America: What Went Wrong? The Sequel
Good news:
I was thinking today, as the news broke that federal income taxes are at the lowest levels in proportion to the GDP since 1950, that it is a shame that more people have not read Âmerica: What Went Wrong? It is a Pulitzer-Prize winning series of stories that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer 20 years ago (October 1991) and was then turned into an easy-to-read book.
The narrative traces how, since roughly 1950 the American middle-class has gotten significantly poorer while the wealthy have gotten richer than ever. Much of this transference of wealth came through two broad avenues-first was a shift in taxation from the rich and corporate to the middle-class, second was fundamental shifts in government policy that promoted and accelerated sending jobs abroad and drove extensive deregulations that not only stripped workers of protections and allowed financial institution to make risky gambles with shareholders and investor’s dollars-gambles that went bad and ended up costing taxpayers (i.e., the middle class) billions while, uhm, corporate profits and the bank accounts of the rich rose and got fatter.
I was going to post that this is a book that Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and fellow travelers don’t want you to read. Ignorance is bliss after all and, besides Beck and the others at the top of feeding frenzy are quite literally making tens of millions of dollars off of their misleading rhetoric. (Glenn Beck earns in excess of $25 million a year-which is really impressive when you find out that his earnings put Beck into the highest 0.1 percent of the nation’s rich-that isn’t a typo: 99.9 percent of all Americans make less than Beck. Is it any surprise he is against taxing the rich? Actually, given that you only have to have a combined household income of $1.6 million to be among the richest 0.1 percent in the nation, Beck is clearly far up the feeding chain-he may be richer than 99.99 percent of all Americans. But I digress.)
Anyway, those interested in protecting the interest of the rich and the corporate don’t want you to read America: What Went Wrong? You might be pissed to know that we, as a nation, had 15 years to avoid the economic meltdown that hit in 2008 and that we, as a nation, did nothing. Happily the book is still available through Amazon and, probably, in your local library. You can even read most of it online.
But, the really good news is that, as I was looking online for a link to the book for my post, I discovered that the two reporters who wrote it, are planning to update it:
Donald Barlett and James Steele are revisiting America: What Went Wrong, their landmark 1991 newspaper series, in a new project with the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Over the next year, the project team will examine how four decades of public policy has shaped America's ongoing economic crisis.
Awesome. (And one of those weird coincidences: The Investigative Reporting Workshop just released this news today.)
In the meantime, if you can get your hands on the original book, it’s worth the read. If you’d like to borrow a copy, just ask: I have two.