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And a good question it is. Why limit it to 25 years?
Quality of life is highly subjective, no?
I used 25 years to encompass the rise of the Personal Computer and then Smart Phone which has changed society and how people interact. Yes, you could go back to the 1950's when TV became common also. We are living more and more in a VIRTUAL WORLD which I think has damaged the quality of life of many, but you're right, that is very subjective.
The intentional dumbing down of America by the corporate elite is making things worse.
It's actually our schools that have dumbed down the populace. Here's more info on how and why it happened:
Quote:
"While students in the bottom quartile have shown slow but steady improvement since the 1960s, average test scores have nonetheless gone down, primarily because of the performance of those in the top quartile. This "highest cohort of achievers," Rudman writes, has shown "the greatest declines across a variety of subjects as well as across age-level groups." Analysts have also found "a substantial drop among those children in the middle range of achievement"
...The contrast was stark: schools that had "severely declining test scores" had "moved determinedly toward heterogeneous grouping" (that is, mixed students of differing ability levels in the same classes), while the "schools who have maintained good SAT [Stanford Achievement Test, for grades K-12] scores" tended "to prefer homogeneous grouping [ability/skill-level grouping, aka tracking]."
If attaining educational excellence is this simple, why have these high-quality schools become so rare? The answer lies in the cultural ferment of the 1960s.
THE INCUBUS OF THE SIXTIES
In every conceivable fashion the reigning ethos of those times was hostile to excellence in education. Individual achievement fell under intense suspicion, as did attempts to maintain standards. Discriminating among students on the basis of ability or performance was branded "elitist." Educational gurus of the day called for essentially nonacademic schools, whose main purpose would be to build habits of social cooperation and equality rather than to train the mind."
And what has been the damage to the US populace 50 years later? US schools are still dumbing-down our country's students. I already posted the info on the OECD's PIAAC results in this thread about US millennials falling even further behind the mediocre results of US adults a decade ago.
The PGPF chart is interesting in that it includes how federal excise taxes and the corporate income tax affects each income group. Most people don't realize that corporate income tax is included as overhead in the pricing formula for goods/services and is therefore embedded in the price of everything we buy. Corporations don't actually pay it. It's passed on to the end users/consumers. It's a hidden tax on whoever buys/rents a corporation's goods/services/etc.
Corporate tax is an operating expense so affects profitability. Corporate profits are paid to investors as dividends and/or are reinvested into the company. If corp taxes are raised the company may decide to take the hit in its profits or to try to pass it on to customers by raising product price but the latter can not be done arbitrarily since they will lose customers to competitors and must keep the price within what the market will bear. Competition, particularly with foreign companies which pay less corporate tax, will limit how much a US company can pass on its tax burden to customers.
Incorrect. Corporate tax is an overhead expense, so it impacts pricing.
Taxes affect the middle class as well. The right wing doesn’t care. I could call them conservative but that ain’t the truth. They tax and spend just as bad at the federal level. Then give the tax cuts to the wealthy elite.
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