The best days of the American economy in the past are long, and better days are not likely in the foreseeable future.
The idea of the 20th century about the “American dream”-anywhere the vast majority of people in the US could become or strive to become a middle class, rich or even extremely rich in-loud dead in the second quarter of the 21st.
According to Moody’s Analytics report in FebruaryThe richest 10 percent of Americans (households with annual revenues of at least $ 250,000) encouraged half of all consumers in the United States (about $ 10 trillion) between September 2023 and September 2024.
Fact those 12.7 million households It could be collectively consumed most of the rest of the nation really falls jaws. This indicates the end of the economy, which primarily depended on the needs and discretionary wear of the usual work Americans since the end of World War II.
The biggest surprise of everyone at the end of the American dream is that tens of millions of Americans are not a surprise. Dismantling American dream and consumer capitalism that defined the nation from 1945 to Bust of Bubbles in 2008 started more than half a century ago.
The gradual savings leaders are imposed on social welfare programs and education in combination with multiple rounds of reduction in taxes for rich and corporations, killing social mobility, especially for Americans living in poverty.
Transition from production to service industry, together with automation, regional switching, reducing the number and abolishing millions of other jobs, supplying millions of Americans with health and higher education debt … All these changes and more of the US middle class have turned into a fight class, not shooters. And the worst part is that this is exactly what the richest Americans have been wanting for decades.
Measuring most experts, the economic power of ordinary Americans reached its peak sometime between 1970 and 1974. More than six of the 10 Americans They could seek a middle -class status, and Black, Latinx and other color Americans began to climb into a US middle class in large numbers.
The story goes yes OPEC oil crisisnow brought by supporting Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, together with The deAndustrialization of the American Middle WestDisturbing the American economy from 1973-74. The combination of greater unemployment and greater inflation, known as the stagflation, has ended with a three -time decade of infinite American economic domination and prosperity. But this story seems to have ended Pax American. Indeed, the main corporations, the richest Americans and the federal government began to reject resources from the end of poverty and maintaining US work and middle classes during the 1970s.
The war against poverty/program of great society, President of Lyndon B Johnson, who pushed in 1965, was the last straw for growing neo -conservative movement. As a co -founder of late neo -conservative movement Irving Kristol wrote In their autobiographical memoir about the “curse” of war against poverty, “they knew that becoming political militant was not a way for poor people to get out of poverty.” Kristol and his followers believed that the sociological motivation for the idealist wealthy policy creators was that “great society” could only occur as a result of class struggles, “and all but accusing Johnson’s policy, caught being a wealthy communist for the Soviet Union.
The neo -conservatives saw Johnson’s vision of ending poverty and switching more dollars for public taxes to truly insert all Americans into prosperity as communist and dangerous. At the time of the conservative revolution of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the remains of a great society and a war against the poverty program, and even the Social Welfare System Franklin D Roosevelt, built through a new contract in 1930, confronted with attacks and savings.
Though Reagan claimed in his Dnevnik 1982 that “the press is dying that he is painting me as now trying to undo the new job. I remind them that I have voted for the FDR 4 times. I try to undo” great society “, eventually showed contempt for all social well -being and social mobility policies. For years, Reagan cited This “fascism was really the basis for a new contract” that the new Deal policy planners who were working under Roosevelt “talked that Mussolini made the trains go on time.”
At the CPAC annual dinner (Conservative Political Conference) in 1985, Reagan stated that ever “from the FDR of the new agreement, the opposition party, and especially those liberal assurances, dominated the political debate”, but ultimately, “The other side is an almost bankrupt idea.” He added that “new conservatives have re -established a connection between economic justice and economic growth”, that it is necessary for them to “launch a fair tax system and turn the current ear.”
Especially since 1981, through corporate lobbyists and connecting different ideological perspectives from both Republican and Democratic Parties, a new lower tax system for rich and corporations have come to be.
Individual individuals in the country have once been paid As many as 91 percent of earnings for each dollar greater than $ 200,000 in the 1950s, and the 70th income tax rate in the 1970s. The reduction of Tax from Reagan reduced the highest tax rate to between 50 and 28 percent during the 1980s. Although by then there were small increases in the highest income tax rates under the President of Bill Clinton, until then, Investments in social welfare programs have not continued with inflation nearly 20 years is prosperity reformThey would never fully recover.
From Trump’s tax reduction during his first term in power, income tax are at the lowest level of 21 percent. These policies led to a huge movement of middle -class wealth, working classes, working poor and poor Americans, according to rich and mass corporations.
Carter C Price and Kathryn Edwards Author of the Rand Corporation Document 2020.estimating that between 1975 and 2018. The reduction of taxes and the savings of social welfare brought to nearly $ 50 trillion dollars of wealth transfer from the bottom of 90 percent of Americans to the top 10 percent of wealth. Worse, this transmission accelerated in 2010 to an average of $ 2.5 trillion a year before Pandemia Covid-19.
In the meantime, things were dark for ordinary Americans in other areas of the economy. The federal minimum wage remained $ 7.25 since 2009 (the minimum wage also went through an eight-year stagnation period in the 1980s). Monopoly and reduction still cost most Americans to life salaries, as Half of all work Americans earn less than $ 50,000 a yearand a quarter of all workers earn less than $ 25,000.
“If you filter the statistics to include unemployed people who can find anything but with a few working hours or who earn poverty salaries (approximately $ 25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, almost one of every four workers is functionally Unemployed in America today – hard to celebrate something, “Eugene Ludwig, former US supervisor, currency, wrote in politics earlier this year. So many For the best economy, they have seen in decades nowAt least it was the claim of former President Joe Biden.
Now, therefore, he has come back to his Economy before great depression. Apart from 2025, it is an economy in which consumer habits of the richest 10 percent have a huge impact compared to the bottom of 300 million Americans. It really cannot have consumer capitalism if most consumers cannot make enough money to afford to rent or buy a home, rest or even pay for food and basic health care. But it was the ultimate goal of rich Americans all the time, with the help of both political parties. Every remaining American dream today is mere fantasy. All because all the ramps for the general prosperity of the middle class are bombed by the carpet.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeere.
