FDR implemented a robust policy of reducing social inequalities (with tax rates on the highest incomes nearing 70%–80% for half a century) and investing in public infrastructure, health, and education.
Reagan dismantled that policy & deregulated government & economic policy with the aid of Clinton [repeal of Glass-Seagal Act-a main plank of FDR’s banking regulation] / deregulate derivatives & credit swaps despite warnings from Brooksey Born [ head of Commodity Futures Trading Commission] that played a key role behind the 2008 economic collapse & ushered in globalization beginning with NAFTA accelerating the giant sucking sound.
In the second 1992 Presidential Debate, Ross Perot argued:
> We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It’s pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, … have no health care—that’s the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south. or west to China. And besides the loss of manufacturing jobs consider all the China coal burning power plants spewing pollution. And the entry of lying, thriving, currency manipulating China into Most Favored Nation trading status.
And we need to remember the previous president voted for the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the foundational law of Reaganism, which dismantled Roosevelt’s progressive tax system by lowering the top tax rate to 28%.
Methinks it is the overwhelming influence of private money in US politics, as pervasive among Democrats as it is among Republicans, that is responsible for this state of affairs.