I really enjoy the YouTube channel TYT (The Young Turks) because they give really good analyses of current events in language that is crisp and yet can be very amusing. But sometimes they are as serious as a heart attack and it is those essays that I like the best. Especially when delivered by Cenk Uygur, their lead reporter (not sure what title he actually holds.) And given that I have an interest in social politics, i.e. the policies that have destroyed the middle class in western society, I thought this video would be very interesting.
What an understatement.
Cenk goes through a series of statistics that show that the USA has fallen to #2 overall for both middle class wealth, and for median income. The first is what the middle brackets take home, and the second is the line where 50% of people make more and 50% less.
Each of these numbers is important because they show how the primary tax base is doing. And it is not doing well in the USA. In fact, it has been stagnant since 2000 where Canada and Britain (for example) have risen 19.7% …. that is a staggering difference. But to underscore it, Sweden and the Netherlands also had solid growth and even Spain had 4.1% growth!
So WTF happened? Well, that’s actually pretty simple … the 1% in the USA figured out how to sucker voters into believing in trickle down economics – where you reduce taxes on the 1% and they pay you back by trickling that down in jobs and health care and so on. So the voters gave them what they wanted and the socked all that money away, leaving the poor and middle class quite literally devastated.
I’ll stop there, since what you really should do is watch this video. If you are an American, this should give you serious pause. He’s not lying … he’s showing you want independent research says has really happened since 1979, not what the prevailing fantasy would have you believe. And if you are Canadian, Swedish, Dutch, etc. then this should not only make you proud, but also very wary of right wing governments and their penchant for servicing corporate greed. We absolutely cannot allow these same policies to devastate our countries’ middle classes and poor as they have the USA!
