Obviously the wealthy have benefited far more than the average Joe. But that doesn't change the fact that average Joe has been completely complicit in this act because for a brief period of time we've been living in relative luxury, a constant influx of new cars, bigger houses, more fancy shit built in sweatshops. Until average Joe is willing to cut his lifestyle back to something more modest as that of three decades ago, the wealthy will continue to benefit more and more while the average lifestyle is dismantled and the truly poor are completely left behind.
To imagine that the only sacrifice will come from the wealthy is beyond foolish. The wealthy may have to give up a slice of the economic pie, but the rest of us are going to have to give up our lifestyles. Americans just won't be willing to do that, therefore the transfer of wealth will continue unabated.
I happen to think that a great deal of that can and should be mitigated by tax policy & capital controls.
When we set out on this Reaganomics/ offshoring/ automation/ service economy shift 30 years ago, we settled for too little from our capitalists, and were deceived by the substitution of credit for middle class income. We never should have cut taxes at the top, but rather increased them, and replaced the lost portion of earned income with more socialism for everybody, not just poor people. health care, child care, senior care, much more heavily subsidized education, wage supports & supplements of various kinds.
The circle of money flow in our economy has been broken by offshoring & automation, no doubt, but we won't reverse that. What we need to do is create ways other than wages that money flows from the top to the bottom, and taxes/ redistribution are really the only way to accomplish that.
Prior to Reagan, we had ways to do that- a largely closed economy where capitalists had to hire Americans. Meaningful financial controls that eliminated conflicts of interest that can be exploited only by those at the top. A system that eschewed so called "financial innovation", prevented abuse on a structural level. Labor Unions. High tax rates on high earners. High estate taxes to continuously level the playing field on a generational basis.
When we set those aside, we should never have denied the legitimate need for policy mechanisms that cause money to flow from the top to the bottom. The only way that ever happened in the first place, that a broad middle class ever came into existence, were the policies of the New Deal. It simply did not exist prior to that, and does not exist in societies who do not have similar mechanisms or mechanisms much more socialist than those.
We won't have a middle class ourselves if we continue to think and to vote on the basis of the agitprop formulated & disseminated by the the rich in their ongoing efforts to steer our democracy in a direction that benefits them above all others.
