Meritocracy? So the CEO who makes $6,000/hr is 400 times more meritorious and deserving the guy on the factory floor making $15/hour? Seriously? The trust fund kid whose invested wealth is earning him $5 million per year is 1,000 time more meritorious and deserving that the Mexican worker in an auto plant making $5,000 per year? Seriously?
Yes, Trump and his outspoken followers we were gleeful over the passage of a tax reform package the further concentrated wealth up the socioeconomic ladder. We are in the fourth decade of a drive to concentrate America's wealth and income to a small minority of the uber-rich. This began under Reagan and it's just kept going regardless of which party held political power. The general prosperity experienced throughout a broad spectrum of the American population in the 50s, 60, and 70sd has all but vanished. More people live paycheck to paycheck than ever before and they're still not making ends meet. Virtually all serious economists agree that the obscene distortion in the distributions of the US wealth and income have already done severe harm to the general prosperity and common good of the nation and that failure to restore some balance will be catastrophic for the US economy.
American society's degradation has been extensive, severe, and mostly ignored; and it continues unabated. The nation's unethical business, political and financial systems; corporate domination of politics; ineffective government; record individual and public debt; rampant incivility (even here on this website);and the record inequity of wealth distribution represent extreme systemic moral shortcomings and a failure of fundamental societal institutions.
America is not a meritocracy. It's plutocracy and a corporatocracy. 'Grab as much as you can get your hands on any way that you can do it and the other guy be damned.' That's not an advanced civilized society, that's the last step before you crumble back into the Dark Ages.
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