The Reagan years between 1980 and 1988 to be sure had created over 19 million new (low paying)jobs, exploding technology, unprecedented prosperity and had rekindled national pride. It also led to firing of 10 million high paying manufacturing jobs as corporations received tax incentives to move their operations overseas.
In fact in the 1980's so many millionaires had been created that the term essentially had become meaningless. By 1988 it was estimated that there were over 100,000 decamillionaires.
But critics of the time saw another America were the 1980's were one last national fling with credit card economics one filled with beggars
It was also in the decade of the 1980's that the U.S. was transformed from the world's largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation. Throughout the 1980's conservatives argued that this really didn't matter.
At the end of 1986 the U.S. had a national debt of $269 billion, at the end of 1987 it was $368 billion, but by 1992 it was $3.5 trillion. It was the greatest economic miscalculation in recorded world history.
It is not enough to describe the U.S. as the world's richest nation between 1945 and 1992. What is more important is the distribution of its wealth.
The U.S. by 1984 had the greatest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation in world history.
In 1953 there were 27,000 millionaires, in 1964 90,000 millionaires, in 1972 180,000, in 1980 574,000, and in 1988 1.3 million.
In 1981 there were perhaps 10 billionaires in the U.S., 26 in 1986, 49 in 1987 and 52 in 1988. No parallel upsurge of riches had ever been seen since the late 19th century of the Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers.
But the downside to all this concentration of wealth was that wages-the principal source of middle and lower class income had stagnated through 1986. The Reagan decade was a heyday for unearned income as rents, dividends, capital gains and interest gained relative to wages and salaries as a source of wealth and growing economic inequality.
The top 10% of U.S. households controlled over 68% of the wealth of the U.S. by 1988.
The average millionaires income might be soaring, but the average family's income was stagnating since the late 1970's in real dollars. In fact real income in 1987 finally recovered back to 1973 levels.
The income of White males fell through the 1980's especially in the manufacturing sector as corporations received tax breaks to move their operations overseas.
The GAO reported in 1988 that there had been a resurgence of sweatshops and other businesses that openly violated wage, child labor, safety and health laws in almost every sector of the U.S. due to business deregulation.
While wages fell the number of economically active population fell as well throughout the 1980's. By the summer of 1988 45.3% of the inhabitants of New York city were not part of the economically active due to poverty, lack of skills and education, drug abuse, apathy or other problems. The nation of average of economically inactive was 34.5%.
Women were also losers in the Reagan Revolution. Families weren't just shrinking they were breaking down. 53% of all Marriages ended in divorce in the 1980's a trend that continues in the 1990's.
Household headed by women, especially those with children ranked well down on the income scale.
One survey that found that for those working in the 1980's they were working harder than ever before in the 20th century. Americans leisure time declined 37% between 1973 and 1987--from 26.2 hours per week to 16.6 hours.
In addition a new sector of the labor force emerged for the first time in the 1980's, "the contingent work force". Airlines, supermarket chains, offices and almost all businesses began to hire temporary labor rather than full time workers. It was cheaper and also seriously undermined the power of organized labor.
For the first time since the depression a majority of Americans by 1989 could not afford to buy a home.
In each period of American history wealth was redistributed regionally and from one income to another.
It's time to reverse Reaganomics and let the middle class prosper.
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