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the future that frightens me isn’t so much a too-Hispanic U.S. caused by unchecked Mexican immigration, but a Latin Americanized society with a…callous oligarchy gated off from a growing mass of screwed-over peons.”
in forty years, the share of wealth owned by our richest 1 percent has doubled, the collective net worth of the bottom half has dropped almost to zero, the median weekly pay for a full-time worker has increased by just 0.1 percent a year, only the incomes of the top 10 percent have grown in sync with the economy, and so on.
As was his wont, he was being aspirational, wishful, reminding us of our better angels.
Even before the pandemic and its economic consequences, and before the protests and chaos following the murder of George Floyd, we were facing a do-or-die national test
The particular sects of the early settlers were all so feverishly new—Puritans (here to build the New Jerusalem), Quakers, Shakers, Mennonites, Amish, Methodists, Baptists—that they required a new place, empty of too many disapproving white people, in which to practice and propagate their peculiar faiths.
The creation of America and then the United States coincided exactly with the Age of Enlightenment, the early 1600s to late 1700s.
America’s tragic flaw is our systemic racism, and it’s a residue of a terrible decision our founders made to resist the new and perpetuate the old: the enslavement of black people.
The most important foundations for slavery, of course, were racism and economics. In the antebellum South, enslaved blacks constituted half of all wealth and generated a quarter of white people’s income.
People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits.”
Coming off the success of the cotton gin, young Whitney convinced the new U.S. government that he was their man to mass-produce ten thousand muskets, even though he knew nothing about making guns.
1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved the Pill, and by 1965 it was the contraceptive of choice.
Catapulted feminism
Even as youth circa 1970 thought of themselves as shock troops of a new age, part of their shocking newness was nostalgic cosplay.
Nixon was simply so unlikable.
manifesto telling businesspeople that they should literally care about nothing other than profits and that they had no additional responsibility to society whatever.
Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago libertarian economist, and published across five pages of The New York Times Magazine under the headline A FRIEDMAN DOCTRINE—THE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY OF BUSINESS IS TO INCREASE ITS PROFITS.
If Lewis Powell had never written his memo or if it had never been widely distributed, the right’s campaign to reconstruct our political economy might have proceeded more or less as it did.
Reagan and Milton Friedman were Hoover Institution fellows.
By the fall of 1975, three hundred corporations and business groups had set up one of these new species of donation pipelines—political action committees. The new Federal Election Commission ruled that it was entirely up to a company’s executives, without their shareholders’ approval, to decide which campaigns and candidates to fund.
After this dire diagnosis, he offered no cure except a vague wave back to the wonderful past—somehow
The great political opportunity at the end of the 1970s was to play to the Me Decade’s narcissism by using nostalgia—cynically,
Everything old was new again, yes, but to really work, the message had to seem simultaneously old and new,
Although ALEC is ostensibly an association of elected officials, its operations have been funded almost entirely by members of the Business Roundtable and other big corporations.
Today a fifth of all income earned by Americans is free from any Social Security tax, twice as much as in the early 1980s—and that tax break is going only to the richest 6 percent of us, those who earn more than $138,000.
The total number of inmates today is 1.5 million, of whom 130,000 are in privately run prisons.
At birth the Federalist Society got funding from the new standard roster of right-wing billionaires’ foundations—Scaife, Olin, Bradley, the Kochs.
As movements, originalism in the law and libertarianism in economics were fraternal twins.
Every year, according to Welch’s new rule, one out of every ten GE employees were fired, no matter what, because nine other employees were judged by their superiors to be superior. It was called the Vitality Curve,
The financial industry actually coined the astonishingly shameless term of art incognito leverage for invisible corporate debt, debt kept off balance sheets, hidden from the clueless chumps among the investors.
In 1970, only one in six households had a general purpose credit card like Mastercard or Visa; by the late 1980s, a majority of Americans had at least one.
Wall Street was no longer just the house that always wins, it had started winning more off more suckers by rigging it as “a negative-sum game for the general public.”
only the incomes of a lucky top fifth kept rising as they had in the past. Around 1980, the Great Uncoupling of the rich from the rest began.
It doesn’t seem like coincidence that the rise and fall of strikes during the twentieth century correlates very closely with the rise and sudden stagnation of U.S. wages.
From the mid-1950s until 1980, the minimum wage had been the equivalent of $10 or $12 an hour in today’s dollars. As with overtime pay, the minimum wage was never technically reduced, but by 1989 inflation had actually reduced it to just over $7, where it remains today.
“The great lie is that the 401(k) was capable of replacing the old system of pensions,” says the regretful man who was president of the American Society of Pension Actuaries at the time and who had given his strong endorsement to 401(k)s.
A fundamental principle of free markets was being repudiated: the supply of labor could barely keep up with demand, but the price of labor, wages, wasn’t increasing.
Today four out of ten recent American college graduates are employed in jobs that don’t even require a college degree.
These days, if you grow up poor in America, you have less than a one-in-four shot of becoming even solidly middle class—one in three if you’re white, one in ten if you’re black.
The economic right was shrewd enough to understand that the issues they didn’t care much about—abortion, gay rights, creationism—did matter to liberals, and that those culture wars drew off political energy from the left that might otherwise have fueled complaints and demands about the reconstructed political economy.
As soon as Clinton left office, the new Republican president and Congresses, thanks to their antitax fixation (and the war in Iraq two years later), promptly took us from a budget surplus equivalent to $365 billion to a budget deficit of $534 billion, a reckless and unnecessary trillion-dollar swing in three years.
The authors of one study divided all 3,138 U.S. counties into two groups, Opportunity-Falling and Opportunity-Rising America, depending on whether each county lost or gained businesses between 2005 and 2015. In the two-thirds of counties that were Opportunity-Falling during that decade before the 2016 election, Trump won the two-party vote by 53 to 47 percent, while in the Opportunity-Rising counties he lost by 55 to 45 percent.
George Mason’s custom-fabricated right-wing law school was renamed the Antonin Scalia Law School, thanks to an anonymous $20 million donation for which the Federalist Society was the intermediary.
Stock dividends (half of which go to the richest 1 percent) used to be taxed like salary income, but in 2003 they began getting special treatment—and today the tax on dividend income for the rich is 22 percent, instead of the normal income tax rate of 37
most major American industries have rapidly turned into oligopolies, where two or three or four big companies run their show and tend not to compete fiercely.
Inequality got worse all over the rich world—but at the end of the day only a bit worse everywhere except America.
Every developed country except the United States collects such a value-added tax. If we were to impose a VAT even at the low Swiss rate, which is only half or a third of the rates charged elsewhere in Europe, it would generate around $500 billion a year for us to spend however we wanted.
The average Nordic person generates less economic output than the average American, 15 percent less in Denmark and Sweden—but they get more of the wealth they generate, on average.
