Jeb Says to Work Harder

It should come as no surprise that Jeb Bush, after saying he would not run, and was not interested in being President, has decided that he is going to run, because he is interested after all. Sure Jeb, you really had me fooled.

This post is only about his most recent foot-in-mouth moment, though he has had a number of missteps from the very beginning: Not good for the brother who was supposed to be the smart one. You can get the gist of it from the picture below.

Here is the interview with New Hampshire's The Union Leader, complete with a video, in which he said the following:

“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours” and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.”

Most critics jumped on the "need to work longer hours" aspect, and with good reason. We, Americans, already work the longest hours in the industrialized world.

Bush claimed what he meant was that too many workers juggle part-time jobs, when they would prefer a single full-time job. That much is true; part-time work takes an even greater toll because of the additional logistic challenges, a point I have touched on before.

Jeb did not clarify how he would rectify that, nor, for that matter, was there a hint of recognition as to why Americans are forced to work such long hours at so many jobs just to get by. Republicans won't mention that the US has among the lowest minimum wage, the fewest paid vacations, relatively few national holidays, inadequate pensions, low job protection, and no paid maternity leave. But Jeb Bush thinks we just need to work harder.
                               
But note also that Jeb said we need to raise productivity, and then maybe people will earn more. It is this observation that reveals how misinformed he is. Does he not realize the US is already among the most productive countries in the world, if not the most? A search taking all of 20 seconds showed the US as the most productive G7 member (2013 data). By all means, see the charts. The productivity has been there for decades, but the gains have been entirely garnered by those at the top. This is a fundamental reality of modern America.

JB just cannot bring himself to accept that growing inequality and rising hardships in this country are the result of policies and legislation promoted by his Party. They are the ones that have wanted cheap labor, the ability to outsource jobs, low minimum wages, weak unions, low employee benefits, low marginal tax rates, numerous tax advantages for the wealthy, massive defense spending, and generous subsidies to profitable companies.

America's overclass has created a blatantly rigged system, but Jeb thinks the solution is for the rest of us to work harder. And he is the smart one?

Cheap Labor Only, Please

Manufacturing and trade news do not get much coverage in our mainstream press. Japanese obsess over trade data, as do the Chinese, Koreans, and most others who take manufacturing seriously. This is obvious from reading any of the mainstream and  business-oriented newspapers overseas.

Ours? The focus is more on Wall Street, corporate profits, and finance. Our corporate media does not want to spend much time on the implications of large, chronic, and structural trade deficits, except for the predictable paeans to free trade, how much we benefit, and how boorishly stupid you are if you are not a committed free trader. Honest analyses of how we arrived at our current condition are rare; most commentary is ideologically driven tripe that contends workers are overpaid and investors need more profits. 

To be sure, we have all read of the decline of American manufacturing. And for those who are determined to know, many websites and blogs, especially those hosted by academics, cover these subjects very well. But while complaints about Chinese currency manipulation and the hazards of doing business in China do get coverage, little is said in the mainstream media about the role of American corporations and how they turned over technology and manufacturing to China and other trade competitors, all in an effort to tap cheap labor, ignore the challenges and capital requirements of advanced manufacturing, boost short-term profits, and please the investor class.

As Chinese wages continue to climb, we are now seeing some evidence of a pick-up in US manufacturing. But a central conundrum remains: Should it be a matter of policy to promote the return of manufacturing to the US? Or is the market going to resolve domestic manufacturing, and perhaps give a boost to exports, without policy intervention?

It is hard to get enthusiastic about an improving manufacturing sector, especially in the face of new data. I once would have welcomed it more openly, but it is becoming increasingly clear that a global economy or neo-mercantilist trading partners are only secondary reasons. In other words, less blame should be attributed to cheap labor in China and more to the desire for cheap labor in the US. The current condition of the US, complete with massive trade and current account deficits, is the direct result of wealthy and well-connected purveyors of neo-liberal free markets. It is they who have hobbled government's essential regulatory role (derivatives anyone?) and facilitated the dominance of finance and the rentier class.

So there is little reason to think that newly created manufacturing jobs are going to pay very well. Neo-liberal policy wonks, along with right-wing politicians, have had a 30+ year run promoting ideas, policies, and legislation that has weakened labor unions, kept minimum wages low, undermined workers' rights and put into place an elaborate tax code that ensures that corporations will largely avoid taxes. All of that in addition to the glories of free and unfettered international trade.

All of which was always the goal. To the extent that corporations locate or relocate manufacturing in the US, it will only be in response to low wages, obscene tax giveaways from states, the absence of unions, and elaborate agreements with government officials that ensure corporations will continue to privatize the benefits and socialize that costs. If manufacturing does meaningfully increase in the US, it will only be because wages have been driven down. If wages go up, even in accordance with productivity gains, corporations will threaten to off-shore production once again.

Impressive

You've got to hand it to Republican Party operatives. After more than 30 years of constant effort, conservatives within the party, media, the judiciary, and in the corporate world, have managed to turn upside down much of what the public thought it knew about government, unions, taxes, and even teachers.

I make a distinction between Republicans and conservatives that some may see as unnecessary; are not Republicans and conservatives synonymous? Pretty much, at least in 2012, but it would be difficult to overstate just how far to the right the Republican Party has lurched; a process that began, to the dismay of millions of moderate and liberal Republicans, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964. The cleansing process picked up rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, with numerous watershed moments, such as the arrival of Newt Gingrich and the politics of destruction. As testimony to Republicans' new approach to governing, many will recall that the Party was able to keep Whitewater in public view, with the help of a stupidly compliant press, for literally years on end, only to have the process finally wind down having demonstrated no presidential malfeasance.

From the judicial standpoint, it was a waste of time and taxpayers' money. But upholding the law had nothing to do with it. The objective was to vilify a Democratic President, obstruct his agenda and ability to govern, and convince the public that conservatives stood on principles. The never-ending rush to spin the story helped feed the narrative that liberals are not to be trusted. Even today people will refer to Whitewater as a scandal, forgetting that there was no wrongdoing, despite years of investigation. It was only a scandal because the Republican hierarchy kept claiming it was. And many will be surprised when reminded that the 12 years of Reagan and Bush saw a dramatically greater number of actual convictions, not accusations, than in the eight years of Clinton. If the reality goes against what you had heard and "just assumed," it is because Republicans worked hard to make it so, for they have shown a superior ability to get their ideas into the media and into people's heads. They dominate most narratives because they understand how to make their messages simple and emotional. What sounds implausible or even ridiculous at first becomes accepted as truth if repeated enough. All propagandists understand this. This why Republicans have said for decades they, against all evidence, are the party of personal responsibility, fiscal prudence, and limited government. Voters who don't study the facts have come to accept this narrative.

And now we see Republican spin taken to new heights, creating a parallel world of logic and reason. They have managed what should have been impossible in a sane world of evidence, facts, and reason; divert enough of the electorate's, and the media's, attention away from the Wall Street banks and turn the middle class against itself. Significant numbers of Americans now think that public workers earn too much, are lazy and irresponsible, and are a drain on our fragile economy.Too many show an infantile understanding of economics by buying into Republican rhetoric that teachers' salaries are too high, so we must rein in those destructive teachers' unions. "Never mind that stuff you hear about Wall Street. Those guys deserve every penny they got, and besides, look at all the jobs they create."

The truly reprehensible thing about Mitt Romney is that he personally promotes these ideas and never once has acknowledged that the Bush tax cuts, which he wants to deepen, have been a prime contributor to the federal deficit. Everything the man says indicates he will be for the one percent and will penalize the working class, and yet he is running as a viable candidate.

And as we just saw in Wisconsin, there are plenty of voters who are fine with Scott Walker's effort to strip away the hard-fought gains by teachers and other public workers. Many now instinctively believe that there is such a thing in America as "big labor," and that cutting back salaries and benefits of teachers, librarians, firefighters, cops, and others, will somehow drive the economy forward, that and more tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans have apparently convinced more than a few that teachers are now fat cats. The Wall Street bankers that drove the economy into recession have almost entirely avoided legal scrutiny. Forgotten is their unforgivable act of paying mammoth executive compensation with the very tax dollars meant to stabilize the catastrophic mess they created. No accountability, no significant judicial proceedings, and the few penalties levied have been easily paid and treated as nothing more than the cost of doing business.

The banks got away with it while attention has been diverted to where Republicans want it. They, including Mitt Romney himself, have convinced many that pushing back against the oligarchy is class warfare, but endless bitching about teachers and other members of the middle class, with an eye to stripping their rights and reducing their pay, is productive policy. And they have roughly half of that middle class believing it.

That is quite an accomplishment.

Labor Just Needs to be Flexible

US corporations pay some of the highest dividends in the capitalist world. That sounds pretty good; corporations sharing their profits, giving back to their communities, right? I mean, all those orphans and grandmothers cashing in those fat dividend checks.

There are two problems with this. The first is that dividends mostly don't go back to the communities where the profits were made, they tend to consolidate wealth for the one percent. The vast majority of dividends actually paid go to America's wealthiest. Those individuals mostly live somewhere else, i.e., profits are made in middle class communities--think Walmart, Starbucks, or your local utility--and then end up as dividends for the investor class concentrated in  relatively few neighborhoods; the Hamptons, Beverly Hills, Zurich.

And then they pay 15% tax on it, tops. This, of course, is what Warren Buffet means when he says his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does.The result is that corporate dividends are yet another way to ensure a steady stream of cash away from the middle class and to the investor class. That's true in a demographic sense, but also geographically; money, and the control of that money, shifts away from communities that need it the most. When some of it does come back, it is on the investor class's terms.

The middle class, in turn, is subjected to endless scolding. How many times have we heard that labor needs to be flexible? What with all the foreign competition, working families cannot expect wage increases; "times are tough," and we all must "tighten our belts" and other nonsense. These assertions are made in the face of record profits, record executive compensation, and continuing tax breaks for both the companies and those that run them.

It's always about how labor must be flexible. Don't be a sap, be flexible and go where the jobs are. And retrain yourself along the way. See? It's easy. Now run along and show me that work ethic that compels you to tolerate the crap I heap on you.

The reality is that an increasing number of Americans are expected to become nomadic laborers. Don't settle down and establish roots. Corporate America paid politicians good money for the right to close down factories with minimal cost to them even if it means massive layoffs for employees. But you can just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get another job, one in the next county, 50 miles away, and lower pay. Night shift only. And you'll be on probationary status as a newbie. Too bad about that commute; the extra gas money comes out of your pocket. Your seniority at the old job? Get real, you're starting all over again. At the bottom, with few benefits. And your lunch hour is now half an hour. Don't like it? There are 200 other applicants behind you. We hire those who don't complain.

Perhaps you have to move across country. That's where the work is, so pack up. And pull your kids out of the only school they have known. It was a pretty good school, too. Kind of ironic, because that's the reason you moved into the neighborhood in the first place. And settled down, so you, your spouse, and the kids could contribute and be part of the community. The company health plan was pretty decent. You put up with a lot because you didn't want to forfeit it.

No matter now; say goodbye to it, and to the neighbors you won't see again. Your spouse will also have to abandon that part-time job. That's gotta hurt; (s)he won't likely find a better job where you're headed.  But if (s)he does, it's almost guaranteed to be at low pay and no benefits, just like nearly all part-time jobs in the US.

You'll just have to tighten your belts some more. Too bad about jerking your kids out in the middle of the school year. Just tell them that labor flexibility is the new American Dream.

Little Sally's Epiphany

On Dec. 22 I posted an article about the doctrine of maximizing shareholder value, what former GE CEO Jack Welch called "the dumbest idea in the world." I shared the views of Steve Denning at Forbes who discussed the contradictions, to use a Marxist term, of management's blind allegiance to improving the net worth of shareholders. Denning, in turn, featured a new book by Roger Martin.

Martin has another article on this called "Little Sally Learns About the Toxicity of Shareholder Value Maximization." In it, Martin makes the case that corporations committed to maximizing shareholder value have perverse expectations of employees. Why would management expect, Martin says, employees to be motivated by a corporate culture that cares most about making mostly rich people richer, people the employees do not even know?

Martin's recognition of the basic psychology of employee motivation should sound familiar to the longstanding view, often held by progressives, that American corporate culture is short-sighted and less committed to improving its products than their bottom line. Recall that General Motors' management of yesteryear boasted that GM was not in the business of making cars, but of making money. GM's subtle indifference to product quality and innovation weighed heavily on it for a generation and nearly destroyed it. Its future remains uncertain.

There are, in fact, two separate arguments at play here; One is the Denning-Roger idea that management is inappropriately concentrating on short-term profits and boosting share price, practices which are systematically distorting management decisions. The other is that focusing on the interests of the investor class, the one percent, creates a bias against workers, community, and ultimately the corporation itself. It is a model best suited to maximizing wealth for a few; it does that very well.

The result is that US corporate culture has the deeply held tendency to treat employees as a mere input, an irritating expense that must be reduced, the abstract L for Labor in the cold computations of economists. It is this second argument which explains why, in the US more than, say, Germany or Sweden, the middle class is squeezed, why jobs are scare, but the investor class is richer than ever. It is the triumph of corporate profits as the centerpiece of American political economy, economics as if people didn't matter.

These are two different lines of argument, from different sources, politics, and traditions, that have dovetailed into a single unavoidable conclusion. I can only hope that we finally see a few inchoate signs that free market economists, free traders, and other purveyors of casino capitalism are beginning to realize the intellectual poverty of their ideology and the aching unsustainability of the American corporate model they have created and upon which they feed.

I leave you with an illustrative dialogue Roger Martin shared about Little Sally.

Sally: Daddy, my teacher asks me to listen carefully in class and do my homework every night. What does your boss ask you to do?

Daddy: He wants me to help him maximize shareholder value?

Sally: Huh? What does that mean?

Daddy: It means increasing our stock price to the highest we can make it go.

Sally: Why?

Daddy: Because that will make the shareholders happy.

Sally: Well who are these shareholders anyway?

Daddy: They are people who buy shares in our company.

Sally: What are they like? Do you know them?

Daddy: Actually we don't really know who they are. Every three months, we get a list of them but they buy and sell so often, the list changes routinely. And even the list we get is for organizations like mutual fund companies and pension funds that invest money on behalf of shareholders and aren't the actual shareholders.

Sally: This is getting a bit confusing. Are they at least nice people; these mutual funds and pension funds?

Daddy: It would be hard to describe them as terribly nice. They are really demanding and if we don't increase the stock price for them, they get pretty upset and sell our stock.

Sally: That isn't very nice. When they do that, do they sell to nicer people?

Daddy: No, typically they sell to people about like them - pretty impatient.

Sally: This sounds pretty weird. If you do get the share price to rise and the shareholders are happy rather than upset, do they do nice things for the company?

Daddy: Not really, Sally. What happens is that they then insist on us getting the share price to rise some more still. Or sometimes they sell their shares because the price has risen enough for them.

Sally: Whew. I must have this wrong but let me check. You go to work every day trying to increase your company's share price for people that you don't know, who don't act nicely at all, and if they are unhappy just sell their shares to some other people who you don't know either and are also not very nice. And if you succeed, they don't do anything for you other than put more pressure on you or sell because they are happy. They seem to sell whether they are happy or upset. That can't be much fun. Why do you do it Daddy? Why don't you try to do something a bit more fun?

Daddy: Well Sally, I know that it sounds kind of weird, but that is our capitalist system. It is our duty to maximize shareholder value, even if it is pretty unfulfilling and unpleasant. And I try to do the best job I can to help our CEO do that. And Sally, if I do a really good job helping my CEO, when he retires, he might appoint me CEO.

Sally: I love you Daddy and because of that I kind of hope that he doesn't make you CEO!

It'll Ruin Us, I Tell You

Yep, it is the most contemptible, onerous regulation you could possibly impose upon commerce. Just ask the business organizations quoted in the video below.

What is this horror? An August 30 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that requires businesses to display a single poster reminding their employees of their rights.

We can't have employees knowing what their rights are. Better get that black man out of the White House. More analysis at Crooks and Liars.

Tax Loafers? Maybe Not

Conservative media continues to repeat the infantile and laughably incomplete argument that roughly half of Americans don't pay taxes, the implication of which is that rich guys are bearing the burden and that millions of Americans are loafing off the hard work of others.

There is a lot to this Republican morality play, except maybe for facts. I will set aside the political psychology of conservative morality for the moment, except to say that it drives all conservative attitudes; not facts, not empiricism, not logic.

The federal income tax burden may be low for many of us, but payroll taxes disproportionately hit the working poor and the middle class. The tax-free argument really falls apart when we include all taxes. Republicans either don't notice, or hope you don't notice, these numerous other taxes; they are much more regressive, and they hit lower income people much harder. These include sales taxes, especially those on food and other basic needs, and indirect or semi-hidden taxes, such as those on phone bills, or those with a tax already built into the price, such as gasoline.

Here is David Leonhart of the New York Times, explaining why the conservative spin is so misleading:

The reason is that poor families generally pay more in payroll taxes than they receive through benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. It’s not just poor families for whom the payroll tax is a big deal, either. About three-quarters of all American households pay more in payroll taxes, which go toward Medicare and Social Security, than in income taxes.

Focusing on the statistical middle class — the middle 20 percent of households, as ranked by income — underlines this point. Households in this group made $35,400 to $52,100 in 2006, the last year for which the Congressional Budget Office has released data. That would describe a household with one full-time worker earning about $17 to $25 an hour. Such hourly pay is typical for firefighters, preschool teachers, computer support specialists, farmers, members of the clergy, mail carriers, secretaries and truck drivers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Taking into account both taxes and tax credits, the average household in this group paid a total income tax rate of just 3 percent. A good number of people, in fact, paid no net income taxes. They are among the alleged free riders.

But the picture starts to change when you look not just at income taxes but at all taxes. This average household would have paid 0.8 percent of its income in corporate taxes (through the stocks it owned), 0.9 percent in gas and other federal excise taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. Add these up, and the family’s total federal tax rate was 14.2 percent.

If anything, the government numbers I’m using here exaggerate how much of the tax burden falls on the wealthy. These numbers fail to account for the income that is hidden from tax collectors — a practice, research shows, that is more common among affluent families. “Because higher-income people are understating their income,” Joel Slemrod, a tax scholar at the University of Michigan, says, “We’ve been overstating their average tax rates.”

State and local taxes, meanwhile, may actually be regressive. That is, middle-class and poor families may face higher tax rates than the wealthy. As Kim Rueben of the Tax Policy Center notes, state and local income taxes and property taxes are less progressive than federal taxes, while sales taxes end up being regressive. The typical family pays a lot of state and local taxes, too — almost half as much as in federal taxes.

There is no question that the wealthy pay a higher overall tax rate than any other group. That is an American tradition. But there is also no question that their tax rates have fallen more than any other group’s over the last three decades. The only reason they are paying more taxes than in the past is that their pretax incomes have risen so rapidly — which hardly seems a great rationale for a further tax cut.

I have slightly edited the original due to length. Go here to read the whole article.

Republican Platform

So how many of these early warning signs do you recognize? Twenty-first century America sounds a lot like 1920s Italy. And if its similarity to Republican talking points doesn't unnerve you, you may be part of the problem. Read more on pre-fascist America
from Naomi Wolf, here, here, or watch her video here.

What Have Unions Done For Us?

I don't imagine that many have seen this video, but it should at least give pause for thought about this country's ridiculous and staggeringly ill-informed assault on American labor. It started with Republicans, of course; they have hated working Americans for generations. But the real problem is that too few Democrats seem prepared to fight for what made this country great.

Nor can we depend on our feckless media to remind us of what we once had and why we had it. Without a more vigorous media, voters remain confused, uninterested, and susceptable to manipulative framing that has reached absurd levels. 

Ignorant shits who can't tell you what GDP stands for, or how many Senators are in their state have convinced themselves they know what this country needs. They have lapped up right wing crap about how "big labor" is strangling the economy. They don't hear, and don't bother to read about, how high union membership coincided and contributed to middle class stability, at a time when we had a much greater manufacturing sector as well as a trade surplus.

All of this happened while the US was a creditor nation, consumers had far less debt, did not rely on two or more jobs to make ends meet, and were able to save far more. Nor did our government depend on our trading partners' dollar surpluses to buy our debt. And it all happened when marginal tax rates were far higher than today.



Now look at the graphs below. You can see that most of America has not done well economically in the last 30+ years, not considering overall growth. This is why we have a stagnant economy; wages are too low, which has led to weak demand. Does it look like the tax burden, regulations, or labor unions have held back the rich? Does it look like they need more tax breaks?

FDR's New Deal created the middle class. Son, if you don't know that, you need to set about reading some American economic history. You do know what FDR stands for, yes?

Labor Day Blues

Labor Day seems like a good time to share this interesting link. It is called IfItWereMyHome.com. What it does is compare living standards from around the world. There are different ways to do it, but the most obvious, and most eye-opening for internationally-challenged Americans, is to compare the US with similar industrialized countries. Take Germany for example.

According to the site, Germans, on average,
    consume 50% less oil (!),
    use 47% less electricity,
    make 26% less money
    are 83% less likely to have AIDS,
    spend 48% less on health care, and
    live one year longer

To be sure, some of the stats can be misleading; the risk of AIDS in the US is not evenly distributed. And though the US continues to show high per capita income, that fact completely masks the reality of extreme income inequality experienced in the US. Outsized incomes on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and in entertainment are the only reason average income in the US remains high.

Some trends consistently pop up when you compare the US with other industrialized countries; the US has much higher health care costs, terrible figures on child mortality, uses far more energy than most, and has a much higher class divide.  

But hey, those Labor Day parades. Makes you so proud to wave Old Glory and to see all those politicans who have done so much for labor, especially those Republicans, marching and waving and such.

They must really support working families. What more proof could you want?

Wasn't the Last Texas Governor Bad Enough?

Rick Perry has announced he is running for President, to the delight of some, and the horror and disgust of others. So it looks like we are going to be hearing a lot more about this guy. Democrats, and his Republican opponents, will need to get out in front on Perry and his Texas Mirage. Don't wait for Obama to make the case.

Lets do a quick review of the Perry's record as Governor; the one he has already set about to distort. First, the folks at The American Dream, hardly a far-left bastion, offer 14 reasons why Perry would be a "really really bad President." Among them: Texas has the highest percentage of workers at the minimum wage of all 50 states. The site's main complaint is that Perry has raised taxes even while the state has increased its debt and failed to address unemployment, poverty, and poor educational achievement. The takeaway is that most Republicans are going to hesitate when they see his record.

Jason Cherkis writes that the "Texas Miracle" includes low-wage jobs, crowded homeless shelters, and budget shortfalls. Joshua Holland echoes this sentiment, warning us to get ready for a "boat-load of spin" as Perry's campaign strategy will be to distort his "abysmal economic record."

Finally, Paul Krugman notes a beggar-thy-neighbor element to Texas economic policy. Offering an appealing mix of jobs, low taxes, low wages, and cheap housing will attract both corporations and desperate workers.  As Krugman puts it:

What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.

We are only in the middle of 2011; the election is not until next year, ferchristsake. We'll be seeing Perry strut and swagger from here on out. He is a combination (as in the worst) of Michelle Bachmann and Mitt Romney.

Let the pushback begin.

Wage Suppression Revisited

On March 23, 2011 I posted an article on the results of wage suppression. In it I reviewed academic studies demonstrating the growing gap between productivity growth, which has been substantial, and wage growth, which has been nil. This gap is recent, the direct result of conservative policies favoring corporations. I followed up on April 20, 2011 with another article on why the rich vote Republican. Again, we see clear evidence of a middle class becoming undone by conservative policies.

Below is another depressing snippet of data. It may be hard to see, but it shows an index of labor's share of income (2005=100). There is a fairly steady drift downward starting around 1980, a short-lived upward trend in Clinton's second term, and a significant deterioration throughout Bush the Lesser's eight years. The trend continues in the Obama years. Some discussion and a bigger example of the chart can be found here.

To put this data in very stark terms, go have a look at Overworked America, 12 charts that will make your blood boil.There is a lot there, but one fact underscores what I have been trying to say about wage suppression in the US: wages generally followed productivity increases for most of the 20th century, at least after the New Deal. As productivity increased, so did wages. That is no longer the case, as I show above. If labor had received commensurate wages, average income would not be around $50,000, but $92,000.

Think about that for a moment. Our recession began and continues because our economy heavily depends on consumer spending. If you ever wonder why spending is flat, it is because wages are too.  Where have the productivity gains gone? The 42 grand per worker? To corporate America and the investor class.

Despite this, Republicans never miss a chance to make you think unions are to blame for America's economic illness. It takes a lot of gall to make such demonstrably false statements.

Yet millions of Americans believe them.  And that takes a lot of ignorance.