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America Keeps People Poor on Purpose: A Timeline of Choices Made to Increase Inequality
Illustration: Dan Perjovschi
By YES! Editors, YES Magazine, August 22, 2014 – http://tinyurl.com/mo5llwd
In his deeply researched book Who Stole the American Dream?, Pulitzer Price-winning journalist Hedrick Smith reports on the structural choices that have brought the united States to a crisis of inequality.
He describes “the heyday of the middle class”, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, when higher wages gave tens of millions of families steady income to spend, generating consumer demand, expansion of production and higher living standards.
Social movements of the 1960s, building on labor agreements from earlier decades, pushed forward new legal protections for consumers and the environment.
Smith’s detailed timeline from the book, excerpted and adapted below, charts how strategic lobbying and legislation over the next four decades gave corporations dominion over the economy and eroded the security of the American middle class.
This infographic was featured in The End of Poverty, the Fall 2014 issue of YES! Magazine. It was adapted from Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith. Random House Publishing Group, 2012, 592 pages.
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