Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Between 1977 and 2014 the share of national income going to the top 1 percent before taxes and benefits had risen by 88.8 percent. After fiscal redistribution their share increased by 81.4 percent. Nor did the tax and welfare state prevent the share of the bottom 50 percent from declining from 25.6 to 19.4 percent.25 Nor was this by accident. Every conceivable source of leverage and influence had been exploited by those with money to maximize their advantage. As billionaire investor Warren Buffett famously put it: “Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won.”26 Buffett was so appalled at the consequences that in 2011 he made himself into a spokesman for proposals to impose a minimum 35 percent tax on America’s highest earners, a proposal that Obama had backed but that had been blocked by the Republicans in Congress.27 It was a sign of both Buffett’s personal decency and the utter lopsidedness of the balance of power in twenty-first-century America that a program of social improvement should consist of well-meaning billionaires volunteering to pay a bit more for the greater good of American society. For those at the bottom of the pile, none of this was news. Opinion polls, especially those commissioned by the right wing, had for a long time been recording the profound resentment among the American population at the way that both the economy and the political system seemed to be engineered to their disadvantage.28 These views we...