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Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans, and the Decline of Middle-Class Prosperity Hardcover – January 26, 1993
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Teenage homelessness in the Chicago suburbs ... crumpled home values in Southern California ... the worst job market for college graduates in New York City since the Great Depression: It all added up to the sharpest economic decline in decades, provoking political unrest unequaled in sixty years. There had been declines before, but no previous postwar downturn so damaged the white middle class as a whole or raised such fears that Americans might lose the unique economic privileges that they have enjoyed since World War II. Boiling Point shows in dismaying detail what has happened to the middle class since the 1970s in disposable income, earnings, home values, job prospects, public services, assets and net worth, pension safety and health insurance, and the next generation's prospects of enjoying the same rising living standards and upward mobility as its parents had. And it was not a natural result of adverse global trends but of deliberate political choices.
In the Reagan-Bush years American leaders who had once spoken up for the average family were celebrating investors, speculators, and the rich, shifting the burden of taxes from the wealthy to the middle class while starving public services and disregarding the growing debt that would punish future generations.
The populist anger so vivid in 1992 is not a onetime phenomenon. It will persist, Phillips says, until the middle class resumes the road to prosperity under government policies that it considers fair. It is on this that the politics of the 1990s now depends.
- Print length307 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateJanuary 26, 1993
- Dimensions6.75 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
- ISBN-100679404619
- ISBN-13978-0679404613
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Product details
- Publisher : Random House; First Edition (January 26, 1993)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 307 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679404619
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679404613
- Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.75 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,634,778 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,433 in Political Economy
- #79,183 in Social Sciences (Books)
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The culprit - free-market conservatism ideology that brought tax reductions, financial deregulation, regulatory permissiveness, and glorification of the rich. For whose benefit - the rich. Per Phillips, the 1950s were the last indisputably 'good decade' for the American middle class. Devastation of the middle class defeated Bush and fueled Perot's insurgency. Unfortunately, after Clinton won he used his authority to pass and endorse massive increases in free trade, often for foreign policy purposes. (Reality - if not Clinton, this certainly would have happened under Bush II.) The tax cuts started us down the path of deficits, temporarily delayed by Clinton, and then rapidly worse under Bush II.
Phillips sees the decline of the middle-class as more than a cyclical problem, rather a long-term result of bad choices made by American business and political leaders.
Some have said that Phillips deserves to be treated as an oracle. Reading this book now certainly substantiates that assertion. We all should have read the book when it was originally printed and heeded it.
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Despite its age, I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in American politics and economics.



