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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDear Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work
The Hartmann ReportThe 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS. Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.
Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders ran their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.
Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation; nearly free college, trade school, and research support; healthy small and family businesses; unions protecting a third of Americas workers so two-thirds had a living wage and benefits; and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports that transformed the nations commerce.
When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class.
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Turbineguy
(37,361 posts)it's about power.
If you are king of the shit heap, you're still the king.
Skittles
(153,174 posts)it was never designed to work for We the People
Never was. Only for the rich.
TDale313
(7,820 posts)I suspect its worked perfectly for the ones it was actually intended to benefit.
keep_left
(1,789 posts)The financialization of the economy really took off with the end of the Bretton Woods system, for example. And there were early harbingers of an increasingly hostile stance toward labor by the Right. There was a lot of labor unrest, particularly in the Upper Midwest, e.g. at International Harvester.
The '70s are really overlooked when it comes to how predictive they were of what was to come in the following decades. There is a really good book by Jefferson Cowie, Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, that covers a lot of the history of that time really well.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/stayin-alive-jefferson-r-cowie/1026661181
relayerbob
(6,550 posts)They don't. The ones in power are getting richer than shit, so it works fine for them, and the ignorant masses voting for them do it so they can "own the libs". "Prosperous and thriving" has WAY too many syllables.
Stuart G
(38,439 posts)FoxNewsSucks
(10,434 posts)cloudboy07
(351 posts)OMGWTF
(3,972 posts)Moscow Mitch said he's taking his ball and going home if he can't be Majority Leader. Good! Make it so!
cloudboy07
(351 posts)Time for that Kentucky welfare mooch to be gone ! Begged a senator to help the pos get out of the service when he was a pvt. in the Army ! the pos helped a Russian rich bitch try to get a aluminum mill in Kentucky to help cut our throat's on union aluminum mill's here ! start calling these pos people out ! Won't debate, they are not that smart !
RANDYWILDMAN
(2,673 posts)Fucking meanest and cruelest group of people the whole country has ever seen.
Every progressive idea is an affront to their whole life.
johnp3907
(3,732 posts)For them:
https://m.