'America's Comeback' is nothing but a con job

Donald Trump takes the stage to address supporters at his rally, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, he was sitting under a tent that had “The American Comeback Tour” printed in huge letters across all four sides. It was the theme of his tour of college campuses, a tour run by his Turning Point organization that was, according to NBC News, early-funded by 10 morbidly rich right-wingers.

The question is “America Comeback” to what?

In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office

Fully two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class,
College was so cheap you could pay your tuition with a weekend job,
Healthcare was inexpensive and widely available,
Women and minorities had achieved legal (albeit not yet actual) parity with white men,
And school and mass shootings were largely unknown because weapons of war were mostly outlawed from our streets.
Today, however, as a result of the Reagan Revolution:
Only around half of us are in the middle class,

College debt has crushed two generations to the point where they can’t start a family or buy a house,

A half-million families end up homeless or bankrupt every year because somebody got sick,

The GOP is leading an effort to make it harder for women and minorities to vote or maintain employment,

And, with more guns than people, mass shootings are an almost-daily occurrence.

It's easy to see why an appealing pitch to the nation’s young people would be “comeback” or “Make America Great Again.” But what caused that “greatness” that we need to “come back to” and what wrecked it?

The American middle class is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1900, only about 17 percent of us were in it; by the time of the Republican Great Depression it was about a quarter of us.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn into office in 1933, he embarked on a radical new campaign to create the world’s first widespread, more-than-half-of-us middle class. It had three main long-term components.

First, he passed the Wagner Act in 1935 that legalized labor unions and forbade employers from bringing in scab workers or refusing to recognize a union. That gave workers democracy in the workplace, and they used that power to demand that as their productivity increased, so would their pay and benefits.

Second, he established a minimum wage to make sure that people who worked full time would never end up in poverty.

Third, he raised the top income tax rate to 90 percent for the morbidly rich and 52 percent for corporations.

That high top tax rate on the rich meant that the average CEO took only about 30 times what the average worker did (because he’d be paying 90 percent or 74 percent after taking the first few millions), leaving far more money in the company to give raises and benefits to workers.

Corporations could get around their top tax rate by investing in their business. Research and development, new product roll-outs, advertising and marketing, and increasing pay and benefits were all tax-deductible, and that high tax rate incentivized them to do these things that built a strong and resilient manufacturing economy (stock buybacks were considered illegal stock manipulation until 1983).

Reagan undid all of that, lowering the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent to 27 percent (it’s since gone up to 34 percent), cutting the top corporate tax rate to 34 percent, and legalizing stock buybacks, so now CEOs are taking literally hundreds of billions out of their companies (Musk is set to make a trillion) and wages for workers have been mostly flat even since 1981.

In similar fashion, Reagan declared war on labor unions so effectively that that one-third of us protected by unions in 1981 has collapsed. Today private sector union membership rates are only 5.9 percent, with some states even lower (North Carolina 2.4 percent, South Dakota 2.7 percent, and South Carolina 2.8 percent.

Regarding college, 80 percent of the cost of an education in state-run colleges and universities was paid by government when Reagan came into office, leaving about 20 percent of the cost to be covered by tuition. The Reagan Revolution changed all that, so that today tuition covers the largest percentage and the state is only covering around 20 percent-40 percent (it varies from state to state).

Healthcare was inexpensive when Reagan came into office because most states required both insurance companies and hospitals to run as nonprofits. There weren’t any billionaire insurance industry executives like Dollar Bill McGuire until Republicans changed the rules of the game, letting insurance companies and hospitals run as profit-making operations at the expense of the American public.

Great strides had also been made in opportunity for minorities and women by 1981; just a decade earlier women had gained the right to have a credit card or sign a mortgage without a husband, brother, or father’s signature. Affirmative Action programs were pulling racial and religious minorities into the mainstream of the American economy, kicking off a widespread Black middle class.

So, if Charlie Kirk was all about an “American Comeback,” what were his positions on the issues that created that broad, widespread middle class that Republicans and Trump promise us they’ll restore when they “Make America Great Again”?

On taxes, Kirk wanted to replace the progressive income tax with a 10 percent flat tax, so even the poorest person is paying income taxes on their meager income while the morbidly rich get a massive tax break.

He called unions “cartels” and celebrated teachers losing the right to unionize.

On college tuition, he opposed any plan to reduce student debt or increase federal or state funding to higher education, calling free college a “bribe.”

And on health care, Kirk opposed the kind of universal health care every other developed country in the world has, calling the VA an example of failed “government-run” healthcare.

With regard to the rights of women and minorities Charlie was also outspoken, most notably saying about prominent Black women Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom he labeled “affirmative action picks”:

“You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

He added:

“We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.”

Finally, with regard to guns, even though 87 percent of Americans want reasonable gun control, Kirk was all-in with the firearms industry, arguing that “some gun deaths every single year” are worth the cost of the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. How do we protect our kids? Kirk said, quite simply, more guns was the solution:

“If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?”

So, the question: How does doubling down on low taxes for the morbidly rich, keeping our health care for-profit, withholding higher education funding, gutting unions, increasing the number of guns, and trash-talking women and minorities make America “comeback”?

Republicans and their well-paid hustlers (Kirk took in hundreds of millions) have been promoting these positions for forty-four years and the result has been the gutting of the American middle class, now leading to anger, resentment, and political violence.

It’s way past time for America to return to the policies and positions that history proves (both in America and around the world) produce and build a strong middle class, the essential foundation for economic and political stability.

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