LETTER: A model to follow

Published 1:30 am Saturday, May 30, 2026

When Donald Trump praises the late 1800s through early 1920s as America’s Golden Age, Americans should remember what followed.

That era featured rapid industrial expansion, railroads, steel and enormous fortunes for a small class of industrial barons. But it also brought child labor, dangerous factories, weak worker protections, financial speculation and vast inequality.

Economic power was concentrated at the top while many workers and farmers lived with insecurity. Those imbalances helped fuel the excesses of the 1920s and the crash that led to the Great Depression.

Protectionist trade policies, especially the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, then deepened the downturn by triggering retaliation and shrinking global trade.

Today we refer to those economic policies as trickle-down economics.

Now compare that with America’s other true golden age: the post-World War II decades from the 1950s through the mid-1970s.

During much of that period, top marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans were around 90 percent. Yet the economy grew strongly, wages rose with productivity, home ownership expanded, college became attainable, and the middle class flourished.

Major public investments like the interstate highway system modernized the nation. Strong unions helped ensure prosperity was shared more broadly.

The contrast could not be clearer. One era glorified low taxes for the rich, weak regulation and tariff walls, ending in collapse.

The other used progressive taxation, public investment and fairer wages to build the strongest middle class in our history.

If we seek greatness again, we know which model actually worked.

Brian Berry

Sequim