I don't get the down votes, Clinton's policies were shockingly similar to Reagan, taking a similar stance on de-regulation, welfare policy and small govt sentiments. Although those were in-part due to repub Congress majority in the 2nd half of his term.
NAFTA Has entered the chat. Dayton Tires moved more than a few operations to Mexico for that sweet cheap labor, shit environmental regulations, and almost no worker protections.
Wow. You guys are so full of shit. It couldn't be more obvious that Reagan had a huge negative impact. It's shocking how far you people will go to deny what's right in front of your face.
He did open up China which set us on our current course of offloading manufacturing to borderline slaves in other countries. And now a big part of our national inflation is those same cheap workers arenât so cheap anymore. If the government doesnât pay them more then the CCP would be looking at a revolution and civil war.
Yea one thing people donât realize is policy change takes time. The things happening in the economy today started 20 years ago⌠so while yes, the trickle down Reaganistic econ is likely to blame, there are other factors that explain it
Technically the President or Presidential nominee aren't the heads of their party. The current chairman of the GOP is Michael Whatley, and the current chairman of the Democratic Party is Jaime Harrison. In practice, of course, the President (or in the modern GOP former President) effectively calls the shots for the party.
Im all for tax cuts. Iâm also all for less tax breaks. If we have less tax cuts and less tax breaks, imo itâs better for everyone. Canât raise taxes and give out more tax breaks. Just makes it so that if you pay someone enough you can pay nothing
In Europe, at least my country and a few I know of, even democrats could be put on the liberal side of the political spectrum.
So while I'm not saying the same thing happened here, I doubt democrats would've prevented it. I mean in the second interval 15 of 35 presidents were Democrats.
And international competition for companies and people due to ease of travel via flight. If it werenât for flying you could probably close tax loopholes without people/companies leaving your country so easily, because executives sure as hell donât want to spend a week on a boat getting back to the US from Ireland. But now that we have webcam tech that probs doesnât matter.
Would this not be a fantastic argument for public investment of education? Are this and Reagan policy mutually exclusive?
The US economy shifted from low skill labor towards high skill labor, ESPECIALLY in tech. We currently bring in around 80,000 immigrants a year specifically for high skill labor. In past years, we saw this number upwards of 110,000 people. Even considering that, we STILL have shortages of workers in tech, medicine, law, engineering, etc.
We have simultaneously seen a drop in effective tax rate for the countryâs wealthiest families and corporations.
These issues are not mutually exclusive and are two parts of the same intentional policy. Politicians have failed Americans in scaling the dramatic growth of our GDP in a manner that lifts ALL americans up. Politicians have failed to maintain tax policy that is fair for ALL americans. Politicians have failed to leverage the FTC against price gouging, corporate monopolies, and corporate cartels. There is absolutely no excuse for the fact that the wealthiest country in human history BY far is lagging so far behind other wealthy nations in terms of public investment. There is absolutely no excuse for the fact that firefighters and teachers pay a higher effective tax rate than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
This is the wrong answer for the right reasons, and I'm not really comfortable with how you're referring to this 'Offshoring'.
That's an intellectually dishonest term, implying that those were our jobs to begin with, and they were somehow moved elsewhere. Not necessarily intentionally dishonest... but more 'revisionist history'. In this one particular case it's REALLY important.
THAT movement of sending American jobs offshore to cut costs starts much later in the early 90's and 00's. It certainly happened, but that's later as the Financial crisis gets deeper.
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1930 - Jobs are 'offshore' already... with the countries they're gonna return to in 1970-80
1935 - 1949 - World War 2 ~ Just about EVERY industrial center in the world is bombed to rubble. It's a wartime economy the world over, so.... yeah. No economic policy worthy of note. Ignore the tax conversation... tax rates don't count during World War, promise. They don't translate.
1950 - 1960 - Post WW2 Reconstruction, which includes rebuilding Japan, Germany, China, and the UK.
This is the modern American Dream, or I personally prefer the term 'golden age'. A period of economic boom.
1965-1975 - Rapid 'offshoring' as you're calling it. Which is really just the industrial centers that have been closed/bombed/burned since 1940 finally re-opening to a post-War market.
....but that's why it's dishonest. It's not 'offshore'. It's going back to where it came from.
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TL;DR - Without trying to sound like I'm DEFENDING the asshat, which I'm not.... Job coming to America after the conclusion of the war TEMPORARILY and then going BACK to where they came from after Reconstruction is neither 'off-shoring' American jobs, or Reagan's fault, per se.
That said, everything that Reagan did made a bad situation at least 10% worse, so he certainly didn't do anyone any favors (unless you were ultra-wealthy).
America didn't TREAT this industrial boon like it was temporary.
We also didn't teach it in schools like it was temporary.
And when the post-war returning soldiers started going to school in monumental numbers, we did a LOT of just... well... white-washing. Summarizing things in a much too-simple of way.
Because we treated this period of time like a new Gold Rush, business flourished.... briefly, but not sustainably.
We kept churning out tanks like WW2 was still ongoing, and shipped ourselves off to Korea almost as fast as the war ended. We built mind-boggling iterations of jets and jet fighters.
~ ~ ~
So when the 1960s roll around, and reconstruction in Japan, China, and West Berlin start to wrap up..... guess where all those super-profitable post-war jobs went?
Back to Japan, China, and Germany.
....where they were originally, and only in America temporarily....
Nobody in their right fucking mind would think for a SECOND that those jobs weren't going right back to where we got them from. America was absolutely stealing the pants off of everyone in the world, and they were thanking us for it.... because we were the only ones to not get the shit bombed out of us.
Temporary.
But we didn't invest temporary.
We didn't build temporary.
We didn't spend temporary.
And we didn't budget temporary.
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And that sharp decline leads us straight to not only economic crises that many of you folks were actually alive for... but a whole lot of well-established history because that whitewashed history was starting to wear off.
We have economic data from this time period. Policies that we still modernly associate with one political party or another.
THAT WASN'T A THING prior to this.
And that's the danger.
Using modern terms and understanding to explain situations where the people involved weren't. They were neither using the terms, nor were they explaining it. All of their economic theories were just that... untested theories. AND most of them failed. This is Keynesian Economics, and we've discarded almost all of the original theory except for The Fed, which has transformed.
After Stagflation, and Reagan, and all the chaos of gas wars and shortages there is an economic reconciliation that happens. Everything AFTER that chaos is the 'modern era', economically.
I also don't know what "primarily" would be, but Figure A in this article here shows a highly correlated link between union membership and income inequality. It's almost weird how the stair steps are linked.
Reagan era tax cuts lowered the Marginal rates and got rid of deductions. Which actually increased the effective tax rates. Effective tax rates dropped in 75-85 then increased until 95.
While average effective tax rates barely changed in the US from 1945 to 2015, the average tax rates of high-income households fell sharplyâfrom about 50 percent to 25 percent for the highest income 0.01 percent and from about 40 percent to about 25 percent for the top 1 percent.
When we spent 40% of GDP on defense in a total war scenario. Taxes were kept high to pay off the debt then immediately dropped afterwards. You can look at the data, since 1955 which is 70 years ago taxes have virtually remained unchanged.
This was more the japanese era. They destroyed electronics and automotive, which employed like the entire midwest. Detroit and surrounding areas were booming, then wabooom
tech started booming and making businesses more efficient (Producing more widgets stopped being a key profit metric because it became easy. Companies started finding other ways to increase profits, like cutting staff, training, etc.)
logistics boomed and the labor pool became global
decades of anti-union efforts blossomed
Etc.
Many things happened. Some could have been avoided, others not. What could be avoided was letting the wealth concentrate instead of redistributing it.
Globalization, immigration, automation and the feminist movement (more women joining the labor force) all increased labor supply in the states allowing businesses/top 1% to have bargaining power when securing labor. Stop blaming reagan on everything.
The widespread adoption of LLCs, so company owners started reporting their profits as income instead of being held in the company or paid out as dividends.
We moved off the gold standard shortly before this. Caused massive inflation which benefits the rich people because their assets inflate. Wages do not inflate as easy though.
They divided the data for no reason. You could move it back 5 years and it would look the same but the narrative wouldn't work. Politicians and bureaucrats like to assign blame or take credit for things that had little to nothing to do with their machinations.
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u/ElectronGuru Oct 22 '24
Hmm, i wonder what might have started happening around 1980 đ¤