The costs of five years of wage cuts are adding up. For five years corporations have enlarged their profit by taking the money directly from the wages of their workers. However, that is a zero-sum game that only works for a limited amount of time, and now the corporations that get their revenue from the shrinking middle class are starting to worry about their customer base.
Sixty-eight percent of the top 100 retail companies in the U.S. -- a group that includes, Walmart, Apple, McDonald's and J.C. Penney -- say the country's stagnant wages pose a major threat to their bottom lines, according to a new report by the Center For American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.
The researchers pointed out that only half as many top 100 retailers identified flat wages as a business risk in 2006, the year before the Great Recession.
The average American family makes less than it did 15 years ago, which The New York Times recently pointed out has not happened since the Great Depression.
Everyone slashing wages means that less money for consumer consumption, which translates into less sales revenue for corporations that sell things to consumers.
It's seems so obvious and logical that only an over-educated economist, a corporate spokesman, or a financial pundit could miss it.
It falls into the same category as free-trade, and that opening up free trade agreements with 3rd world nations means that workers are competing directly with impoverished workers, and thus a race-to-the-bottom in wages is inevitable.
All this wage slashing and Laissez-Faire Economics has left us with record wealth inequality.
A key metric of wealth inequality in the United States has reached levels unknown since the Great Depression, a new study into global finances has found.
It was also revealed that almost half of the assets in the world are owned by just 0.7 per cent of the world's population, as the world's economy powers ahead.
The new data has raised the specter of a new catastrophic economic failure, of a parallel with the banking crashes of 2008 or the dot-com bubble in 2000.
The study shows that global wealth is increasing at an accelerate rate in the past year or so, but at the same time global "median wealth plunging 14 per cent since 2007".
Amazingly, the United States has 41% of the world's millionaires, and that about a third of the globe's rise in wealth over the past year was in just America's economy despite
median wages being flat in the United States.
7:26 PM PT: