Anybody who wanted a job could get one. If you worked hard and kept your nose clean, you could keep that job, often for life. You got benefits, and with larger companies, a pension fund. We switched policies in a massive way in the 1980s under the “leadership” of Ronald Reagan. The theory was that if we change the rules so the “Job Creators” or Creators for short, get more and more money, they will create more and more jobs. To funnel more money to the rich, we had to begin to cut investment in things that actually grow the economy, and assistance to the poor, so the Creators could create millions more jobs.
We cut the top marginal tax rate from 70% in 1980 to 35% for most of the period since. We also added a bewildering array of tax breaks to reduce the real tax rate that very wealthy pay. Most of these new loopholes were designed so they were only available to taxpayers who earned enough to put them in the top 1%. We also amended corporate tax law so that really big corporations could make enormous profits and end up paying no taxes or even having the government owe them money. We made it so that, to do that, they needed to move much of their operation offshore. None of these rule changes benefited small business. You had to have sales in the billions before these rules helped you.
That Voodoo Economics BS Reagan sold Americans has become so deeply entrenched in the national psyche that as of yet, very few Americans seem to have noticed that we’ve been in a slow but steady decline since adopting it. The Creators can’t create jobs if none of what the GOP calls “Takers” has enough money to feed themselves. Why crank out millions of lovely living room sets when hardly anyone has enough money to buy their next meal? If you do crank them out, they’ll just rot in a warehouse somewhere.
There aren’t enough Creators to keep the economic cycle going all by themselves. Even if a Creator has 5 homes, they still only need 5 living room sets. And they are way, way less than 1% of the population. We’ve begun deconstructing the middle class to transfer ever more of the nation’s wealth to the very, very wealthy.The real goal of Voodoo Economics is wage slavery, a banana republic sort of society. A small but very dedicated group of rapaciously greedy billionaires like the Koch Brothers funded the development of the ideas and slogans to push it, and they pour billions per year into the campaign war chests of right wing politicians who, if elected, will deliver what they want, namely “Everything”.
Here’s two short videos that pretty much explain the plan.
George Carlin’s rant about our owners.
Nick Hanauer’s TED talk.