https://hartmannreport.com/p/dear-republicans-we-tried-your-way
Dear #Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work
THOM #HARTMANN
..."Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight #Eisenhower renewed #America with modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation; nearly free college, trade school, and research support; healthy small and family businesses; unions protecting a third of America’s workers so two-thirds had a living wage and benefits; and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports that transformed the nation’s commerce.
When we handed America over to Ronald #Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class.
The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It became a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then America.
...
Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.
It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked:
Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.
Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over 40 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 60% of us to fewer than half of us. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.
...
The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience.
And now that we know what it is, we’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.
We don’t want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused)."...
