It’s always advisable to ignore hyperbole and avoid clickbait headlines, but this one from The Independent was eye-catching, to say the least: "US has regressed to developing nation status, MIT economist warns.” The key point of the article is that without a robust middle class, the United States ...
... is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.”
Peter Temin authored the book that The Independent is reporting on—and he’s not too far off the mark with this idea.
We are certainly at a tipping point in our society, and the roots of this trace back to the election of Ronald Reagan, when we saw some of the first shots fired on the middle class: the firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers; cutting taxes on the rich; raising the retirement age to 67 on those who did not even have a voice in the matter; and the advent of the media friendly-named "trickle down economics" (for the record, I’ve been waiting since the ‘80s for my pile of cash to trickle down).
This was not unique to the Reagan years. After George H.W. Bush, President Clinton raised taxes and we had a budget surplus at the end of his second term. When President George W. Bush came into office he cut taxes, and by the end of his term we were in the worst economic times since the Great Depression. President Obama came into office, raised taxes, and signed into law a much-too-small stimulus plan to dig us out of the hole the GOP put us in.
Governors like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker have broken unions and traditional union states have become “right to work” states. Wages have been stagnant as productivity has gone up, a trend that has been going since 1973. The party that is currently in power serves the interests of a such a small sliver of American society that it’s referred to as “the 1 percent.”
A supposed billionaire ran for (and won) the presidency as a populist candidate. He is anything but a populist. His goals are to take health care away from millions, lower taxes for his buddies, and get rid of regulations that keep us safe at work and ensure that we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink—all so a few can get more pennies of profit at the expense of the many.
It is no secret that our infrastructure is crumbling. Take a drive down any highway, and it is clear we have a problem. Drive down a European highway and it will be crystal clear that we are falling behind. While other countries are building high speed rail and updating airports and airline terminals, we are doing nothing. While our coastal cities are flooding, the Republican Party is still mostly in denial about climate change. According to a recent BuzzFeed article, Republicans who have finally come to Jesus on climate change due to the impacts in their districts admitted that:
“You can’t lead off with ‘climate change’ with most Republicans,” Debbie Dooley, president of Conservatives for Energy Freedom and of the Green Tea Coalition, a collection of clean energy advocates that includes tea partiers, like Dooley, told BuzzFeed News. “The message you use is freedom, market, national security, fiscally responsible. … Republicans are absolutely receptive to that.”
“If you mention ‘climate change’ to a Republican they’re not going to hear another thing you said.”
“Freedom,” “market,” “national security,” “fiscally responsible”—all of those GOP buzzwords manage to trump (no pun intended), “We are killing the fucking planet.”
I was just a child toward the end of the 1960s, which was the last time we had a major social upheaval. One of my earliest memories was the bombing of Sterling Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. We have seen the beginnings of this turmoil in the Black Lives Matter protests. This time around, the turmoil will be between the haves and the have-nots.
President Obama’s treatment during his time in office makes it clear that racism is part of the strategy used by the elite to keep wages down.
Mr Temin also claims that this dual-economy has a “racist” undertone.
“The desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.
The current occupant of the White House is a symptom, not the disease. As more and more jobs become automated or die off due to changes in technology, the middle class will be just a footnote in our nation’s history, and the United States will cease to be the most powerful nation on Earth unless things change. As stated in the first sentence in this post, hyperbole is mostly useless. Much of Mr. Temin’s thesis is hyperbole because there is reason to continue believing in the good of mankind, and the goodness of our fellow Americans.
While we are at a tipping point, I do believe that Americans will figure out that they have been duped by a grifter, and that we have been duped by a series of Republican grifters since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.
We have to believe that—because if we don’t then we will lose hope, and if we lose hope? Then the hyperbole becomes reality, and then the United States will indeed regress into a developing nation.