Reply #6: The damage has been 25 years in the making.

[TahitiNut]

By every measure of equity and justice, the rot-from-within has been proceeding since the beginning of the Reagan Regime. It'll be more than 40 years, afaicg, before we're back to the levels of liberalism we saw at the end of the 70s. I'll offer just a couple of the indicators below: federal minimum wage and Gini Ratio (a measure of income distribution).


Until the minimum wage is increased to $7.00/hour (in last year's dollars), we're not close to the labor compensation for the poorest we had in the late 70s.




Until the income equity is adjusted (more for the lowest income and less for the highest) and we attain a Gini Ratio of 0.35 or below, approaching that of other western industrial countries, we're still burdened with the plantation economics of banana republicanism.