thegreatdivide
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[Alternet]
America's Comeback' is nothing but a con job
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, he was sitting under a tent that had “The American Comeback Tour” printed in huge letters across all four sides. It was the theme of his tour of college campuses, a tour run by his Turning Point organization that was, according to NBC News, early-funded by 10 morbidly rich right-wingers.
The question is “America Comeback” to what?
In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office
・Fully two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class,
・College was so cheap you could pay your tuition with a weekend job,
・Healthcare was inexpensive and widely available,
・Women and minorities had achieved legal (albeit not yet actual) parity with white men,
・And school and mass shootings were largely unknown because weapons of war were mostly outlawed from our streets.
・Today, however, as a result of the Reagan Revolution:
・Only around half of us are in the middle class,
College debt has crushed two generations to the point where they can’t start a family or buy a house,
A half-million families end up homeless or bankrupt every year because somebody got sick.
The GOP is leading an effort to make it harder for women and minorities to vote or maintain employment, And, with more guns than people, mass shootings are an almost-daily occurrence.
It's easy to see why an appealing pitch to the nation’s young people would be “comeback” or “Make America Great Again.” But what caused that “greatness” that we need to “come back to” and what wrecked it?
The American middle class is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1900, only about 17 percent of us were in it; by the time of the Republican Great Depression it was about a quarter of us.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn into office in 1933, he embarked on a radical new campaign to create the world’s first widespread, more-than-half-of-us middle class. It had three main long-term components.
First, he passed the Wagner Act in 1935 that legalized labor unions and forbade employers from bringing in scab workers or refusing to recognize a union. That gave workers democracy in the workplace, and they used that power to demand that as their productivity increased, so would their pay and benefits.
And, with more guns than people, mass shootings are an almost-daily occurrence.
It's easy to see why an appealing pitch to the nation’s young people would be “comeback” or “Make America Great Again.” But what caused that “greatness” that we need to “come back to” and what wrecked it?
The American middle class is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1900, only about 17 percent of us were in it; by the time of the Republican Great Depression it was about a quarter of us.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn into office in 1933, he embarked on a radical new campaign to create the world’s first widespread, more-than-half-of-us middle class. It had three main long-term components.
First, he passed the Wagner Act in 1935 that legalized labor unions and forbade employers from bringing in scab workers or refusing to recognize a union. That gave workers democracy in the workplace, and they used that power to demand that as their productivity increased, so would their pay and benefits.
Second, he established a minimum wage to make sure that people who worked full time would never end up in poverty.
Third, he raised the top income tax rate to 90 percent for the morbidly rich and 52 percent for corporations.
That high top tax rate on the rich meant that the average CEO took only about 30 times what the average worker did (because he’d be paying 90 percent or 74 percent after taking the first few millions), leaving far more money in the company to give raises and benefits to workers.
Corporations could get around their top tax rate by investing in their business. Research and development, new product roll-outs, advertising and marketing, and increasing pay and benefits were all tax-deductible, and that high tax rate incentivized them to do these things that built a strong and resilient manufacturing economy (stock buybacks were considered illegal stock manipulation until 1983).
Reagan undid all of that, lowering the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent to 27 percent (it’s since gone up to 34 percent), cutting the top corporate tax rate to 34 percent, and legalizing stock buybacks, so now CEOs are taking literally hundreds of billions out of their companies (Musk is set to make a trillion) and wages for workers have been mostly flat even since 1981.
In similar fashion, Reagan declared war on labor unions so effectively that that one-third of us protected by unions in 1981 has collapsed. Today private sector union membership rates are only 5.9 percent, with some states even lower (North Carolina 2.4 percent, South Dakota 2.7 percent, and South Carolina 2.8 percent.
Regarding college, 80 percent of the cost of an education in state-run colleges and universities was paid by government when Reagan came into office, leaving about 20 percent of the cost to be covered by tuition. The Reagan Revolution changed all that, so that today tuition covers the largest percentage and the state is only covering around 20 percent-40 percent (it varies from state to state).
(cont.)
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