ECONOMIC LAWS ARE BULLSHIT
GDP Grows But Most Lose Ground

From the New York Times courtesy of the Progressive American, Princeton economist Paul Krugman on how a "good economy" is meaningless to most Americans:

The Great Disconnect

The stagnation of real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — actually goes back more than 30 years. The real wage of nonsupervisory workers reached a peak in the early 1970's, at the end of the postwar boom. Since then workers have sometimes gained ground, sometimes lost it, but they have never earned as much per hour as they did in 1973.

Meanwhile, the decline of employer benefits began in the Reagan years, although there was a temporary improvement during the Clinton-era boom. The most crucial benefit, employment-based health insurance, has been in rapid decline since 2000.

And

Why have workers done so badly in a rich nation that keeps getting richer? That's a matter of dispute, although I believe there's a large political component: what we see today is the result of a quarter-century of policies that have systematically reduced workers' bargaining power.

Click here for the rest.

Somewhere along the line, in the late 80s or early 90s, when I wasn't as liberal as I am now, but had already left conservatism behind, it occurred to me that all the talk I was hearing then about traditional stay-at-home mothers versus working mothers was kind of a pointless debate. The conversation was in terms of how feminism was or wasn't hurting America, but for some reason it suddenly became obvious to me that so many women entered the work force starting in the 70s not because of a newfound freedom to do so, but because of necessity. It just so happens that the womens' rights movement happened at the same time that wages started falling. The long and the short of all this is that, in my lifetime, the middle class has effectively ended.

When I was a kid, a family could easily get by with only one breadwinner. Furthermore, this successful breadwinner status was easily accomplished by guys working in factories, driving cabs, clerking in grocery stores, and in many other blue collar jobs. Not today. Now most families absolutely have to have two adults working full time in order to make ends meet, and often these families are one financial disaster, such as an injury that requires surgery, away from ruin. If we have a middle class in the US today, it is cultural only. The economic middle class of my childhood is simply a thing of the past.

Krugman nails it when he suggests that the cause is the erosion of collective bargaining rights. That is, the middle class was essentially created after WWII by conscious policy decisions that established full legitimacy for labor unions, which affected all workers' situations, even those who weren't in unions. Since the Reagan era, and even earlier, even during the administration of liberal icon Jimmy Carter, the Federal government has made it absolutely clear that they would not only be repealing many of those labor-friendly laws passed decades before, but they would also refuse to enforce the laws remaining on the books. In other words, the government created the middle class, and the government destroyed the middle class.

In short, it doesn't have to be like this. Things can be much better.

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