What is wrong?

[jtuck004]

31. Our administrations, for some time now, have been perps, not just players.

If you are reading through this OP, you probably realize it's not just the tax code. Rather, administrations from Reagan through this one have purposely structured the economy, your life, to benefit and sustain the wealthy at your expense. The rules they make and apply to the working folk are purposely absent from those who are in the higher "professional" classes, and it is by design. Not an accident. And it works to the detriment of all of us. Fair taxes are important, but there is much more to address, a route which addresses the disease, not just the symptoms.

Dean Baker, an economist from Swarthmore and University of Michigan, and Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, lays this out in his latest book, (>> Here: << - Important enough that it's free for the reading, in three different formats, also for sale at Amazon - )

One of many resources worth reading if you want to know more about and be better at recognizing exactly why we are where, and what we must change to get better.

From "The End of Loser Liberalism"

"For the most part, progressives accept the right‟s framing of economic debates. They accept the notions that the right is devoted to the unfettered workings of the market and, by contrast, that liberals and progressives are the ones who want the government to intervene to protect the interests of the
poor and disadvantaged.

But this view is utterly wrong as a description of the economy and competing policy approaches. And it makes for horrible politics. It creates a scenario in which progressives are portrayed as wanting to tax the winners in society in order to reward the losers. The right gets to be portrayed as the champions of hard work and innovation, while progressives are seen as the champions of the slothful and incompetent. It should not be surprising who has been winning this game.

In reality, the vast majority of the right does not give a damn about free markets; it just wants to redistribute income upward. Progressives have been useful to the right in helping it to conceal this agenda. Progressives help to ratify the actions of conservatives by accusing them of allegiance to a free-market ideology instead of attacking them for pushing the agenda of the rich.
...
It is not by luck, talent, and hard work that the rich are getting so much richer. It is by rigging the rules of the game: From a political perspective it is much better to say the progressive agenda is about setting fair rules for the market. The argument that highly paid professionals should face the same international competition as factory workers is a compelling one, and more arresting than the argument that we should redistribute money from the winners to the losers."

Since public debate is so badly misinformed on almost all economic issues, most people will be hearing these arguments for the first time. Few realize that an agency of the government, the Federal Reserve Board, actively throws people out of work to fight inflation. Few know that the loss of manufacturing jobs and the downward pressure on the wages of manufacturing workers are not accidental outcomes of trade agreements but rather the whole basis for them. (The enigma of trade is that it can make a whole country richer and yet most of its people poorer.) And hardly anyone understands that a higher-valued dollar intensifies the hurtful effect of trade by putting further downward pressure on the wages of workers subject to international competition.

The reason I put it here is to add to this OP, because the kind of people reading through it are the kind that are more likely to take advantage of what Baker writes. I think