Our Great Economic U-Turn The top 20% of households earned more, after taxes, than the rest of the country combined in 2005, while the topmost 1% of the population took home more than the bottom 40%. The top-earning hedge fund manager of 2007, in fact, made about as much last year in nominal dollars ($3.7 billion) as J. Paul Getty, one of the richest men in the world, was worth in the mid-1970s. Real hourly wages for most workers, on the other hand, have risen only 1% since 1979, even as those workers' productivity has increased by 60%. What's more, American workers now clock more hours per year than their counterparts in virtually every other advanced economy, even Japan. And unless you haven't read a newspaper for 15 years, you already know what's happened to workers' health insurance and pension plans. I confess that I am fascinated by the mechanics of this huge social reconfiguration - in the same sense that I am fascinated by the industrial procedures of a slaughterhouse, or by the strategies that enabled small Confederate armies to win victories for slavery over much larger Union forces. (...) The feeling I get from absorbing all these facts about the state of labor comes close to the nauseated dread that washes over me when I stay up late to read one of those what-if stories in which Hitler wins World War II. Could this really have happened to my country? It has not merely "happened"; it has been done to us. The distinction is an important one to keep in mind as we survey the ruins of the affluent society. What has overtaken America's working people is not a natural disaster like "globalization," and not even some kind of societal atavism in which countries regress mysteriously to their 19th-century selves. This is a man-made catastrophe, a result that proceeded directly from the deliberate beatdown of organized labor and the wrecking of the liberal state. It is, in other words, a political disaster, with tax cuts, trade agreements, deregulatory measures, and enforcement decisions all finely crafted to benefit one part of society and leave the rest behind. Few of the voters who gave Ronald Reagan his landslide victories, it is fair to say, intended for this to be the outcome. They wanted their country to stand tall again, certainly; they wanted the scary regulators off their backs, maybe; but I can recall no conservative who trumpeted those long-ago elections - or any of the succeeding contests, for that matter - as a referendum on plutocracy. So let us have one now. Instead of pleasant talk about "change" and feats of beer drinking at the corner tavern, let us hear our candidates address this greatest issue of them all: What kind of country are we to be? A land of equality? Or a bankers' utopia - where the law of the land has achieved mystical oneness with the higher law of classical economics, and devil take the bottom 80%.
The top 20% of households earned more, after taxes, than the rest of the country combined in 2005, while the topmost 1% of the population took home more than the bottom 40%. The top-earning hedge fund manager of 2007, in fact, made about as much last year in nominal dollars ($3.7 billion) as J. Paul Getty, one of the richest men in the world, was worth in the mid-1970s.
Real hourly wages for most workers, on the other hand, have risen only 1% since 1979, even as those workers' productivity has increased by 60%. What's more, American workers now clock more hours per year than their counterparts in virtually every other advanced economy, even Japan. And unless you haven't read a newspaper for 15 years, you already know what's happened to workers' health insurance and pension plans.
I confess that I am fascinated by the mechanics of this huge social reconfiguration - in the same sense that I am fascinated by the industrial procedures of a slaughterhouse, or by the strategies that enabled small Confederate armies to win victories for slavery over much larger Union forces.
(...)
The feeling I get from absorbing all these facts about the state of labor comes close to the nauseated dread that washes over me when I stay up late to read one of those what-if stories in which Hitler wins World War II. Could this really have happened to my country?
It has not merely "happened"; it has been done to us. The distinction is an important one to keep in mind as we survey the ruins of the affluent society. What has overtaken America's working people is not a natural disaster like "globalization," and not even some kind of societal atavism in which countries regress mysteriously to their 19th-century selves. This is a man-made catastrophe, a result that proceeded directly from the deliberate beatdown of organized labor and the wrecking of the liberal state.
It is, in other words, a political disaster, with tax cuts, trade agreements, deregulatory measures, and enforcement decisions all finely crafted to benefit one part of society and leave the rest behind. Few of the voters who gave Ronald Reagan his landslide victories, it is fair to say, intended for this to be the outcome. They wanted their country to stand tall again, certainly; they wanted the scary regulators off their backs, maybe; but I can recall no conservative who trumpeted those long-ago elections - or any of the succeeding contests, for that matter - as a referendum on plutocracy.
So let us have one now. Instead of pleasant talk about "change" and feats of beer drinking at the corner tavern, let us hear our candidates address this greatest issue of them all: What kind of country are we to be? A land of equality? Or a bankers' utopia - where the law of the land has achieved mystical oneness with the higher law of classical economics, and devil take the bottom 80%.
Holy Crap. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
I'm still amazed they'd print something like this. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
I'm a big fan, and he's a great addition to the WSJ if this is a permanent thing. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
