Replies to post #33937 on Politics and Money

[PegnVA]

I am in the process of reading Jeff Madrick's new book, AGE OF GREED, The Triumph Of Finance And The Decline Of America, 1970 To the Present. Madrick begins by talking about...
"a realatively unkown man named Lewis Uhler, a Southern Californian, who, like his father before him, hated the New Deal. He and others like him, who came of age in the 1950s, feared their personal liberty was in constant danger of being taken away by big government. Many of them were sincere, and most were angry - especially because in the 1950s and 1960s they weren't being heard. But they laid the foundation for a new age.
In those years, most Americans believed the federal government was good for them. Washington created far-reaching financial, social, and economic reforms in the Depression and managed the massive war effort in the 1940s. In the 1950s it built highways, set out to send men into space, and subsidized housing. In the 1960s, it created Medicare, expanded Social Security, adopted regulations to protect consumers and workers, passed long-awaited civil rights guarantees, and developed antipoverty prgrams. Progressive taxation to pay the bills was widely accepted as just. All the while, the American economy grew rapidly and wages doubled adjusted for inflation for workers at every income level.
Perhaps more than any other factor, punishingly high inflation in the 1970s changed all of this. Americans panicked. Well before incomes became highly unequal or the wealthy gained undue political power with outsize campaign contributions and well-financed lobbying organizations and think tanks, Americans came to belive that government had gone too far. The ideology of the Lewis Uhlers of America, long dormant, began to gain influence. Soon social programs were curtailed. Regulations were elimiated and weakened. Uhler among many others participated in a tax revolt that started slowly but then spread rapidly, well before Ronald Reagan was elected president. The new persistent refrain was that big government held all Americans back. The narrative came to dominate the public discourse."

Without giving away any more of Madrick's book, suffice to say it is an excellent read.