Redistributing Wealth

Les Leopold recently posted an article at Alternet called How Can the World's Richest Country Let Children Go Hungry? 6 Tricks Corporate Elites Use to Hoard All the Wealth. Not only is he spot on in his analysis, the evidence supporting his contentions is massive and unmistakable. I want to examine just one of them in this post. The others I will return to in time.

His first, and now mine, addresses increased economic productivity and how the benefits have become poorly distributed. His contention is thus:

Productivity continues to rise but the 99 percent doesn’t share in the benefits. The key to the material wealth of any nation is productivity – how much we produce per worker hour. Productivity is a crude measure of our overall level of knowledge, technique, organization, skill and cooperative work practices that produce the sum total of our goods and services. Lo and behold, there’s nothing at all wrong with productivity in America. It continues to rise and rise just like it did during our post-WWII boom years. What’s changed is that the average American wage has stalled since the mid-1970s -- which is precisely the time that we started to deregulate Wall Street and cut taxes on the rich. During the 1950s and '60s boom years, almost all Americans shared in the fruits of productivity leading to rising real wages (after inflation). But now the productivity lines and wage lines have pulled apart. The gap between the two lines represents trillions of dollars that once went to the average American but are now going almost entirely to the super-rich.

Here's what Leopold is saying, in graphic form:

As should be apparent, throughout most of the post-war period, labor productivity steadily increased, and workers' compensation largely kept up. This was close to ideal and helps explain why the US economy was the envy of the world. The trend came to an end, rather abruptly, in roughly 1980.

It isn't getting any better. A recent study from Northwestern University reveals that 88 percent of income growth since 2009 was in the form of corporate profits, and only one percent went to wages. A recent investor report from JP Morgan notes approvingly that corporate profit margins increased by about 1.3 percent from 2000 to 2007, adding not only that profit margins are now at levels "not seen in decades," but that the primary reason for the fattened margins is a reduction in wages and benefits.

This is sick.  I remind the reader that reducing taxes on the wealthy and on corporations is at the heart of the Republican platform. And increasing wages and benefits for middle America is not.