Rich paid taxes. We built civilization.

Xennials, Millennials, and GenZ might as well have lived through the Guilded Age and then the Great Depression.

That’s how fucked we are and will be.

EDIT: Gilded

I’m GenX, barely. When I tell Millennials that I never saw a truly homeless person in San Francisco until I was in my mid-teens people just say I’m lying. Before that the Federal Housing Authority funded housing for everybody: women, kids, men, alcoholics, drug addicts, ex-cons, everyone.

Yep. Lunch in schools, Parks had peewee football, and we had lifeguards at beaches.

Now, we just get told we can’t have nice things. All of that money is being transferred to people who have enough.

Stop defending people who take and take and then after they own everything say, “we shouldn’t have to give our money for welfare.” Your grandaddy _stole_ it all. No fucks given.

You have tax break after tax break. We should be using what money we have left for pitchforks.

We’re living in the time where those rich folks are getting their revenge for that time.

What the current generations don’t seem to understand is that this shit requires immense sacrifice to maintain… I’m not sure we’ve got anymore gas.

The rich also had yachts and summer homes and piles of blow in the 60s and 70s, let’s not pretend they’re suddenly impoverished and need the tax cuts

GIVE TEACHERS THREE FIGURE SALARIES!!!!!!! If we can give $17.76b to this orange troll, for NOTHING; then we can pay the people who EDUCATE our children….. 1776… what’s next?

And then Reagan came along.

We’re at a point now where if the rich simply paid a decent amount of taxes, America could be an insanely good place to live.

Near-future utopian levels of society.

But the common man, like you or me, would be too free. We would have too many options. We wouldn’t have to rely on them for anything. How are they going to dictate us if we don’t need them?

And what’s really depressing is many of the people that benefited from all of that as children and young parents are the same ones depriving the current generation

Then came Ronald Reagan.

What makes this even sadder is that we were very close to making the rich pay their fair share again: [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/irs-expects-to-collect-hundreds-of-billions-more-in-unpaid-taxes-thanks-to-new-funding](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/irs-expects-to-collect-hundreds-of-billions-more-in-unpaid-taxes-thanks-to-new-funding)

All we had to do was be a little more patient.

Accurate

Worth noting: they probably still didn’t even pay their fair share, they just paid *some* taxes as opposed to almost none.

This makes a very good case for the left, as icky as it might feel to most on it, to own patriotism. For all the shameful moments in our history, the fact is that the period most associated with Americana–the one the to which the phrase “MAGA” implicitly refers–was when the *economic* left was at its strongest.