OI
Uh huh.
We were a leader until we went socialist.
Now we such shit, just like you guys do.
Study the economic growth during the 50s and 60s, during the height of New Deal liberalism. America had strong labor unions, which helped build the world's highest-paid middle class. Because wages and benefits were so high, the mother could afford to stay home and raise the kids. Families had more time together. Ironically, the New Deal, by ensuring that the father got paid enough so the mother could stay home, ushered in the heyday of American conservativism. The Liberals protected the solvency of American families.
Unfortunately, there was corporate unrest over the admittedly fragile postwar compact between capital and labor. Simply put, the wealthy wanted cheaper labor. They no longer wanted to pay expensive middle-class labor costs.
So Reagan freed capital to seek cheaper labor in Asia and the developing world (and Clinton, the opportunist, followed suit, in obedience to the powerful corporations he was beholden to). As a result of the cheap labor costs that Reaganomics produced, the profits of American corporations skyrocketed. However, the wages of American workers remained flat or vanished. Corporations like Nike took advantage of the fact that they could have their sneakers made for pennies a day by workers living in freedom-hating nations beneath dictators. Walmart gets over 50% of its products made in Communist China. By helping corporations ship jobs to cheaper labor markets, Reagan helped corporations thrust large portions of the American middle class into the kind of generational, unending poverty that used to be exclusive to the third world.
Having lost jobs to China, The American middle-class went on a 30 year borrowing binge to make up for the shortfall in wages. [What else were American families going to do? They needed to provide for their children. So they went deeper and deeper into debt. Don't take my word for it. Do the research yourself. I urge you to study what happened to household debt starting in 1980. It will blow your ******* mind.]
Under Reaganomics, credit cards and debt slowly replaced wages. The borrowing got so bad that Americans pawned the last thing they had left with any value: their homes.
Again, compare the thriving economy of the postwar years to the unstable economy of the post-Reagan era, when we had to constantly bailout capital.... and middle-class debt reached Toxic levels.
America swallowed poison in 1980.
You've been lied to.