Some issues are never settled.
Of course, the biggest and most destructive one isn’t the one that usually comes to mind first. For all the controversy over abortion, it affects a lot fewer people than the real issue that’s never settled.
What’s that?
It’s obvious. The one issue that will never be settled is lower taxes for the rich. In our era of greatest prosperity, the 20 years or so after World War II, the highest income tax bracket was 91 percent for much of that time and 70 percent for the rest.
The middle class was never stronger, and the government was never able to get more done than it did then, including the construction of the interstate highway system.
There was one difference.
The rich weren’t obscenely rich. You could count the number of billionaires on one hand, and valuable properties sold for reasonable prices. In 1973, a syndicate including George Steinbrenner bought the New York Yankees for $8.8 million.
Those same New York Yankees had a value in 2020 estimated at $5 billion.
Who’s to blame?
The Messiah of the right wing, Ronald Reagan.
Elizabeth Warren’s speech quoted here was from nearly a decade ago, and she was referring to the early 1980s when the plutocrats got Reagan elected president and then started going after all the things they hated from the New Deal onward.
The last thing they want is to pay wages that allow people some control over their own lives.
They certainly don’t want to allow unions that can bargain collectively for their employees.
If they have to provide their employees with insurance, they want to use it to tie their employees to them. Government insurance is the complete opposite of what they want.
Pensions? Hell, they don’t want their employees to walk away from their jobs until they have taken every drop of usefulness out of them.
Thank you, Ronald Reagan.
And they have certainly taken Reagan’s teachings to heart, including elimination of the Fairness Doctrine that has allowed right wingers to control media outlets with no regard for the truth.
If there is one major difference between 1980 and now, it’s the amount of power — both economic and political — average people have ceded to the elites. And the real tragedy is that too many of them have no idea what they have lost.
All because Ronald Reagan was a better actor than any of us knew.