Thom Hartmann - Since the 1970s, productivity has increased by 146%, but wages have actually either stagnated (if looking at household incomes; today many more are two-wage-earner households) or fallen (looking at individual incomes). CEO compensation has rocketed from 30 times the average worker’s to hundreds of times, in some industries even thousands of times (for example, Coca-Cola’s CEO, James Quincey, gets paid $16.7 million per year—or 1,016 times the typical employee’s pay). ...
Because of Reaganomics, today it takes two or more people working in a household to maintain the standard of living that one worker could sustain prior to the 1980s. From 1950 to 1970, both wages and productivity pretty much doubled, an increase of around 100% (it was in the high 90s, but let’s round off to keep things simple). Using 1950 as a benchmark, between 1970 and 2019 wages went up from around 97% to 114%, but productivity went from 98% above the 1950 number to 243%. That 130% increase in productivity while holding wages steady led to a massive increase in corporate profits.
December 3, 2023
What happened to the middle class?
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We do know what to do about it, but the powerful forces that benefit from the inequality in the system will fight hard to keep their power. Thereby burning up the planet.
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