Under the current regime, we are regressing to 1929. Believe that this a conscious strategy goal of key factions within the GOP. And we are allowing it because of the traditional values smokescreen that the architects of this plan are hiding behind. This from Tom Paine:
The share of national income going to wages and salaries is at the lowest level since 1929—the year that kicked off the Great Depression. The share going to after-tax corporate profits, which heavily benefit corporate executives and other wealthy Americans through increased dividends and capital gains, is at the highest level since 1929.
"In 2005, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans borrowed more than they earned," Parade magazine reports in "What People Earn."
Fueled by obscene wage inequality and tax cuts, income and wealth are piling up at the very top. More and more jobs are keeping people in poverty instead of out of poverty. Middle-class households are a medical crisis, outsourced job or busted pension away from bankruptcy.
Contrary to myth, the United States is not becoming more competitive in the global economy by taking the low road. We are in record-breaking debt to other countries. We have a record trade deficit, hollowed-out manufacturing base and deteriorating research and development. The infrastructure built by earlier generations of taxpayers has eroded greatly, undermining the economy as well as health and safety.
Households have propped themselves up in the face of falling real wages by maxing out work hours, credit cards and home equity loans. This is not a sustainable course. The low road is like a "shortcut" that leads to a cliff.
We will not prosper in the 21st century global economy by relying on 1920s corporate greed, 1950s tax revenues, downwardly mobile wages and global-warming energy policies. We will not prosper relying on disinvestment in place of reinvestment. We can't succeed that way any more than farmers can "compete" by eating their seed corn. . . .
In the book How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing To Make It In Today's Global Economy, Suzanne Berger reports the findings of MIT's Industrial Performance Center study of more than 500 international companies. She observes, "Contrary to the widely held belief of many managers, we conclude that solutions that depend on driving down costs by reducing wages and social benefits—in advanced countries or in emerging economies—are always dead ends. . .
"Strategies based on exploiting low-wage labor end up in competitive jungles, where victories are vanishingly thin and each day brings a new competitor. . . As low-end firms that compete on price move from one overcrowded segment of the market to the next, there is virtually no chance of gaining any durable advantage. The activities that succeed over time are, in contrast, those that build on continuous learning and innovation."
Instead of pretending the problem is overpaid workers and accelerating offshoring, we need to shore up our economy from below and invest in smart, sustainable development. Raising the minimum wage is a vital step.
The high road is not only the better road, it is the only road for progress in the future. An America that doesn’t work for working people is not an America that works.
See other posts here and here I've put up on this topic. The point is an obvious one, but one most Americans seem unable to embrace. We define the American dream in the crudest materialistic terms as the freedom to become fabulously wealthy. A few do, and hats off to them. But that ideology sets the stage for the migration of power away from the 90% of us whose means are more moderate. And we are sitting back and watching this, and the next thing you know we are living in Brazil, the rich living in their heavily gaurded gated communities, the working poor growing larger as people who have been solidly in the middle since the New Deal lose their grip there.
There will continue to be a group of professionals and small business owners in some specialized service industries who will continue to maintain their middle status, but everyone else is in a much more tenuous situation, and if the middle is not going to vanish, it's certainly not going to be who most of us are.
Nothing is guaranteed, and I'm not for a society in which people are pampered from cradle to grave, but we are allowing a society to develop in which it's going to be increasingly desperate and ruthless. We're allowing this because we've bought into the propaganda of a group of people whose ideology dates to the Social Darwinism of late nineteenth century. Most Americans would reject this vision of America if it was something that presented itself for what it is. But it has been hidden in rhetoric of lower taxes and getting government off our backs. It plays to a resentment of some the more poorly designed entitlement programs of the New Society. But most of all it has been their appeal to fear after 9/11.
But even so, they have been winning the battle of ideas because the Democrats, as the representatives of the New Deal compromise, became complacently arrogant. They have not fought back by proposing a coherent, robust alternative vision of a more humane American future. The GOP has seized the opportunity the feckless and disorganized Democrats have given them, and America pays the price. I am disgusted with the Democrats because their irresponsibility. But I fear the GOP because of the predatory ideology that is at the heart of their vision of America, no matter how they try tot disguise it with their political rhetoric.