Why It’s Time to Raise the Minimum Wage to $15 or More an Hour: What the Corporate News Media Doesn’t Want You to Know

Source: Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

More than 40 million US workers would get a raise if the US minimum wage was raised to $15 an hour. Doing so would do five important things to help the US economy.

1. It would increase the demand for goods and services and create jobs in the process. Currently, we are in the worst post World War II economic expansion in US history, except for the last one, you know, that negative job growth under the economic policies of the worst president in US history, George W. Bush! Outside of that expansion, the current expansion is the worst, with the lowest job growth, the least GNP growth, and lots more historically weak statistics.

2. Every US economic expansion since 1981 has been caused by artificial bubbles which have created artificial stock market bubbles, which have almost completely benefited only the rich, and mostly the super rich, at the expense of everyone else. The Bill Clinton presidency saw the creation of 22 million jobs, which came about because of simultaneous housing, tech, stock and telecommunications bubbles. The tech and telecommunication bubbles were created by Clinton’s signature on legislation. The current economic bubble has been created by an illegal housing bubble created by the big banks. See The fix is In! The Banksters are Manipulating the rise in housing prices: Mortgage applications are down for home sales–Johnhively.wordpress.com Raising the minimum wage would create more demand, possibly creating the first demand inspired economic expansion since the Great President Jimmy Carter.

3. Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would steer money away from the stock market bubble because it would decrease corporate profits, and perhaps gently deflate the current bubble that is due to burst in a few months anyway. The other option is to allow the bubble to run its course and essentially ruin the US economy like what occurred from 2007 to 2012 and from 1929-1933. The next recession will be worst than the last one, and it’s just around the bend.

4. Income inequality is at an all-time US high with the 1 percent stealing about 37 percent of all income produced in the USA every year compared with only 8 percent in 1980. That means the 99 means we have less money to buy things, while the rich primarily purchase things like stock options, stock, bonds and politicians. This inequality is stifling the demand sector and weakening the economy which is why the US economic expansions since 2000 are the weakest in history. This is, of course, unless, the creation and functioning of the US and worldwide economies are solely for the benefit of the 1 percent, and always at the expense of the 99 percent. You can see from the graph above the rich are stealing $17,867 from every working American, and they do this year after year after year. I think it’s time we get a little of our money back.

5. Wealth inequality is also near an all time high in the USA, and this means (along with income inequality) the rich can afford to buy the services of more politicians, which has already effectively turned our democracy into both an illusion and a myth, and this occurred perhaps as early as 1981. Raising the minimum wage would cut away a bit of the economic cancers known as wealth and income inequality.

The corporate talking heads will also insist raising the minimum wage will result in lost jobs, but there are plenty of studies showing not a whole lot on this issue. Most studies on this subject during the last twenty years show a rise in the minimum wage has a negligible impact on job loss, or jobs experience slight growth. On the other hand, most minimum wage increases that have been studied have been minimal and very local.

However, all of this is irrelevant because there is one gigantic study that shows that when the real wages of the 99 percent go up, so too does the US economy, and not just for the benefit of the few. This study is called the history of the US economy. Notice in the graph below real wages grew in the US economy from 1948 to 1978. In reality, you can go back to 1938 and see the same stuff. Inflation was low and job growth was high during the years 1938 to 1980. The middle class was strongest then, and demand for US goods was incredibly strong, especially the demand from US citizens. Even the rich got richer, although the percentage of income and wealth they could steal from the rest of us was small compared to today.

Source: Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Corporate talking heads will always lie and say raising the minimum wage will increase inflation. In reality, allowing the financial markets to rise in bubbles creates inflation, as I pointed out in my book, The Rigged Game.

Now some people will say inflation was fairly high during the 1970s, and yes that is kind of true, and then kind of not. That’s because the US government has changed the way it measures inflation twenty times since 1981, and every change has the intended effect of lowering the rate of inflation. In other words, if inflation is 1.5 percent nowadays, using the methodology of 1975, today’s inflation would be about 6 percent. Average yearly inflation during the 1970s was 7 percent, and so using today’s inflation methodology, inflation during the 1970s would have averaged about 2.5 percent, which isn’t all that much.

You can also see from the graph above how real hourly wages have stagnated since 1978, but of course, that’s a lie since real wage increases are measured against inflation, and we know inflation is no longer measured like it used to be. If inflation over the last 35 years was measured with the methodology used by the US government in 1975, US inflation would be significantly higher each of those years, and real US wage growth during this period would be negative, year after year after year for the last thirty or more years. This means real wages are significantly lower nowadays than the available statistics will allow us to measure, and this, of course, is one of the reasons why the government changed the way it measured inflation: it stops us from seeing how much we of the 99 percent are getting screwed by our corrupt government in redistributing our income and wealth to the 1 percent.

I don’t know about you, but I want my money back! Raise the minimum wage!

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The Conspiracy to Jack Up the Cost of Monthly Rents and House Prices

Home mortgage applications

To one my stories about how income had finally begun going up in 2016, somebody wrote, “Yes the 80 bucks more a month I’m getting now completely covers the hundreds of dollars my rent has gone up due to rich developers moving in and gouging us all.”

There are a few things to be said about the comment above. As you can tell by the graph above, applications for home mortgages peaked in 2005 and have dropped quite a bit since then. So why are home and rental prices still shooting through the roof?

The big banks in 2007-11 conspired together to keep over 50 percent of vacant houses off the market so as to jack up prices. Home prices have artificially risen since then. The banks have allowed an increasing dribble of these homes back onto the market as prices have artificially and illegally risen.

Rents are artificially high as well, and for the same reason. What the big banks have done is commit a crime called “a conspiracy in restraint of trade.” This collusion redistributes income from home buyers and renter (the 99 percent) to share and bondholders of the 1 percent.

90 to 95 percent of US population growth is due to immigration. When population constantly increases while large amounts of housing units are illegally taken off the market, the result jacks up housing prices and rents. See Shadow Inventory: More Houses Will Soon Be Available for Sale–Rismedia.com. See also The 7-Million Housing Shadow Inventory Could Trigger A Price Avalanche–Business Insider.

The government has changed the way it measures inflation twenty times since 1981 so as to reflect a lower rate of inflation than actually exists. This means real wages are actually higher than they would have been under the old methods of measuring inflation, so that when the government tells us wages have been stagnant for thirty-six years, it really means real wages have gone down significantly.

Meanwhile, increases in home and rental prices are not actually counted in the inflation rate. See How to Fix the Housing Component of CPI–Slate. Food and energy prices are not included either, but they used to be. There’s a reason for this; inflation measured against wage increases would demonstrate real US wages have plummeted over the last three and a half decades, rather than stagnated. Both Republicans and Democrats in public office don’t want you to know the real story, and neither does their corporate news media.

Both major political parties are controlled by big corporations, billionaires, hedge funds and Wall Street investment banks, and most of these benefit from this conspiracy in restraint of trade. So don’t expect the US government to do anything about this illegal manipulation of prices. It isn’t going to happen until we get honest government back to Washington.

Editor’s note;

The big banks have conspired against Federal law and supply and demand to withhold product from the market in order to manipulate prices and profits upward so it is the renters and buyers who are ripped off. Much, if not all, of this conspiracy has to do with mortgage backed bonds, and the profits and losses to be had from them. A loss in value of 8 percent in the housing that backs triple B rated bonds sends the value of those bonds down to zero, according to Michael Lewis in The Big Short. Likewise, he writes, a 20 percent slump in the price of housing sends the value of AAA home mortgage backed bonds to zero. A lot of billionaires and millionaire investors lose in this instance. So the big banks conspired to keep over 50 percent of the vacant housing off the market in order to prop up the value of those bonds. However, there are other significant benefits to those banks to keep houses off the market. Buyers and renters pay the price of this conspiracy because the obvious result of the actions of the big banks is to redistribute hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars, every year from the 99 to the 1 percent.

Dear Democrats, please note then President Bill Clinton refused to sign legislation that would’ve regulated derivatives. Home mortgage backed bonds are a derivative, since their value is derived from an underlying asset. That’s why they’re called derivatives.

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What is the Federal Reserve Really Doing When It Just Raised Interest Rates? It’s Redistributing Your Income to the 1 Percent. In other words, it’s welfare time once again–for the rich

Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen announced Wednesday, December 16 that the Fed will raise short term interest rates by .25 percent. That means interest rates are going to rise for the 99 percent; from 15 to 17 percent on credit cards, for example. Home mortgage rates, car loans, home equity credit lines, and student loans, among other loans, are going to rise. Home mortgage loans will rise from about 3 percent to roughly 5 percent.

Yet there are no signs of an inflationary spiral, which would in theory spur the Fed into raising rates, which is one of its falsely stated goals. Then there’s high (but not too high) employment, another cherished and false goal of the Fed. For the last six years the US economy has been creating less jobs every year (and with declining wages) than occurred under that alleged dreadful president, Jimmy Carter, whose four years as president also included rising real wages. Carter did this with an economy and population about half of today’s economy.

Preliminary indications are that the US is headed toward a recession deeper and longer than the last one, and we should arrive there somewhere between seven and seventeen months from now. The Fed’s actions exacerbate these indications by redistributing income from the 99 to the 1 percent, curtailing demand, and hurting the economy, such as a US durable goods sector that is clearly in recession. So what gives? What is the Fed up to?

Despite false statements to the contrary, the Fed actually has pretty much followed only two goals throughout its history, and its latest move is a classic example of this. One goal is to protect the profits and share prices of the big banks, and number two is to protect wealthy investors from their own bad investment decisions. Everybody else is expendable when the Fed undertakes its responsibilities. In other words, the 99 percent is expendable, and often the victims, of the Fed’s actions on behalf of its unstated goals, which is to financially protect the rich.

And so in this most recent Fed action, the Fed is doing its first duty; increasing the earnings and share prices of the big banks at the expense of the 99 percent, which makes it seem, quite accurately, that the relationship between the Fed/Big Banks and the 99 percent is akin to parasites unto their hosts.

Your higher credit payments are going toward greater bank profits, which will provide rising dividends to rich shareholders. Share prices might and should rise, at least in the short term. This is pure income redistribution, and the corporate propaganda network wants you to believe the Fed’s increase in interest rates is to stabilize the economy, or limit non-existent inflationary pressures, or who knows what. But the last thing the corporate press wants you to know is that more of your income is being redistributed by the US Federal Reserve Bank to the rich via higher bank profits, rising shares, and soaring dividends. The rich are going to get richer, and you are going to be more poor.

The ten biggest US banks have many things in common, and one of them is declining share prices since last summer. Clearly, the Fed’s action is intended to reverse the decline.

The ten biggest US banks are:

1 JP Morgan Chase
2. Bank of America
3. Citigroup
4. Wells Fargo
5. US Bancorp
6. Bank of New York Mellon Corporation
7. PNC Bank
8. Capital One
9. HSBC North America Holdings
10. TD Bank US Holding Company

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Why It’s Long Past Time to Raise the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 an Hour By 2017

People earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 aren’t going out to eat at restaurants because they can’t afford to do so. That’s pretty much true for those who make higher state minimum wages of nine and ten dollars an hours. These people are not taking yoga, piano, or karate lessons. They don’t belong to gyms, and they don’t take part in yoga classes. They purchase few if any new books, and buy clothes at second hand stores, like the local Goodwill. They don’t buy flowers for their mother’s on mother’s day. They’re not purchasing new computers, cameras, tables, chairs, carpets, washing machines, dryers, I-phones, cars, organic food, or houses. They’re not buying a lot of other things.

What good are these people to the economy, other than to provide rich people with cheap labor? Like the idle rich, minimum wage workers barely stimulate demand for goods and services.

What do low wages have to do to with rich people? Low wages boost profits. As a consequence of that, corporate dividends and share prices go up. People who earn less than $100,000 a year own hardly any shares of corporations. The primary beneficiaries of people working at minimum wages go primarily to the rich.

If you raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, the people who benefit from this raise will be buying a lot of the things listed above and more, even a house in Detroit, Michigan, and elsewhere, as well.

And all of a sudden, not just large businesses, but small businesses thrive because demand for goods and services is stronger.

Studies over the last fifteen years show that the idea that high wages weakens employment is a myth.

There are two fundamental laws of capitalism. One is something about supply and demand, which is often rigged in favor of those who believe and act upon the golden rule; he who has the gold makes the rules. The other rule, which Henry Ford (the founder of the Ford Motor Company) believed was simple: When people have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more workers.

This explains why the current economic expansion is the worst since the Great Depression in virtually every category having to do with jobs, wages, GNP, and the things that are important to 99 percent of the US population.

Currently, 1 percent of the population has rigged the economic and political games over the last thirty-five years to the point where they have received a legislatively determined 95 percent of all income growth since 2009, the most ever on record. Worse yet, the rich steal 37 percent of all income produced in the United States nowadays, and that figure is growing, and with no end in sight. Rich parasites will soon be larger in terms of total income than their hosts, the 99 percent.

Ever wonder why the economy under President Jimmy Carter produced more jobs, raised wages, and had greater GNP growth on average than any year of the last fifteen with an economy that was ½ the size of today, and with a population that was 60 percent the size of today? The answer is simple.

Back then, the rich only stole 8 percent of the annual income produced in the United States. That means the rest of us earned 92 percent of all the income created in the USA, which meant demand for goods and services was far more plentiful then than today, job growth was greater, and wages for the 99 percent also rose. Under Carter, the economy created 225,000 jobs a month. Over the last fifteen years, 90,000 has been hailed as an outstanding achievement by President George W. Bush, as well as President Obama.

Something clearly is out of whack with the economy, and yes, most of it has to do with the massive corruption of the US government that was unleashed by the Reagan tax cuts. But if income can be massively redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent, as it has been for the last thirty-five years, then the government can act to redistribute it back to where it belongs, and all for the good of the economy. This can partially be achieved by raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2017.

And don’t tell me corporate America doesn’t have the money. Currently, they’re sitting on 7-8 trillion dollars inside the US, while holding another 7-8 trillion outside the US, because the demand for goods and services is so low they have no reason to invest it in new plant and equipment so as to increase production, which would require workers.

You can go back 150 years and literally find the same people shouting over and over again on behalf of their rich patrons saying the same thing, “If people on the bottom get paid more, it will be bad for them, and they will lose their jobs.” That’s just a polite way of saying, “My patrons and I are rich, you’re poor, and my boss and I want to keep it that way. And besides, it’s good for Wall Street.”

The fact that corporations are sitting on trillions upon trillions of dollars because demand is slack shows the opposite is true. Every one of those trillions of dollars could be used to create jobs if only the demand was there. The years between President Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan also show the same thing.

If you pay people more, they will purchase more, and everybody will be better off, not just a few politically powerful people. Those trillions of dollars will be used to invest in the production of goods and services. Those trillions also show that US corporations are quite capable of paying their employees more, and not just the already rich CEOs.

That’s why it’s long past time to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Besides, if the minimum wage had kept up with productivity (or real inflation) over the last 56 years, the US federal minimum wage would be nearly twenty dollars an hour.

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Trickle Down Economics Started it All

Trickle down economics was the lie that said if you made the richer more wealthier, everybody would get richer, and all boats would rise with the rising tide. The American public bought it under a massive media propaganda blitz, and Reaganomics was born.

Trickle down economics, in reality, was an income redistribution scam designed to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent, and, as you can tell from the graph above, it has worked really well.

It all began with President Ronald Reagan and his tax cuts for the rich. Thus ended the most prosperous period for the middle and lower classes in US history as trickle down economics sucked more and more of their income, like a vacuum cleaner, right up into the pockets of the affluent.

The affluent used their new found purchasing power via the tax cuts to corrupt government to the maximum. They bought legislation to redistribute income into their already fat wallets. In short, that’s how we got to where we are today.

1. The worst economic expansion in terms of job growth in US history.
2. The worst economic expansion in terms of wage growth in US history.
3. The best economic expansion for the rich in US history, where 95 percent of all wage growth has gone to the 1 percent since 2009.
4. Rising poverty.
5. Rising permanent unemployment
6. The top 1 percent steal 37 percent of all income produced in the United States, compared to 8 percent in 1980, when Jimmy Carter was president.

There are some interesting things we can now see that have remained clouded to our eyes due to the media propaganda.

It makes one understand that Jimmy Carter was the last great US president. Everybody else has been a puppet of Wall Street. Under Carter, wages rose, and more jobs were created per year on average than under any other president since. He also staged a diplomatic coup when he engineered the Camp David Accords. Makes you wish for the good old days doesn’t it?

Sure, Carter had a few failings. There was relatively high inflation. You know, something like 6-8 percent per year. Carter appointed Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve. Volcker jacked up interest rates until the Fed crushed inflation. So Carter should be given credit for eliminating the 1970s inflation during the early 1980s, when he was already out of office. But guess what?

The federal government has changed the way it measures inflation 20 times since Reagan took office, so that unofficial inflation today is running at 6-8 percent. The government no longer counts energy and food prices, like it did back then. That’s why a can of tuna has increased in price from 3 for a dollar to 1 for a dollar over the last five years, and it isn’t among the items the government uses to determine the official inflation rate.

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Why and How a powerful right-wing lobby is plotting to stop minimum wage hikes by combining litigation and legislation

“A network of Republican lawmakers and their rightwing corporate funders are battling behind closed doors to block minimum wage increases in cities across the US, in a step-by-step counter-attack that could cut back the incomes of millions of Americans despite an economic upswing.

According to strategic details obtained by the Guardian, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – along with its localized sister organization, ACCE – is trying to prevent elected city representatives from raising the minimum wage to levels above those set by their states. The group has launched an aggressive dual-track mission that combines legislation and litigation in what Alec calls a “new battleground” over worker compensation.”

Why would rich people want to stop poor people from earning more money? The answer is simple.

The financial markets are Ponzi schemes. More and more money has to be pumped into the financial markets, or the values of corporate shares that are traded on those markets will crumble into nothingness. For example, if shares of Weyerhauser climb to $50 per share, yet profits go down, more sellers will enter the market than buyers, and the value of the shares go down. However, the process is also true if profits stay the same from one quarter to the next. In which case, there might be exactly as many buyers as sellers of Weyerhauser shares if other stock prices are rising.

Why hold a static stock when when you can sell and purchase shares that are on the rise? The result of static corporate profits (and profits are the key to whether or not share prices rise), is to send share prices down. Weyerhauser’s stock plummeted from $50 to $1 per share from 1929 to 1933, which is when the Ponzi Scheme known as Wall Street collapsed. I demonstrated this in greater detail in The Rigged Game: Corporate America and a People Betrayed.

This is why ALEC opposes increasing the minimum wage anywhere except for shareholders, CEOs and corporate lobbyists. If corporations need to pay workers higher wages, that will reduce profits and potentially send share prices lower. This is also why the 1 percent wage war against the middle class, corrupt government at all levels with their ill-gotten gains, and have their legislators push legislation to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent. This is also why we have much greater inflation today than the government lets us know about, but that’s another story.

Check out the rest of the story from the Guardian by clicking on the link below.

How a powerful rightwing lobby is plotting to stop minimum wage hikes–the Guardian

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The Big Lies of Government, the corporate news media, Wall Street:

This is the labor force participation rate. Notice it peaked in 2000, and the total percentage of people participating in the labor market has gone done for numerous reasons…

Note: the corporate press is already launching the counterattacks to what Jim Clifton wrote on his blog.

Jim Clifton, CEO of the polling service Gallup, has reported what we already know: the US government understates the unemployment rate. This is done so as to make the economy appear better than it is.

Writes Clifton in a blog post published Tuesday on Gallup.com:

Here’s something that many Americans — including some of the smartest and most educated among us — don’t know: The official unemployment rate, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, is extremely misleading.

Right now, we’re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is “down” to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market. There’s no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.”

The Big Lie is true of a lot of things. For instance, the news media, the president, and Wall Street are trying to push through the largest international income and political power redistribution agreement in world history called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). They’re calling it a free trade treaty.

The government, the media and Wall Street also push the Big Lie with inflation. Since 1983, the government folks have changed the way it measures inflation twenty times, and each time the government has done this, the inflation has been made smaller than it really is. If inflation today was measured the way it was in 1980, inflation would be about 5 percent. And if gasoline prices were stable, rather than heading downward, the inflation rate would be about 8-10 percent. There’s a reason for this Big Lie. Keep prices and profits going upward without alarming the 99 percent.

The safety of GMO foods is another Big Lie perpetrated by the big three. President Obama and others tell us they’re safe. However, numerous peer reviewed academic studies show tremendous potential for GMOs to human health, which has been linked to autism, cancer, tumors, allergies, liver damage, sexual organ damage, and numerous other maladies. Just check out the shocking Fox News Video about GMOs below.

The corporate press is launching a vicious counterattack against Clifton and his blog post. That’s their job, to discredit anyone who questions one of the corporate news media, government and Wall Street Big Lies.

Here’s what the corporate propaganda machine doesn’t want you to know–Gallop.com

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How the Federal Reserve Can Help or Hurt the Economy: What’s at Stake | Economic Policy Institute

The Federal Reserve can make or break the economy. Currently, the Fed is keeping interest rates low, which it easier for people to purchase things on credit, spurring demand for goods and services and creating jobs in the process. Republicans have wanted the Fed to raise interest rates for years, but only since President Obama was elected in 2008, in order to tank the economy and place the blame on President Obama.

Click the link below to check out a story by Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute on what other steps the Fed can take to make or break the economy.

How the Federal Reserve Can Help or Hurt the Economy: What’s at Stake | Economic Policy Institute.

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Inflation: Lies and stupidity on the right vs. lies and stupidity on the left

Inflation redistributes income from the 99 percent and delivers said income to the 1 percent. This is a no-brainer, making inflation nothing more than an income redistribution scam that those on the right and those on the left lie about, although maybe they just don’t know, which is unlikely. Case in point is a Paul Krugman op-ed below.

Krugman claims there is little inflation nowadays, while his right wing opponents claim there is ton’s of inflation and its caused by the Federal Reserve. They’re both right and they’re both wrong, kind of, but not really.

Krugman claimed in his op-ed that inflation is close to zero, and that’s true, kind of. In reality, inflation is currently closer to 8 percent if it was measured as it was back in 1980. Since then the government has switched the way it measures inflation twenty times, and all of these changes show less and less inflation. That is why inflation as measured today is less than 3 percent when it’s probably slightly above 8 percent. The purpose of doing this was to keep people from protesting and getting mad about their loss of real spending power, such as happened back in the 1970s.

Conservatives rightfully claim the inflation numbers are understated, which is remarkably true. However, Republicans claim this is caused by the Federal Reserve and its massive printing of money, which is perhaps a tad true, but mostly false.

Inflation mostly comes from corporate planning. Publicly traded limited liability corporations must always have rising share prices, which is largely a product of increasing profits and dividends. The best way to ensure these constantly increasing returns on investment is for corporate competitors to gather together and plan price increases. Thousands of corporations plan their prices rises in tandem, for the most part, and that’s why we have inflation.

When corporations raise their prices in tandem, it’s called a conspiracy in restraint of trade, a violation of the law, but the government almost always looks the other way, which is a function of corruption. This is not to suggest that to some degree competition doesn’t exist in the corporate world, because it does, but it’s a minor nuisance to our captains of industry which is quickly eliminated when the competition gets too hot, and saner minds quickly impose a truce on any hostilities since the primary enemy of the corporations are their unwitting customers.

Guess who pays the cost of this non-competition? You do. When the price of tuna, or lettuce, or gasoline, or cars, or airline tickets rise due to corporate planning, the difference between the old prices and the new higher prices goes from your pockets into those of rich shareholders.

That’s what the politicos and corporate fat cats don’t want you to know, so they keep the argument within unrealistic and narrow lines of debate.

See Krugman’s op-ed below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/07/opinion/paul-krugman-conservative-delusions-about-inflation.html?_r=0

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The Central Economic Challenge Today

From the Economic Policy Institute:

“The vast majority of Americans primarily rely on their earnings from work—not investment income, not government support payments—to get by. That’s why we can’t address inequality without addressing wages. And what has been happening to wages is not pretty. The pay of most workers has been stuck for decades even though productivity and earnings at the top are escalating. Between 1979 and 2013, productivity grew eight times faster than median worker pay. Americans are working harder, more productively, and with more education than ever, but are treading water, as an enormous and ever-increasing share of income growth goes to corporate profits and executive pay. Just in the last decade—between 2002 and 2013—inflation-adjusted wages were stagnant or fell for the bottom 70 percent of wage earners. This widespread wage stagnation, which afflicts even the college-educated, hurts economic growth, curtails the aspirations of lower-income families, and constricts middle-class incomes.

The central economic policy issue today is the challenge of generating broad-based wage growth. Broad-based wage growth is the key to addressing income inequality, ensuring social mobility, reducing poverty, boosting middle-class incomes, and enjoying stable economic growth.”

These are brave and accurate economic words from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), but dealing with these matters is a political problem, which is how income has been redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent during the last thirty-four years.

It’s also a misinformation challenge as the corporate press dutifully lies to us about how our income and health is being redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent, but that’s another story.

Free trade treaties are written and approved by congress and the president with an eye toward jacking up the profits reaped by major corporations (which are tools through which the 1 percent redistribute income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent), and for shipping jobs overseas.

The primary US export is American jobs. The difference between the old and higher US wages and the new lower overseas wages is redistributed to the 1 percent via higher profits, surging share prices, and mounting dividends. The rich get richer, while the middle class sees a reduction in jobs, pay, tax revenues for schools, fire, police, road maintenance, and more, and all of that “more” is negative, for the 99 percent.

Currently, the Obama regime is negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the largest income redistribution treaty of all time, and it’s being negotiated with an eye toward exactly that. Obama is being helped by the entire Republican Party, and many Wall Street Democrats such as Senator Ron Wyden, an always loyal and corrupt servant of the 1 percent.

Don’t believe me? Check out the video below.

The point here is the challenge of meeting the needs of the nation, of creating US economic vitality, as EPI pointed out above, is an issue of money in politics because with such obvious economic decline as experienced by most of the 99 percent during the last 34 years, President Obama (along with the help of key Republicans and Democrats in congress) is planning on doing the same old thing in ramming the TPP through congress.

Albert Einstein reportedly said the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”

Obama and the congress people who support the TPP are not insane, nor are they stupid, they’ve merely been corrupted by big money, such as Wall Street and the Koch Brothers.

And that’s the big challenge facing the 99 percent today, because money in politics is precisely why the government has been redistributing you and your children’s future, as well as your income, and tax dollars to the 1 percent over and over again for thirty-four disastrous years.

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