This is the best article I've read in a while

What was happening to workers across the country could be called “Operation Break the Working Class.” It was a broad policy to undermine worker confidence by destroying the capacity of organized labour to offer resistance. This took place in tandem with a large transfer of wealth to the financial elite. Reagan’s first budget represented a giveaway of more than $750 billion to the super rich in a mere five years. This drove federal debt to $2.8 trillion and turned the United States into the world’s largest debtor nation. At the same time, Reagan cut basic services to the underclass, such as the food stamps program.

Such clarity is often obscured amid the toxic political rhetoric and disinformation of a nation increasingly defined by red state/blue state culture wars. And the statistical data is indisputable. Across all economic indices, American workers have faced a shocking level of lost opportunities over the past four decades. A 2020 study by the Rand Corporation, undertaken to identify the links between economic disparity and the political instability of American life in the twenty-first century, found massive losses to workers since 1980. For example, in 2018, a working-class Black man was making $26,000 (US) a year less than what he would have been paid if the income patterns prior to 1980 had held constant. A college-educated worker earned between $48,000 and $63,000 (US) a year less.

The authors of the Rand report tracked these lost wages, as a direct conduit, to the bank accounts of the 1 percent. They valued the loss of income for every worker at $1,144 (US) a month for every year over the past four decades. The final price tag for this looting of the American worker comes to $50 trillion (US) in accumulated lost wages and benefits.