It’s always advisable to ignore hyperbole and avoid clickbait headlines, but this one from The Independent was eye-catching, to say the least: "US has regressed to developing nation status, MIT economist warns.” The key point of the article is that without a robust middle class, the United States ...
... is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.”
Peter Temin authored the book that The Independent is reporting on—and he’s not too far off the mark with this idea.
We are certainly at a tipping point in our society, and the roots of this trace back to the election of Ronald Reagan, when we saw some of the first shots fired on the middle class: the firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers; cutting taxes on the rich; raising the retirement age to 67 on those who did not even have a voice in the matter; and the advent of the media friendly-named "trickle down economics" (for the record, I’ve been waiting since the ‘80s for my pile of cash to trickle down).
This was not unique to the Reagan years. After George H.W. Bush, President Clinton raised taxes and we had a budget surplus at the end of his second term. When President George W. Bush came into office he cut taxes, and by the end of his term we were in the worst economic times since the Great Depression. President Obama came into office, raised taxes, and signed into law a much-too-small stimulus plan to dig us out of the hole the GOP put us in.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2qtr7VM
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