| Working class people who identify with the Republican party labor under the mistaken impression that their hard work will be rewarded with upward class mobility. Restaurant kitchens and dish rooms, hotel maid rosters, construction sites retail outlets, etc. are filled with the hardest working people in America, most of whom will never achieve any sort of financial security beyond their next paycheck, much less financial wealth. |
| Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.
To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years. Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains. And then there’s the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s. There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came. "We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. "We know now that it is bad economics." And last year we learned that lesson all over again. Source: "All the President’s Zombies" By PAUL KRUGMAN - NY Times - August 23, 2009 It showed that America’s most wealthy earn an even greater share of the nation’s income than they did in 2000, at the peak of the tech boom. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported, earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005 (the latest date for which these data are available), up from the high of 20.8 percent they’d reached in the bull market of 2000. The bottom 50 percent of people earned 12.8 percent of all income, compared with 13 percent in 2000. And the median tax filer’s income fell 2 percent when adjusted for inflation (to about $31,000) between 2000 and 2005. More and more people are being priced out of a middle class existence. Source: "The Clinton Surprise" by Judith Warner - NY Times - 10/21/07 The poor, we are told, can use their own bootstraps. President Bush got away with huge tax cuts for the rich in part because nonrich Americans, who make up most of the population, believe everybody has a chance of making it into the club. Unfortunately, the American dream is not that broadly accessible. Recent research surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a governmental think tank for the rich nations, found that mobility in the United States is lower than in other industrial countries. One study found that mobility between generations — people doing better or worse than their parents — is weaker in America than in Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain and France. In America, there is more than a 40 percent chance that if a father is in the bottom fifth of the earnings’ distribution, his son will end up there, too. In Denmark, the equivalent odds are under 25 percent, and they are less than 30 percent in Britain. America’s sluggish mobility is ultimately unsurprising. Wealthy parents not only pass on that wealth in inheritances, they can pay for better education, nutrition and health care for their children. The poor cannot afford this investment in their children’s development — and the government doesn’t provide nearly enough help. Source: "The Land of Opportunity?" - NY Times - July 13, 2007 On Thursday [12/8/05], House leaders hope to win approval for their top priority this week: a $56 billion tax cut that would extend President Bush's tax cuts for stock dividends. House and Senate Republican leaders also edged closer on Wednesday toward an agreement to cut as much as $45 billion over the next five years from domestic programs like Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and child-support enforcement. Source: "House Votes to Block Alternative-Tax Rise" By EDMUND L. ANDREWS - NY Times - December 8, 2005 37 million Americans -- 13 million of them children -- are living in poverty, 4.5 million more than when Bush was first inaugurated. "This is a matter of public policy," Bill Clinton said on Sunday, belatedly challenging the government's woeful response to the hurricane. "And whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of the action made. That's what they did in the '80s; that's what they've done in this decade." The man should know. After all, though he hardly solved the issue in downtrodden Arkansas or the country, poverty levels did significantly decline during his presidency (from 15.1 percent of the population in 1993 to 11.3 percent in 2000). Source: "A new storm on the right" by Robert Scheer - Creators Syndicate - 09.21.05 Notwithstanding the steady job growth over the last year, median household income remains below 1999 levels, and wages have trailed inflation over the past year, partly because of rising gasoline prices. And millions of workers have lost health care coverage while many companies have reduced retirement benefits for their workers. Source: "Amid Difficulties, Leaders of Labor See Opportunity" By STEVEN GREENHOUSE - NY Times - September 5, 2005 [T]he city of Atlanta has been considering a living-wage ordinance that would set a $10.15-an-hour wage floor to be paid by corporations that profit from government contracts. That's hardly lavish pay––about $21,000 a year––but it would allow working families a middle-class possibility, and would restore some integrity to the promise of America's work ethic. [Georgia Republican] Governor Sonny Perdue has now signed HB59, barring any city in the Peach State from requiring that corporations that get city contracts have to pay higher wages than the poverty pay set by the federal government. Source: "SAVING THE DAY FOR CORPORATE POWER" by Jim Hightower - 6/9/2005 For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call "workers" all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production -- although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. In so far as the labor contract is "free," what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product. Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. Source: "Why Socialism?" by Albert Einstein |
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