It seems to me that the problem of the United States today is still essentially a middle-class problem!
The United States after World War II, including the Cold War, relied on a large middle class that provided a steady stream of innovation and consumer markets. In particular, a series of laws, such as the Veterans Bill of Rights passed in 1944, the Employment Act of 1946, and the Housing Act of 1949, transformed the resettlement of a large number of demobilized soldiers from World War II into "teaching people to fish".
The most important of these is that the federal government funds veterans to continue to receive free education or technical training, and provides them with the necessary learning supplies and living allowances to help them complete secondary or higher education – effectively breaking the long-standing aristocratic and privileged stratification of American education (high school students were rare in the United States before World War II: only 3% of Americans had a college degree in the 1940s, and only 23% of military personnel had a high school degree)—When the Act ended in 1956, Some 7.8 million veterans have received education and training, and higher education in the United States has rapidly become widespread.
In addition, after the soldiers who returned from the war were trained on the battlefield of blood and fire, their thinking and cognition became more conservative and more traditional, so a huge middle class with high education, self-reliance, and conservative traditions was quickly born, and the class structure of the United States was thus presented as an excellent spindle, thus laying an extremely solid foundation for the rapid development of the United States after World War II.
It can be said that after the end of World War II to the 80s, the United States was the first era of the United States, during this period, the United States had developed industry and economic prosperity, leading the world's richest countries such as Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and other countries, and the standard of living and technology far exceeded that of the Soviet bloc.
Another point that has to be mentioned is that at that time, whites still accounted for the majority in the United States, and the proportion of blacks and other minorities was low.
At that time, many American cities had large factories, and Americans could find suitable jobs in their hometowns, and the average person could enter the local factory after graduating from high school, and the family could live a middle-class life with one person's salary. Even ordinary Americans live in abundance.
But that all ended with the end of the Cold War.
However, after the Cold War, with the exodus of multinational corporations, this virtuous circle was broken!
Capital is like water, which will always flow to the capital depression.
Capitalism is ruthless, indifferent, cruel, and its essence is the pursuit of profit.
With the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of globalization, many large European and American companies have moved their factories to countries with lower wages such as East Asia to save costs and obtain higher profits.
After the 90s, IT giants and financial predators on the east and west coasts of the United States spared no effort to advocate globalization in order to grab high profits from the world, which led to the deterioration of the economic situation in the central region of the United States. The gap between the East and West Coasts and the Middle United States is widening.
Another reason is the strength of American labor unions, which has led to the continuous rise in wages and benefits of American workers, forcing American companies to abandon negotiations with unions and leave other countries, resulting in the closure of American factories and the loss of jobs.
The factories that remained in the United States gradually fell into disrepair, and the once prosperous factories and their communities continued to decay and became "rust belts", and the vast number of Americans with low education levels lost their jobs one after another, falling from the middle class to the bottom of society, becoming what Hillary Clinton called "the wretched people".
As a result, many industrial cities in the United States have fallen into a vicious circle: community, middle class, enterprise, tax revenue, employment, service, community, and middle class The closed loop has been broken!
Enterprises leave, employment disappears, and multinational enterprises cannot be controlled; **Without taxes, it is not possible to continue to provide services.
In contemporary America, the shrinking middle class, the unemployed army, the Rust Belt, and the hillbilly tragedy ......