Digression -- an important economic fact
I commend to your attentionJeffrey A. Winters in The American Interest, with the essential truth about our present historical moment, that gets obscured in the deliberate distractions thrown up by politicians and journalists who would rather make us think and talk about something else. Pull quote:Despite polls consistently showing that large majorities favor
increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, policy has been moving for
decades in the opposite direction. Reduced taxes on the ultra-rich and
the corporations and banks they dominate have shifted fiscal burdens
downward even as they have strained the government ’s capacity to
maintain infrastructure, provide relief to children and the poor, and
assist the elderly.
Everyone is by now aware of the staggering shift in fortunes upward
favoring the wealthy. Less well understood is that this rising
inequality is not the result of something economically rational, such as
a surge in productivity or value-added contributions from financiers
and hedge-fund CEOs, but is rather a direct reflection of redistributive
policies that have helped the richest get richer. Winters attempts to explain how this happens within an electoral republic in which the very wealthy directly possess only a tiny minority of the votes. But the history is revealing. The average income of working class Americans tripled from 1920 to 1970, but then it stalled out. But after the crash of 1929, incomes of the very wealthy stagnated. B...
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