The Root of Economic Fragility and Anger
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 22:39 I read this Huffington Post piece by economist Robert Reich today with disappointment and no small amount of alarm.
We’re within .4 percentage points of the 23.9 percent of the wealth of this country having gone to the top 1 percent of it’s citizens in 1928. It was 23.5 percent in 2007.
The Republicans, with a lot of help from DINO’s ( Democrats in Name Only), Wall Street and a sleepy American electorate have put us back to the economic inequality we had just before the Great Depression.
Now that’s progress?
Combine that with ‘too little, too late’ stimulus that went primarily to the Big Boys and not to Main Street, with an irrational Tea Party promoted hysteria regarding either deficits or further spending to lift Main Street out of this crisis and you’ve got the makings of a continuing disaster.
Americans are failing to connect the dots. It’s about wages. Hourly wages. We’re working for the same wages we were getting - adjusted for inflation - that we were in the 1970’s. And we’re doing it without the governmental and public safety nets we had then. The likes of Sharron Angle would take away what little safety nets - such as social security - that we have left.
The only thing that has lulled Americans into thinking the have ‘more’ has been the two-income family, real estate booms and dot com booms plus fast and easy, no holds barred ‘borrowing power’. From no collateral mortgages, credit cards for all to pay day loans - thanks to the gutting of any sensible regulation of the financial services industry.
The financial reforms currently winding their way from conference committee and through the Senate, are a pale imitation of the robust Glas-Steagal Act of back in the day.
We’re not making the foundational reforms necessary. We’re not insisting that wealth be re-distributed out of the bony fingers of that top one percent and back to the middle class.
Instead, we’re letting ourselves be drawn into assinine national arguments about The Founders intent, Constitutional originalism, gay marriage, family values, the Second Amendment and all the rest of the ridiculous ravings of a disaffected, confused and ignorant political subculture that would be king.
Why? Am I the only one who realizes that I had more dollar for dollar purchasing power in 1972 than I do now?
Sharron Angle would say that it’s not her job to provide jobs. That American’s should be happy to take any job they can get rather than be on ‘the dole’ - unemployment that they’ve actually paid into as taxpayers. Sharron Angle would argue against increases in the minimum wage, telling you that it will kill business.
She really doesn’t get it.
Read on:
The Root of Economic Fragility and Anger
by Robert Reich
Missing from almost all discussion of America’s dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June’s decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent.
In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.
