08-24-2022, 03:51 PM
(08-24-2022, 12:05 PM)sbarrera Wrote:(08-24-2022, 10:16 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: And hollowing out of the American middle class is not "largely due to all the outsourcing" but even more due to the wealthy hogging the wealth here in the USA through tax cuts, deregulation and social spending cuts<...>
This is an interesting point and distinction. I wonder if anyone has done a data-driven analysis to try to separate out these causes.
I don't know, I guess, but it's pretty clear that because salaries and wages have not been raised for most people for 40 years, while it is well known that salaries for wealthy CEOs are now hundreds of times higher than for their workers, and that this has happened over the last 40 years, and that this was not the case before then, that this has resulted in inequality. Surely you have heard of this fact? I think the videos above make this point. It is quite well known that the national minimum wage is still only $7.25 an hour (higher in some places), and that it costs 3-5 times that much just to afford housing, and that this is deliberate trickle-down economics Republican policy, not outsourcing. Congress is responsible for the minimum wage, not multinational corporations. This is what Hanauer was talking about.
And furthermore it is well known that, in addition to this unequal salary situation, that these rich people, corporations and CEOs pay far less in taxes by % of their income than they did in 1980, when Reagan reduced top rates to 50% and then Bush and Trump and their congresses have reduced these taxes 2 or 3 times further, down to about 20%. This results in gross inequality even without the free trade policies that allowed companies to close factories here and take away their jobs, and instead employ cheap labor overseas and sell their products back to us cheaper and with more profit for themselves.
If Trump was not a neoliberal, and was a populist, he would have raised the minimum wage and raised taxes on the wealthy, and he would have passed a lot more social programs like the ones Biden proposed in his BBBBB but were taken out by Manchin.
It is also well-known that anti-trust laws have not been enforced or unpdated, as Senator Klobuchar proposes, so that ownership of the economy is much more concentrated than it was in 1980. Mergers and acquisitions have caused many factory closings and job losses too. This again is Republican policy and neoliberal orthodoxy, and I didn't see Trump change this. Populist? Only he can fix it? I will fix the economy for you? No, he just broke it further for us. Biden is trying to fix it, and he could do much more if he had a working congressional majority, which he doesn't have now.
I think Bobbitt and Robb admitted that neoliberalism was largely implemented unilaterally (although the UK and other English-speaking countries also did to a large extent, and somewhat in Germany too), which means that neoliberal policies such as the above were implemented, not just free trade which is only one part of neoliberalism, with the inevitable results of gross inequality, and job losses and higher cost of living relative to income for more and more people resulting in the vanishing middle class. And by the way also gross, destructive attacks on the living world we all depend on.
Neoliberalism is PRIMARILY tax cuts, deregulation, and cuts in government spending for social/economic/health programs, as the 3 videos above (and my essay) describe. See:
http://philosopherswheel.com/freemarket.html
with many more links there