And JimG., you've got a couple of other things completely wrong too. First of all, people on welfare and people who work for low wages and not being supported by those who get high wages and pay taxes. It is the other way round.
The poorer people are, the faster they recirculate their money. They cannot afford to hold on to money, whether in index stock market funds, or any other way. They spend their money. And it tends to end up in the hands of those getting high wages. So if these high wagers don't like that some of it goes to taxes, fine, just refuse the income. The recirculation of tax revenues is what pays them their high salaries.
You need some large mechanism in place to redistribute wealth downwards, or the economy will come to a near standstill.
Most every society which has ever existed has divided into the extremely poor and the extremely rich. Ours would do the same.
What created a middle-class in the beginning was the subsidy of low cost or free land. And the people who came here from England, with very few exceptions, were dirt poor. They were not leaving England to get away from taxation. And certainly they would never have been subject to taxation without representation, any more than they would have been subject to any legislation without representation. I can only speculate as to what kinds of sources are influencing you and why you post some of the things you do.
Though coming here poor, many seem to have forgotten this.
But by around the time of the Civil War, this supply of low cost and free land was starting to run out. And so after the Civil War, you do start to see domestically generated economic stratification, as well as government policies designed to transfer wealth upwards. This "Gilded Age" was an ugly time.
The first of these world wide industrial recessions, caused by over production, particularly of steel, was in the early 1870's.
And as a result of this, pressure was applied to the Lame Duck Grant Administration to end Reconstruction ( federal occupation of the South ), and to turn the South into a kind of internal third world market, as well as to turn the West into a natural resource base to exploit. Capitalism works like this, always creating problems and never solving them, but instead finding ways to expand.
And the 1870's are also where Social Darwinism first got going, and then the 1880's were an especially reactionary decade.
This era was also when we first saw some movements to limit the power of Big Business. We saw this with the Grangers, and then with the Progressive Era and Teddy Roosevelt.
Now finally the excess production was soaked up, as it usually is, in large scale warfare.
After Teddy Roosevelt tried to run against Taft and get back in, splitting the Republican Party, and causing Wilson to be elected, that progressive wing of the Republican Party was gone forever, leaving only it's reactionary wing to govern after Wilson.
So as a decade of Laissez-faire brought us nothing but a horrible stand still, people learned. And they elected Franklin Roosevelt, and even he at first did not really understand the situation. But FDR would end up reinstating the middle-class by setting up a progressive income tax system, redistributing wealth downwards, and also by protecting the rights or workers to organize and gain fair wages and working conditions.
This sustained our middle-class, working well for over 4 decades.
After that our mitigated Capitalism still ran into problems with natural resource consumption, particularly oil. And then when people elected Ronald Reagan, he and his people dismantled what had been, and so that set us up for the mess we are in today.
Our country is dividing into rich and poor. The bogus pseudo science of Social Darwinism is alive and well. And a vast segment of the population is taken in by Right Wing media and its carefully crafted reactionary message.
SJG
Chaka Khan
youtube.com
