As the coronavirus pandemic continues to tear across the globe, it has ripped away the thin veneer of our modern American society and revealed the ugly oligarchy underneath. As the mortality rate of African Americans hit much higher rates than that of white Americans, as our unemployment systems have been overloaded by the tens of millions of people now out of work, as millions of low paid workers have had their jobs ruled as "essential", necessitating their returning to work in potentially life threatening positions, the virus has shown the notion that America was the best country in the world for anyone other than the rich was nothing but a lie. Instead we are the country with the highest number of coronavirus infections in the world (although to be fair, we do not have the highest per capita), and we are the country with a leader who wildly flails around for someone else to blame, from former president Barack Obama, to China to the World Health Organization.
Yes, it's easy to point the finger for this terrible outbreak at president Trump, and while I certainly think that's understandable, our country's poor response to what is a national crisis has its roots in a fundamental shift that took place decades ago. Back in the late 1970's, when Ronald Reagan first decided to run for president, he was perceived by many as too extreme. Even George Bush, his eventual vice president, once dismissed his economic policies as "voodoo economics," while his infamous blaming of air pollution on trees was widely mocked. Reagan, of course, not only won, he shifted both the Republican party and the entire country to the right politically. Before him, the Republican party didn't care about abortion either way, (the last Republican president before him, Gerald Ford, was a pro choice supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment!) but he permanently linked the party to the Christian Fundamentalist movement, making it the party opposed to gay rights along with abortion.
But it was Reagan's economic policies that really have had a huge lasting impact: when he took office, the top income tax rate on the wealthiest Americans stood at seventy percent. By the time he left office it was under thirty percent. Although it has gone up slightly since then, it still stands today at only around thirty eight percent. He also cut the tax on capital gains, which similarly benefited the rich. The sad result of this is that we have now had several generations of rich people in this country who see their low tax rates and decadent lifestyles as a normal thing. And the Republican party has gotten so extreme on this issue that they have been pushing to completely eliminate the estate tax, which is only used against the wealthiest two percent of the population!
This creation of a super rich upper class in America has a devastating effect: although we are told that hard work, talent and ability are the keys to success in this country, the real advantage truly comes from being born to a family of enormous wealth and privilege. Our last two Republican presidents have shown that you can spend the first forty years of your life being a lazy drunk (like George W Bush) or declaring bankruptcy multiple times (like Trump) without suffering ill effects because they've always had their daddy's money to bail them out. Neither of them are an example of hard work and perseverance; quite the opposite, they're more like American royalty.
So what has this got to do with the coronavirus? Well, when the voodoo failed and those tax cuts for the rich did not bring the increased revenue that was promised, the Reagan administration began gutting as many federal government programs as possible. The philosophy of that administration was that any federal spending that didn't go to the enormous defense budget was money wasted. This had repercussions that were both immediate (a huge surge in the homeless population) and long term (a general degradation in branches of the federal government that weren't part of the military).
And what are the long term results of this defunding of the federal government? Crumbling infrastructure, a wildly unequal public school system in which the best schools are only in the richest neighborhoods, a partially privatized prison system that has helped lead the country into having the largest prison population on the planet, an equally privatized healthcare system that has left tens of millions of Americans without any healthcare, and a federal government unable to deal with a national crisis like the coronavirus because of decades of defunding groups like the Center for Disease Control. Consider that after Ronald Reagan first proposed his ridiculous Star Wars nuclear missile defense program back in the eighties, the government wasted billion upon billions of dollars on it, without it ever coming close to working. Billions more have been spent on different nuclear missile defense programs since then, without one of them ever proving successful. Imagine if those billions had been spent on healthcare, infrastructure, or yes, some kind of pandemic response team. It's depressing to consider how much money has been thrown into the gaping maw of defense spending in the past few decades when just a small amount of spending elsewhere could have made the country much better off.
As I previously stated, part of this mess is certainly because of the incompetence and single minded focus on the stock market that is found in the Trump administration, but another important part is the decades of conservative thought that funds our defense spending and nothing else. A change may soon be coming: as terrible as this pandemic is, it may cause Americans to start realizing that having a healthcare system built around employer providing healthcare is utterly flawed, especially when tens of millions of Americans lose not only their jobs but also their healthcare after being laid off through no fault of their own. Not to mention the fact that the younger generation of Americans now understand that socialism, done properly, is not a terrible thing. The fact that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were recently able to inject left wing ideas like Medicare for all and a wealth tax into the political mainstream shows that we may soon see a sea change into a more just society and a rejection of Reagan's "greed is good" legacy. Personally, I don't think that it can come soon enough.
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