Is this a secret? This so-called “recovery” is fake, just like extend-and-pretend policies Obama approved for the banks. If the banks had been held accountable and cleaned up, we’d have a real recovery by now:
Think your money’s not going very far this year? It’s not your imagination. According to new research by the Economic Policy Institute, real hourly wages declined for almost everybody in the U.S. workforce in the first half of 2014. Thanks, so-called recovery.
Economist Elise Gould pored over data from the government’s Current Population Survey and determined that workers at the 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, 60th, 70th, 80th, 90th, and 95th percentiles all saw declines in their real wages in the first half of 2014 compared with the same period last year. This was true whether you had no high school degree, a high school diploma, some college, a college degree, or an advanced degree. In fact, people with advanced degrees saw the biggest drop (2.7 percent).
EPI reveals this isn’t just a blip. Real wages dropped 4.9 percent for workers with a high school degree and 2.5 percent for workers with a college degree from the first half of 2007 to the first half of this year.
Gould explains in the report that “the last year has been a poor one for American workers’ wages.” She states that “on the whole, the broad wage trends by education level over the last decade and a half make clear that wage inequality cannot be readily explained by stories about educational credentials and technology; wage inequality has increased steadily, yet even those with a college diploma or advanced degree have experienced lackluster wage growth.”
How do the rich get richer? Only when the poor get poorer. “The production of wealth is not the work of any one man and the acquisition of great fortunes is not possible without the cooperation of the multitudes.” Samuel Gompers,1892. Now for Obama. He gave a speech today in a foreign land. 50% of it was half-truths. 45% was bullshit. 5% made some sense. It’s amazing that the oligarchy allows him to be honest as much as 5% of the time.
And then to have Obama and Democrats pat themselves on the back for the ‘recovery.’ That sets my hair on fire. To 99.9% of Americans, “Aren’t we great, better than those nasty Rethugs.” To their masters, “Hahahahaaha, they fell for it again.”