February 21, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE GROSSLY UNFAIR ECONOMY

Economic statistics are frequently like dealing with a quick change artist. After he walks away you find you've been had. We get all kinds of statistics about our wonderful economy, the number of jobs created, the rising incomes for everyone. But it's simply not true. Government policy since the Nixon years has consistently been tilted to make the rich richer. The incomes of most of us are stagnant or falling, even as everything else gets more expensive. This has happened even though worker productivity is at record levels. This article by Joel S. Hirshhorn is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said recently that incomes at all levels are rising; it's just that incomes at the upper end are rising much faster. Minor increases for the many are not the same as staggering increases for the few. And that’s what economic inequality and injustice are all about.

An expanding Upper Class does NOT mean that those below that class are doing equally well. Between 1979 and 2005, the percentage of the prime wage-earners aged 25 to 59 earning more than $100,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars grew by nearly 13 percentage points. But the overall population grew by more than 30 percent. So the Lower Class is expanding more rapidly than the Upper Class and they are not getting the increases in wages and benefits that they deserve.

Third Way removed lower and higher age Americans and non-married households from their data to emphasize the median income of married-couple households at more than $72,000, up 22 percent from 1979 to 2005 when adjusted for inflation (and not that impressive for 25 years). If both work outside the home it is $81,000. Guess what? Less than half of American households fit the married couple category, and even fewer in the prime wage-earner class. If you include the many unmarried households in this age range the median drops to $61,000. If all households are counted, the median drops sharply to just over $46,000.