Share the Wealth to Save the Nation

Although we recognize the centrality of Economics
in any understanding of the modern world we live in, and have in fact
taken several courses in the material,many of the economic phenomena
we observe first hand remain absolute mysteries until explained by
someone with a stronger knowledge background and a knack for explaining
things to knuckleheads like the Dowbrigade.

We had such an enlightenment today reading Robert
Kuttener’s column in the Boston Globe about the millions of jobs immigrants
are taking because supposedly Americans aren’t interested in them.
He maintains that the reason they aren’t interested is that the jobs
suck unnecessarily:

Raise wages, improve working conditions, and Americans
will materialize. But won’t that be inflationary? Here are some statistics
that suggest it needn’t.

Last September, Robert Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker, economists from Northwestern
University, observed that productivity and per-capita GDP had roughly
doubled in three decades, while median wages had hardly budged. So they
conducted a study titled “Where Did All the Productivity Go?"

They found that nearly all of it had gone to the richest 10 percent of
the population, and the most extreme gains to the richest 1 percent,
who now have a share of national income equal to the bottom 50 percent.
The people who really made out were the top one- 10th of 1 percent —
one American in 1,000.

So if we had a distribution of income more like the one that prevailed
in 1966, when chief executives made "only" 60 times what a
normal worker made instead of 600 times, we could raise the wages of
ordinary
people without adding to the nation’s overall wage bill.

from Boston Globe Op-ed page

So that’s how come real wages have been stagnant
for the last 30 years and families now have to work 50% more hours
to stay
in the middle class! Productivity has DOUBLED, meaning a worker nearing
retirement is producing twice as much as he or she was when they started,
but still getting paid the same crummy wage.

Where did all of that increased productivity
go? During the past three decades, as the worker’s slice of the pie stayed
the same, 100% of the benefits of the growth in productivity went to
owners, investors and top managers.

The fact that American business as a whole has been
able to get away with this boondoggle is directly related to the decline
of the American labor movement. Organized labor is the only practical
counterbalance to the greed of Ivy league executives and their legions
of highly educated lackeys, but because of scandal, corruption and disinterest
American labor as currently constituted has largely betrayed and abandoned
those it should be representing.

Meanwhile, big business has just abut bought or
co-opted every important politician in all three branches of government,
facilitating
the rip off of America’s workers and the concentration of the resulting
concentration of profits in the bank accounts of the richest fraction
of a percent of Americans.

This devaluation of honest working class jobs, leads
to the twin cancers of a large, non-productive underclass of
poor minority
citizens,
and
an
indigestible army of alienated illegal immigrants working in illegal
conditions for illegal wages. It does a tremendous disservice to the
millions of ordinary men and women who keep this country going, and represent
everything that is worth saving about this poor beleaguered land.