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For reference, 1971 was when Nixon first coined the term “war on drugs” (after passing the Controlled Substances Act and related legislation a year prior). People love to bring up that website when the gold standard is mentioned, but it’s actually showing a broader trend of the government apparatus being weaponized against the middle and lower classes. Here’s a quote that summarizes the effect of the time period nicely: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” — John Ehrlichman, to Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971. That’s what the fuck happened in 1971. Then, notice how many graphs actually show an inflection point around 1981 when Reagan started as president, employing Nixon’s Southern Strategy to get elected and then serving those voters with policies that attacked the lower and middle classes (slashing spending on federal aid programs, raising income taxes while lowering capital gains taxes, freezing the minimum wage, raising military spending which is essentially a cash transfer to rich arms dealers, etc). Then throw the Cold War in there, and you have a US government that is in an adversarial position with everyone but the 1%. |