As that happened, you've seen the rich get richer, and you've perhaps noticed that the government's main response to this has been to keep cutting their taxes (in fairness, President Barack Obama did raise the highest rate in 2013 to 39.6 percent from 35 percent, although for single filers, that rate didn't kick in until
earned income went above $400,000).
You witnessed the financial meltdown of 2008, caused by big banks betting against themselves. Capitalists might want to consider how all that looked to a young person who came from a working-class family and who probably knows someone who lost a job or even his house, while some of the bankers who helped create the mess walked away with
golden parachutes, like that of Countrywide Financial's Angelo Mozilo, which
The Times valued at $88 million.
You've watched corporations hoard profits, buy back their stock and not reinvest in their workers the way they once did as they move jobs to Central America and Bangladesh. If you read a lot, you know that stock buybacks were permitted under the Securities and Exchange Commission's
Rule 10b-18, which dates to the Reagan era, and that since it's just an S.E.C. rule, it can be changed without having to pass legislation, but no one in either of the Democratic administrations since then bothered.
I could go on like this for 20 paragraphs. Many more, in fact. But you get the idea. Back in the days when our economy just grew and grew, we had a government and a capitalist class that invested in our people and their future — in the Interstate highways, the community colleges, the scientific research, the generous federal grants for transportation and regional development.
And, funny thing, during all this time, socialism didn't have much appeal. Back in the 1910s and '20s, during an era of intense labor strife and before the existence of the welfare state, there were a couple of Socialist Party members in the House of Representatives —
Victor Berger of Wisconsin and
Meyer London of New York — as well as hundreds of Socialist mayors and state legislators and local officials.
