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America's rich, it's powerful, it's professional classes and its politicians have spent a generation now not just betraying ordinary working Americans, but telling them that their endless betrayal was actually good for them, and that just like cod liver oil, they should shut up, suck it down, sit down and wait for the good times to happen again if they just do everything they were told to.
The result, for non-supervisory, hourly employees has been that they haven't made a single wage gain since about 1976. The result for the US's rich is that they have a greater proporiton of the nation's wealth and income than at any time in the United States history, surpassing even the Gilded Age.
But ya'know, I've covered the numbers before, what I want to talk about today is the disconnect and the rhetorical betrayal. Think about it, for a generation the talking heads, the academics, the think tankers, the politicians, the journalists and the chattering classes have all had some nostrum they wanted the middle and working classes to swallow. In the 80's they first had to suffer through Volcker strangling inflation. Then Reagan dropped progressive taxes and told working people that they'd get a "trickle down effect". Well, perhaps I shouldn't be too harsh on Reagan - it was true, they got nothing more than a trickle. Or to put it more vulgarly, all they got was trickled on.
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