PART I: THE 100 YEAR WAR ON BUSINESS AND SUCCESS (1913-2013)
Chapter 1
THE LEGACY OF PROGRESSIVE IDEOLOGY -
(WHERE HAD ALL THE BUSINESS GONE?)
The SHORT answer is that it’s gone overseas - along with a staggering $1.2 trillion in assets and profits-to avoid the highest business income tax in the world -- 35% before double taxation! (For more on this, see John Chambers’ (CEO of CISCO) 2011, "60 Minutes" interview with Lesley Stahl in Chapter 10.)
To understand why, by 2013, America's corporations were fleeing America in droves--and taking their profits and capital and manufacturing and headquarters and jobs with them,-- it is vital to understand the forces that built up over 100 years of progressive (liberal) ideology and the steady inroads that progressivism made over time by utilizing an ever- expanding government and government regulation of American life. With that said, bear in mind that this is not a treatise on 100 years of progressivism; rather it is an attempt to hit a few highlights that explain why business and free enterprise seem to be “from Mars" while progressives and big government believers seem to be “from Venus". It’s like men and women without the wine, roses and candlelight.
Very simply put, progressives were and are the people who believe that they and some other smart people know what is going on, so they need to run things for all the people who aren't as smart or aware of what is transpiring.
Furthermore, progressives have been obsessed with expanding their power and elite view of the world by implementing their utopian ideas that are rooted in the unfortunate belief that government can best rule mankind --and not the other way around as set forth by the founders. By 2013, it seemed clear that the progressive President, (who famously indicated that "We the People" were still "clinging” to guns and religion), typified the overriding progressive view that the old fashioned notion that Americans could effectively rule themselves was about as outrageous as the old-fashioned notion that the antiquated U.S. Constitution was for serious application in the modern world.
Capitalism however, was a major stumbling block for progressives. Big corporations, successful individuals and those who believed in "rugged individualism" had inherent power of their own. These were the people and entities that were major hurdles. Their successes were frequent antitheses to progressive egalitarian aspirations. Interestingly, these successes were the people and entities that President Barack Obama first described as “our enemies” and then told the crowd in Rhode Island "they can come along for the ride, but they'll have to sit in the back".
Nobody, however, could have embodied the elitist view more than the ultimate academic, a 10-year President of Princeton University, the acknowledged "Father of Progressivism”, Woodrow Wilson. As the only "Ph.D President”, he knew far better than the founders that their short-sighted, rigid Constitution couldn't meet the needs of a modern society that needed a "living Constitution" to serve an evolving and enlightened world. That is where the story of "The 100 Years War" waged by progressives on the Constitution and the freedom from government that it provided to "We the People" begins.
Woodrow Wilson -
Woodrow Wilson took office on March 4,1913. On October 3, 1913, he signed the Income Tax Act on the heels of the passage of the 16th Amendment and just prior to signing the Federal Reserve Act on Dec 23, 1913.
In 1914, 98% of Americans were exempt from the income tax and the rate was 1% on incomes over $3,000. From $20,000 to $500,000 the 1% rose up to 7%.
In 1916, 7% went to 15%.
In 1917, 1% went to 2%, the $3,000 threshold went down to $1,000, and 15% rose meteorically to 67%.
In 1918, 67% went to 77%.
By 1921, after eight years of Woodrow Wilson, the economy was in ruins, and the backlash from America was to elect a "non-progressive" in a landslide for President.
Unfortunately, "soak the rich" as a way for the elites to wrest power from their corporate and wealthy adversaries was on the books. It would lick its wounds and resurface a decade later.
According to U.S. Treasury Department figures, Wilson's term ended in 1921 with a 73% top rate on millionaires and just 21 people reporting income of $1M or more. This was over a 900% drop from the 206 millionaires in 1916.
The Treasury also reported that in the last 5 years of Wilson's reign the number of people reporting $300,000 to $1M dropped almost 400% from 1090 in 1916 down to 225 in 1921.
Woodrow Wilson's last Secretary of Treasury, David Houston, wrote at the end of the 1913-1921 "Progressive Era" on the attempt to collect 77% rates "We are confronted with a condition, not a theory. The fact is that such rates cannot be successfully collected".
Woodrow Wilson's re-election "Campaign "Promise" was embodied in his prophetic campaign slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War"!
He took his second oath of office in March, 1917. At 8:30 on the evening of April 2, 1917, Wilson appeared before a joint session of Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany to "make the world safe for democracy."
In 1916, the federal debt was $3.6 billion. Within three years, it was $27 billion.
Wilson left Warren G. Harding massive debt, a 73% top income tax and a deep recession called the "1920-21 Depression".
The early saga of "Progressive" ideology in America centered on high tax rates and sentiments against big capitalism, big business and the well-to-do. The idea that America needed a large, expanding government of "smart" bureaucrats to make her decisions for the common people ran into the stumbling blocks that were rules of "The Constitution" and the contrary views of the Founding Fathers' conservative allocation and dispensation of power to the federal government.
In the 1920 election, the disastrous eight years of Progressives and their ideas were rejected soundly by the electorate.
The Roaring 20s.
Under Warren G Harding and the ultra- frugal Calvin Coolidge, the 1920s saw the reversal of progressivism. Wilson's top tax rates were slashed down to 24% by the end of the decade and government—and its spending were reined in. As a result, the Great Depression of 1920-21 was replaced by a decade of exceptional innovation and prosperity.
Harding's conservatism, affable manner, and straightforward campaign strategy made him the quintessential choice at the 1920 Republican National Convention. During his presidential campaign in the aftermath of World War I, he promised a return of the nation to normalcy. This "America First" campaign encouraged industrialization and a strong economy –one free of foreign influence.
Harding departed from the progressive movement that had dominated Congress since President Theodore Roosevelt.
In the 1920 election, he and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, defeated Democrat and fellow Ohioan James M. Cox --and his Vice Presidential running mate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt), in the largest presidential popular vote landslide in American history (60.36% to 34.19%).
The long, bull market in stocks and real estate accelerated in 1928 and 1929 to unsustainable levels as a result of excessive stock purchasing "on margin" and excessive growth in the nation's money supply at the hands of the new Federal Reserve.
The "Roaring-20s" came to an end with the 13% drop in the stock market on "black Tuesday", October 29, 1929 and a further 11% drop the next day on Wednesday, October 30th.
The Dow Jones high of 381.17 came on September 3, 1929, and would not be surpassed until 1954, in inflation-adjusted numbers. The bottom of the 1929 Crash came on November 13, 1929, when the stock market closed at 198.69. By the end of the year, the Dow had bounced back 44% in just six weeks to 286 on December 31, 1929. For the decade, the Dow would end up with a healthy 173% gain from 105 to 286. By contrast, the decade of the 1930's would see the Dow fall from 286 to 146 - a 50% plunge.
On the heels of the "Black Tuesday" crash, the unemployment rate surged to 9% from 4% earlier in the year. By June of 1930, however, the unemployment rate had settled back down to 6.3%.
Few people realized that the federal debt that was amassed prior to the "Roaring 20s" under Wilson’s tenure had gone from $27 billion down to $16 billion by June of 1930.
Of major note to Americans were the smash hits of 1930 "Happy Days are Here Again" and Chasing Rainbows whose titles reflected their newfound optimism.
Do Progressive Policies Really Make Much Difference?
Ask Herbert Hoover. These policies definitely turned a rebounding economy around in 1930 and sent it straight down.
To understand the Great Depression and the decade of the 1930s, start with 1) Herbert Hoover signing The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act on June 17, 1930, and the resulting shrinkage of world trade and 2) the new bankers of the World acting behind the curtain of the new Federal Reserve to shrink 35% of America's money supply that created deflation and caused 35% of America's banks to fail.
In May 1930, a petition with 1,028 economists’ signatures was sent to Hoover. They were asking for the President to veto the Smoot-Hawley bill. Henry Ford spent an evening with Hoover begging him to veto the legislation, but he was unable to persuade Hoover to do so. The goal of the legislation was to protect the American markets and workers. However, when the legislation was signed into law, the Act increased tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods.
Canada was the first to pass retaliation legislation and imposed tariffs on 16 products that amounted to 30% of the US exports to our northern neighbors. The protectionist theory in reality resulted in a drop in imports to the US-- and a drop in exports to other countries around the globe.
In 1929, US imports were $4.4 billion and exports were $5.4 billion. After Smoot-Hawley, in 1933, the US imports were only $1.5 billion and exports were just $2.1 billion. This decrease in trade affected the US and all of her trading partners. The punitive taxes went as high as 60% on more than 3,200 products and made trade less profitable and less attractive.
The unemployment rate before the Act was passed in Congress was at 7.8%, but by 1933, it was at 25.1%.
Herbert Hoover was just getting started.
He effectively kicked off the "New Deal" before FDR got a chance by unleashing government spending, spearheading new social programs that resurrected the most central progressive idea: "Soak the Rich".
The Progressive's liberal, Pulitzer, media giant, Walter Lippmann, would later give a glowing confirmation that Hoover unleashed unprecedented “Big Government”.
.
In a 1935 column, Lippmann wrote:
"The policy initiated in the autumn of 1929 was utterly unprecedented in American history. The national government undertook to make the whole economic order operate prosperously... the Roosevelt measures are a continuous evolution of the Hoover measures."
Did Hoover learn from the mistakes of Woodrow Wilson and the previous progressive era?
No! - He would cement the familiar progressive refrain-- and the theme that would reign through the entire "100 Years War" - raise the income tax - and he raised it from Coolidge's 24% to 63%.
In desperation, Hoover also signed an excise tax on writing checks that prompted Americans to race to their banks to get their cash out, which, along with the Feds mismanagement of the money supply, started the banks spiraling down as an inept government attempted to assume control over nearly every aspect of American life.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The backlash to Hoover's big government spending, high taxes and the re-emergence of progressive policies into the limelight resulted in Hoover’s resounding 1932 defeat, and he continues to live in proverbial infamy 80 years later.
The American people wanted another sweeping change away from the disasters of progressive tax policies and big government spending. FDR swept into office, and brought an ironclad Congress with him that included 322 Democrats in the House of Representatives to just 103 Republicans.
The American people thought they were getting the opposite of what had just devastated the American economy again. They thought they were getting lower taxes, less spending, freer markets, and more individual liberty.
After all, FDR had gone around the country giving hundreds of campaign speeches that billed him as a common-sense, fiscally prudent believer in running the government just like a family would by tightening its belt. He espoused limited borrowing by the government.
The following is one September, 1932, speech given to 25,000 people in Sioux City, Iowa. Roosevelt said:
I shall use this position of high responsibility to discuss up and down the country, in all
seasons, at all times, the duty of reducing taxes, of increasing the efficiency of
government ... and getting the most public service for every dollar paid by taxation.
This I pledge to you, and nothing I have said in the campaign transcends in importance
this covenant with the taxpayers of this country.
Once he was elected he embarked on big Government and big spending that resulted in a top income tax rate that would reach 100%.
He "doubled down" on virtually everything that Herbert Hoover had started and his immediate and obvious disdain for business forged a disastrous conflict between business and government during the tumultuous 1930’s.
As we know, it would be 1954 before the Dow Jones would recover to the 381 level of September 1929. It would be 25 long years of progressive rule over business with much of the nation's resources under central control. With Government soaking up resources, the private sector's ability to compete shrank against the landscape and backdrop of an anti-business federal government that continued to usurp the power of the American people. From the White House on the heels of its Wagner Act, Roosevelt unleashed a thunderous barrage of insults against business. Businessmen, Roosevelt fumed, were obstacles on the road to recovery. He blasted them as "economic royalists" and said that businessmen as a class were "stupid."
He followed up with a rash of new punitive measures. New strictures on the stock market were imposed. A tax on corporate retained earnings, called the "undistributed profits tax" was levied. "These soak-the-rich efforts," writes economist Robert Higgs, "left little doubt that the president and his administration intended to push through Congress everything they could to extract wealth from the high-income earners responsible for making the bulk of the nation's decisions about private investment."
During a period of barely two months during late 1937, the market for steel — a key economic barometer — plummeted from 83 percent of capacity to 35 percent. When that news emblazoned the headlines, Roosevelt took an ill-timed nine-day fishing trip. The New York Herald-Tribune implored him to get back to work to stem the tide of the renewed Depression. What was needed, said the newspaper's editors, was a reversal of the Roosevelt policy "of bitterness and hate, of setting class against class and punishing all who disagreed with him."
Even the ultra-progressive Lippmann, wrote in March 1938, that "with almost no important exception every measure he [Roosevelt] has been interested in for the past five months has been to reduce or discourage the production of wealth."
This was a far cry, as we saw earlier, from Lippmann's endorsement of the Hoover and Roosevelt progressive agendas when they were unleashing "unprecedented" government to turn the country around and it is worth repeating:
"..The national government undertook to make the whole economic order operate prosperously... "
For Roosevelt to lose even Lippmann was telling because Lippman had also made known the extent to which progressives loathed business. In 1935, he wrote that New Dealers would:
"rather not have recovery if the revival of private initiative means a resumption of private control in the management of corporate business . . . The essence of the New Deal is the reduction of private corporate control by collective bargaining and labor legislation, on the one side, and by restrictive, competitive and deterrent government action on the other side."
Remember that we have already emphasized that Herbert Hoover's own version of a "New Deal" had hiked the top marginal income tax rate from Coolidge's 24 percent to 63 percent by 1932. Still, he was a piker compared to Roosevelt. If the previous plan was "soak the rich", Roosevelt's plan was surely "croak the rich"! (See Exhibit 2 for 100 years of "Soak the Rich" tax rates).
Under Roosevelt, the top rate was raised at first to 79 percent. Later, it soared to 90 percent. Economic historian Burton Folsom noted that in 1941, Roosevelt even proposed a whopping 99.5-percent marginal rate on all incomes over $100,000. "Why not?" he asked, when an advisor questioned the idea.
After that outrageously ludicrous proposal failed, Roosevelt issued an executive order to tax all income over $25,000 at the astonishing rate of 100 percent. He also promoted the lowering of the personal exemption to only $600, a tactic that pushed most American families into paying at least some income tax for the first time. Shortly thereafter, Congress rescinded the executive order, but the members went along with the reduction of the personal exemption.
Left in the dust was an old September, 1932 campaign headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune:
"GOVERNOR ROOSEVELT MAKES PLEDGE TO SLASH TAXES".
What did the decade of the 1930s and Hoover and FDR leave us with?
The chart below in Exhibit 1 shows that from January 1, 1930 to Dec 31, 1939 the Dow (even after crashing in 1929) went from 286 down to 148 - the worst decade in the 110 years of Dow Jones measurement. The stock market which supposedly had already crashed in 1929, "crashed and burned" over the 10 years of the 30’s.
The Exhibit 1 below also shows, that of all the decades of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 1930-1940 could aptly be called the "Goring 30s" because capital and business and investment were decimated.
Unemployment during the New Deal and New Deal II was recorded as follows. Keep in mind that the progressives claimed that they tried to solve the problem of unemployment:
1933: 24.9%
1934: 21.7%
1935: 20.1%
1936: 16.9%
1937: 14.3%
1938: 19.0%
Progressives and Good Intentions
The grand progressive social experiments and the high taxation rates started by Wilson and accelerated by Hoover and FDR would become known in "The 28th Amendment Debates" as "The 100 Year War on Business and Success" or "The 100 Year War" for short.
In one corner was big government led by progressives - in the other corner were businesses hiring Americans and trying to propel their earnings, stockholders and employees to greater heights only to get knocked down, punched and kicked. It was heavy-weight versus welter-weight, and the brutal fight stood the original intent of the Constitution—and its tenets of freedom of enterprise and a limited government with only enumerated-- powers on its head.
Just as the anti-Federalists had warned, "The 100 Year War" was orchestrated at the highest levels of power. The anti-Federalist founders had many of their fears allayed with the compromise by the Federalists to add the additional protections into the Bill of Rights as ratified in 1791 (two years after the ratifying of the Constitution in 1789). But would these safeguards be enough to stop the new federal government from "usurping" its restricted authorities over time? In a word, no! The anti-Federalists fears would be validated and they would be proven right to have been exceedingly worried about rampant federal power.
Cumulatively speaking, what had been the result of 100 years of three branches of government usurping powers that were not granted in the Constitution and its amendments in order to implement the good intentions of progressive ideology? The result in 2011 and 2012 can sadly and ironically be summed up as "Anti-Prosperity", and "Additional Poverty". Nothing has provided more evidence of this than 47 years of massive spending on the "War on Poverty" resulting in the tragic decline of the prospects, education, living conditions and freedoms of African-Americans. Their world, generally speaking, had been decimated.
In 1964, as part of "The Great Society" of President Lyndon Johnson, the "War on Poverty" was passed into law after progressives sold the program to Americans by claiming that it would cost no more than $1 billion a year. Unfortunately, the progressives underestimated the ACTUAL cost by one THOUSAND times because by 2011, the real cost had skyrocketed to $1 trillion. Ultimately, the progressives’ "100 Year War" would guarantee poverty for great numbers of people that would stretch far into the foreseeable future because of mounting, crushing debt. In 2013, this debt was already crippling the fragile American economy—and dashing the hopes of hard-working citizens who had lived through some of the most difficult times in recent history at the hands of the housing collapse and the banking and market collapses of 2008. Another factor was the direct prosperity decline experienced by those who were forced to pay the government the fruits of their labor to support massive overspending. In the end, the results were not about the proverbial rising tide lifting all boats --which conservatives embrace but which progressives seem to despise-- but instead -- a progressively, ebbing-tide, lowering all boats.
From 2005 to 2009, the Commerce Department found that the living standard of those who subsisted below the poverty line dropped 50 percent. In 2010, 2.8 million more people fell below that line. The most stunning and disturbing statistic, however, was that nearly ONE IN FOUR children was impoverished. The lessons of progressively bigger government were resulting in an increasingly larger tab. Inefficiency, ineptness, frequent indifference, and, in some cases, insidious corruption were just a few of the elements that contributed to this ever-expanding behemoth that was the United States federal government.
From the Conservative perspective, ten decades of these big government lessons and the wrenching of property, wealth, and prosperity away from targeted groups, stemmed directly from the extensive usurpation of power that the founding fathers had feared. And the results were ominous. Coercive redistribution stifled wealth and reduced the incentives and reasons to create wealth in the first place and there was less prosperity produced overall affecting virtually every American. To see the obvious truth of this, one needs to look no further than the chronically-struggling U.S. Postal Service. By September 2011, the USPS was, for all intents and purposes, bankrupt and announced that it couldn't pay $5.5 billion it had coming due and was planning to lay off more than 35,000 workers. The paths to progressivism were paved with good intentions, but they diverted America away from freedom and capitalism and the amazing legacies of success through free enterprise. Instead, progressivism fostered ever more governmental control and spending far beyond the country's means. The taking of property and wealth and prosperity from Americans destroyed America's prosperous paths. In doing so, progressivism hijacked those sacred freedoms and institutions guaranteed in Her founding charters.
The Consequences of Fundamentally Thwarting the Constitution and Fundamentally Transforming America with the Redistribution of Income
For America, the answers by 2013 were clear and ominous. As Margaret Thatcher, the illustrious former British Prime Minister stated aptly, "The problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money". Rarely have truer and timelier words been spoken with regard to the American political and economic status quo. By 2013, weary Britons had long soured on socialism, run out of money, and tried desperately to set up "Free Enterprise Zones" in the large, blighted cities (including Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, Liverpool, among others) to reclaim some economic and individual freedoms and business prosperity with low taxes, relaxed regulations and business- friendly rhetoric and ideas. America had 1) lurched into socialized medicine and 2) continued supporting more and more massive entitlement populations and 3) employed regulations in vast array on Her businesses instead of helping Her businesses employ Americans. Worse, America was employing and requiring much higher deficits and debt to support Socialism than Europe was.
America's plight was especially poignant because the money was running out just two decades after the spectacular failure of what was once, arguably, the greatest modern-day example of centrally-planned government. The egalitarian aim of that State-controlled government was also "Prosperity for All"-- "according to each person's needs" per the nefarious tenets of Marx and Engels and as appropriated malevolently by Lenin. A classic failure, this government collapsed seemingly overnight. After over 70 years of centrally planned and brutally operated government, the Communist U.S.S.R. (1922-1991) was bankrupt, and, at last, vanquished. While Lenin originally confiscated the property and wealth of the population in virtually one fell swoop during—and immediately following-- the Bolshevik Revolution, the progressives of America took 99 years to eat away at the property rights and the rights to the fruits of labor (income).
They did however, quickly master the usurpation of one of the main tenets on which America had fought and won Her independence and founded Her Constitution - "No taxation without representation". It was progressives' most urgent desire to divert the nation's wealth to its coffers and exert its draconian control over a small minority - the wealthy - and they did it with a few precedent setting big grabs of power.
As their battle plans were being refined early in the “100 Year War”, the 1930s "Soak the Rich" strategy would become one of the best examples and biggest offenders of tyranny of the minority by the majority and "Taxation without Representation" over the course of 225 years of the American Constitution. For 99 years, the progressives could and would take the property of the well-to-do in great amounts.
The protections afforded those Americans in the Constitution, would just be overlooked while the progressives were sitting in King George's position of power.
The progressives and the bankers got the income tax, the 16th Amendment, and the Federal Reserve Bank in place in 1913. Also in 1913, the 17th Amendment passed, and this saw the end of the state Legislatures' representation in Congress since state legislatures no longer elected their two senators as set out in Article 1 Section 3. "Soak the Rich" and amassing America's taxation money in the Federal level and away from the state legislatures, quickly laid the foundation for the federal juggernaut. When combined with the attendant "class warfare", the "Progressive Mantra" and political strategy was on its way.
As the three branches learned to collude under progressives to circumvent the Constitution, so too, would the power lust infect both national political parties as they colluded within the system to consolidate their controls over money and political clout. Prior to "The 28th Amendment", incumbents had nearly mastered co-dependent constituencies and refined the spending of other people's money to best "bring home the bacon" to those at the re-election breakfast table. In an astounding legislative accomplishment, Congress honed these advantages to the point that incumbents came to win 19 out of 20 times, and there was a near 99% re-election rate as the twentieth century ended. These rates were far from the 50 percent election cycle turnover for which the founders had envisioned and prepared the federal structure.
For 45 years after Roosevelt and his original ironclad Democratic Congress, Congress continued taxing successful Americans at rates of 90% and 70% from the 1940’s through the 1970’s as illustrated in Exhibit 2. Not until Ronald Reagan unleashed major tax cuts that fell to 28% in the 1980s did America get a taste of what a modest taxing policy could do to change the economic outlook. It was a study in how to springboard exceptional rallies in investment and innovation and success. A 26-year boom that lasted from 1982 to 2008 was the ultimate result of this achievement. The stock market went from Dow 800’s and exploded to over 14,000. This unprecedented growth is shown in Exhibit 1.
When it became apparent that progressive monopolies were again on the horizon in 2008, America braced for another period of demonizing business and corporations, discrediting" and "dumbing down" success, the demoralizing of investment and pride of accomplishment, and the higher decibels of the progressives' battle cry of "tax the rich and take them down along with their greed!” Ninety-eight years of that was enough.
Corporations, those who were successful, and those who were the so-called "rich" all figured out that they weren't wanted, they didn't need all the attacks, they didn't need the hassles, and, most importantly—and infuriatingly-- they didn't need targeting.
They'd had enough.
They were gone by the tens of thousands and the pace was increasing. They located to other countries in which the leaders—and the people-- wanted them, their businesses, their success, and their jobs. Meanwhile, America continued to bear the “Legacy of "The 100 Year War"—the focus of which was “RED INC”, otherwise known as the legacy and the legend of REDistribution of INCome. “RED INC" became the proverbial poster child and the face of the progressives and their "100 Year War.” As the ratification battle unfolded in 2012, and as America continued to hurdle toward the edge of the abyss, the sea of “RED INC" was massive.
The idea that America could collapse so quickly behind the legacy of the Soviet Union's collapse at the hands of socialism disguised as progressivism was a stark realization that average Americans were starting to understand. The progressives ratcheted the rates back up in the 1990’s and it was their rallying cry through the first decade of the new century. They were hell-bent on re-establishing rates to the punitive heights of yester-year. It didn’t matter that incentives to work and invest and succeed and reach new heights were the victims of their unrealistic idealism. These were minor considerations that would not get in the way of the progressives' drive for power to impose their utopian decrees. They certainly weren't going to allow their voting blocks to participate in partnerships with the rich and the successful in which all of these groups worked together for joint solutions. Rather, progressives employed their insidious, tried-and-true “divide and conquer” strategy with great success. If progressives were about anything, it was retaining their power—come hell or high water. "The 100 Year War" against success was all they knew as they came up against debate and ratification of "The 28th Amendment".
FDR's Secretary of the Treasury (1934 - 1945)
At the end of the transformative 30s, Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., had, with FDR, overseen all of the debt, and taxing and spending programs. In a regret-filled entry in his diary, he wrote: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong... somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!"
By 2013, at the end of "The 100 Years' War" (1913 -2013), the debt was coming due and the progressives were about to get their proverbial due with a Constitutional amendment.
The power brokers who amassed their power over 100 years did so by trading on America's soul and using up Her future treasures. In 2013, they fought "tooth and nail" to stay in power and defeat the huge obstacle that was “The 28th Amendment.” The power brokers built their massive federal government at the hands of a few—and at the expense of many-- and in 2013, America the Beautiful was about to begin digging out of enslavement to reclaim her soul, her honor and her posterity. The sweeping changes of the 28th Amendment found that their time had come in 2013, and thankfully, the massive power in the federal government found that its time had come and gone. "The 28th Amendment" was about to restore those two great words “limited and enumerated” to remind a restructured federal government that its powers were few and that the states’ and the people’s powers were many.
In football stadiums and baseball stadiums and all across the land, Americans looked around and discovered that more and more they were joining in unison to sing out the stirring words of the high flying “Star-Spangled Banner”. And two other words were also resounding loudly across "the fruited plain". Two words that perfectly exemplified the General who lead the way in winning the revolutionary war and whose towering persona presided over the Constitutional Convention and the President whom the American people unanimously elected to be the “Father of their Country”. They were the two words that anchored the great last line of Francis Scott Key's first and most familiar verse of the national anthem -- "O'er the Land of the FREE" and the "Home of the BRAVE".
"FREE" was being empowered once again to its exalted cornerstones in the esteemed FREEdoms and FREE enterprise of America. "BRAVE" was once again that inherent trait in Americans that built a great nation and that would be called on again to end a "100 year War" and restore America and Americans with that sacred pledge of “.. one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all”.
Exhibit 1
Dow Jones by Decade (1890 to 2010)
late 1890s, the index stood at a level of 40.94
1900 - 1910 ended at 100 point level.
1910-1920, 100 to 105. Woodrow Wilson (77%)
1920-1930, 105 to 286. Harding/Coolidge (24%)
1930-1940 286 to 148 (Hoover 63%/Franklin Roosevelt (79%/90%/99% )
1940-1950 148 to 206
1950-1960 206 to 616
1960-1970 616 to 800
1970-1980 800 to 838. )
1980-1990 838 to 2,753
1990-2000 2,753 to 11,497
2000-2010 11.408 to 10,428
Exhibit 2
Individual Top Income Tax Rates
1913 7.0%1946 86.45%1979 70.0%
1914 7.0%1947 86.45%1980 70.0%
1915 7.0%1948 82.13%1981 69.0%
1916 15.0%1949 82.13%1982 50.0%
1917 67.0%1950 91.00%1983 50.0%
1918 77.0%1951 91.00%1984 50.0%
1919 73.0%1952 92.00%1985 50.0%
1920 73.0%1953 92.00%1986 50.0%
1921 73.0%1954 91.00%1987 38.5%
1922 56.0%1955 91.00%1988 28.0%
1923 56.0%1956 91.00%1989 28.0%
1924 46.0%1957 91.00%1990 31.0%
1925 25.0%1958 91.00%1991 31.0%
1926 25.0%1959 91.00%1992 31.0%
1927 25.0%1960 91.00%1993 39.6%
1928 25.0%1961 91.00%1994 39.6%
1929 24.0%1962 91.00%1995 39.6%
1930 25.0%1963 91.00%1996 39.6%
1931 25.0%1964 77.00%1997 39.6%
1932 63.0%1965 70.00%1998 39.6%
1933 63.0%1966 70.00%1999 39.6%
1934 63.0%1967 70.00%2000 39.6%
1935 63.0%1968 75.25%2001 38.5%
1936 79.0%1969 77.00%2002 38.5%
1937 79.0%1970 71.75%2003 35.0%
1938 79.0%1971 70.00%2004 35.0%
1939 79.0%1972 70.00%2005 35.0%
1940 81.0%1973 70.00%2006 35.0%
1941 81.0%1974 70.00%2007 35.0%
1942 88.0%1975 70.00%2008 35.0%
1943 88.0%1976 70.00%2009 35.0%
1944 94.0%1977 70.00%2010 35.0%
1945 94.0%1978 70.00%2011 35.0%
