The time element of "30 years" keeps slipping into American official reports and news stories about the origins of crises--the latest in "The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report"--but rarely is the relevance of the three-decade span explained, and there is a reason.
The failure to close the circle in saying who started the nation off on the path toward these disasters is because nearly everyone shies away from blaming Ronald Reagan for almost anything.
Robert Reich, former labor secretary under President Clinton, picked up on the 30-year theme in a recent article titled "How Democrats Can Become Relevant Again." They can start, Reich essentially is saying, by undoing what Ronald Reagan set in motion:
Democrats have become irrelevant. If they want to be relevant again they have to connect the dots: The explosion of income and wealth among America's super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of public services for the middle class and the poor.
It is not a complicated story. Begin with what's happened to the typical American, whose wages have been stagnant for thirty years. Today's typical 30-year-old male (if he has a job) is earning the same as a 30-year-old male earned three decades ago, adjusted for for inflation. (Although women are doing better than they did 30 years ago, their wages still trail men's.)
The bottom 90 percent of Americans now earn, on average, only about $280 more per year than they did thirty years ago. That's less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. Families are doing somewhat better but that's only because so many families now have to rely on two incomes.
How did this happen? It started with Reagan, and Reich lays it out in stark, cold numbers:
Given this explosion of income at the top you might think our tax system would demand a larger share from them. But you'd be wrong. You're not taking account of the power of the super rich. As income and wealth have risen to the top, so has political power. As a result, their taxes have plummeted.
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