[ Your generation today holds only 4.6% of the nation’s wealth
and you’re most likely struggling to own a home & are deeply in
debt. What happened? In a word, Republicans…]
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DEAR MILLENNIALS: I’M SORRY WE DIDN’T STOP THEM  
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Thom Hartmann
July 13, 2022
The Hartmann Report
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_ Your generation today holds only 4.6% of the nation’s wealth and
you’re most likely struggling to own a home & are deeply in debt.
What happened? In a word, Republicans… _

, Image by Hebi B. from Pixabay

 

Dear millennials: back in the 1980s a lot of us worked like hell to
try to stop the Reagan revolution. We failed. This may be our last
chance to save American democracy and the American middle-class.

When my boomer generation was the same average age as your millennial
generation is today, back in 1990, OUR GENERATION HELD 21.3% 
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THE NATION’S WEALTH. Louise and I shared in that wealth; although
we were still in our 30s, in 1990 we owned a profitable small business
(our fourth) and a nice home in suburban Atlanta.

That was, in fact, the “American dream.” It was normal then. My
dad (born 1928), who worked in a tool-and-die shop, was able to buy a
house, a new car every two years, and take a two-week vacation every
year because the middle class in America before Reagan had a pretty
damn good life. He retired in the 1990s with a full pension that let
him and my mom travel the world.

YOUR GENERATION TODAY, IN CONTRAST, IS ABOUT THE SAME NUMBER OF PEOPLE
BUT HOLDS ONLY 4.6% 
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THE NATION’S WEALTH and, if you’re the same age I was in 1990,
you’re most likely struggling to own a home, are deeply in debt, and
find it nearly impossible to start a small business.

Yes, you read that right. Boomers in their 30s owned 21.3 of the
nation’s wealth; Millennials in their 30s today own 4.6% of the
nation’s wealth.

WHAT HAPPENED?  IN A WORD, REPUBLICANS.

George HW Bush was president that year, and you were probably just
born around then: the millennial generation spans those born between
1981 and 1996. But we Boomers remember it well.

FIRST, GOP FAT-CATS CAME FOR YOUR WAGES.

Those first two decades of the Reagan Revolution saw the first major
attack on workers’ wages  since Democratic President Franklin D.
Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act, giving union
members legal protection from physical and economic violence, way back
in 1935.

In 1990, Republicans were still just getting started: 56% of workers
who applied for union representation got their union
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That wasn’t as good as during my dad’s generation — 80% of
workers got a union
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they petitioned for one in the 1940s — but it was still a far cry
from what you’re facing today as giant trillion-dollar corporations
employ the billion-dollar union-busting industry (that largely
didn’t exist in 1990) to keep you from having democracy in the
workplace.

In large part this is because “right to work for less” laws —
that allow employers to gut their unions — began spreading in a big
way in the 1990s. The notorious Taft-Hartley law that gave states the
legal ability to destroy union rights was passed over President Harry
Truman’s veto in 1947, but the _National Right To Work
Committee_ wasn’t formed until 1995.

IN EVERY SINGLE CASE, ANTI-WORKER RIGHT-TO-WORK-FOR-LESS LAWS HAVE
BEEN PASSED IN STATES CONTROLLED BY REPUBLICANS AT THE TIME OF
PASSAGE; DEMOCRATS HAVE FOUGHT THESE ANTI-WORKER LAWS FROM THE
BEGINNING AND CONTINUE TO DO SO.

Nonetheless, employers have big bucks and can buy a lot of elections
and politicians: what started as a trickle in the 1950s has turned
into a flood since the 1990s.  Today right-to-work-for-less
states include [[link removed]] Arizona,
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Iowa,
Kentucky, Michigan, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Missouri,
Nevada, North Dakota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, South
Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

THEN THEY CAME FOR YOUR RIGHT TO AN EDUCATION. 

Before Reagan became governor of California, the entire University of
California system was free.  Reagan did away with that as governor,
and then, as president, began the methodical process of eliminating
federal and state support for tuition
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saying he didn’t want to “sponsor the intellectual curiosity” of
“brats” who “protest my policies.”

I went to college — briefly — in the late 1960s and the only
person I knew who had college debt was a friend working on his
graduate degree at MSU. I paid my tuition working part-time jobs as a
dishwasher at Bob’s Big Boy on Trowbridge Road in East Lansing and
changing tires and pumping gas at the Esso station across the street.

My mom paid her own way through 4 years of MSU in the 1940s with the
money she made as a summer lifeguard up in her home town of
Charlevoix, Michigan. My dad, like most men of his generation,
was paid to go to college
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the GI Bill.

Now, Republicans have not only changed the bankruptcy laws so that you
are no longer “cleared“ after seven years like it was when I was
coming up, but you can’t even discharge student loans in bankruptcy.
This was arguably one of the largest gifts the GOP ever gave the
banking industry.

AFTER THAT, THEY WENT AFTER ENTREPRENEURS AND LOCAL BUSINESSES.

I dropped out of college in part because the small business Louise and
I had started in 1969 — an electronics repair shop across the street
from MSU — had grown to five employees and I was making as much
money as my dad.

Back then pretty much every business in East Lansing was locally
owned, from the restaurants and hotels to the furniture and clothing
stores and appliance shops. The only chain store I remember was the
Sears that anchored the local mall; almost all of the rest of the
stores in that mall were locally owned.

But then, in 1983, President Reagan ordered the federal government to
stop enforcing the anti-trust laws that had been on the books for
almost 100 years; the resulting “merger mania” consumed the
American economy, with “M&A Artists” (Mergers & Acquisitions) and
speculative banksters like the one Michael Douglas played in _Wall
Street_, were ascendant.

Buying up small businesses and crushing them together into giant
conglomerates, shedding “excess employees” and employing
“economies of scale” were the main way to make money, instead of
serving customers and local communities.

Now their absolute market dominance and greed are driving
out-of-control inflation, as the normal competitive pressures that
keep such behavior in check are dead. And they enthusiastically squash
new, upstart businesses — from tech to retail to consumer goods —
like bugs.

Thus, your chances of being able to successfully start a business like
we did are tiny compared to what they were before the Reagan
Revolution when literally tens of millions of Americans owned small
enterprises that they would often hand down from generation to
generation.

THEN THEY STARTED SQUEEZING YOU FOR CASH WHEN YOU GOT SICK OR INJURED.

Medical debt is another burden that came out of the Reagan Revolution
that destroys millions of American families a year: for half-a-million
families every year since the 1990s it’s so severe they have to give
up their homes and possessions to declare bankruptcy.

America is the only country in the world that experiences medical
bankruptcies like this.

When Louise and I started that electronics shop (as teenagers!), we
were able to provide all of our employees with full medical insurance
because, at that time, both insurance companies and hospitals
were _required by law_ (in Michigan and most other states) to be
non-profits.

Drug companies weren’t monopolistic monoliths and pharmaceutical
prices were reasonable, too. The country wouldn’t have tolerated
asses like “Pharma Bro” back in the 1960s and 1970s.

But the neoliberal Reagan Revolution did away with all that,
encouraging states to change their laws to bring “free market
principles” to healthcare, ending nonprofit requirements. There was,
after all, big money to be made, and when somebody is sick and you
hold the cure, you have the ultimate power to extract every last penny
they have. 

As _The New York Times_ noted in an article titled _Medical
Mystery: Something Happened to U.S. Health Spending After 1980
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“America was in the realm of other countries in per-capita health
spending through about 1980. Then it diverged.

“It’s the same story
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health spending as a fraction of gross domestic product. Likewise,
life expectancy. In 1980, the U.S. was right in the middle of the pack
of peer nations in life expectancy at birth. But by the mid-2000s, we
were at the bottom of the pack.”

Yep, not only did the parasites get rich, but our nation’s life
expectancy actually went _down_, relative to other wealthy nations.

Now, as the _Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) _reports
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“We find that 23 million people (nearly 1 in 10 adults) owe
significant medical debt. The SIPP survey suggests people in the
United States owe at least $195 billion in medical debt.”

AND IF THE GOP DIDN’T NAIL YOU MILLENNIALS ON ANY OF THE ABOVE, THEY
FIGURED OUT HOW TO GO AFTER YOUR NEED FOR A ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD.

In the 1990s, as part of Newt Gingrich’s notorious “Contract On
America,” Congress “deregulated” the financial industry to the
point that it’s become a giant blood-sucking leech attached to your
back.

Thus, millennials are struggling with housing costs today, and for
good reason. Trillion-dollar hedge funds and investment groups are
purchasing as many as half (in some towns more) of the
available-for-sale housing, so they can turn them into rentals and
then, when they’ve cornered the market, jack up the prices.

When my dad bought his home in the 1950s the median price of a
single-family house was around 2.2 times
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median American family income.  Today, the Fed says
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$374,900 while the median American income is $35,805
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more than ten-to-one between housing costs and annual income.

Louise and I bought our first home in our mid-twenties, as did many of
our friends.  Banks were locally owned and worked with you; finding
fixer-uppers was easy.

NO MORE.

As noted in a _Wall Street Journal_ article titled “Meet Your New
Landlord: Wall Street
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in just one suburb (Spring Hill) of Nashville:

“In all of Spring Hill, four firms … own nearly 700 houses …
[which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”

This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg. 

“On the first Tuesday of each month,” notes the _Journal article
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a similar phenomenon in Atlanta, investors “toted duffels stuffed
with millions of dollars in cashier’s checks made out in various
denominations so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their buying spree
with trips to the bank…”

The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America;
the investment goliaths use fine-tuned computer algorithms to sniff
out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market
and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the
market.

AFTER STRIPPING NEIGHBORHOODS OF HOMES FAMILIES CAN BUY, THEY THEN
BEGIN RAISING RENTS TO EXTRACT AS MUCH CASH AS THEY CAN FROM LOCAL
WORKING CLASS COMMUNITIES.

In the Nashville suburb of Spring Hill, the vice-mayor, Bruce Hull,
told the _Journal
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used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000
a month.”  Today, the _Journal
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“The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned
by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a
month…”

As the _Bank of International Settlements_ summarized
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of the years since the Reagan/Gingrich changes in banking and finance:

“We describe a Pareto frontier along which different levels of
risk-taking map into different levels of welfare for the two parties,
pitting Main Street against Wall Street. … We also show that
financial innovation, asymmetric compensation schemes, concentration
in the banking system, and bailout expectations enable or encourage
greater risk-taking and allocate greater surplus to Wall Street at the
expense of Main Street.”

It’s a fancy way of saying, “Big banks and hedge funds are now
worth trillions while you and your community are destitute.”

And forget about getting a loan to start a small business in this
big-bank environment of today.

When Louise and I started our first business, we did it with a $3000
loan from a small local Michigan bank.  Back then bankers were part
of the local community and eager to do what they could to help the
community grow and prosper.

Nowadays they just want to extract every penny they can from you so
their CEO can buy another megayacht.

AND THEN REPUBLICANS CAME FOR YOUR WEALTH, IN A HUGE WAY.

Finally, perhaps the most important reason millennials are so badly
screwed these days is the various changes in our tax code that began
in the 1980s.

Reagan dropped the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74%
down to 27%, and cut corporate tax rates from 50% to functionally
nothing.

America’s richest millennial, Mark Zuckerberg, owns fully 2 percent
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1/50th of ALL the wealth of ALL millennials in the country.

The average billionaire pays an income tax rate of under 3%, and the
majority of our nation’s largest corporations not only pay nothing
in annual income taxes but most have so gamed the system that they get
money back.

AND WHERE DOES THAT MONEY COME FROM?  IT’S TAKEN OUT OF THE TAXES
THE GOVERNMENT COLLECTED FROM YOU AND ME.

This 42-year-long process, with Reagan’s original massive tax cuts
amplified by trillions more in tax cuts for the morbidly rich from the
George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations, has produced a $50
trillion transfer of real wealth from the middle class to the top 1%.

YOU READ THAT RIGHT: THEY’VE TAKEN _$50 FRIGGIN TRILLION DOLLARS
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OF OUR POCKETS OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS AND STASHED IT IN THEIR MONEY
BINS. 

When Reagan was elected there wasn’t a single billionaire in
America; now they’re appearing like popcorn, while all around us
homelessness spreads like a relentless fungus, destroying the lives of
millions of Americans — particularly millennials
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THE BOTTOM LINE, MY DEAR MILLENNIAL FRIENDS, IS THAT YOU’VE BEEN HAD
BY THE GOP.

And now that Republicans have handed all that money over to the top 1%
— and five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in _Citizens
United_ that billionaires and corporations owning politicians isn’t
corruption or bribery but “free speech” — its getting harder and
harder to do anything about it.

Every time any sort of reform — even modest, reasonable reforms —
come before Congress, a united block of Republicans in the Senate haul
in another billion dollars in campaign contributions and Mitch
McConnell and his friends kill it in the Senate.

And don’t get me started on climate change, which Republicans, right
across-the-board, continue to deny, in deference to the fossil fuel
industry and its billionaires that funds their elections. They’ve
put money and power above the fate and future of your and your
children’s planet.

THEY EVEN TRIED TO END OUR 240-YEAR EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRATIC SELF
GOVERNANCE, AND ARE NOW ACTIVELY EMBRACING NEOFASCIST AUTOCRACY,
OPENLY TRYING TO EMULATE THE RIGHTWING STRONGMAN GOVERNMENTS THAT HAVE
TAKEN OVER RUSSIA AND HUNGARY.

Like Russia and Hungary, they’ve even succeeded in overturning the
right to abortion and are openly embracing homophobia and misogyny.

AND DID I MENTION 400 MILLION GUNS DRENCHING OUR COUNTRY IN BLOOD, AND
REPUBLICAN SENATOR JOHN CORNYN JUST TODAY SAYING THAT REPUBLICANS ARE
UNIFIED ACROSS-THE-BOARD TO PREVENT ANY FURTHER ACTION TO STOP GUN
VIOLENCE IN AMERICA?

I’m so embarrassed to have to say this, but my generation let this
happen. Back in the 1980s, huge numbers of Boomers voted for the
Reagan Revolution that kicked off this whole political and economic
death spiral. The guilt is largely ours.

And now, these Republicans are trying to marinate your children in
their white supremacy and racism by forcing teachers to push a false
narrative about American history — all while they try to rig our
elections by purging millions of minority, Boomer, and Millennial
voters from the rolls.

The good news, however, is that, increasingly, our two generation are
working together to throw Republicans out of office and elect
progressive Democrats who understand these issues and know how to do
something about it. 

From the 80-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders to 19-year-old progressive
candidate for the Ohio House Sam Lawrence
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me!), progressives are growing in political power at the same time
America is waking up from the fog of bullshit Republicans have been
crop-dusting over us since 1981.

All is not lost; change is in the air.

Get out there. Get active. Tag, we’re it!

* Millenials
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* Decline in the Standard of Living
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* tax cuts
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* republicans
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