On Monday The New York Times reported this:
The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity - the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards - has risen steadily over the same period.
As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”
…
For most of the last century, wages and productivity - the key measure of the economy’s efficiency - have risen together, increasing rapidly through the 1950’s and 60’s and far more slowly in the 1970’s and 80’s.
But in recent years, the productivity gains have continued while the pay increases have not kept up. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent, according to Labor Department statistics analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Benefits accounted for most of the increase.
“If I had to sum it up,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the institute, “it comes down to bargaining power and the lack of ability of many in the work force to claim their fair share of growth.”
…
In 2004, the top 1 percent of earners - a group that includes many chief executives - received 11.2 percent of all wage income, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than 6 percent three decades ago, according to Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, economists who analyzed the tax data.
And on Wednesday, The New York Times reports:
The nation’s median household income rose slightly faster than inflation last year for the first time in six years, the Census Bureau reported yesterday.
The rise, however, had little to do with bigger paychecks - in fact, both men and women earned less in 2005 than 2004. Rather, census officials said, more family members were taking jobs to make ends meet, and some people made more money from investments and other sources beyond wages.
…
The small uptick in median household income reported yesterday, 1.1 percent, was not enough to offset a longer-term drop in median household income - the annual income at which half of the country’s households make more and half make less.
That figure fell 5.9 percent between the 2000 census and 2005, to $46,242 from $49,133, according to an analysis of the data conducted for The New York Times by the sociology department of Queens College. The difference was so sharp, in part, because the 2000 census measured 1999 income, which was at the height of the dot-com bubble.
…
The new data also showed continuing erosion in the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance. In 2005, an estimated 46.6 million people had no coverage, up 1.3 million since 2004 and increasing the percentage of Americans without health coverage from 15.6 percent of the population to 15.9 percent.
After recent decreases in the numbers of children without health insurance, this year’s data found that their numbers grew between 2004 and 2005, rising from 10.8 percent of those under 18 to 11.2 percent.
Republicans were very pleased with these numbers. Why? Because their plan is working. The figures cited in these two articles show that they have successfully shifted much of the nation’s income from the lower and middle classes to the upper classes.
Corporate profits are up! Taxes on dividends and capital gains are down! Hooray for the super rich! They can hire the proletariat to cater to their wants and desires. And that’s good, because those extra jobs increases household income by getting more people in each household to work for less money.
There’s a name for this type of government: Fascism.
The working class fought against fascism during the Roosevelt years and made solid gains. Now it seems that we must fight the same battles all over again.
0 Responses to “Things are Looking Up… for Fascists”