PEAK REAGANISM = A MAJORITY-POOR AMERICA
The Hartmann Report
Thom Hartmann
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2019
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
As of this year, new data shows that for the first time since World War II middle class Americans are no longer a majority. We are a majority-poor country now. Death rates for young working people have increased substantially- for the first time in the modern era- because of poverty in general and lack of access to health care in particular. Why is it so expensive for working people to merely live, and why is it so expensive to get ahead or pay for a college education?
Where is all the money our work generates going to? How much money does the top 1% need to be happy? Have we reached 'Peak-Reagonomics'?- an era in which some combination of poverty, drug addiction, obesity, and despair haunt the lives of so many Americans? What can the Progressive agenda hope to do to make things better? Is there a chance this could all change with the 2020 election?- because people's lives are at stake.
Plus Thom reads from Harvey JK's book 'Make America Radical Again'.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Tom Hartman program. |
| 0:15.0 | Welcome back, Tom Hartman here with you. |
| 0:18.0 | Young Americans are dying right now in record numbers |
| 0:22.0 | by young in particular 25 to 34 year olds that's the |
| 0:27.0 | group that is dying the most but in general 25 to 64 year olds. This started in the 1980s. |
| 0:36.8 | Throughout the 1970s death rates were going down. In the 1980s death rates started going up very slightly but it has |
| 0:46.0 | really picked up recently and what has really picked it up is in my opinion the |
| 0:51.6 | Reagan Revolution we have now reached full Reagan |
| 0:56.4 | Revolution. In 1981 he started out destroying workers rights, destroying unions, |
| 1:01.2 | which of course as people lost Union jobs, they lost health care and |
| 1:04.7 | things like that. |
| 1:06.8 | And this year, for the first time in generations now, the number of Americans who are, quote, middle class, the number of Americans |
| 1:17.7 | who are defined as middle class by our government statistics for the first time |
| 1:21.9 | since the 1940s has dropped below 50%. |
| 1:28.6 | We're not even a majority middle class country anymore. We're a majority poor country now. And when you look at, you |
| 1:38.5 | know, and this is the result of Reagan, the Reagan Revolution, changing our tax code. There have been six major tax cuts since |
| 1:46.4 | Reagan's first one. And what this has done is it has transferred something on the order of six or seven trillion dollars out of the wealth of the middle class |
| 2:00.0 | used to be you know being middle class I mean back in the 60s, 70s, even the 80s before Reaganism really sunk in. |
| 2:09.5 | You know, people have bought a house, they bought a car, sometimes they had a second house or vacation |
| 2:14.4 | home, they took vacations. |
| 2:16.2 | That was the American dream, being middle class. |
| 2:19.2 | It's gone. |
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