Wages Dropped for Almost All American Workers in First Half of 2014

From AlterNet:

Think your money's not going very far this year? It's not your imagination. According to new research by the Economic Policy Institute, real hourly wages declined for almost everybody in the U.S. workforce in the first half of 2014. Thanks, so-called recovery.

And

This was true whether you had no high school degree, a high school diploma, some college, a college degree, or an advanced degree. In fact, people with advanced degrees saw the biggest drop (2.7 percent).

More here.

REPUBLICANS: Oh, well, of course wages have dropped.  We've got that socialist in the White House.  And tax-and-spend Democrats won't let us free business up enough to do its thing.

DEMOCRATS: Oh, well, of course wages have dropped.  The Republicans continue to control the House, which means Obama can't get anything done, and Bush really did leave a mess for the President to clean up, you know.

I'm so sick of hearing this shit.  Wages have dropped because nobody is doing anything to stop it.  For the Republicans, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of macroeconomics, originally based on the flawed assumptions of neoliberalism back during the Reagan era, but which has now devolved into bizarre folk wisdom, and I use the term "wisdom" very loosely here.  For Democrats, it's essentially the same thing, but without the devolution part--that is, with the Dems, it continues to be "morning in America," even though that sinister euphemism never did describe reality.

In short, both parties have embraced neoliberal thought, Reaganomics, corporatism, whatever you want to call it.  And it's total bullshit.  Kissing big business' ass does not grow the economy.  But that's what both parties have been doing, over and over, for decades, in spite of numerous demonstrable failures.  This is why I continue to say that there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties.

Well, okay, to be fair, maybe there's at least a dime's worth of difference.  But not much more than that.  The GOP, for instance, is very much into second amendment rights, while the Democrats prefer to protect the rights of people who don't want to die from gunshot wounds.  Republicans, in spite of their recent seeming love of "libertarianism," want the government inside all women's vaginas; Democrats, of course, oppose this.  And so on.  So yeah, there are some very important differences between the two parties.

But not when it comes to economics, which arguably affect our lives overall far more than any other issues.  On economics, Democrats and Republicans are in lockstep.  I mean, okay, yeah, the GOP establishment has to throw a few psychotic bones to their psychotic Tea Party base, you know, utterly irrational debt ceiling standoffs and the like, but philosophically, among Republicans who can pronounce the word "philosophically," there is something approaching full agreement with Democrats.  Low taxes, privatization, less regulation, anti-union attitudes, etc.  The stuff we've been doing in this country for three decades, always with shitty results.

I'd vote for somebody else, but I don't know who that would be.  And now Elizabeth Warren is all about terrorizing Gaza.  It just keeps getting worse.

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