Chart of the Day
October 22, 2010
This speaks for itself. Ordinary people were doing pretty well until the 1970s, and the Reagan era benefitted only the rich.
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But the trickle, the trickle ! Tricked into the trickle the regular people are kept down. With all the practice in Latin America, eg Chile, Los Chicago Boys were in good shape to reshape the USA. Interestingly, the Friedman disciples started it all at a Catholic university in Chile. Malthus would be proud.
Honestly I think this may be a result of how our economy is changing so that we manufacture ideas and not things. The problem is that all the Big Think jobs require education, and not everyone is college material or graduate school material. And they deserve to be able to provide for their families, too.
This is going to be even worse after our latest downturn – a lot of the jobs people with high school diplomas used to work, are never coming back. What do we do? We NEED to have career paths available for these people, in fact I would say it is a moral imperative. Not to mention what it means for our national security that we are losing the manufacturing infrastructure and skillsets.
Well economic protections are important. These days you have the people who cry about big government, yet they want a government just as large, but they just want a different government. Just like people are against the healthcare reform. Yet our former system was not, as touted, the best system in the world by any measure. Maybe if we Add your health insurance premium costs to your taxes and then compare that figure to other countries’ taxes (where they do not have to carry private insurance with it’s executives and advertising departments skimming off the top) and see if you’d really be better off.
Our country in reality, is sliding behind most first world industrial nations. The problem seems that in America, when someone does start trying to do something to fix things, we get too impatient to wait it out to be fixed, and that is just half of the problem. The other half is the people on the other side who cry foul because someone is doing something differently then they would have.
This graph doesn’t say much…according to this website the average income in the 70′s was $7,564. By the 90′s it was $27,809.60 (13.37*40*52).
http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade70.html
Yes the rich get richer but I don’t see this graph as the end all and be all of Reagon’s theory.
Lessons from this chart: Recessions are really good.
So I’m thinking of starting this project called VisageBook. I expect great things to come of it. And just maybe I’ll fall into the gold line.
While I agree pretty much with the substance of what Cindy posted, I want to correct one (common?) misaprehension. “Socialized medicine” in European countries does not mean that there is no private insurance. This is the case in England, which has nationalized medicine. However, other countries (Spain and Germany for sure, based on personal contacts) have a “blended system.” The state provides some level of health care, funded through taxes. Everyone gets this. However, for those who can afford it (generally through their employer) there is supplemental insurance which covers things state insurance does not pay for: private hospital rooms, more tests, quicker elective surgery, etc. Frankly, I am not sure of the details of how health care is divvied up, but I do know that private insurance is very heavily regulated. It is worth keeping this in mind when talking about health care in Europe.