The Betrayal of the American Dream -- A Once Vibrant Middle Class Is Now on the Brink

Thursday, August 2, 2012

The Betrayal of the American Dream -- A Once Vibrant Middle Class Is Now on the Brink | Alternet

And brackets mean the more you pay—the more you earn, the more you pay. That’s the way things used to be, and the country thrived under that system, and it didn’t penalize anybody and didn’t create class warfare, had actually created a very broad-based society.

Trade policy is another that needs to be amended. Don’t just have our door open, let everybody send their stuff in, unless they’re going to do the same with us, which has never happened. We’ve never had the guts to enforce the proper trade policy.

A significant thing we also talk about is, we really need to invest in the country, because corporations aren’t. So many of them are going abroad. A true broad-based investment infrastructure and many other things. The largest peacetime infrastructure investment program in this country was under Dwight Eisenhower in the ’50s: the interstate highway program. And that was with broad, bipartisan support. I mean, that’s what we need to get back to in this country. Obama’s rather anemic stimulus program was roundly condemned by conservatives, when in fact it’s things like that that are part of the solution to the problem.

This is a fairly long article but it is well worth reading. It explains a lot of what’s going on now and some things we could do to change it - if the politicians had the will to do so or we put enough pressure on the politicians that they do so.