The class struggle against the poor in the United States is nothing new—it was formally launched in the early 1970s and has been implemented with great efficiency over the past 40 years. For about 30 years, from 1933 to the late 1960s, the United States followed roughly the same development path as postwar Western Europe, moving towards a social democracy. When former corporate lawyer Lewis Powell entered the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for corporate money to enter politics.
After becoming president in 1981, Ronald Reagan intensified the Supreme Court's attack on public welfare by cutting taxes for the wealthy, launching attacks on organized labor and rolling back environmental protections. This trajectory has not yet been reversed.
As a result, the United States has drifted further away from Europe in terms of basic economic decency, welfare, and environmental controls. While Europe by and large continues on a path to social democracy and sustainable development, the United States continues on a path characterized by political corruption, oligarchy, a growing gap between rich and poor, contempt for the environment, and a refusal to limit human-induced climate change. rush.Several numbers illustrate the difference. On average, EU government revenue accounts for about 45% of gross domestic product (GDP), while U.S. government revenue accounts for less than 30% of GDP. Thus, while European governments are able to fund universal access to health care, higher education, family support, and job training, the United States cannot ensure the provision of these services. European countries rank first in the life satisfaction rankings of the Global Happiness Index Report, and the United States ranks only 19th. In 2019, the life expectancy of people in the European Union was 81.1 years, and that of the United States was 78.8 years. As of 2019, the top 1% of households in Western Europe held about 11% of national income, compared with nearly 20% in the United States. In 2019, the United States’ per capita carbon dioxide emissions were 16.1 tons, while the EU’s was less than 10 tons.