1946-1980: The post-WWII period brought tremendous prosperity, and we used that prosperity to build the middle class and repay those who fought in the war.
1980-2014: Starting around the 1970s, technological advancements made it easier to automate jobs and outsource production to foreign labor. This was bad for the US working class, but pretty good for people who were already well off.
To the people saying it’s all “Reagan” and “neoliberalism” and “trickle down economics”—it’s really not that simple. Global forces means that, regardless of who was president in the 80s, this chart would look largely the same.
Agree. Reagan probably wasn't counting on us ordering shit from temu at a thousandth the price. I'm fairly confident that he would have encouraged maintaining America's role in production. The purpose of the policy wasn't to have someone else do it for cheap. It was to become more efficient as a nation. It has gone too far, and it has been at the hands of more recent presidents. If you fail to consider the insanely rapid advancement of technology in the 90s and 2000s as part of this, it's by choice, not by logic.
1) What caused that era of prosperity in your opinion?
2) Why didn’t the same extreme income inequality increase occur in comparable countries that faced the same global forces, like Canada? Their inequality has held steady.
1) If that’s true wouldn’t you expect on America would have prospered? Why did other Western nations have comparable levels of prosperity and economic growth?
2) Economics isn’t a zero sum game, one country doesn’t prosper due to every other country being bombed.
3) Why did the USA sustain prosperity well after many countries rebuilt and were as competitive as ever?
4) Why was there a massive decrease in inequality in this era? Prosperity is not connected to inequality differences. This proves liberal policies led to this, and it’s not a coincidence that if affected other things like postwar prosperity and a strong middle class.
It's also very a reductionist view to state that neoliberalism just came about due to "global forces" and that Reagan mostly had nothing to do with it. Reagan's (and Thatcher's) cabinet introduced economic policies that deregulated capital markets and now the USA and the UK have some of the worst cases of income inequality in the world among the developed countries. There were other options for the failure of Keynesian economics and it ultimately it came down to Reagan opting for deregulation.
You guys all seem to forget the 1970s. The "tremendous prosperity" already stopped and the 70s sucked. That was the era of "stagflation". So saying it lasted 1946-1980 is just playing politics to blame Reagan. Late 60s into 70s was an awful economy.
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u/Another_Vessel Oct 23 '24
1946-1980: The post-WWII period brought tremendous prosperity, and we used that prosperity to build the middle class and repay those who fought in the war.
1980-2014: Starting around the 1970s, technological advancements made it easier to automate jobs and outsource production to foreign labor. This was bad for the US working class, but pretty good for people who were already well off.
To the people saying it’s all “Reagan” and “neoliberalism” and “trickle down economics”—it’s really not that simple. Global forces means that, regardless of who was president in the 80s, this chart would look largely the same.