They broke it on purpose.
A deliberate, forty-year rewrite of the rules that governs the American economy — and the manufactured culture war designed to keep you from noticing.
They didn't break government by accident. They broke it so you'd blame each other instead of them.
While you argue about bathrooms and drag shows and who kneels during the anthem, they cut their taxes, defunded your schools, and made healthcare a profit center. Every culture war is a cover story. Every outrage cycle is a distraction. Every manufactured enemy is a reason not to look at the exposed wires behind the curtain.
Let's be clear: people are allowed to make money. This country was built on capitalism, and capitalism works — when the rules are fair. Build a company. Create something. Get rich. Nobody is coming for that.
But when getting rich means buying the politicians who write the tax code, defunding the schools your workers' kids attend, and pricing healthcare out of reach for the people who built your wealth — that's not capitalism. That's extraction. And the middle class and the working poor have been paying the tab for forty years.
What actually happened while you were distracted.
Every statistic below is sourced to the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Congressional Budget Office, the Economic Policy Institute, or ProPublica — not pundits, not talking heads. Click through to the primary source on any of them.
How the rules were rewritten.
Each of these policies was sold as a boost to everyone. Each primarily benefited those who already had the most. The cumulative effect was a wholesale transfer of economic power from working Americans to the wealthiest fraction of a percent. This is not conspiracy — it is public record.
Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA)
Cut the top marginal rate from 70% to 50%. Slashed capital gains and estate taxes. Sold as relief for working Americans; delivered primarily to those with capital.
PATCO Strike Response
Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers in a single day. Signal to every corporation in America: the federal government will side with management against organized labor.
Garn–St. Germain Act
Deregulated savings & loan institutions. Contributed directly to the S&L crisis that cost taxpayers $132 billion.
Tax Reform Act
Cut the top rate from 50% to 28% — the lowest since 1931. Collapsed 14 tax brackets down to 2. The foundation of every rate conversation since.
Welfare Reform (PRWORA)
Imposed work requirements and time limits. Cut the safety net for the most vulnerable Americans under the banner of 'reform.'
Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act
Repealed the Glass-Steagall firewall between commercial and investment banking. Enabled the conditions for the 2008 financial crisis.
Bush Tax Cuts (EGTRRA & JGTRRA)
Cut the top rate to 35%. Cut capital gains and dividend taxes to 15%. CBO scored 65% of benefits going to the top 20%.
Citizens United v. FEC
Supreme Court ruled that corporate political spending is speech. Opened the floodgates for unlimited outside money in American elections. Over $4.5 billion in outside spending has followed.
Tax Cuts & Jobs Act (TCJA)
Cut the corporate rate from 35% to 21%. Cut the top individual rate to 37%. Added roughly $1.9 trillion to the national debt over ten years.
Manufactured, funded, and deployed.
The culture war is not organic. It works because it's cheap. It costs nothing to post a tweet about bathrooms. It costs everything to explain why insulin is $300 in America and $8 in Canada. One of those conversations gets clicks. The other one gets donors nervous.
Here's what the culture war does. It keeps working people fighting each other instead of looking up. A truck driver in Ohio and a nurse in Georgia have more in common with each other than either has with the billionaire funding the PAC that told them they're enemies. As long as they're arguing about pronouns, they'll never notice that both their insurance premiums doubled, both their school budgets got cut, and both their representatives voted for a tax bill that saved the top 1% more in one year than either of them will earn in a lifetime.
That's not a conspiracy. It's a strategy. And both parties have used it — one with more cruelty, but both with the same result: you stay angry, they stay rich, nothing changes.
Wealth concentration tracks policy choices. Exactly.
Between 1962 and the early 1980s — the era of higher taxes, strong unions, and regulated markets — wealth concentration in the United States was declining. The top 1% share was falling. The middle class was growing. Productivity and pay moved together.
In 1981, the direction reversed. It has not reversed since. Every major tax cut for the wealthy — Reagan in 1981 and 1986, Bush in 2001 and 2003, Trump in 2017 — was followed by further concentration at the top. The only periods where the trend flattened or slightly reversed were the Clinton-era tax increases of 1993 and the post-2008 recession.
Policy choices drive outcomes. This is not an accident. This is a record.
Not complaints. Replacements.
The Common Good Party wasn't built to complain about the system. It was built to replace the parts that are broken. Fifty policy positions covering every front of the forty-year rewrite — taxation, labor, corporate power, campaign finance, healthcare, housing, education, and twenty-eight more. Every one researched. Every one sourced. Every one published in full for anyone to read.
We don't ask you to trust us. We ask you to check us. We start local — school boards, city councils, state legislatures — because that's where government actually touches your life. We disclose every donor and every dollar. Not because the law requires it, but because a party that demands transparency from government and practices opacity itself is a fraud.
You should be able to make money in this country. You should also be able to see a doctor, afford a home, send your kid to a decent school, and retire with dignity — without going bankrupt in the process. Those two things aren't in conflict. A rigged system made them feel that way.
A hand up for every American. Never a handout to the wealthy few. That's the Common Good.
Read the platform. Check our work.
Fifty policy positions. Every one sourced. No corporate PACs, no dark money, no billionaire owners. Judge us by what's written.