Inflation was blamed as the big bogeyman starting in 1969 when Richard fucking Nixon took office. He blamed it 100% on greedy workers demanding high paychecks, especially those greedy workers in unions. He didn't get a hell of a lot of traction with it until OPEC started with an embargo and then tripled the price of offshore oil. That handed his successor, Ford, the runaway inflation that the GOP had been screaming about for years but wasn't there. He, too, blamed greedy workers who thought they should be able to live decently by the sweat of their brows.
A 40 year policy of making sure wages lagged far behind inflation was put into place, continued by the conservative Democrats who ran and were elected to counter the fictitious turn to the right the country was supposed to have made. And media continued to lie about what was happening to purchasing power at the bottom of the pyramid, where we were all living.
Reagan jiggering the tax code to favor the richest just put the whole thing on steroids.
Never forget what the conservatives in both parties have done to us. Never forget they all blamed inflation on us, instead of a combination of the inflation built into fiat currency by the Fed plus the OPEC oil shocks. Never forget that the minimum wage was originally set to allow a family of four to manage on a full time wage without subjecting them to extreme penury.
Know who your enemies are. They are the conservatives who always describe themselves as pro business or fiscally sane. They're not.
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