All this bickering and pissing about political parties is going to get you nowhere, especially today with the "New Economy" that's severely rigged to benefit so few and those few have all our politicians in their pocket.
Study up on "The Great Compression," and what it would take to get BACK to this type of economy our fathers and grandfathers knew and enjoyed.
During the Great Compression, tax & regulatory & labor & trade policy was designed to build the largest middle class in world history. These policies made it harder for the capitalist to ship middle class manufacturing jobs to communist China. The government wasn't run by corporations and their lobbyists; rather, it was run on behalf of the middle class. This is when the Federal Reserve was charged with ensuring full employment rather than fighting inflation, i.e., they primed the pump during downturns rather than imposing austerity.
It also meant that if you were born poor, you had a greater likelihood of rising up into the middle class. Because of strong unions and a dizzying array of targeted government programs, the father could support a family on just his wages, allowing the mother to stay home and raise the kids. Health care and Education were kept affordable for the masses, so Americans could rise up the ladder and contribute to the world's strongest economy.
Then, in 1973, high oil prices initiated stagflation, and the great postwar boom ended. This is when the Republicans began their final push to put a corporate-friendly leader in the White House. Enter Reagan, who convinced the world that we did not need all the policies that protected and strengthened the middle class. He said that if we channel all those resources to the wealthy, they would grow the economy and the jobs and benefits would trickle down.
So we listened to Reagan.
But a funny thing happened. While Reagan was championing the "trickle down" theory, he was using the Cold War as a context to finish building the global market system. He was using the Soviet threat to pull resource-rich parts of the developing world under the our protective wing. As a result, the capitalist now had access to ultra cheap labor in the global south and communist China. So, instead of good jobs trickling down, manufacturing was shipped to the dirt-cheap labor markets of freedom-hating nations. The capitalists made out like gang busters.
Something did trickle down to the middle class: credit. This is when we all started receiving 3 credit offers a week. You understand why this happend, right? To make up for deindustrialization and the loss of solid middle class manufacturing jobs, Reagan financialized the economy, that is, he lead us from an "empire of production" to an "empire of consumption". The "hard hat" factory worker (with high wages a great benefits) was replace by the indebted credit-card consumer. We traded factories for Shopping Malls. We replaced the solid jobs of the postwar years for a sea of low-wage, no benefit retails jobs. We went from the GM job model (where a worker could support his family and send his kids to college) to the Walmart job model (where a worker made under 25K and his family went deeper and deeper into debt just to say afloat. And we installed monopolies over the worker's health insurance so his rates could be raised and his coverage decreased so that wealthy investors could realize higher returns).
Don't take my word for it: study what happened to household debt starting in 1980.
The great compression of incomes upon which the middle class was built died in 1980.
Reagan's promise that the jobs would trickle down died with globalization - furthered by Clinton and his Reaganite adviser, Richard Rubin.
Now, when our capitalists get a tax break, they don't necessarily have to create American jobs. Why would they? Nike investors get higher returns when their sneaks are made in Taiwanese sweatshops by workers who make pennies a day. The American capitalist has hijacked the American government so that he can partner with freedom-hating nations in order to get ultra cheap labor. The capitalist takes a portion of his profits and invests it into rightwing media for the purpose of fooling idiots into believing that corporations are victims rather than owners of government.
The result of this hoax is a world where the benefits of economic growth goes into fewer and fewer hands. Meanwhile the dying middle class goes further and further into debt in order to make up for the jobs and money that isn't trickling down.
The great compression is over. We now have a 3rd world caste structure with an ultra wealthy elite lording over the restless hordes (many of whom are being fooled by men like Rush Limbaugh about where the real concentration of power lies)
