Requiem For The American Dream

Requiem For The American Dream argues that the gap between the wealthy and the poor is not an accident, but rather the result of intentional policy decisions made by rich individuals and corporations to increase their power and decrease that of ordinary citizens.

Over the last 40 years, income inequality in the United States has grown to shocking proportions. While there are many areas of the socio-economic environment of the USA that went downhill, deregulation, privatization and even globalization played a critical role in the process.

Financial institutions have become vastly more powerful than governments or corporations while also controlling much of their revenue streams—from taxes on investment income to fees paid by consumers who purchase credit cards or take out mortgages.

In other words, as everything is privatized, governments now rely on the financial industry for a large portion of their revenue while financial companies rely on governments for stability. The problem? The working class is carrying the burden of these rushed decisions.

Deregulation is another problem because it allows banks to charge higher interest rates, issue misleading statements, and overall protect corporations in exchange for more profits. These macro-organizations know that they may be skipping the law at certain times, but that doesn’t impose a problem for them anymore.

We can see this phenomenon occurring as corporations are bashing unions and targeting their leaders. As employees start to speak up about issues at work, their voices are often silenced by the officials while their unions are dissolved. The lives of these people often get destroyed, while executives get away with it.

Noam Chomsky argues that globalization allowed corporations to import from low-income countries and grow even more powerful. Tax cuts for the rich and offshoring assets become a norm for every wealthy individual. Including organization that wants to maintain wealth, while the possibility doesn’t even exist for middle-income families. Government spending on such families or poorer people lowered significantly. While the remaining budget helped support these companies in exchange for a place in their world. These tax cuts allowed corporations to grow richer but also pushed families into poverty. For example, Chomsky says that in his view “the income tax has been converted into a device for subsidizing the rich.” How come? Well, the entire system of taxation works for the high-income profiles, as the money keeps on being redistributed upwards. Simply put, the system taxes working people at a higher rate than it does corporations or wealthy individuals. Even more, government spending on families was reduced to help support these companies, all while the middle class shrank and the poor one grew. American workers are left behind as corporations prefer to outsource jobs to other countries where…