>> They created an incredibly unequal world that has eroded democracy to the point where we can seriously discuss a US that isn't a democracy anymore in our lifetimes.
> Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic
Until the 1970s and 1980s we lived in a totally different world. Taxes on the rich were high. Productivity gains were shared with workers whose wages went up. After the 1980s (Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Fukuyama, and more broadly neocons) everything changed.
It's incredibly striking, you can see it even is basic graphs.
The share of wages as percentage of GDP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2KkM Until the 1970s it was pretty stable, then you have a steep downward trend. The capital class who owns things, now that they had many fewer regulations and didn't need to pay taxes, they decided to keep far more of the wealth for themselves.
Companies in 2022 spent nearly $1 trillion in stock buybacks. Those were illegal until 1982! That money would have gone to workers, instead, it's going to owners.
There's also been a huge shift in competition. Instead of competing with one another, companies now consolidate. This used to be a very rare event, now, in most industries we have only a few big players that absorb everyone else. That's a direct consequence of deregulation, not enforcing antitrust laws, and giving money to capital instead of people.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wyvntk8Krq0/WQdL-4X-WjI/AAAAAAAAI...
Guess why Trump talks about Making America Great Again? People have a collective memory of a time when wages were going up and when there was optimism about the American Dream.
The crisis we're seeing in the US today is all about these charts and this timing; it's really striking how the 80s are the focal point for all of the problems that people talk about today. People are hurting now, their wealth is sapped, their wages aren't going anywhere, they have little security left. They feel like they have no future and that their children't won't have a future. Not to mention that large parts of the country are deindustrialized.
It's really sad that instead of turning to organized labor, like we saw in the 19th century, these people are mostly turning to the exact people who marginalized them in the first place (conservatives, Republicans and large businesses).
> Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic
Until the 1970s and 1980s we lived in a totally different world. Taxes on the rich were high. Productivity gains were shared with workers whose wages went up. After the 1980s (Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Fukuyama, and more broadly neocons) everything changed.
It's incredibly striking, you can see it even is basic graphs.
The share of wages as percentage of GDP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2KkM Until the 1970s it was pretty stable, then you have a steep downward trend. The capital class who owns things, now that they had many fewer regulations and didn't need to pay taxes, they decided to keep far more of the wealth for themselves.
This is also what gives rise to this famous graph https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/dropzone/2016/10/unn... The gap between labor productivity and labor compensation.
Or just look at a graph of who owns what https://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1415721490539/Wealth_line-chart... You can see it clearly, in the 80s the top 0.1% take off and the bottom 90% of people start to lose.
Even our language clearly shows what's going on. Look at when the term "Rust belt" became a thing: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Rust+belt&year...
Companies in 2022 spent nearly $1 trillion in stock buybacks. Those were illegal until 1982! That money would have gone to workers, instead, it's going to owners.
There's also been a huge shift in competition. Instead of competing with one another, companies now consolidate. This used to be a very rare event, now, in most industries we have only a few big players that absorb everyone else. That's a direct consequence of deregulation, not enforcing antitrust laws, and giving money to capital instead of people. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wyvntk8Krq0/WQdL-4X-WjI/AAAAAAAAI...
Guess why Trump talks about Making America Great Again? People have a collective memory of a time when wages were going up and when there was optimism about the American Dream.
The crisis we're seeing in the US today is all about these charts and this timing; it's really striking how the 80s are the focal point for all of the problems that people talk about today. People are hurting now, their wealth is sapped, their wages aren't going anywhere, they have little security left. They feel like they have no future and that their children't won't have a future. Not to mention that large parts of the country are deindustrialized.
It's really sad that instead of turning to organized labor, like we saw in the 19th century, these people are mostly turning to the exact people who marginalized them in the first place (conservatives, Republicans and large businesses).