georgephillip
Diamond Member
If organized labor had not become a shell of its former self over the last three decades, it seems reasonable to assume that middle class wages would have grown at about the same rate as the overall economy-just as they did in the decades following WWII.Chris...The great unmentioned reality in this is that Reagan and the two Bushes lowered taxes for the rich and created a huge National Debt.
This act effectively transferred $11 trillion dollars from middle class taxpayers to the wealthy.
It is the greatest redistribution of wealth in human history.
Do you have details on this transfer?
Over what length of time?
$11 trillion trumps even the latest taxpayer bailout of Wall Street's high rollers, and could inspire more working class Americans to believe the class war really exists.
Details forthcoming......tick...tock....tick....tock......
"But they didn't, and that meant that every year, the money that would have gone to middle-class wage increases instead went somewhere else.
"This created a vast and steadily growing pool of money, and the chart below gives you an idea of its size.
"It shows how much money would have flowed to different groups if their incomes had grown at the same rate as the overall economy.
"The entire bottom 80 percent now loses a collective $743 billion each year, thanks to the cumulative effect of slow wage growth.
"Conversely, the top 1 percent gains $673 billion.
"That's a pretty close match. Basically, the money gained by the top 1 percent seems to have come almost entirely from the bottom 80 percent."
Over the same three decades financial risk has shifted off government and corporations and onto the already overburdened individual taxpayer.
The recent Wall Street bailout is the biggest and best example so far, but that clock is still ticking.
Plutocracy Now P.4