All I am saying, if I was locked in a room with Hitler, Bin Laden, and Reagan. I had a gun with two bullets. I would shoot Hitler and Bin Laden. Then proceed to beat Reagan to death with a giant purple dildo.
I almost wish there was a hell, so I could go to there and beat the shit out of Ronald Reagan.
There is. You’re living in it now.
There has been 6 presidents since Reagan, how is our current economy his fault?
Because actions can have long term consequences, and fixing those consequences can take a long time. Especially when people invested in the status quo hold a lot of power.
He’s not solely responsible, but he was a gatekeeper of a lot of shit that was let loose during his tenure.
I mean there is like 100 other things I can think of that are more responsible for todays economy than a president from 40 years ago. That would be like Reagan blaming Hitler for an economic slump.
The precedence for not having adequate taxes for high wealth has been devastating for our busineesses. You use to have to be good to make money back then as opposed to simply having large amounts of money allowing to easily grow it. Earning an additional dollar in investment was harder and harder the more your company made which forced it to run efficently or several smaller ones could eat your lunch.
Can you elaborate or reference books or economic terms on this? Genuinely interested, never heard this before.
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Honestly the biggest difference with the 90% marginal rate is that the reputation of your company used to be more valuable than cash.
Back then to avoid the top bracket, you’d reinvest into your company and make sure it paid you and your family out for the next hundred years.
Now you don’t have to deal with all that. Just sell out or cash out asap, and you don’t really need to deal with making sure the company is well run or maintains a reputation.
In fact, a reputation since the 1980s has increasingly just been an untapped source of cash. Buy the company, cut every corner, and it’ll take years for the reputation to catch up to how shit the product has become.
This has been the biggest driver of enshittification over the past fifty years.
The current added push to enshittification is venture capital drying up. Consider Uber, a company whose entire business model was to skim money off of drivers who provided all of their own equipment. Once you’ve scaled enough to dwarf the relatively fixed cost of building the app, nearly everything they bring in should be pure profit. But they ran at a huge loss every year. Why? Because the way to make money in the 2010s wasn’t to build a better mousetrap and sell it for profit. The way to make money in the 2010s was to attract venture capital and cash out. The more you could spend, the more attractive you’d look to hedge funds and investors.
Now with relatively easy 6% investments lying around left and right, the desperate search for investment dumps is gone. All these places that were structured for big numbers to get a higher valuation suddenly need to just be profitable off their mousetraps.
Does that make sense?
Yes. Fascinating, thank you.
I just found a Matt Stoller article that has a bit different, but compatible, take on the same thing. You can scroll down to the “counterfeit capitalism” heading.
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Pouring concentrated sugar down someone’s throat will give them an energy boost, but there will be consequences if you do too much.
That was Reagan’s policies. Most of the “wealth” generated only existed on paper.
Take GE as an example. They used to have a bunch of factories and products that they made in those factories. Then the 80s hit and Jack Welch took over as CEO. He scrapped the factories and had GE start outsourcing, well, everything. He also used the GE financial department as an illegal bank.
Anyway, the stock price went through the roof, because GE could always claim that they were making all sorts of profit with no expenses… except the truth was that they were basically just an unregulated bank with some product branding deals.
They’ve gone bankrupt a few times now.
That’s how most of the Reaganomics worked. Paper profits as the real wealth went into the hands of the super rich.
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The bad management was Jack Welch, and his bullshit was only possible due to Reagan loosening regulations on businesses.
“legendary CEO” my ass. Dude was a fucking disaster.
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Strange? Accurate.
He took a healthy company that turned a consistent profit in to a house of cards built on lies. It blew up the stock price for a decade or two before the cracks began to show.
Jack Welch was 100% about short term profit at the expense of long term stability.
His stack ranking fucked over thousands at GE alone, and countless more at all the companies who followed suit. It was and still is a brain-dead policy.
The list goes on, but it all boils down to taking an innovative company and turning it into an unregulated bank, an unregulated bank that was at the heart of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
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