During the postwar years, wages were much higher and health/retirement benefits were incredible. The American worker had enough skin in the game to pay taxes and still survive.
But the Reagan/Thatcher model claimed that high wages/benefits stunted economic growth, and that we needed to lower the cost of production to incentivize investment, innovation and economic growth.
So we spent the last 30 years moving production to cheaper labor markets in freedom-hating, tyrannical nations like Communist China. (The relationship between capitalist investors and communist labor is nicely juxtaposed w/ tired talking points about freedom, a contradiction the cut and paste Rottweiler doesn't see.)
Now the largest employer, Walmart, barely pays enough for families to survive, and the benefits for the majority of workers are non-existent. Walmart famously has food drives for their employees during the Holidays because many of their workers barely make enough to buy food. (Meaning: it's hard to squeeze tax revenue from a population of low wage workers who don't make enough money to survive, much less put their children through school or give their families any kind of heath care)
The upside of the new low wage/no benefit economy is that owners & investors have realized unprecedented wealth - they have enough money to fund elections and staff government, which translates into the most concentrated power that the West has seen since the old Feudal monarchies. If you don't believe me, research the number of election that the Koch brothers - just 2 men - have been able to influence. If a politician doesn't vote correctly, he gets removed in the next primary. Period.
Here is the point: as a consequence of the new low wage/no benefit economy, the working class does not have the income to contribute effectively to the tax base.
This is exactly the kind of tax revenue problem that the opponents of Supply Side economics predicted. They said that we would end up with a concentrated pool of dynastic wealth on one side surrounded by growing hordes of wage serfs who not only lacked the capacity pay taxes, but who would also require massive amounts of debt to buy things and survive.
The following is what well-meaning people like Rottweiler don't understand.
Ultimately, it was predicted that the low wage serfs would amass so much debt in the aggregate that they would eventually lose the capacity to consume at the needed level to sustain economic growth. And when this tipping point was reached, it was predicted, the economy would slide into terminal stagnation. You would have massive investment capital stuck on top sitting side by side with a huge unemployed or under-employed workforce, but with no way to combine the two (because the capitalist has no incentive to invest when consumers lack the purchasing power in the aggregate to buy what they produce). Furthermore, it was predicted, that when we reached this stagnant phase, the economy would have to manufacture bubbles (e.g., tech, housing) so that the surplus capital could be re-invested into "growth" vehicles. The result of increasingly bubble'izing the economy, it was predicted, would result in a bubble so big that its bursting would bring long term damage to the economy (2008 Financial Meltdown).
Welcome to the downside of Voodoo Economics. When the money fails to trickle down to the pockets of average consumers, than the result is the death of consumer demand and the destruction of the economy. But it gets worse. If you try to "fix" this demand problem with credit (as we have been doing since 1980), than you are going to make the original demand problem 1,000x worse - and the overall damage could quite literally destroy the nation faster and more completely than any number of nuclear bombs.
Summary - the United States of America swallowed poison in 1980; it bankrupted its "consumer base" to give investment capital cheaper operating costs. But to answer Rottweiler concern about taxes. If you want more revenue from the working class, than you need to give a larger portion of the workforce more than subsistence wages. You can't squeeze water from a stone. Actually, because your side destroyed this nation with voodoo economics, you probably do believe that you can get something from nothing.
Okay . . . now go back to your cut and paste propaganda.
