Socialist Progressives

but certainly tolerable and within the inflation built into any fiat currency. That's one thing they simply didn't understand then, the necessity to index wages and benefits to it. The "stagnation" wasn't in wages, it was in the paper value of stocks and bonds, which generated income even as they failed to generate increased net worth on paper.

That's what the Republicans used to convince the WWII generation that the economy was in the toilet. Combined with the oil shocks, wages that didn't keep up with the double digit inflation, and bracket creep into high tax rates in a progressive system that hadn't been indexed to inflation, it was an easy sell for Reagan and his cronies to come along and dismantle the New Deal.

The New Deal had been the best deal labor had ever had. It was a terrible deal for retirees on fixed pensions and rich men who wanted to get richer faster. The former could have been solved by indexing benefits to inflation. The latter didn't need a solution as much as it needed a sales campaign to convince the rich that they were doing just fine on interest and dividends, and they were. Anyone who paid even cursory attention to his portfolio did well. It was those who ignored it while they joined the jet set who found themselves having to work for a living.