Dr. Richard Wolff On the Reaganomics Scam and How it is Still Impoverishing All But the Very Rich

Thom Hartmann interviews Economist Richard Wolff on the RT network, explaining Reaganomics and how it has affected the U.S. since 1980. Some of us haved lived long enough to remember the post-WWII era, the Reagan years, and the Clinton-Bush-Obama era, and are in a position to know what it was like to live then and to observe how things have changed. Things have not changed for the better, I can assure you, unless you are in the top 10% in income.

I was born in 1945, just days before WWII ended. My parents lived in a small apartment in Jackson, Mississippi, but moved two years later to a modest three-bedroom home in what was known as the G.I. Subdivision. The houses were small, but the lots were large, which was perfect for kids, of which there were many.

These neighborhoods were about as egalitarian as you could get unless you were filthy rich, in which case you lived in a posh subdivision reserved for the wealthy. The rest of us, from lower middle class to the top of the managerial class, lived together in a fairly harmonious manner. Many of our neighbors had college degrees they earned under the G.I. Bill, which paid college tuition and living expenses for veterans of the war.

We expected to achieve the American Dream when we grew up: a suburban home, two automobiles, children who could attend good public schools and the resources to send them to college[1].

Most Americans are absymally ignorant of modern history, that is, of the 20th Century. It is not their fault; most governments prefer that their citizens remain ignorant of recent events, because if people knew how their present conditions came about they would in all likelihood grab their pitchforks and go after the power elite. Instead, history has been made into a dull irrevelant study that kills any interest a high school student may have in the subject. If they don’t know history, they will not be able to comprehend the lessons of history.

If Americans had possessed a decent knowledge of the Great Depression (1932–1942) and a modicum of economic understanding, they would have quickly seen through Ronald Reagan and his economic proposals as a scheme to enrich the upper classes by destroying the very institutions that were established during the ’30s to prevent future depressions. Dr. Wolff discusses all of this in detail in the above YouTube recording, which I strongly urge you to watch.
Don’t bother commenting until you have watched the interview with Dr. Wolff above.

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1. Most states funded their college and universities generously and kept tuition and expenses down to a level that almost anyone who wished could earn a degree. For those who could not afford to pay for college, there were plentiful grants-in-aid and scholarships available. Since 1980, state support for education has declined to the extent that students are expected to assume debt burdens that would have been unthinkable and outrageous before 1970. This gradual strangulation of public education was not the result of uncontrollable economic events; it was quite deliberate.  ↩