This is just unbelievable. Kudos to David Frum for highlighting this:
Workers’ share of U.S national income:
">
Yeah, I know who David Frum is. But he is at least addressing this and it is quite funny to me that he is asking the republican presidential candidates if they think this should be addressed. I think we all know what the answer to that is.
I rarely diary. But seeing this just stunned me, even though I know that things are bad.
How can we ever recover from this? Notice the steep decline since 2001, when of course the "wonderful" Bush tax cuts, 2 wars, Medicare Advantage, and continued loss of jobs and benefits all led the lower 90% of the country to this position. Now the recession has caused an even steeper decline. And by the way, how in the world can we officially be out of a recession when we have record high unemployment/underemployment and wages dropping so steeply?
Yet, our elites/leaders tell us we still have too much. We need to cut unions, take away collective bargaining rights, lower salaries, cut benefits while the CEOs of big companies increase THEIR take-home by double digits- last increase I heard was 25%. That federal deficit is killing us! Let's cut Medicare, SS; those abortions/Planned Parenthood/ACORN are what is destroying our society; those poor people are lazy and need to just work harder. The poor people don't pay federal income tax- why that is a crime, they say! They need skin in the game, they say! Who cares if they can barely afford a roof over their head and food on the table! We need to cut the wages to everyone except upper management, especially public workers and we can break the promise to fund pensions when our politicians underfund them for years. We need to cut WIC, cut food stamps, cut, cut, cut! But those rich people just can't pay a penny more in taxes- after all, they deserve what they earn, while the rest of us struggling to put food on the table apparently don't even deserve what we have.
What little we are now doing is not helping, IMO. Keeping interest rates near zero helps the upper echelons, but the rest of us suffer with minimal returns on the meager savings we do have. Same goes for the quantitative easing- very, very little trickles down to us. All that Obama has proposed is recommending Congress ratify a few free trade agreements and pass something to do with the patent process. Relying on the "magic market" is clearly not working but I keep reading there is just "no appetite" in Congress for any further stimulus.
Seriously, we have lost any moral imperatives to function as a society when these things dominate our national, state and local conversation. These are deemed acceptable by too many in our leadership. No doubt about it, this is class warfare. We have lost.