to three years in prison, but was free on bail while appealing his conviction. The trial court’s judgment was overturned by the Austin Court of Appeals, a Texas intermediate appellate court, on September 19, 2013; the Court of Appeals ruled that “the evidence in the case was ‘legally insufficient to sustain DeLay’s convictions'” and acquitted DeLay. The acquittal was upheld on appeal.
LikeLike
For much of the 20th century, wages and productivity increased in tandem. Then, in the early 1970s, wages went flat, and productivity continued to increase until it almost doubled. Where did all that increased value go? It was stolen from workers and went into the pockets of the obscenely, grossly wealthy, and they used some small part of it to purchase private collections of political wind-up dolls, think tank bobbleheads, and judicial action figures.
LikeLike
If anyone wants or needs proof that the way capitalism (the worship of wealth and the power it buys above all else) is practiced in the United States is toxic, look at the Nordic countries in Europe where cuddly capitalism is practiced instead of the “F” you cutthroat capitalism that is practiced in the United States.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/23/why-do-people-in-nordic-countries-consistently-rank-as-the-happiest-and-what-can-we-learn-
LikeLike
I don’t claim to be an accountant nor know the history of the tax code. But I am pretty sure those CEOs and other Corporate Executives had enough incentive to divert profits to share holders from the lower gains rate before Reagan cut taxes. Most Corporate wealth is in the form of gains not income. Most CEO compensation is in the form of stock options .
I have no problem with a progressive tax rate going all the way to Eisenhower’s 93% but I doubt the income tax was the motivation.
The assault on labor had started long before in the late 40s and 50s. With that a change in the Corporate Culture which still until the early 60s viewed the mission of the corporation as serving three stake holders , employees , consumers and share holders.
By the early 80s share holder primacy and vulture capitalism was becoming the rule. The war on the working class was in full gear.
LikeLike
I wrote this back in 2008, when John McCain and Sarah Palin were running for president. But Donald Trump makes Sarah Palin look like a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient in comparison.
The End of the Pax Americana
If you happened to live in Rome in the year 170, you could be forgiven for thinking that the empire was eternal. For almost two hundred years, across a vast empire that stretched from the Scottish borderlands to the sands of Arabia, people had enjoyed the Pax Romana. The brutish banditry and lawlessness of previous times had become almost unknown. Trade and the arts flourished, and bellies were full. One couldn’t imagine that such a system, the like of which the world had never before seen, would fall apart practically overnight. Then, in 180, Marcus Aurelius died and was succeeded by his son, the weak, cruel, debauched, and possibly insane Commodus. It was the beginning of the end.
If I were writing a history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, I would begin with the story of a distressed Roman family farmer, in the second century AD, with no choice but to sell the land that had been in his family for centuries to one of the handful of wealthy landowners at the top of the latifundia system that developed in the first two centuries of the first millennium. (This system was the forerunner of the medieval system of large feudal estates worked by serfs and ruled by a baron.) Rome had been built by the strength of its legions of sturdy boys from small family farms who fought for the earth that their fathers (and mothers!) plowed. By the second century, that system of small family farms was gone. From one end of the empire to the other, the land was owned by a wealthy few, and the formerly free peasantry had been reduced to serfdom. Who could blame anyone for not wanting to take up arms to defend the system that oppressed them? By the time the latifundia system developed, Rome was already dead. It just didn’t know it yet.
So, that’s the opening story for a book on the decline of Rome. The historian who tells the story of the decline of the American empire might well begin with this story: During the 2008 presidential campaign, both of the Republican nominees, McCain and Palin, gave speeches in which they derisively described the waste of taxpayer dollars on studies of fruit flies. Here, for example, is Palin, in her first major public address after being selected as her party’s vice-presidential candidate:
“Sometimes these dollars go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good—things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not!”
A day or two later, McCain repeated this talking point. The bit about the fruit flies wasn’t just another piece of rural idiocy from the mouth of the former beauty queen Ms. Palin. It was written for her by McCain’s advisors. What she said was the campaign’s official line. Now, why would I think this a good story with which to begin the history of the decline of the American empire? Because it goes to the heart of a problem in the American system of government that I believe will be, in due time, fatal to it. Think of the person who suffers a cerebral embolism, a stroke. He or she feels healthy, strong, on top of his or her game, but all the while, there is this blood vessel in his or her head with a weak wall, and that wall is ballooning outward. One day, it bursts. There is just such a problem, I believe, at the core of the American system of government, a brilliant system, to be sure, but one with a fatal flaw.
How does one get to be a United States senator or the governor of one of our fifty states without knowing that fruit flies are the most common subjects of genetic research and that much of what we know of genetic mechanisms comes from studying them? Anyone with the slightest interest in science, with the slightest curiosity about how the universe around them works, would surely know that. Anyone who occasionally read books or magazine or newspaper articles about scientific topics would know that. We are at a point in the history of our species at which we have sequenced the genomes of ourselves and of many of the creatures with which we share this planet; when we are developing genetic therapies for the over 4,500 diseases with a known genetic component; when we have developed techniques allowing for the creation of genetic chimeras, creatures with genes borrowed from other species; when we are at the brink of controlling our own evolution and possibly, even, of creating new human subspecies. And yet, at such a time, those who would lead us know nothing, NOTHING AT ALL, about genetics, not even what is known by, say, someone who has recently completed an elementary school science curriculum. This fact is more than simply disturbing. It’s how it all ends for America.
It’s no accident that Thomas Jefferson should have been so interested in education that he founded a university and donated his library to it, that John Adams was so interested in education that he wrote, in the Constitution of the Common Wealth of Massachusetts, that
“Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools and grammar schools in the towns.”
Jefferson and Adams understood that democracy cannot flourish without an educated populous, for an ignorant people will elect ignorant leaders who will make horrific mistakes. The founders wisely shielded us from the worst excesses of mob rule by making ours a representative government on the theory that those who would run for office would be, at least, of the educated classes, and they hoped that we would become an educated country, where an enlightened citizenry elected enlightened leaders. I remember reading a letter of Jefferson’s in which he dreamed of blacksmiths working at their anvils with copies of Plato stuffed into their breeches. But this is not what has happened. Having representative government instead of government by referendum is not sufficient to ensure that leaders will be educated, wise, and humane. This is the worm at the core of American democracy. This is the rot at the center of the tree. An ignorant citizenry elects ignorant leaders.
The founders embraced democratic government because they knew that the old system of aristocratic rule was terribly, terribly wasteful of human potential, of the possible fruits of the labors of lowborn geniuses. They were also well aware that one could not count on the intelligence or beneficence of those born to high estate, for history is replete with aristocratic monsters, madmen, and idiots—with Caligulas and Mad King Georges. Under the old aristocratic system, the only way to deal with an insane, lazy, ignorant, or cruel leader was assassination. In a representative democracy, one could at least vote such people out of office.
But what happens with the citizenry becomes too ignorant to recognize the ignorance of its leaders at the very time when knowledge is crucial to making decisions of policy and governance? According to recent surveys, the people of the United States can’t find Texas on a map. They read, on average, one book per person per year. They can’t locate the lungs on a diagram of the human body. They don’t know that the Earth travels around the sun. They think that dinosaurs and people lived at the same time. I’m not making this stuff up. This is the way it is in the United States today.
Is it any wonder, then, that these same people elected not once but twice a president who found it difficult, in interviews, to utter a grammatical sentence or to name ANY book that he had ever read, who evaded the draft by joining the National Guard and then went AWOL from even that limited service to his country, who spent most of his youth as a dissipated drunk and drug user, who ran two businesses into bankruptcy, who set the all-time gubernatorial record for executing people but believed in the sanctity of the lives of stem cells, and who thought that the universe was created 6,000 years ago by a guy in the sky? And, of course, some of these same Americans elected John McCain and Sarah Palin, who thought themselves informed enough to run the most powerful country on the planet even though they didn’t have the scientific understanding that they might have gained from perusing a third grader’s Weekly Reader.
This problem of the ignorance of our populous and of our politicians is made particularly clear in regard to the healthcare debate now dominating our news. A national healthcare system isn’t even on the agenda, despite the incontrovertible existence proof of the superb functioning of such systems in every other technologically advanced democratic nation on the planet and despite the fact that no one in those countries (except, perhaps, an occasional lunatic) would dream of going back to a barbarous system in which equal access to health care was not treated as a fundamental right. And, of course, the average health care cost in those other countries is, literally, HALF what it is in the United States, for in this country, according to a recent study, fully one third of the health care dollar goes not to providing care but to providing the profits and marketing costs of private health insurance companies. All one has to do is to look at the health care systems of Canada, Japan, Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, etc., to verify these facts, but the people of the United States are too ignorant to do so, and their representatives are too ignorant themselves and too hooked on the great flow of campaign contributions from the insurance industry to point people in the direction of the facts. So, we’re going to end up with a health care bill that increases the burdens on the average citizen, one that requires everyone to buy private insurance and so “solves” the problem by increasing even further the profits of the private insurers–that is, the percentage of our health care dollar that goes not to health care but to private profits.
In a similar vein, the truly learned experts in Colin Powell’s State Department wrote a report saying that if we invaded Iraq, we would be watering and fertilizing the plants of terrorism around the world, would get ourselves involved in a Vietnam-style quagmire, would own the problem for decades, would spend trillions of dollars, would destroy hundreds of thousands of lives, and would be less safe in the end, but our politicians OF BOTH PARTIES simply ignored the research and acceded to the Bush administration’s astonishingly naïve agenda. Why? Because our leaders are ignorant people, elected by an ignorant people.
For the first half of the twentieth century, we in the United States made great strides in education, but somewhere it all went to hell, and the progress not only stopped but was reversed. Democracy won’t work unless people are educated. Today, sixty plus percent of Americans do not have college degrees. Over fifty percent of Americans cannot calculate a ten percent tip. Harvard graduates cannot tell you why we have winter and summer. This in a time when we control nuclear and biological weapons and can create new forms of life in laboratories!
One of the Bush administration’s avowed policies, cooked up in the Washington think tank called The Project for the New American Century, was “spreading democracy in the Middle East.” Iran had a revolution. Its new leaders gave the people the right to vote. And what did they do? They elected despots who plunged them back into the Middle Ages. And why did they do that? Because they were ignorant, because they ascribed to body of belief straight out of the sixth century. The mass of Americans, instead, ascribes to a body of belief straight out of 1100 BC.
Right now, the real enemy in the Middle East is not some fringe group of terrorist radicals but a CONSENSUS VIEW across the region that Western secularism is a great evil that threatens Islam and must be wiped from the face of the Earth, but our politicians are too ignorant to recognize that. If they did, they would be fighting the jihadists who want to reestablish the Caliphate by inundating the cultures of the Middle East with modernity in the form of schools, radio, television, video, and the like—the very things that the jihadists fear. Americans are naive enough to think that fundamentalism is a fringe phenomenon in the Middle East when it is, in fact, the general case in many countries, often instantiated in national law. On this issue, as on so much else, our politicians, elected by an ignorant citizenry, haven’t a clue. They are so ignorant that they aren’t even wrong. They don’t even know what war they need to be fighting—the war to bring the Enlightenment to an entire region that never experienced it.
Enough with the examples. What can be done about the ignorance of our politicians? Here’s one idea: What if we required, as a condition of standing for public office in the United States, that one qualify by passing some basic examinations on history, political science, economics, science, public health, and so on? Wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, to have politicians who, when they use the word socialism, have some idea what the word means (ownership of the means of production by the workers)? Wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, to have the guy who is voting on whether we shall allow stem cell research be someone who knows what a stem cell is?
I know, it’s a radical proposal. But consider this: we wouldn’t let someone with no education perform heart surgery on us, so why should we let just such people lead us into wars in which hundreds of thousands die and in which the national treasury is looted via no-bid contracts for the benefit of the captains of the war industries?
Short of such a radical change in the way in which we choose our leaders, I don’t think there is any hope for us, for education in the United States is in severe decline and has been for decades now, and we certainly cannot expect the idiots we currently have in office in this country to do anything about that problem. Meanwhile, in the past ten years, India has built twenty-five new large institutes of technology that rival MIT and Cal Tech.
Requiring a modicum of education on the part of our leaders is no panacea, of course. Certainly, it is possible for one to be an educated person and still be a monster. Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister for the Third Reich, had a Ph.D. in Romantic Literature from the University of Heidelberg. Being educated is not a sufficient condition for good leadership. It is, however, a necessary one in a technological age. One cannot listen to or read the speeches of politicians in the United States today without becoming convinced that we are ruled by buffoons, by people who are not only profoundly, breathtakingly ignorant but are actually proud of their ignorance. And, of course, the way to ensure that you will NOT get elected in the United States is to suggest that you might be, say, educated or cultured or traveled or well read or, god forbid, an intellectual.
And that, my friends, is why we won’t last, why the future lies with India, with China, with Brazil, and with other countries of the former third world where education matters and is revered.
The founding fathers did so many things so well that it is difficult to fault them. I am often dumbstruck by their wisdom, by their farsightedness. But this they missed: they didn’t build into our system any mechanism to ensure that those who stand for office have some modicum of learning and understanding. And that’s why, to my horror, I am fairly certain that this noble experiment of theirs will not last.
LikeLike
cx: an educated populace, not populous, ofc
LikeLike
Bob
Aspirational , much !
“In the 118th Congress, 94% of representatives and all but one senator hold at least a bachelor’s degree, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. House and Senate biographical data.Feb 2, 2023”
And some of the dimwits you speak of have post graduate degrees.
“For example, 30% of House Members, and 51% of Senators, have law degrees and have practiced law.”
A far greater number when all Post Graduate degrees are counted.
Now I would not use this to argue as the Luddites do for the value of dropping out in 3rd grade. However it would seem obvious that simply being educated is not the answer.
All the devoutly religious from Hasidim who can’t read English to the Graduates of Bob Jones University, consider themselves very educated. Education was under the auspices of religion for most mans history. So garbage in garbage out.
As for other Nations placing a premium on higher education, we have enough of a problem comparing school districts in a State or even a City. Comparing Education Globally is far more complex. So how is China doing? 59% of youth have a degree of Higher Education. Yet they flock to the US and Western Countries for Graduate work especially in Science and Engineering. While Xi is President for life a position Trump till now only dreams of.
I assure you Chinese Higher Education is not designed to foster Jeffersonian Democracy. Perhaps it was perhaps only a short period of time that American Education had those goals. Till the Empire led by Lewis Powell struck back.
LikeLike
The problem is the lack of education of people who vote for these particular Congresspersons, not that of the Congresspersons themselves. I contend that if people were better educated, they would not vote for the likes of Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz. And yes it is possible to get a degree from a hotshot school, even an advanced degree, and still be mostly ignorant. Exhibits A and B: Donald Trump and George Bush, Jr.
LikeLike
My reply is in moderation. The biggest problem is that we have an ignorant populace that votes for people who went to colleges but clearly did not receive an education at them. Exhibits A and B: Donald Trump and George Bush, Jr.
LikeLike
Sorry. No longer in moderation. For some reason, the comments in moderation did not show up for a few hours.
LikeLike
Not an issue, Diane. I’m astonished at the great job you do keeping up with this moderation nonsense. I was just letting the person I was talking to know. Love to you and yours, and once again, have a great New Year!
LikeLike
So many problems with that essay I dug up from 2008. I really should have given it a major overhaul before reposting it. Sorry.
LikeLike
But yes, this piece needs an edit that I did not give it.
LikeLike
Harvard grad, hedgefunder and school choice demander, Bill Ackman, should be drummed out of the Democratic Party. Ackman and his Wall Street cronies widen income inequality while driving down GDP by an estimated 2%. Non-profit private schools should be taxed. Zero tax dollars should fund the slime that seeks tax dollars for private schools and, that includes the self-serving religionists.
LikeLike
Let me hasten to say that that essay on “The Pax Americana” that I posted (but is as of this writing in moderation) says that education in the United States is in severe decline. Let me clarify what I mean by that: The standards and testing movement foisted on us by the likes of Bill Clinton, Jeb Bush, George Bush the Lesser, Bill Gates, David Coleman, Arne Duncan, et al., has led to a VAST DEVOLUTION of curricula and pedagogy in the United States. Ask any college professor you know. He or she will tell you that kids AFTER decades of test-and-punish, kids are coming into their classes knowing LESS. And, a lot of kids are not going to college because it’s too expensive. This is particular true of our boys, who can’t afford it and don’t see much future in it and are spending their time in Mom and Dad’s basement playing videogames and reading about ammo. And, of course, we have had this great post-Trump polarization in which half of the country is PROUD of its ignorance and of its utter rejection of science. Just like their Glorious Leader.
LikeLike
OK, we’ve identified the problem, its source, reasons & effects. What can\should we do, rely on the Party that was supposed to not let this happen, that we counted on to represent us? We understand the Republican mind, grab all you can, while you can & we expect policies like Reagan’s, we’re not surprised, they’ve been lurking ever since FDR’s era & will always be circling progressive gov’t programs & policies looking for weaknesses, but we got fat, dumb & happy & now can no longer count on Democrats to fight, end our capitulation & slide. There are too many fronts in this war, an effective Republican strategy. We suggest fighting one issue at a time, behind one leader who’ll carry this Banner Issue, start there, win there & move to the next. We suggest the most fundamental issue, Public Education be the 1st.
LikeLike
What is most frustrating is that our system of taxation is corrupted by chronic grift. I retired from North Carolina and worked in Alabama to make enough to put my kids through college and pay health care. For a short time I was among the ten percent in wage earners and was gobsmacked by how little I actually paid in income taxes. Hartmann mentions the Reagan Tax cut, but the Trump cut was even more egregious because not only did it represent further cuts and gamed deductions for the wealthy, but it also represented a tax increase for the rest of us through a deceptive greater automatic deduction. When, according Hartmann, billionaires pay an average of 3% toward income taxes while 90% percent of us are left holding the bag there is a problem. I often see comments that claim the wealthy pay the most in taxes by aggregate and that may be true. However, the combined increase in payments for services, like tolls, small business licenses, parking et al, while government reduces provisions in such sectors as education, health care, and housing, means that the average American carries the greatest economic burden. Although Republicans have led the charge against taxes, the neoliberal economic policies of the past 40+ years have been far too bi-partisan. I’m not sure the Democratic Party has the guts to make a correction should they take over Washington.
LikeLike