Conservatives love to claim that government policies have redistributed wealth downwards from the rich to the poor, when actually the opposite is true.
Beginning in the Reagan years, lawmakers began passing huge tax cuts for the rich, deregulating entire industries, and carving out new corporate loopholes. For those at the top, executive pay soared, Wall Street made a killing, and corporations grew even larger. Meanwhile, middle-class and working families faced stagnant wages, cuts to public education, and the rising costs of health care, housing, and basic necessities.
Overtime the imbalance has shifted wealth upwards from those at the bottom to those at the top. In 1980, the bottom 50 percent of Americans took home 21 percent of the nation's income, twice as much as the top 1 percent. But today the picture has flipped: the super-rich earn 20 percent of the nation's income, while the bottom 50 percent earns just 13 percent.
The Trump-Republican tax cuts for the rich and corporations would make the situation even worse. At a time of widening economic inequality, the last thing this country needs is to take even more from the middle-class and working families to enrich America's oligarchs. Your thoughts?
