Someday, historians will note the American decline began in the 1980s when wealthy conservatives figured out how to take policies designed to impoverish the middle class, wrap them in a sugar coating of patriotism and Christian values, and get millions of middle class voters to swallow them. In fact, not just swallow them, but come back time and again and ask for more.
Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, does a great job in the following short video clips of explaining how we got into the mess we're currently in:
* Why Taxes Have to Be Raised on the Rich
* The War on the Poor and Working Families
The question for us in 2014 is -- will those future historians be writing about a decline which ultimately led to the demise of the United States? Or will they be writing about a period of darkness before the American middle class, what was left of it, woke up and took back their democracy?
How the story ends is up to us.