It's All About the Wages -- Our Economy Would Be Fine If Everyone Made Their Fair Share
Here's part of what the article says:
You know, I came close to flunking economics when I was an undergraduate but this has been obvious to me for a long time. Why is it so hard for the movers and shakers of our society to grasp????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.
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We're back to the same ominous trend as before the Great Recession: a larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground. And as long as this trend continues, we can't get out of the shadow of the Great Recession. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing.
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hi Ellie, I personally think they do grasp it, but movers and shakers are either themselves at the very top, or being heavily lobbied, wooed, flattered and bribed by those at the very top, and so I think it's all too easy to let that insight slide. Sadly.
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