Well…read an interesting article in “The Guardian” this afternoon about all of the crowing the 1%’ers do that they create jobs and earn the ridiculous money they make and the politicians that still believe that nonsense…and I am going to keep pointing this stuff out until I can’t write anymore or things change. But, the first point on productivity that I touched on briefly last week is that from the late 40′s until the late 70′s, productivity and real wages of the middle class were basically a 1:1 ratio; that is that as productivity rose 118% in that time, real wages rose about 122%. Since then, though, from 1979 through 2009, productivity has risen almost 80% but the real wages of the middle class has fallen by 4% and the rich have taken all of that additional production for themselves in the form of bonuses and higher pay to the tune of a 279% increase. Can anyone see that from a pure economic standpoint, this concentration has stripped huge amounts of demand out of the economy since the the middle class has less and less of the pie to spend? It is something I have been saying for quite some time now…as the rich and corporations have been squeezing every last penny out of you and me, who is going to be able to buy the goods and services that make any economic growth sustainable? We are seeing these effects now in sluggish growth and stagnation that have become the hallmarks of this type of wealth concentration…and I finally hope someone cares….other than me, that is.
Tag Archives: productivity
I predicted this one….
Well…there are a couple of things that I want to talk about today…the first is a neat little study that was done that compared the increase in productivity with the increase in wages since the 1980′s….where the projection of wage increases, if they had kept up with the increase in worker productivity, would have resulted in the median wage for the American worker being almost 100 percent higher than it is…what this says is that even though the American worker is working harder and longer, the fruits of this work increase has gone entirely to the top whose wages HAVE increased by 100% in that same time frame.
The second part of this nasty little secret is the sluggish performance of the American economy and my prediction that if the war on the American worker continued by slashing wages and benefits, and moving jobs overseas, there would be no one left to buy the 40 thousand dollar SUV’s and it would result in a feedback loop that would result in an economy that would never recover; but would remain stagnant over time since the majority of the economy is consumer spending. Exactly what is happening now; no one in the middle class is willing to spend anything since they don’t have any extra money anymore…it’s all in the hands of the rich and powerful who don’t purchase enough to keep the factories moving…and I am going to say this to the short sighted CEO’s out there who are lining their pockets at the expense of the entire American economy….I hope you feel good about yourselves…you’ve managed to destroy an economy that was the envy of the world…hope you can’t sleep at night…geez…