America: What Went Wrong (20 Years Ago)?

Donald Barlett and James Steele published a series of articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1991 entitled America: What Went Wrong? They expanded the series into a book of the same name.
Twenty years later, their book seems prescient. They identified problems that were growing then and are only now coming to their full, ugly fruition. They're planning to publish a new version of A:WWW? this year.
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Excerpts from the first article, America’s 2-class Tax System:

"... a forecast made years ago by William J. Casey, a wily Republican from another era who liked to dabble in the intelligence world’s black arts inside and outside the country, and who helped craft the election of Ronald Reagan, is coming true. After taking office, President Reagan installed Casey as head of the CIA in 1981. After his first staff meeting at the agency, Casey was quoted as saying:

“'We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.'

"One of the more egregious falsehoods being peddled by the corporate tax cutters is that companies doing business in the United States are taxed at an exorbitant rate. Not so. Though the United States has one of the highest statutory rates on the books at 35 percent, the only fair way to measure what companies actually pay is their effective rate – what they ultimately pay after deductions, credits, and assorted write-offs. By that yardstick, companies in the United States consistently pay taxes at rates lower than corporations in Japan and many nations in Europe."