Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

But I will agree, it really depends on the person. When you're young and have a lot of energy, drinking 2-3 beers throughout the day might seem like a good idea. I never did; but the fact that many people are blissfully unaware of how 2-3 beers throughout the day impacts them still shocks me.

What you're really talking about is corruption. Specifically, that comes from wealth inequality due to financialization and letting the wealthy dodge their taxes.

To use your farm analogy as an example, it takes about 2 acres of land to support 1 family growing gardens and livestock with subsistence farming. So a modern farmer with 40 acres should be able to support 20 families and earn about 20 times original income. In other words, if we pay $1 for a tomato at a store, that tomato would cost about $20 to grow ourselves if we divide 1 year's labor and materials over the year. At least that would be the equivalent cost in terms of time and labor if remove money from the equation.

But we don't really do that. Farmers struggle regardless of how large their farm is. So who gets all of that extra money? Banks, middlemen, equipment manufacturers, shippers, stores, the government, etc. That's where financialization converts the real labor of earned income into the profits and leverage of unearned income.

There are major dates when this happened in the US. Modern agriculture had progressed to the point where we could feed the whole world by about 1965. Also technology had advanced enough that everyone could have access to information and automate workflows by about 1985.

But around those dates, we elected Nixon and Reagan to shift incomes from the working poor (us) to financial elites (the capitalist class). Backlash to progress in civil rights in the 1990s resulted in the Bush v Gore decision electing GW Bush. Obama produced the former president. We see this cycle throughout history - for every two steps forward there is almost always one step back.

Wealthy financiers now hoard most of the wealth produced by the working poor. Studies have shown that millennials are working harder for a smaller piece of the pie than workers did during the Great Depression:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/27/millennia...

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/millennial...

(there are nearly an infinite number of these articles and studies)

That's hard to believe when we look around at all of the marvelous technology when everyone has a smartphone. What changed is tax policy. Between the New Deal in the 1930s and trickle down economics in the 1980s, the top tax rate was between 60 and 90%:

https://www.statista.com/chart/16782/historic-marginal-incom...

How that translates into real economic terms is, when business owners collect their profits at the end of the year, they can decide to keep it or invest it back into their business. If the tax rate is 35% like today, they'll often keep it. But if it's 90%, they put it back into their business to avoid it being taken as taxes. This is the key reason why US industrial capacity increased like it did for 50 years between about 1940 and 1990, and the Baby Boomers enjoyed the fruits of labor from previous generations. And why today, whole communities have their wealth sucked out as franchise fees to corporate chains rather than fed back into infrastructure and government services. AKA the Walmartization of small town America.

So now that money's all gone, sunk into McMansions and luxury cars and a Wall Street that booms the more that Main Street busts.

This election between Harris and the former president is about whether we want to pass the torch to Gen X and start addressing the rampant corruption that has saddled anyone younger than 50 with cynicism that the economy will improve in the future, or just let it slide and ignore corruption with stuff like Project 2025 cancelling the National Weather Service so that we no longer see the effects of global climate change.

Now, we can be skeptical that the candidates are more than figureheads. It's rational to see that democrats abandoned the needs of labor since Clinton rolled back social safety nets in the 90s. And that republicans put money in people's pockets through deregulation, basically removing liability from polluters and others who profit from externalities, so that those associated costs get paid by future generations.

But what we can't endorse is the othering of races and genders. Anyone younger than 50 knows it's off-color to comment on someone's race or gender in polite conversation. Yet we see it on the news, as politicians do it openly and set a poor example for their supporters to follow.

If you're saying that it's hard to integrate a multicultural melting pot like the US, well, that argument can't really be allowed to stand. Because we shouldn't decide economic policy based on racism or sexism.

Sure, democratic candidates generally support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). But that's a far cry from dividing the population along ethnic lines to garner political support, as we're seeing from republican candidates. There's a difference between working to overcome the lingering effects of generational racism and actively stoking it.

So I would say, yes, it's hard to get the US to agree on anything when half the population actively votes against its own self-interest. But that's not some law of nature, it's a result of the wealthy and powerful spreading propaganda and using regulatory capture to keep workers divided so they don't rise up and overthrow their rulers.

TL;DR: the main lever that controls how much the economy benefits the middle class or the wealthy is tax policy. It currently benefits the wealthy to an extreme degree while the middle class has largely been replaced by the working poor. Because the top tax rate was higher when the middle class prospered (this is the academic view).