The crisis of neoliberalism: America arrives at one of history's great crossroads

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

68% : Free trade, he said, had been a disaster for American workers.
61% : Nobody, Trump proclaimed, would be a better friend to Social Security, Medicare, housing supports and other entitlement programs that supported the poor and middle class alike than him.
58% : Bringing American manufacturing back home, raising top income tax rates to the above-50% level that stabilizes the explosion of great wealth, and building a 21st-century social safety net with free college and Medicare for All would guarantee that the Democratic Party -- as it did from the 1930s to 1980 -- would control most of the U.S. government for generations.
55% : Deregulation would also end economic depressions, because no banker or stockbroker in his right mind would take such big chances that a misstep could wipe out large sectors of the nation's economy.
53% : Public schools around the country have been kneecapped as their resources are reallocated to corporate, for-profit charter schools.
50% : Most Americans had no idea, really, what this new political/economic ideology meant; they just knew it involved free trade, economic austerity, tax cuts, deregulation and privatization.
50% : They rolled out the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which later birthed the World Trade Organization (WTO) and negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that was later signed by Bill Clinton.
46% : Free trade was also going to eliminate poverty in the world by giving every country an "even playing field" to compete for manufacturing jobs.
46% : The oil shock so shook our economy that Richard Nixon, no fan of government intervention in markets, resorted to wage and price controls while people formed mile-long lines to get gas on the odd- or even-days they could do so, based on the last digit of their license plate.
45% : But starting in a big way in the 1950s, a number of front men for big money industries and dynastic fortunes stepped forward to argue that all this regulation and taxation was not a benefit or economic stabilizer
44% : Everything from trickle-down to busting unions to "ending welfare as we know it" and "tough on crime" policing fell under this single rubric.
44% : Expanding on the idea, Reagan and George Bush the Elder negotiated what Bush called a "New World Order" of "free trade.
42% : In the neoliberal story, Black people weren't isolated in their neighborhoods by redlining and racist designs for highways, power plants and other polluting industries; they lived in "public housing" on "welfare" and made more and more money, the neoliberal story went, as they had more and more babies out of wedlock.
42% : Deregulation, we were told, would enable all this "free market magic" to happen quickly, because businesses were more nimble and knew better what they needed to do to make their products than did "government bureaucrats."
42% : Do they finish the job and end neoliberalism altogether, bringing our manufacturing back home, rebuilding the power of organized labor and raising taxes and regulations?
40% : Meanwhile, harsh prison sentences, mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws would end the scourge of "super-predators" on our streets.
40% : Privatization was a subset of deregulation, moving control over essential services like water, power and schools out of the public and governmental arena and into the hands of the rich and their allies.
12% : Milton Friedman argued (in his book "Capitalism and Freedom") that high wages, taxes and regulation were stifling the economy in a way that would surely lead to hyperinflation and ruin, predicting a disaster far worse even than the Black Tuesday stock market crash and ensuing Republican Great Depression that Herbert Hoover kicked off in 1929.

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