Robert Reich - If you want a single reason for why Democrats lost big on Election Day 2014 it’s this: Median household income continues to drop. This is the first “recovery” in memory when this has happened.
Jobs are coming back but wages aren’t. Every month the job numbers grow but the wage numbers go nowhere.
Most new jobs are in part-time or low-paying positions. They pay less than the jobs lost in the Great Recession.
This wageless recovery has been made all the worse because pay is less predictable than ever. Most Americans don’t know what they’ll be earning next year or even next month. Two-thirds are now living paycheck to paycheck.
So why is this called a “recovery” at all? Because, technically, the economy is growing. But almost all the gains from that growth are going to a small minority at the top.
In fact, 100 percent of the gains have gone to the best-off 10 percent. Ninety-five percent have gone to the top 1 percent.
4 comments:
Yup, Americans will continue to get poorer if we keep trying to grow the economy. The only intellignet way forward is to equitabley reduce the size of the economy, tax the rich, and start healing ecosytems
Yes, we have been in a downward spiral since 1990. Once a country ceases domestic production of products they eventually become poor. Every country that has too many unemployed eventually will collapse. What is the sweet spot for the percentage of unemployed? No economist knows.
Greg, the only economy "we" as in the US govt has been trying to grow is the Chinese Economy.
We need to bring manufacturing back home - modern smart clean manufacturing. We also need to invest heavily in infrastructure, both physical and electronic - and we need to pay for that massive expenditure with DEBT FREE CURRENCY issued lawfully by the US government.
We must break free of the financial element's death grip on this country's life force. That also means systematic debt cancellation or it will be all for naught. Debt cancellation was understood by the ancient empires who faced the same problems we have. We now have the highest amounts of debt by all standards in world history and if we don't begin to cancel them, we will face the greatest economic collapse and depression in history.
5:54
The downward spiral began in 1980 with the election of R.Reagan. Under Reagan the minimum wage no longer kept pace with inflation, and the wealthy were given large tax cuts in the 1986 tax reform bill. When Reagan broke the air traffic controller's union, during their strike, he started a union busting free for all. Privatization became a thing during Reagan, for example when he closed the mental hospitals, and despite his talk of increasing out patient serves with privatized contracts for the former patients, those services never materialized. The former patients were in effect dumped on the street, where with no support they became homeless and unstable, with the only place left to house them was prisons. That isn't to say that Bush1, Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama haven't all contributed to making things much worse, but Reagan really kick stated the downward spiral for the average US citizen.
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