I know I'm a week late with this post, but I want to post my feelings on the death of Margaret Thatcher. You can probably tell by the title of this post, that I won't miss her. Actually, it's a little sad that millions of people around the world celebrated her death so enthusiastically.
Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1979, and immediately began waging war on the poor and middle class of the United Kingdom. She promoted deregulation, privatisation of public companies, reduced the power of trade unions, and instituted a poll tax on the citizens of the United Kingdom.
I'll paraphrase this summation of Thatcher's rule that I read the other day, (I apologize to the author, I can't remember his name to properly attribute this quote.) "Thatcher came to power by convincing the middle class that the poor were stealing from them, and once in power she began stealing from the poor and middle class and giving it to the wealthy."
This same strategy was adopted by the American Republican Party with the election of Ronald Reagan, and is still the foundation of Republican policy today. This strategy has been so successful that it has even pulled the Democratic Party to the right, witness President Obama's plan for chained-CPI increases for social Security, or President Clinton's Welfare to Work program. The current mantra is that our federal deficit is out of control and massive Federal spending cuts are necessary, and that the poor put upon wealthy cannot be asked to pay more in taxes. Meanwhile, the wealthy in this country have magnified their wealth immensely, while middle class wages have stagnated or, in many cases, disappeared.
Here is the big problem, as I see it. In America, the poor have no voice, and are for the most part too apathetic to even vote. The middle class is content with the status quo. As long as their income is secure, and their health care is paid for by someone else, they see no need for change. When their rug is jerked out from under them, (for instance, when the factory where they work is moved to China) all of a sudden they are no longer middle class, and as stated before, have no voice. So we see the incremental dismantling of the middle class, not because the poor are stealing from them, but because the rich are doing so.
The odd thing about the decline of the middle class is that as a nation we produce more per ca pita today than at any time in our history. According the the Bureau of Labor Statistics, our Gross Domestic Product per ca pita has more than tripled since 1960 when is was about $16,000, to about $48,000 today in adjusted real dollars. I remember when I was young, the general consensus was that as technology improved in manufacturing and automation, we would all benefit from better and cheaper goods, and work less with more pay. Well, technology did it's part, it is possible to produce more and better goods with less labor. The only problem is that the wealthy have skimmed the cream off the milk.
