The Great American Unconspiracy Conspiracy
by Errington C. Thompson, MD
A belated Happy Fourth of July. I hope you had some time off. I hope that you’ve taken the opportunity to spend some time with significant others and/or family.
When we celebrate the Fourth of July, we are forced to look back and ponder our country’s history. When I look back at the 1950s and ’60s, I see that the majority of Americans lived pretty well. The average American was able to bring in enough money to buy a house, buy a car, and send their kids to college. The average American was able to take vacations. For most Americans, we were actually able to pay off our houses. We did not have tons of long-term revolving debt year after year, decade after decade.
The “New Normal”
To the average American today, these ideas, these concepts seem foreign. The graph is taken from United States census data: it represents Real Median Household Income, adjusted for inflation. Basically, since 1979, income for the average American has been flat. From World War II through 1979, Americans made huge strides; then, everything seemed to grind to a halt in the 1980s. We made a little progress in the 1990s but that’s it. Why?
I would suggest that there has been a great conspiracy perpetrated against the American people. The conspiracy is multipronged – economic, educational, international, healthcare, and labor. The conspiracy is designed to keep our wages suppressed. The conspiracy is designed to enrich the wealthy and the chronically impoverished the poor.
Busting Unions
Labor has been attacked on all sides. A strong labor union negotiates higher wages and better benefits for all its workers. The benefit to the middle class and the lower class is undeniable. Yet, union-busting, and making it more difficult to actually join a union, is what we’ve seen over the last several decades, beginning with the evisceration of the air traffic controllers union in 1981, when Ronald Reagan – the former union president of the Screen Actors Guild – fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers six months after taking office. Weaker unions equals lower take-home pay for the average American.
Making Health-Care Unaffordable
Everyone in the United States knows that healthcare costs have been skyrocketing. If you don’t have health care insurance and you have a catastrophic illness, it can bankrupt the average family. Along with this, companies are insuring less and less of their workers.
Just 15 years ago 69% of workers were covered by some sort of employee insurance; today that number is down around 57%. This doesn’t even include the fact that most healthcare plans covered everything 20 or 30 years ago and now they are picking and choosing what they cover with much higher deductibles. Again, this is taking money out of the pockets of average Americans.
The Giant Sucking Sound
Free trade equals decreased income to the average American. We’ve seen NAFTA and all of the other iterations of NAFTA wreak havoc on the American worker. We’ve also seen jobs being exported to Mexico, Malaysia, and China. Ross Perot was right when he said, during his 1992 presidential campaign, that “a giant sucking sound” was American jobs going south of the border. All of this equals less take-home pay for the average American.
No more upward mobility
My brother’s eldest daughter was just accepted to Oklahoma University. Out-of-state tuition to Oklahoma University is $35,000 a year. When I went to medical school, back in the mid-’80s, the University of Texas at Southwestern (Dallas) cost $500 a semester. School used to be affordable. Higher education was obtainable because the state subsidized education. This is no longer true.
We are being asked to pay more and more for higher education. This means that higher education is almost out of the reach of the average American. This means the average family which is taking home less is being asked to pay more and more for higher education. This double-edged sword cuts especially deep because education is the main tool that the lower and middle classes use to get ahead.
From a plain economic standpoint the average worker is bringing home less of a share of the overall economic pie. The top 1% are now taking home over 20% of the overall income and own more 35% of all the wealth in the United States.
The Big Lie of Reaganomics
Perhaps the biggest culprit of robbing the poor to pay for the rich is supply-side (or trickle-down) economics. Almost every American over the age of 35 has heard of trickle-down economics, championed by President Reagan’s economic advisors and by everyone in his party ever since. We were told that if we gave more and more tax breaks to the rich, the rich would then reinvest their windfall of money in the United States, and the benefits would “trickle down” to the rest of us. Supposedly this would make more jobs and would increase wages.
Unfortunately, that was a myth – or maybe a deliberate lie, swallowed by a populace ignorant of economics. Over the last 30 years, the theory and the practice of supply-side have been proven categorically false. “Trickle down” doesn’t work: More money to the rich equals more money to the rich.
A Secret That Everybody Knows
One could look at this as a conspiracy, but it is all out in the open. It’s not as if Washington is making decisions behind closed doors. This is an un-conspiracy conspiracy. The proponents of these policies have been proclaiming them from the rooftops since 1980. The fact that those same policies have brought the American middle class to its knees is part of their long-term plan, and it has succeeded.
In order for the American family to begin to get ahead, again, we have to break this vicious cycle. We have to stop giving tax breaks to the rich. We have to pay for education as a nation. We need to increased import tariffs in order to make American manufacturing competitive.
The only way to seriously control healthcare costs is to expand coverage into a single-payer system. Finally, we need strong unions. This comprehensive approach will bring back the American dream of prosperity and economic mobility for all of us.
