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Well, not exactly lied. I hadn't really intended to post anything else for a while, and this WILL be my last post as far as that goes, but I got one of those RW forwarded letters from my foster mom this afternoon and had to craft a response to it.
The title of it was "What happened?" and it lists a whole slough of taxes we are forced to pay, remarking that a hundred years ago we had no income taxes and the government seemed to run fine.
I had to respond to it. And, I figured that if I had to respond to that, I might as well post my response here. Take it as a final hurrah--at least for the time being. ;)
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What happened? Well, for starters, we eliminated most of the trade tariffs that gave us the money to keep the government working. We had almost NO infrastructure to support, back then, since most of the roads were little better than dirt trails.
Most wars were still fought by men with rifles and cannons rather than airplanes, tanks, bombs, and missiles. The only communication infrastructure we had was the USPS. The only investigatory arm of the US government was the private security agency known as the Pinkertons. Robber barons and monopolists ruled our economy--from the railroad companies to shipping magnates. The vast majority of America was rural, and agriculture and animal husbandry was the principal source of income for most of them.
There WAS no real middle class, except for the wealthier citizens in small towns, and some of the professionals living in the cities (mostly lawyers and employees of the various corporations of the time).
The middle class, as we know it today, came about primarily after WWII, when the war-time industries turned their attention to peace-time production of goods useful to the American people and needed to hire incredible numbers of people to run their factories. Labor gained allies in government, and the corporations were finally forced to pay people a decent wage for a day's work. The very wealthy and corporations were taxed up to 90%, which left the average worker to pay a lot less of the burden of governance.
Since the 1980s, deregulation of the corporate sector has seen wages plummet in comparison to corporate profits, and the very wealthy and the corporations being granted tax breaks so extensive that they're barely paying any taxes at all, at least in proportion to the amount of money they're pulling in. While we, as consumers, may be forced to pay up to 35 to 40 percent of our income in taxes and fees, they may only be paying as little as 10 to 12 percent, and receiving tax breaks and subsidies from the government WE are paying to maintain.
In fact, the oil companies are STILL getting special dispensation in the way of tax breaks and subsidies even after reaching record profits for the past several years. They've managed to shift most of the burden of paying for government onto the backs of the rest of us, while, at the same time, gaining the most from the system in general. CEOs and corporate officers in 1906 were lucky to make 20 times the wage of their lowest paid employee. Now the number is more like 400 times the wage of the lowest paid employee. Employee pensions are being stripped and defaulted upon while corporate officers get multi-million dollar "golden parachutes" and fully-funded pension plans.
Meanwhile, the people primarily responsible for this state of affairs have gotten us into two unwinnable wars, sunk us as much as 40 TRILLION dollars in debt (roughly 40% of which is owned by communist China) , are STILL voting themselves regular pay raises, refusing to adjust minimum wage to keep up with cost of living, denying us a right to universal healthcare (our quality of healthcare is rated at 38, far below most of the rest of the industrial world, by the World Health Organization), and making it increasingly difficult for the average citizen to get higher education.
You want to know why we're in this situation? Because the vast majority of Americans are more interested in who wins American Idol than who wins the Presidency. Far more Americans are more interested in what's on TV any given night than what bills are being pushed through the Senate and the House of Representatives. Like the Bankruptcy Bill, which makes it harder for the average citizen to get a fresh start, did nothing to curb predatory lending by banks and credit card companies, and still allows big corporations the same rights to bankruptcy as they always had. Or the Medicare reform bill, which disallowed the government the right to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies and is STILL confusing the heck out of everyone having to deal with it.
Apathy, laziness, and ignorance are the culprits. The vast majority of Americans have no clue about such things as public financing of campaigns (a way to get corporate money out of the political process), proportional representation (a way to break the stranglehold the two major parties have on our political system), or the effect that corporate lobbyists have on the way our legislative branch does business.
Add to that the effect of outsourcing jobs overseas (because it's a heck of a lot cheaper to pay some poor kid in Asia pennies a day to make products to sell here in America than to pay an American worker enough money to survive) , and the massive influx of consumer goods from these countries with NO balancing tariffs to reclaim the money the United States is losing through these practices, as well as a corporate media that is owned by a handful of VERY rich people who would rather we pay attention to missing teenagers in Aruba, Michael Jackson's personal foibles, and lost mountain climbers than to actually show us the repercussions of our political, social, and economic decisions in bare, stark detail.
I could go on forever. The basic fact is that we, as citizens, have allowed the corporations to co-opt a government that was initially designed to belong to US, pretty much discounting the efforts of the founding fathers and other figures like Teddy Roosevelt who did everything to break the power of monopolies over our economic welfare. Many of us have allowed powerful religious figures to change the dialogue to things that DO NOT matter in the long run, and drive a wedge between groups of people who have every reason to work together and very few real reasons to distrust or dislike one another.
The American populace is paddling away in a leaky rowboat while the predatory upper classes are powering away from us on a large cruise ship, waving at us from the deck with simpering smiles on their faces.
They're killing the golden goose and they're so caught up in the quest for short-term profits that they don't even see it. Our planet is being disrupted in stunningly obvious ways and the people in power are being paid to look the other way. The scientists who are trying to tell us about it are being silenced by our government.
What happened? We've been played for fools.
You didn't actually think I wouldn't have an answer, did you?
;)
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