http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-state-inequality-america
This column is part of “The State of America,” an msnbc.com series leading up to President Barack Obama’s 2015 State of the Union Address on Tuesday, Jan. 20. This is the state of the issues you care about, as told by organizations promoting social change and other policy experts.
The president has an opportunity in the State of the Union to tell the truth about the economy: Jobs are coming back, but wages aren’t. In December, the average wage actually dropped.
The deeper truth is that this recovery, like the last five recoveries, masks the longer-term decline of most peoples’ wages – and the decline of the American middle class.
Three decades ago, we took a giant U-turn.
In the first three decades after World War II, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen.
“This recovery, like the last five recoveries, masks the longer-term decline of most peoples’ wages – and the decline of the American middle class. “
During those years, the earnings of the typical American worker doubled, just as the size of the American economy doubled. By 1960, the income of a single school teacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family.
Over the last thirty years, by contrast, the size of the economy doubled again but the earnings of the typical American have gone nowhere.
In that earlier period, more than a third of all workers belonged to a trade union — giving average workers the bargaining power necessary to get a large and growing share of the large and growing economic pie.
Now, fewer than 7% of private-sector workers are unionized.
Then, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid an average of about 20 times the pay of their typical worker. Now their pay is well over 200 times.
In those years, the richest 1% took home 9 to 10% of total income. Today the top 1% gets more than 20%.
Then, the tax rate on highest-income Americans’ top dollars never fell below 70%; under Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, it was 91%. Today the top tax rate is
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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