Hartmann
Report - The destruction of the American Dream isn’t
just an abstraction; it’s measurable. In 1980 when Reagan was elected
president, at the peak of the American Dream, fully two-thirds of American
families were in the middle class. A single income could support a family, buy
a house, take an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and even retire
with dignity.
Today, only 43 to 47 percent of
Americans qualify as middle class (depending on whose numbers and what criteria
you use). And it takes two full-time incomes today to achieve what a single
union job gave a family in 1980.
Consider wages. If wages had kept
pace with productivity since 1980, the median American individual worker’s
income would be over $100,000 today. Instead, it’s around $50,000. With help
from the Reagan Revolution, that missing $50,000 has largely gone into
corporate profits and executive compensation: in other words, into the money
bins of the nation’s oligarchs.
Then there’s housing. In 1980,
the median home price was about $47,000, roughly three times the median
(single-worker) household income. Today, the median home price exceeds
$400,000, while median household (two-worker) income is around $75,000. That’s
more than five times the household income, and in many cities it’s ten times or
more. People who could have bought a home in their twenties, like Louise and I
did in the 1970s, now struggle to do so even in their forties.
The same is true of education.
When I attended college in the late 1960s, I paid my tuition working part-time
jobs. My mom paid her way through four years at Michigan State in the 1940s
working summers as a lifeguard and propping airplanes. Today’s post–Citizens
United students graduate with an average of $30,000 in debt, and total American
student loan debt exceeds $1.7 trillion. We’re the only developed country in
the world where this is true, and an entire generation is now starting life in
a financial hole that previous generations never faced.
Or consider healthcare. In 1980,
healthcare costs were 8.9 percent of GDP, and most hospitals and health
insurance companies were required by state law to be nonprofits. Today,
healthcare costs are nearly 20 percent of GDP, and half a million American families
declare bankruptcy every year just because someone got sick. Medical bankruptcy
like this doesn’t exist in any other developed country in the world. Only in
America.
And then there are the under-siege unions. In
1980, about a third of American workers belonged to unions, so those union
contracts established the wage floor for another third of American non-union
workers. Today, after forty-five years of Reaganomics’ relentless assault
grounded in corporate constitutional rights, union membership has collapsed to
around 10 percent. When workers can’t organize, they can’t bargain for fair
wages, so corporate profits and billionaire wealth soar while workers struggle
