How the rich stole your money
by digby
David Atkins has a nice piece up at Salon about how the economics elites managed to keep us all feeling fat and happy (for a while) through cultural and policy changes that masked the fact that we were actually losing ground. He notes four specific areas:
1) Push people away from defined-benefit pensions and into stocks and 401(k)s.
2) Push more people into buying real estate, and increase home prices by all means possible.
3) Democratize consumer debt, especially through credit cards.
4) Reduce the cost of goods through free trade policies.
All of those are changes that happened within my lifetime. And he’s right. Stock market investing, owning your own home, credit cards and cheap imported goods were simply not something everyone had or expected to have when I was growing up.
The overall plan was very simply stated by none other than Ronald Reagan who said:
Roughly 94 percent of the people in capitalist America make their living from wage or salary. Only 6 percent are true capitalists in the sense of deriving income from ownership of the means of production …We can win the argument once and for all by simply making more of our people Capitalists.
With all the risk and insecurity that comes with it.
It’s an interesting piece and well worth reading in its entirety. I would just note that one of the reasons this worked when it did was because the very risk averse depression era folk all got old and started to die off. The memory of economic calamity tends to make people think twice about debt. I’d guess that the young people who are shouldering a boatload of debt for their schooling might have some different ideas about all this as well.
Not everyone wants to be a financial analyst or has the skills to be an “investor” even in a capitalist economy. Most of us are workers for wages just trying to live a decent life and give our kids a fighting chance. Getting rich is not the point. So all these policies just transferred risk to average people while the rentier class just got richer and richer. Nice scam.
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