Bernie Sanders Shows How Reagan Destroyed The Middle Class

Bernie Sanders Shows How Reagan Destroyed The Middle Class

by Michael McAuliff | huffingtonpost.com | Posted: 01/30/2015 7:59 am EST
Excerpts:

WASHINGTON -- "When Sanders took to the Senate floor Thursday evening to offer a broad vision for how to do something to help the declining middle class, he offered a stunning chart that showed just how poorly most Americans have fared during economic recoveries since the advent of Reaganomics.

The chart starts by showing that in the decades after World War II, the bottom 90 percent of the country captured most of the growth in income during rebounds from tough times. After Reagan implemented his policies, the top 10 percent grabbed nearly 80 percent of the growth in incomes coming out of the oil crises of the late '70s.
.....

"Whoa! What happens in 1982?" Sanders said, noting the dramatic reversal in his diagram. Well, Ronald Reagan is president, and the good news is we are into trickle-down economics."

"Frankly, this is a metaphor," Sanders said. "This is an example of exactly what trickle-down economics is all about."

read more see chart:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/...ddle-class_n_6578130.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
.......

IMO: So we now know that trickle-down economics does not work except for the wealthy 10 percent, and the republicans want to keep it that way. It cements Reagans' tenure as just another working slave for the 10 percenters, but why any American can view Reagan as anything but a Grade B movie actor turned politician is proof of their gullibility and being easily deceived.

It has always been and still is "trickle UP economics" with most of the profits going to the top 10 percent. The system is so irretrievably legislated in favor of the rich that unless 90 percent of American workers march on the White House and Congress we are caught in an inextricable web of republican greed, double talk, and, yes, fear that we may one day march upon Congress in another paroxysm of anger over our plight at the hands of those who are supposed to govern all of the people, all of the time in a righteous manner.

When did a Democracy ever in our history bow to a 1%er group of super wealthy greedy bunch of socialist crooks that suck off the government "entitlement teat" that allows them to pay a lower tax rate than a working stiff?

 

Let me repeat this because it seems like a lot of lefties just dont understand finance. Rich people will continue to get richer and the gap will grow.... because of COMPOUND INTEREST and savings. Rich people can allow large nest eggs to sit and earn interest, growing their wealth faster than they can spend. Poor people do not have savings, can not earn any interest worth saving, and live paycheck to paycheck. Rich will always get richer unless you steal from them or they (*)(*)(*)(*) up.

 

Illegal immigration destroyed the middle class, therefore both political parties have destroyed the middle class. Both have been charged with making the laws and enforcing the laws. Both have failed. Neither takes responsibility. Neither party will stop it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corne...5-million-work-permits-foreign-nationals-2009

 

Thom Hartmann does the same EVERY hour of every broadcast.

There. You don't have to listen. You're welcome.

 

The only time the rich getting richer is a problem is when GDP tanks, like under the Obama regime. Usually the pie expands. But today we have a triple whammy of international wage competition, illegal alien wage pressure and a craptacular 'recovery'

Thanks, Obama.

 

Bernie Sanders is a self described socialist.

He doesnt like Reagan?? Im shocked....

AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

 

Your going to have to talk a better game than that to make me remember the Reagan years being anything but great! We had ten years of Nixon, Ford, and Carter and the country was flat on its face with a military that couldn't whip a sick cat. But under Reagan the economy took off, we became strong and powerful again, and shortly afterward the Soviet Union was a thing of the past. So what do you prefer? Obama?

 

Because "trickle up" is working so well, right? Please explain who is "the middle class" in the socialist fantasy world Sanders lives in.

Another pathetic attempted history rewrite to try to disparage The Greatest American from the necrotic left.

 

It would appear the lefties will say or do anything to replace trickle down economics with envy economics.

The ends always justify the means.

 

A political science major socialist keynesian who studied at the commie U of Chicago who cant even comb his hair lectures us on how the greatest economic recovery of all time was a bad thing. Ooooook

 

Steal from them... give me a break.. It's called taxing them. It's a fee for living in the great country that created their wealth.

 

Right, the country "created their wealth". They were just in the right place at the right time.

 

What!? lol. When has the GDP tanked under Obama?

 

I don't think you got what I wrote. The only way to stop their money from growing is to steal it or for them to (*)(*)(*)(*) up. Taxing will not stop them from growing in wealth, just slows it down slightly. They will continue to get richer and richer, unless we tax more than they make ( which will never happen and makes no sense). So everyone better get used to the 1 percent and their wealth growing because barring a global collapse, it will continue on the same way.

 

They were. Living in the richest country in the world provides a lot of opportunity to gain wealth that would not have existed in other countries. There is a reason most of the world's richest people are American.

 

Yeah. In the Ideal Leftworld, a ditch digger would make the same as a brain surgeon.

 

No one wants to stop them from growing. They want their growth to be more in line with the rest of the country.

- - - Updated - - -

Uh no...

I don't even think that's how they do it in communist countries. A brain surgeon is always going to be a more valuable job.

 

Thanks for saying that as it moves back to my original point. Poor people and middle class don't really have money to grow. So how does one get inline with the rest of the country when the rest of the country has no savings? Compound interest works exponentially, thus why the rich has much faster growth in the wealth. Their really is nothing that is going to change this, ever. Its existed since man created wealth.

 

Yeah, and so gets paid more, only for the envypanderer-in-chief to take it back to redistribute.

 

Having the opportunity to gain wealth does not mean the country "created their wealth". They did. You clearly subscribe to the Obama school of "you didn't build that" Marxism.

 

Reagan destroyed the middle class by turning them into upper class.

 

Weird, IF only the US Gov't had someway to stop the inequality from growing?

The way things worked before the US essentially invented the middle class by implementing the progressive tax structure and the New Deal in the wake of the Great Depression, was a series of booms & busts. These sucked for the ordinary people, but were a fantastic way for the obscenely wealthy to garner more wealth.

Here's how it worked:

Choose a market segment and start investing heavily.

Create a bunch of noise around how that segment is growing.

Create investment tools that even the little guy can buy.

Whip the public into a buying frenzy. No one wants to be left behind in a market that has no place to go but "up."

When the bubble inflates to a point of your choosing, it's time to start the next bubble, strip your profits out via a massive sell off.

This happens to crash the market, reaming the little investors - but you don't care, because you just took all the money they'd invested.

Sock a bunch of your ill-gotten gains into an inheritance trust to be passed on to your children, then start investing the rest in another market segment. Pump that bubble, pop it, move on to the next.

To these avaricious slime-balls, "the economy" is a toy, not something on which they rely for survival. We're the only ones who get hurt when they crush it.

WHAT CHANGED IT? Oh yeah PROGRESSIVE policies like HIGH EFFECTIVE TAX RATES, regulations, unions rights, labor laws, min wage, etc


Non-Partisan Congressional Tax Report Debunks Core Conservative Economic Theory



The conclusion?

Lowering the tax rates on the wealthy and top earners in America do not appear to have any impact on the nation’s economic growth.

This paragraph from the report says it all—

“The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.”






http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickung...rvative-economic-theory-gop-suppresses-study/


The Top 0.1% Of The Nation Earn Half Of All Capital Gains

(That's 1/10th of 1% for the 'math' challenged GOPers)


http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertl...of-the-nation-earn-half-of-all-capital-gains/




Same study (as well as another)

Capital Gains Tax Cuts ‘By Far’ The Biggest Contributor To Growth In Income Inequality, Study Finds

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/20...r-to-growth-in-income-inequality-study-finds/

 

"craptacular 'recovery'

Thanks, Obama. "

Recovery from what? Oh right 8 years of Dubya/GOP 'job creator' policies



September 27, 2010

So How Did the Bush Tax Cuts Work Out for the Economy?


The 2008 income tax data are now in, so we can assess the fulfillment of the Republican promise that tax cuts would produce widespread prosperity by looking at all the years of the George W. Bush presidency.

Just as they did in 2000, the Republicans are running this year on an economic platform of tax cuts, especially making the tax cuts permanent for the richest among us. So how did the tax cuts work out? My analysis of the new data, with all figures in 2008 dollars:

Total income was $2.74 trillion less during the eight Bush years than if incomes had stayed at 2000 levels.

That much additional income would have more than made up for the lack of demand that keeps us mired in the Great Recession.

Tax Analysts -- So How Did the Bush Tax Cuts Work Out for the Economy


The Bush Era Tax Cuts Didn't Create The Wealth They Were Supposed To

The Bush tax cuts were a test of these claims about supply-side economic policies. To justify the tax cuts the nation was, in effect, given a business prospectus from the Republican Party.

We were promised that cutting taxes on the wealthy would result in much higher economic growth and broadly shared prosperity. For those who wondered how we would pay for such a large cut to the government’s revenue stream, the Republican prospectus had a remarkable claim.

The tax cuts wouldn’t cost us anything. Growth would be so strong that the tax cuts would more than pay for themselves. Even those who admitted that the tax cuts might not be fully self-financing still made strong claims about faster economic growth offsetting much of the lost revenue from the tax cuts.


The reality, of course, has been quite different

http://www.businessinsider.com/bush-era-tax-cuts-didnt-fix-economy-2012-12

 

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Right wing Mises

The Myths of Reaganomics


Tax Cuts. One of the few areas where Reaganomists claim success without embarrassment is taxation. Didn't the Reagan administration, after all, slash income taxes in 1981, and provide both tax cuts and "fairness" in its highly touted tax reform law of 1986? Hasn't Ronald Reagan, in the teeth of opposition, heroically held the line against all tax increases?

The answer, unfortunately, is no. In the first place, the famous "tax cut" of 1981 did not cut taxes at all. It's true that tax rates for higher-income brackets were cut; but for the average person, taxes rose, rather than declined. The reason is that, on the whole, the cut in income tax rates was more than offset by two forms of tax increase.


http://mises.org/library/myths-reaganomics

 

The Republican sham of lower taxes and less regulation doesn't help anyone but the richest Americans and Big Business and kill jobs and opportunity for almost everyone, especially in the middle class and poor.


Because under current tax rates, there's no reason for the 1% to not continue to pay themselves hundreds of times what the average family earns, even if some of the loopholes go away.

The reason we had more equality of income back in the 1950's through the 1970's is that the 1% couldn't keep the money they gave themselves. When high earner's income went into the 70% margin rate (or the 91% rate under Ike), they were simply paying more taxes. No board of directors would okay increases in CEO wages because most of it would go to the IRS. Cap gains rates were also higher. Paying yourself a big salary or bonus was worthless if you couldn't keep it.