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Here's what's changed
- The market has collapsed into a few companies. That means that monopolistic forces are in nearly full force
- Labor unions have been severely weekend. In the 60s almost out of fear companies were practicing "corporate charity" to try and keep employees from unionizing. They've lost that fear.
- Regulations around corporate stock price manipulation have been all but eliminated. Buybacks use to be illegal because they allow a company to artificially inflate their stock completely unrelated to the actual performance of the company.
- Social safety nets have been gutted or underfunded.
- Public education has been destroyed. We used to have a fairly robust public university system that's been uber privatized with funding reduced to almost nothing.
- Hospital systems have consolidated as has insurance agencies which not only drives up the price of medical care, it drives down the wages of doctors and nurses while keeping them as minimally staffed as possible. This translates into terrible care that fucks you over when you need any medical work done.
We're all sacrificing life experiences so that a very, very, very small percentage of people can live like kings.
Pretty much, it's the very natural consequence of a deregulation and the an-cap philosophy. We've seen this before in america during the 1900s. It's the whole reason Teddy and FDR ended up getting elected.
So we need another FDR. Can we do it without a preceding depression this time around?
We can't because we have corporate
propagandanews outlets that will work tirelessly to frame this "new FDR" as a fascist communist racist woke elite conman.Pick your outlet and that will determine the words chosen to disparage them.
Hell just look at the supposed "liberal media" treating Bernie Sanders when he looked to be taking the lead in the primaries, suddenly every story was "Bernie loves Castro! Bernie loves Cuba! Be afraid! He likes communist stuff! Boo! Ahhh! Oh no it's Bernie!"
Don't forget the low blow campaign tactic of the "Bernie Bros" - and how I cannot be a feminist if I don't cast my vote for Clinton. I couldn't believe how biased NPR was in their coverage and framing of that primary. It caused me to stop being a supporter.
I’m still proud to be considered a 21 year old russian man named Vladimer online!!! (I am not even close to any of those but my twitter replies insist i’m wrong about that actually)
MSNBC's Chris Matthews literally said if Bernie was elected him and his rich buddies would be executed in Central Park.
Chris Matthews’ Wild Rant Connects a Bernie Sanders Win With Public Executions. The MSNBC host talked about socialist-led “executions in Central Park” while tying those fears to Bernie Sanders
In addition to this, the government is working to ban any news outlet that disagrees with them. They’re starting with “foreign” outlets like RT and TikTok, but they’ll soon move to anything that doesn’t toe the party line.
Democracy is dead.
I can understand literal propaganda outlets, government run news from countries we know have their orgs run with specific orders to run whatever stories would be an obvious thing to want to curtail here. I used to check into RT and all I'd see are anti-american stories or even using Americans to tell an anti-american government story from someone like Abby Martin. I can't imagine we'd be getting any news from say North Korean news outlets that isn't specifically meant to manipulate foreign countries citizens.
Tiktoc isn't really news, it's more like YouTube. If anything I'd say assholes like Zuckerberg lobby the government to kill foreign competitors in our market which is a whole nother issue that also sucks :(
You're about to elect Trump again. I shouldn't worry about there not being enough bad economic news.
First and foremost you should mention the corporate tax cuts. How can corporations afford consolidation and other malicious shit they do? Their tax bill was cut in half. And their executive income tax rate was cut dramatically.
Rather than paying their employees, they give massive bonuses to their executives and save the rest for buying out competitors or attracting suitors.
It's not so much the corporate tax rate that did it, it's capital gains tax (and especially how it's implemented) that's the big problem.
The fact that capital gains isn't treated as regular income tax creates all sorts of really bad incentives. It means that executives are generally primarily paid in stock which means they are incentivized to push the value of that stock up. And since everyone making those decisions are also primarily paid in stock they'll authorize things like stock buybacks to boost their own personal wealth.
5 regulations I'd make to fix this problem.
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No executives can be paid with equity.
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The maximum salary can not be more than 10x the lowest salary in a company.
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Tax capital gains as regular income.
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Bring back the 90% top income tax bracket
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Introduce a wealth tax. Perhaps 3% for a networth over 1 billion.
100 percent for every dollar over a billion, at least for individuals. No single person needs that much wealth.
Has the way capital gains tax works changed over the years?
Not really, it's mostly the rates that have changed. It used to be much higher.
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So, republicans happened.
Edit- before you tar and feather me, democrats went along. But all of those have been articles of faith in the GOP.
I mostly blame Reagan and Nixon. They were the harbingers of modern republican governmental stupidity. Nixon courted the racists out of the democrat party and Regan push dumbass deregulation. Bigotry + being the whipping boys for rich people is basically the only principles republicans stand on today.
Civil Rights happened.
Once it became clear to racist whites that Black Americans would have full access to the social programs that they enjoyed, they decided that they'd rather burn all those social programs to the ground before they'd share them. This is the basis of the modern Republican party, so you weren't wrong.
Incidentally, the scenario in this original post was never true for almost all black Americans.
Aren't there a lot more social programs today than there were in the period the OP refers to?
While all of this is true, I'll also add that this was an unrepeatable condition: WWII gutted Europe and the US was untouched. All of perks of the past society were part of an unsustainable economic bubble. USA citizens have never quite realized that.
The only part I would disagree with you on is that in the past 80 years productivity has grown by a huge margin, and if that translated into increased wages (as opposed to increased corporate profits) as it once did I think that quality of life would not be so unsustainable.
The richest 1% own almost half the world's wealth. The hoarders have mostly dug in and ensured that their hoarding is legal, will stop at nothing, is easier than ever, and is well defended and unopposed.
We live in the joke where the billionaire takes 99 cookies from the table, leaves one and says "Careful, peon, the [member of the minority you dislike] is after your cookie".
While I agree with all of that and more, the world has gotten much more complex over the years. It’s not a bad thing to try to raise the bar on minimum education for everyone.
Also, for the part of it due to global outsourcing … there’s only so much protectionism can give you without ruining importer/exporters. A better approach is to try to bring a more educated workforce than offered by cheap third world labor
Great summary of how things suck. Also, Severely Weekend would make a great band name.
Regulations around corporate stock price manipulation have been all but eliminated. Buybacks use to be illegal because they allow a company to artificially inflate their stock completely unrelated to the actual performance of the company.
In that case, once a company sold stock to investors, they could never recoup it then? The only way for that to happen would be a single person or group organized to buy up a lot to get a controlling stake?
Effects ofWW2
Immigration
Lack of training in general.
Offshoring.
People buying loads if crap. Like seriously how many coats did your grandparents have in their adult life. Probably about the same you have in your closet right now, maybe less. Not to mention TV, phones, exotic food.
The housing market is fucked because land is undervalued.
Oil? (I might be wrong on this)
Somethings need to change but there are some things missed here.
Coats, and devices for that matter, used to be built to last and be repairable. But if your
customerconsumer never needs to buy another product from you now that wouldn't make much business sense would it?It would if you stole everyone else's business and that's what businesses used to compete on.
But consumers want fast fashion. They want cheap clothing and it doesn't matter if it only last 5 years instead of 30 because they are going to throw it out after 1 anyway.
Consumers have forced the hand of businesses in this case. People want cheap more than they want anything else.
Personally I don't feel that way, but my personal experience isn't a particularly large sample size.
Consumers may want various things, but those wants aren't created in a vacuum. Otherwise advertising would be pointless.