What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . and What Other Countries Got Right
George R. Tyler
Language: English
Pages: 576
ISBN: 1937856712
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The American economy has experienced considerable growth in the last 30 years. But virtually none of this growth has trickled down to the average American. Incomes have been flat since 1985. Inequality has grown, and social mobility has dropped dramatically. Equally troubling, these policies have been devastating to both American productivity and our long-term competitiveness.
Many reasons for these failures have been proposed. Globalization. Union greed. Outsourcing.
But none of these explanations can address the harsh truth that many countries around the world are dramatically outperforming the U.S. in delivering broad middle-class prosperity. And this is despite the fact that these countries are more exposed than America to outsourcing and globalization and have much higher levels of union membership.
In What Went Wrong, George R. Tyler, a veteran of the World Bank and the Treasury Department, takes the reader through an objective and data-rich examination of the American experience over the last 30 years. He provides a fascinating comparison between the America and the experience of the “family capitalism” countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
Over the last 30 years, they have outperformed the U.S. economy by the only metric that really matters—delivering better lives for their citizens. The policies adopted by the family capitalist countries aren’t socialist or foreign. They are the same policies that made the U.S. economy of the 1950s and 1960s the strongest in the world.
What Went Wrong describes exactly what went wrong with the American economy, how countries around the world have avoided these problems, and what we need to do to get back on the right track.
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What they could use as a threat.”52 These public relations campaigns were conducted in conjunction with niche law firms specializing in union busting. Lawyers taught executive suites where enforcement was weak, how to bend the rules, and how to greatly muddy the simplicity of union-organizing elections. New York Times journalist David Leonhardt explained: “Companies pay minimal penalties for illegally trying to bar unions and have become expert at doing so, legally and otherwise.”53 The.
The border.69 The controversy has sparked a bit of reform in Bern, although the Swiss idea of tax reform was for the legislature in mid-2012 to raise the forfait to a slightly higher multiple of the cost of an annual stay.70 Turning now to corporate taxes, US Treasury department economist Harry Grubert indicates that an era of competitive tax cuts internationally for corporations began with the arrival of the Reagan era in the United States and United Kingdom.71 Multinationals began to conduct.
James MacGregor (historian), 284–85 Bush, George H.W. (President), 24, 41, 181, 184-6, 187 deregulation of the savings and loans, 78 Bush, George W. (President), 30, 41, 86, 215, 217, deficits don’t matter, 208 economic Darwinism perspective of court appointees, 285 election, housing bubble and Alan Greenspan, 214, 220, 222 federal prosecution of bank fraud was sharply rolled back, 87–88 “Free market capitalism is … the engine of social mobility, the highway to the American Dream,” 43.
Conducting fractional reserve lending, and stock exchanges. Each was essentially in place around the time settlers reached Jamestown. That allowed greedy sovereigns and schemers during the Colonial era to profit on a mass scale from the opportunities offered by credit. Perhaps the most famous bubble was the 1636 Tulip Mania that caused the Dutch to wildly bid up prices—some writers suggest even so high that the value of one bulb could feed a merchant ship’s crew for one year; woe the unfortunate.
Pressures and empowering an obsessive focus on maximizing productivity and stakeholder prosperity. Codeterminism proved a success in the larger coal and steel firms where it was initially installed. The German industrial machine has never looked back as the practice spread to the entire economy by the 1970s and then to much of the rest of northern Europe. German employee representatives hold one-third of Aufsichtsrat seats at public corporations with 500-2,000 employees and one-half of all board.