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This isn't just some fun quirky tidbit to talk about at the water cooler, it's been the primary goal of all of the social and economic policies of the last 50 years.
This isn't just some fun quirky tidbit to talk about at the water cooler, it's been the primary goal of all of the social and economic policies of the last 50 years.
Yup , dump all Unions shrink the middle class and have the wealthy and the poor ,no in between .
Also allow open borders to increase the ranks of low wage workers and keep wages of low income Americans stagnant. And have a successful economy which raises wages for top earners.
This isn't just some fun quirky tidbit to talk about at the water cooler, it's been the primary goal of all of the social and economic policies of the last 50 years.
I have never heard it summed up better than this...
Quote:
The Middle Class is not “Normal”
There’s nothing “normal” about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it’s a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class. Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.
At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists - doctor, lawyers, shop-owners - who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people - typically over 90 percent of the population - who make up the working poor. They have no wealth - in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives - and can barely survive on what little money they make.
So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in “normal” capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.
You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.
This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed - this huge change was done in less than 35 years. The only ways a working-class "middle class" can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval - a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century - or by heavily taxing the rich.
It is the worst place to be poor in the developed world. The right-wing media tries to convince everyone that having a TV and a phone makes you well off compared to other countries. Things that are essential like good healthcare, schools, housing, nutritional food....that’s where the U.S is severely lacking.
The world bank, inflation, the Fed, and the income tax are working hard to achieve their end goals.
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