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From the NYT (P. Mishra): America, from exceptionalism to nihilism
Excerpts:
The US lost its way with the advent of Reckless Ronnie to the White House - a "celebrity" with exaggerated political instincts. Ronnie returned the favor of supporting his candidature by the wholesale take-down of Upper-income Taxation during his tenure of office. (See here the result of the monumental tax-cut.)
The direct consequence was evident. A flood upwards of Insufficiently taxed Income into Wealth. Which economists at the UofCal were able to observe statistically, as seen here:
The US has come full-circle to the era of the 1920s where most of the wealth is owned by a sickening small percentage of American families. Meaning what?
The Wealth is not returned to the economy, except in "investments" that are a small fraction of the total. So the Wealth just sits and earns interest for the elderly who could care less about increasing it until passed on to their inheritors.
(And is in most case supposedly lost by the second-generation that did absolutely nothing - except being born - to deserve it ...)
Excerpts:
Sub-title: The U.S. leads the free world in its helplessness before the dissolution of its most cherished values.
Extravagant promises by ruling elites, and their unexamined assumptions, are at least partly to blame for this moral breakdown in the world’s most powerful country. In 2011, for instance, Mr. Obama had claimed, “We are perfectly poised to make the 21st century again the American Century.” But such onward-and-upward narratives seemed to mock the suffering, despair and frustration exposed in different ways by Black Lives Matter or the white Rust-Belt proletariat. Mr. Obama, who recently accepted a very lucrative speaking engagement on Wall Street, now looks like just one of the fortunate members of historically depressed minorities who mistake their own upward mobility for collective advance..
By the 1980s, Reagan or Reaganites would brush aside any suggestion that there was a “national malaise.” The collapse of Communism seemed to vindicate the American model. The disappearance of an antagonist that had defined America’s self-image for much of the 20th century unleashed the solipsistic idealism that Niebuhr, among many midcentury intellectuals, had warned against. Postcommunist Russia received an army of American economists, technocrats and journalists determined to usher the country into American-style democracy and free markets.
Generalizing about the world at large on the basis of personal success, or proclaiming that life has never been so wonderful, can be politically disastrous, it turns out, especially when loss, decay and fear sum up the experiences of many other people. We will have learned nothing from Mr. Trump’s victory if we do not examine today how and why American elites came to indulge in ressentiment-generating boosterism just as economic and cultural inequality was becoming intolerable to so many, and how their loss of intellectual credibility and moral authority brought about the post-truth era.
The US lost its way with the advent of Reckless Ronnie to the White House - a "celebrity" with exaggerated political instincts. Ronnie returned the favor of supporting his candidature by the wholesale take-down of Upper-income Taxation during his tenure of office. (See here the result of the monumental tax-cut.)
The direct consequence was evident. A flood upwards of Insufficiently taxed Income into Wealth. Which economists at the UofCal were able to observe statistically, as seen here:
The US has come full-circle to the era of the 1920s where most of the wealth is owned by a sickening small percentage of American families. Meaning what?
The Wealth is not returned to the economy, except in "investments" that are a small fraction of the total. So the Wealth just sits and earns interest for the elderly who could care less about increasing it until passed on to their inheritors.
(And is in most case supposedly lost by the second-generation that did absolutely nothing - except being born - to deserve it ...)