Why the American golden age was caused by leftism and why it ended.

Firstly I should point to this video here Drew vid Drew expressed many of these points better than I ever could, so please watch his video.

Next I should make clear, though this is somewhat American centered as I am an American if this applies to America much of it could apply to the rest of the world, onto the rant.

Most consider "THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM" to be from roughly the 1940's to the 60's or 70's, the time of the AMERICAN DREAM you could buy a good picket fence home for a horse and two barrels of peanuts, work hard and succeed, truly the American Dream.

But what most don't think about is all the left wing policies that made it possible. Taxes on the wealthy were higher than they ever were before and would be after, union membership was multiple times higher, adjusted for inflation minimum wage was many times higher, welfare programs reached their apex, and the US was heavily regulated. This led the US to historically low inequality, propelled the US into an economic superpower, and made the American dream. You truly could work hard and at least join the middle class. Things were not perfect but these big programs helped bring America out of it's biggest economic crsis and into a golden age. But I know what some are thinking "why would we have stopped?" And I'll explain what happened.

Most would just pin it on Reagan, he cut taxes for the rich, let money into politics, deregulated like crazy, upped military spending a ton, weakened unions, but that's the cowards way out, after all, the people didn't elect Reagan for kicks and giggles, the economy was already bad.

We start our story with LBJ, yes, he holds some blame, why? His hawkish policy. Piles of money were used and little economic strength was generated, this would eventually devastate American manufacturing when it ended, little was invested outside of war, so most manufacturing slowly got behind. Next Nixon, he deregulated some things, weakened anti-trust cut taxes for the rich a bit, spent even more money on the army, really everything Reagan would do but less. Most importantly though he weakened trust in the government, making people tend to want a smaller one. And Ford.... honestly didn't have much time to do anything, so onto Carter. Carter would do some of the most deregulation yet, and even did tax cuts, and worst of all allowed monopolies, duoplolies, and oligopolies to crop up, which had power to raise prices, keep wages down, and lobby congress to give them more and more tax cuts and deregulation. And finally Reagan, and well, I already talked about him​, and everyone talks about him, so see above

The loss of the American dream was not simply Reagan, not simply the republicans, not globalization, and certainly not socialism. The loss of the American dream was the fault of a long line of mistakes, the loss of the American dream was the loss of left wing policies in America, many of the policies considered by many as "un-American" and "socialist". So maybe, just maybe, you should try socialism as well

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