The stagnation of earnings for most Americans, despite rising productivity, and the shrinkage of the middle class, because of soaring inequality
If you don't cherry pick your staring and ending points, if you exclude the effects the economic cycle by picking points at equivalent parts of the cycle or otherwise factoring them out, total compensation, or even cash earnings per worker, have continued to go up, and not just for the top 1% or even the top half, over the long run they have gone up (if slowly) even for the bottom 20%. Maybe the "slowly" part gets exaggerated in to "stagnation". It is true that the growth in the official stats has gone down. I'm not sure how much of that is real, and how much of that is a measurement problem, concerning issues like (but not only) adjustments for inflation.
As for "soaring inequality". It isn't. It did increase a lot in the 90s (whether or not that amount's to "soaring" is a subject for another debate but the increase was real), but not as much since then.
Not that I'm overly concerned about inequality anyway. (I would be concerned about the poor getting poorer, but the rich getting richer is a god thing.)
It’s time to revive it.
Is it time to revive it in the sense that we should say its a good idea and encourage its spread? Or is that a way to say its time to force it on those who don't like it?
Actually it seems like its in between that, encouraging tax credits. In other words trying to "nudge" people in to jumping through a bunch of hoops the government sets up in order to keep some more of their own money.
If the middle class is to survive
Hyperbole, at best. |
