5. Unchecked use of outsourcing (5 million jobs sent to China and elsewhere) that killed the relatively high-paying jobs that used to exist in American manufacturing and many services. A 2008 Harvard Business School study concluded that as many as 2 out of every 5 U.S. jobs could eventually be sent abroad.
6. Ignoring the growth of the trade deficit that has destroyed our manufacturing base. (More on this later).
7. The 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act under President Clinton, which led to reckless lending by banks and an unprecedented housing bubble, which collapsed in 2007 to trigger the ongoing slump that reduced home values by a third and left a quarter of all American homes "underwater," with trillions of dollars of middle-class wealth destroyed in the process.
8. The Bush tax cuts and bailouts that further benefited the rich while nearly doubling the government debt -- on which we must all pay interest every year at tax time.
9. The decimation of the real minimum wage by President Reagan and other Republicans: In 1981, an hour of minimum wage work allowed the worker to purchase $8 worth of goods, compared to the $6 worth of goods that the same work-hour bought by the end of Reagan' presidency in 1988, compared to a mere $5.15 worth of goods that the hour allowed the worker to buy in 2006 under George W. Bush. (Reaganomics in action.)
Another measure of falling real wages for the middle and lower classes was recently provided by the Wall Street Journal, which recently reported that, in terms of its buying power, America's median wage fell by 7% over the last decade -- as incomes for the top 1% tripled.
While surveying this nine-point list, ask yourself one key question:
Is there even one of these measures that has in any way helped the middle class? Obviously not. Thus, over the past three decades, whatever the government did, presumably to help American citizens, actually ended up hurting the large majority of them! Mergers, outsourcing and free trade raise productivity, but also lower wages, whereas the other provisions of the list directly enrich the wealthy. Therefore, the nine-point list is really a list of various kinds of exploitation -- of the 99% by the top 1%, whose income gains have quadrupled since 1979 (while most everyone else's have remained more or less stagnant.
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