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64% of Americans Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck
Yet they pretend the economy is strong — and that’s why we’re in no shape for a war of attrition
It’s a grotesque and fantasy-based ideology that leads a wealthy nation down this path. There was a short few-decade window where workers had the language of class, fought for their rights, labor laws were passed, unionization shot up, wages increased, the middle class bloomed, and then, starting in the early seventies, it all was slowly but surely dismantled.
GDP continued to soar, worker productivity rose multiples, and per capita income looked good, but Americans got progressively poorer.
And McCarthyism has consistently remained the status quo. Anyone asking whether it was bad for the country that the top one percent was steadily leeching $50 trillion from the middle and bottom over the last five decades was smeared as some sort of a pinko-commie bastard.
As a nation, we don’t know how to have a proper conversation about economics. There are millions of bullshit baseline assumptions that keep us from having an understanding of what’s happening.
A false sense of scarcity permeates the American psyche when there’s plenty to go around — most wealth is simply hoarded and hidden. Making money is…