The Life in “All in the Family” is also No Longer Attainable

In the 70s, the show "All in the Family" was hugely popular. Archie Bunker had a house, a stay at home wife, and his daughter and her boyfriend lived with them in her home while she went to college. Archie supported them all driving a forklift on a high school education.

The change came in the Reagan years as tariffs to protect US markets that had been in place since the founding of the country were removed. The changes allowed capital to exploit people in other countries. We could not produce goods under such conditions in the US, it would be illegal. But through corruption and mental gymnastics, it became legal to purchase goods produced undere horrible physical and ecological conditions. Eventually we accepted goods produced by virtual slaves (see iPhones and textiles).

Along with the removal of tariffs came the slow destruction of labor unions and the non-enforcement of anti-trust laws. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to look at an Amazon warehouse worker of 2021 and see that she or he should be able to live like Archie did in the 70s, but they don’t. They don’t because they have no union protection, and Amazon is allowed to be a monopoly in several different business areas simultaneously.

Jeff Bezos made $2000/second in 2020. Apple sits on over $200,000,000,000 in cash. Google over $100,000,000,000. Facebook $50,000,000,000. That amount of capital is spread over a few thousand individuals, instead of over 200 million American workers. The math is not difficult. The velocity of money when it is in so few hands is near zero.

The solution is also not difficult:

• Tax the billionaires out of existence.
• Tax capital gains as regular income.
• Restore inheritance taxes back to what they were 40 years ago.
• Require goods sold in the US to follow the same production laws as goods produced in the US.
• Make every full-time job have a living wage requirement, full medical, unemployment and retirement

Yes, prices on consumer goods will increase by about 5%. Workers making 100% more income will take that tradeoff in a nanosecond.

The only people financially hit by this plan would be a few thousand billionaires and Wall Street bankers. They’d still be super wealthy, they just would no longer be equivalent to small countries in wealth and power. That is one of the main reasons it needs to be done.