People walk along a shopping street in lower Manhattan in New York City on July 05, 2019. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Despite Weak Growth, Americans Feel Content About State of the Economy
WASHINGTON—There’s a strong sense among Americans that the economy is strong. Despite a falloff of economic growth last year, Americans increasingly rate the U.S. economy as the best since the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.
The U.S. economy grew 2.3 percent in 2019, the weakest annual rate since Trump took office and far short of the 3 percent growth target set by the White House.
The president, however, repeatedly pointed to the economic expansion as one of his biggest achievements, calling it “the envy of the world.”
In his address on the State of the Union on Feb. 4, Trump said, “Our economy is the best it has ever been.”
“Since my election, we have created 7 million new jobs,” he said, adding that “the average unemployment rate under my administration is lower than any administration in the history of our country.”
The U.S. economy indeed proved resilient last year, despite recession fears throughout the world that dominated the headlines. The economy entered the longest expansion in American history, surpassing the economic boom of the 1990s.
Critics argue that the economy has been doing well, but it’s not as strong as Trump has claimed, especially when compared with the economic boom of the post-war years.
While some economists caution against giving Trump too much credit, the polls suggest Americans feel content with the current state of the economy.
According to a Gallup survey last month, 59 percent of Americans say they’re better off financially today than they were a year ago, the highest since January 1999. And nearly three-quarters say they’ll be better off financially in a year, the highest level of optimism recorded by Gallup.
And a Washington Post–ABC News poll showed that Trump’s approval rating on the economy hit an all-time high last month.
Consumers were central to the continued economic expansion last year, said Nathan Sheets, chief economist at PGIM Fixed Income and former undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs under President Barack Obama.
“The core engine of the U.S. economy through this expansion, since the global financial crisis, has been the consumer, and the consumer is imperative during the year ahead,” he told The Epoch Times.
However, in order to maintain this expansion, a strong jobs market with “at least some moderate wage gains” has to continue, he said.
Strong Balance Sheet
The U.S. consumer landscape has changed dramatically since the 2008 financial crisis. Lower debt levels and a higher savings rate compared to pre-crisis levels have contributed to a more stable expansion, Sheets said.
Household debt dropped sharply after the financial crisis, and it has continued to fall, as a share of gross domestic product.
Despite rising spending in the last few years, consumers have managed to keep a strong balance sheet, and this has reduced risks stemming from changing credit conditions and interest-rate increases, such as those imposed by the Federal Reserve from 2015 to 2018.
“So it doesn’t feel like we’re running out of gas in the tank for the consumer,” Sheets said.
The spread of COVID-19, however, poses a growing risk to the U.S. economy, he said. “I expect it is going to be primarily a first-quarter shock. And then as the year progresses, we’ll largely make it up, and the growth for the year as a whole will be a little lower, but not substantially.”
Increasing reports of COVID-19 outside mainland China are putting pressure on global financial markets, and the Fed is still assessing the potential economic impact of the virus on the U.S. economy.
The disruption in China could spill over to the rest of the world, Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida said on Feb. 25 at a conference in Washington.
However, it’s “too soon to even speculate” about the impact on the economic outlook, Clarida said.
Despite risks to the outlook, “the U.S. economy is in a good place. The labor market remains strong,” he said.
‘Amazing Time’ to Launch Business
Increased hiring and rising wages have powered consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy.
The slowdown in global growth and trade tensions, however, weighed on business investment, exports, and manufacturing in the United States.
The trade dispute with China hasn’t affected consumer spending. Despite tariffs on Chinese imports, changes in retail prices have kept pace with broader inflation, mainly due to China’s devaluation of its currency, according to economists.
The stock market also rose steadily since Trump took office, boosting household income and allowing people to spend more.
“Continued solid job gains and lower mortgage rates and gas prices are still supporting consumer confidence,” Scott Anderson, chief economist of Bank of the West, part of BNP Paribas, wrote in a report.
Another factor in driving consumer spending is the rising pay for low-income workers.
“Over the past two years, wage growth at the bottom has been substantially faster than that in better-paying industries,” boosting consumption, The Economist reported.
William Taylor, career development manager at recruiting company Velvet Jobs, based in Los Angeles, said he benefited from the job market boom, “as there are more job opportunities now.”
The trend of flexible working and freelancing is on the rise, he told The Epoch Times.
“I believe this is one of the reasons why the unemployment rate is at its lowest right now. As people now have multiple options to choose from, I can see companies offering better wages to retain and attract top talent,” Taylor said.
The last few years have been an “amazing time” to launch a new business in the United States, said Ian Wright, who’s originally from London. Wright owns a business called Fleet Logging, which provides tracking, management, and logging solutions for the U.S. trucking industry.
“The good economy has allowed us to profitably grow our business, so it’s been really positive,” he said.
THE REASON TRUMP IS NOT PROSECUTING EMPLOYERS OF
ILLEGALS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
More Americans Are Going on Strike
Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel
Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
U.S. Congressman
Says Many of His Colleagues Are 'Struggling' Financially
STRIKES
ALL OVER AMERICA, THOUSANDS OF RETAIL STORES CLOSING, CAR SALES SLUMP, REAL
ESTATE IN THE DOLDRUMS… That is the real “recover”… It only happened for the
rich!
Despite
a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just holding on
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-federal-reserve-household-survey-20190523-story.html
The millennial generation in the US: Life on
the brink
Education
"But what the Clintons do is criminal
because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel
thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their
friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs
beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now."
---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) ripped what he called
the country’s “new aristocratic elite” for engineering the United States
economy against the American middle class.
Recent research revealed that while coastal, elite metropolis cities have flourished in the last decade, small town and rural American communities have suffered depopulation, mass job loss, and continued economic strain since the Great Recession.
The
billionaire class — the country’s top 0.01 percent of earners — have enjoyed
more than 15 times as much wage growth as America’s working and middle class
since 1979, new wage data reveals.
Study: Elite
Zip Codes Thrived in Obama Recovery, Rural America Left Behind
Wealthy
cities and elite zip codes thrived under the slow-moving economic recovery of
President Obama while rural American communities were left behind, a study
reveals.
THE REASON TRUMP IS NOT PROSECUTING EMPLOYERS OF
ILLEGALS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
More Americans Are Going on Strike
For decades, the
decline of the American labor movement corresponded to a decline in major
strike activity. But new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or
BLS, indicates a recent and significant increase in the number of Americans who
are participating in strikes or work stoppages. As a report from the
left-leaning Economic Policy Institute explained on Tuesday, strike activity
“surged” in 2018 and 2019, “marking a 35-year high for the number of workers
involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period.” 2019 alone marked
“the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers
since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible
to track work stoppages by size.” Union membership is declining, but workers
themselves are in fighting shape.
EPI credits the
strike surge to several factors. Unemployment is low, which bestows some
flexibility on workers depending on their industry. If a work environment
becomes intolerable or an employer penalizes workers for striking or
organizing, a worker could find better employment elsewhere. (Though federal
labor law does prohibit employers from retaliating against workers for
participating in protected organizing activity, employers often do so anyway,
and under Trump, the conservative makeup of the National Labor Relations Board
disadvantages unions when they try to seek legal remedies for the behavior.)
The other reason
undermines one of Donald Trump’s central economic claims. Though the president
points to low unemployment as proof that his policies are successful, the
economy isn’t booming for everyone. Wage growth continues to underperform.
People can find jobs, in other words, but those jobs often don’t pay well. As the
costs of private health insurance rise, adding another strain on household
budgets, Americans are finding that employment and prosperity are two separate
concepts.
Without a union,
exploited workers have few options at their disposal. They can take their
concerns to management, and hope someone in power feels pity. They can stage
some kind of protest, and risk the consequences. Or they can find another job,
and hope their new workplace is more equitable than the last. Lackluster wage
growth suggests that this last option is not as viable as some right-to-work
advocates claim. Unions afford workers more protection. Not only do they
bargain for better wages and benefits, union contracts typically include
just-cause provisions, which make it more difficult for managers to arbitrarily
fire people for staging any sort of protest at work. Discipline follows a set
process, which gives a worker chances to improve. Retaliation still happens,
but would likely happen more often were it not for union contracts, which are
designed to act as a layer of insulation between workers and managers with ill
intent.
The new BLS data
reveals that despite their relatively small numbers, unionized workers are
exercising the power afforded them by their contracts. Elected officials ought
to listen to what this activity tells them. A strike wave is a symptom that the
economy is actually not as healthy as it superficially looks. Nobody withholds
their labor unless they’ve exhausted all other options. Strikes and stoppages
stem from exasperation, sometimes even desperation. Workers know they’re
playing a rigged game, and they’re running out of patience.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the
economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion
deficit.”
Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel
Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz
President Donald Trump told business and political
leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has
lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview,
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s
characterization is “just wrong.”
“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and
misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the
annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”
In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a
“blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging
wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than
ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle
class.”
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel
Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic
policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans
over each of the past three years.
“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide,
drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not
Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.
“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since
the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that
at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the
economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion
deficit.”
As the presidential race inches closer to the general election
in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in
broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED
DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME
“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting
crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic
presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the
economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how
they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate
and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies
that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business
investment.
“To every business looking for a place where they are free to
invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth
than the United States,” he said in Davos.
Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on
European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may
continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America
and China.
“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi
A new Gilded Age
has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The
wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both
the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia,
where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle
class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as
less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers
and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you
can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can
start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to
succeed in this country. Most people don’t
want to start a tech company. [Americans]
maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in
a small town … they want to be able to make a living and
then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis
added]
The problem with corporate
concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it
inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get
together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector,
for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance
between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem
and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has
dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades,
crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries,
entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported,
Hawley detailed in the
interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World
Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01
percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much
wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of
wealthiest earners. A study released last month
revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than
all other Americans.
U.S. Congressman
Says Many of His Colleagues Are 'Struggling' Financially
Rep. Jared Huffman (U.S.
government photo)
(CNSNews.com) -- Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.)
told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that many of his colleagues in the House
of Representatives are "struggling" financially. He made the
observation in response to a question about whether members of Congress, who
now earn $174,000 per year, deserve a pay raise.
“I’ll
let the body and the public opinion and other factors decide whether we
get a cost of living increase," he said, "but I do know a lot of my
colleagues are struggling.”
CNSNews.com
asked Huffman: “Congressman Huffman, at $174,000 members of Congress get paid a
salary that is 370 percent of the median earnings of a full-time American
worker. Do you think the Congress deserves a raise?”
Huffman
responded: “I think no one goes into this line of work to get rich. A lot of my
colleagues are struggling with the fact that we have housing costs both in
home, at our home district, in some cases where real estate values are very
high and housing costs are high. And then you have to also have housing here in
D.C. So, I know a lot of members are struggling."
“I’ll
let the body and the public opinion and other factors decide whether we get a
cost of living increase," he said, "but I do know a lot of my
colleagues are struggling.”
According
to the Congressional Research
Service (CRS),
regular senators, representatives, delegates, and the resident commissioner
from Puerto Rico are paid an annual salary of $174,000.
"The
only exceptions include the Speaker of the House (salary of $223,500) and the
President pro tempore of the Senate and the majority and minority leaders in
the House and Senate (salary of $193,400)," reported the
CRS. "These levels have remained unchanged since 2009."
According
to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median annual earnings of a U.S. worker
are $47,016. A salary of $174,000 is 3.7
times the median earnings of $47,016, or 370% higher.
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP
Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the
10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a
government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama
will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact
of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners
and labor."
“Our entire
crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a
kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the
way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN
THINKER.com
STRIKES
ALL OVER AMERICA, THOUSANDS OF RETAIL STORES CLOSING, CAR SALES SLUMP, REAL
ESTATE IN THE DOLDRUMS… That is the real “recover”… It only happened for the
rich!
Despite
a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just holding on
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-federal-reserve-household-survey-20190523-story.html
By MATTHEW
BOESLER
Many U.S. households find themselves in a fragile position
financially, even in an economy with an unemployment rate near a 50-year low.
(David Sacks / Getty Images)
Many U.S. households find themselves in a fragile position
financially, even in an economy with an unemployment rate near a 50-year low,
according to a Federal Reserve survey.
The Fed’s 2018 report on the economic well-being of households, published Thursday, indicated “most measures”
of well-being and financial resilience “were similar to, or slightly better
than, those in 2017.” The slight improvement coincided with a decline in the
average unemployment rate to 3.9% last year, from 4.3% in 2017.
Despite the uptick, however, the results of the 2018 survey
indicated that almost 40% of Americans would still struggle in the face of a
$400 financial emergency. The statistic, which was a bit better than in the
2017 report, has become a favorite rejoinder to President Trump’s boasts about a strong economy from Democratic politicians, including 2020 presidential
candidate Sen. Kamala Harris of California.
“Relatively small, unexpected expenses, such as a car repair or
replacing a broken appliance, can be a hardship for many families without
adequate savings,” the report said. “When faced with a hypothetical expense of
$400, 61% of adults in 2018 say they would cover it, using cash, savings, or a
credit card paid off at the next statement,” it added.
“Among the remaining 4 in 10 adults who would have more difficulty
covering such an expense, the most common approaches include carrying a balance
on credit cards and borrowing from friends or family,” according to the report.
Based on a survey of 11,000 people in October and November 2018,
the report showed that a quarter of Americans don’t feel like they are doing
"at least OK" financially. That number was higher for black and
Latino Americans, at roughly one-third for both. For those making less than
$40,000 a year, the share who felt they weren’t doing well was 44%.
“We continue to see the growing U.S. economy supporting most
American families,” Fed Gov. Michelle Bowman said in a press release
accompanying the report.
“At the same time, the survey does find differences across
communities, with just over half of those living in rural areas describing
their local economy as good or excellent compared to two-thirds of those living
in cities,” Bowman said. “Across the country, many families continue to
experience financial distress and struggle to save for retirement and
unexpected expenses.”
Boesler writes for Bloomberg
"While America’s working and
middle class have been subjected to compete for jobs against
a constant flow of cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2
million mostly low-skilled immigrants are admitted to the country annually
— the billionaire class has experienced historic
salary gains." Sen. Josh Hawley
The millennial generation in the US: Life on
the brink
For the American ruling elite, life has
never been better.
The father of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just
completed the most expensive purchase of a living artist’s work in
US history, spending over $91 million on a three-foot-tall metallic
sculpture. Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund Citadel,
recently dropped $238 million on a penthouse in New York City, the
most expensive US home ever purchased. And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos,
the world’s richest man, has invested $42 million in a 10,000-year
clock.
The stock market is booming, and President Donald Trump is
boasting at every turn that the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in
five decades.
However, the working class, the vast majority of the population,
is confronting an unprecedented social, economic, health and psychological
crisis. The same processes that have produced vast sums of wealth for the
ruling elite have left millions of workers on the brink of existence.
Perhaps no segment of the population reflects the devastating
consequences of these processes so starkly as the generation of young people
deemed the “millennials,” those born roughly between the years 1981 and 1996.
More than half the 72 million American millennials are now in their 30s, with
the oldest turning 38 this year.
A recent exposé by the Wall
Street Journal noted that millennials are “in worse financial
shape than prior living generations and may not recover.” The article,
“Millennials Near Middle Age in Crisis,” concludes by stating that people born
in the 1980s are at risk of becoming “America’s Lost generation.”
The older side of this generation was born at the beginning of
the Reagan years, which heralded in an era of social counter-revolution against
the working class that saw the dismantling of much of the industrial
infrastructure of the country, and the restructuring of economic life to
benefit the banks, hedge funds and other financial firms, with the
collaboration of the trade unions.
By the time these youth reached the job market, the 2008
financial crash hit, vastly accelerating all of the processes begun in the
1980s. The Obama administration organized the bailout of the banks and a
massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich.
The results have been devastating.
Education
More millennials have a college degree than any other generation
of young adults. In 2013, 47 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds received a
postsecondary degree. For most, however, getting a college education has not
led to a significant increase in quality of living.
Instead, millions of young people are working jobs for which
they are vastly overqualified and are shackled with unprecedented levels of
debt. For the millennials who did not go to college, the situation is even
worse.
·
Millennials have taken on 300
percent more student debt than their parents’ generation. [Source: The College
Board, Trends in Student Aid 2013]
·
The number of hours of minimum
wage work needed to pay in-state tuition and fees for each year of a four-year
public college for the “Baby Boomer” generation (born between 1946 and 1964)
was 510. For millennials, it is 1996. [Source: National Center for Education
Statistics. Calculations based on four-year public universities from 1973–1976
and 2003–2006]
·
Since 2010, the economy has added
11.6 million jobs, and 11.5 million of them have gone to workers with at least
some college education. In 2016, young workers with only a high school diploma
had roughly triple the unemployment rate and three-and-a-half times the poverty
rate of college grads. [Source: America’s Divided Recovery, Georgetown University]
·
Average college debt for
millennials that have debt is around $33,000, with the median household income
remaining the same since 1999. [Source: PEW Research and USA Today]
·
National college debt is now at
$1.3 trillion, and college tuition has increased by 1,140 percent since the
late 1970s. [Source: Economic Policy Institute (EPI) Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts]
·
By 2014, 48 percent of workers
with bachelor’s degrees are employed in jobs for which they’re overqualified.
[Source: Labor Economist Stephen Rose, published by Urban Institute.]
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating
divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages
and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the
population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell
to only 61 percent.
"This is how they will destroy
America from within. The leftist billionaires who
orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing
us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of
millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities
being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and
human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have
contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned
an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy
alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the
statesmanship of today.” THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
"But what the Clintons do is criminal
because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel
thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their
friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs
beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now."
---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in
“public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes."
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes."
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between
2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the
United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich
also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that
money back.
Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the
US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income
gain on record.
Watch–Josh Hawley Rips ‘Aristocratic Elite’ for
Engineering U.S. Economy Against American Middle Class
JOHN BINDER
16 May 2019184
6:00
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) ripped what he called
the country’s “new aristocratic elite” for engineering the United States
economy against the American middle class.
For his first major speech on the
Senate floor, Hawley slammed the “big banks, big tech, big multi-national
corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media,” whom he
said have created an economic structure in which they, the well-connected,
benefit while the American working and middle class increasingly struggle to
get ahead.
Hawley said:
The chattering class often tells us
that all of this—the jobs, the despair, the loss of standing—is the result of
forces beyond anyone’s control. As if that’s an
excuse to do nothing. But in fact, it’s not true. [Emphasis added]
Today’s society benefits those who
shaped it, and it has been shaped not by working men and women, but by the new
aristocratic elite. Big banks, big tech, big
multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the
media—these are the aristocrats of our age. They live in the United States,
but they consider themselves citizens of the world. [Emphasis
added]
They operate businesses or run
universities here, but their primary loyalty is to their own agenda for
a more unified, progressive—and profitable—global order. These modern
aristocrats often claim to be a meritocracy. And many of them truly believe
they are. What they don’t see, or won’t acknowledge, is that the society they
have built works mainly for themselves. They’ve effectively run this
country for decades. And their legacy is national division and national decline.
[Emphasis added]
Defending the needs of the American
middle class against a growingly powerful “aristocratic elite” is the “crisis
of our time,” Hawley asserted.
“After years of sacrifice, the great
American middle is being pushed aside by a new, arrogant aristocracy,” Hawley
said. “The new aristocrats seek to remake society in their own image: to
engineer an economy that works for the elite but few else, to fashion a culture
that is dominated by their own preferences.”
“This town has embraced a politics
of elite values and elite ambition rather than building opportunities to thrive
in the great and broad American middle. This has left middle America—the great
American middle class—under siege: battling the loss of respect and work, the
decline of home and family, an epidemic of loneliness and despair,” Hawley
continued. “This is the crisis of our time.”
Specifically, Hawley blasted
multinational corporations for outsourcing American middle class jobs overseas
— wreaking economic, cultural, and social havoc on rural and small town
American communities in the process — and both political establishments for
treating American citizens as mere consumers.
“In places like the one where I grew
up, in middle Missouri, good-paying jobs that you can raise a family on are
going away,” Hawley said. “The jobs go overseas or south of the border or to
cities on the coasts. And once-vibrant towns decline, taking with them the
network of schools and neighborhoods and churches that make up middle class
life.”
Hawley continued:
Rural America has been particularly
hard hit. Rural Americans’ life expectancy has not just leveled off,
its actually dropped, and for women without a high school degree, that drop has
been staggering. In some rural places, residents struggle with outright
deprivation. [Emphasis added]
My home state contains some of the
poorest counties in America, all in rural places that once boasted thriving
small towns. As those communities struggle,
want sets in. But the crisis reaches well beyond economics. [Emphasis added]
The message that Washington has sent
our whole society is loud and clear: our elites are the people who matter—and those who aspire to join them. Everyone else is
unimportant or backwards. And millions of Americans are left with
the sense that the people who run this country view them with nothing but
contempt and value them as nothing but consumers. [Emphasis added]
Indeed, working and middle class
Americans have been hit the hardest from decades-long political consensus
between the Republican establishment and Democrats.
Recent research revealed that while coastal, elite metropolis cities have flourished in the last decade, small town and rural American communities have suffered depopulation, mass job loss, and continued economic strain since the Great Recession.
For instance, by 2016, elite
zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which is more than the combined
bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While it only took about five years
for wealthy cities to replace the jobs lost by the recession, it took “at risk”
regions of the country a decade to recover, and “distressed” U.S. communities
are “unlikely ever to recover on current trendlines,” the report predicts.
Economic growth among the country’s
middle-class counties and middle-class zip codes has considerably trailed
national economic growth. For example, between 2012 and 2016, there were 4.4
percent more business establishments in the country as a whole. That growth was
less than two percent in the median zip code and there was close to no growth
in the median county.
While America’s working and middle
class have been subjected to compete for jobs against a constant flow of
cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2 million mostly low-skilled
immigrants are admitted to the country annually — the billionaire class has
experienced historic salary gains.
A study by the Economic Policy
Institute found that the country’s top 0.01 percent have enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the
bottom 90 percent of wage earners. Between 1979 and 2017, working and middle
class Americans’ wages grew by only 22 percent. On the other hand, the
plutocrat class saw their salaries grow by more than 155 percent over the same
period.
Likewise, free trade deals like
NAFTA — supported by Republicans and Democrats — as well as China’s entering
the World Trade Organization (WTO) has eliminated nearly five million American
manufacturing jobs across the country, devastating steel towns and U.S.
autoworkers. One former steel town in West Virginia lost 94 percent of its
steel jobs because of NAFTA, with nearly 10,000 workers in the town being
displaced from the steel industry.
THERE IS A REASON WHY
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS!!! IT HAS TO DO WITH OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES,
YOURS, NOT THEIRS, DEPRESSED!
Billionaire Class Enjoys 15X the Wage Growth of
American Working Class
3:00
The
billionaire class — the country’s top 0.01 percent of earners — have enjoyed
more than 15 times as much wage growth as America’s working and middle class
since 1979, new wage data reveals.
Between 1979 and 2017, the wages of the bottom 90 percent — the
country’s working and lower middle class — have grown by only about 22 percent,
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) researchers find.
Compare that small wage increase over nearly four decades to the
booming wage growth of America’s top one percent, who have seen their wages
grow more than 155 percent during the same period.
The top 0.01 percent — the country’s billionaire class — saw
their wages grow by more than 343 percent in the last four decades, more
than 15 times the wage growth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans.
In 1979, America’s working class was earning on average about
$29,600 a year. Fast forward to 2017, and the same bottom 90 percent of
Americans are earning only about $6,600 more annually.
The almost four decades of wage stagnation among the country’s
working and middle class comes as the national immigration policy has allowed
for the admission of more than 1.5 million mostly low-skilled immigrants every
year.
In the last decade, alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to
compete against a growing population of low-wage workers. Meanwhile, employers
are able to reduce wages and drive up their profit margins thanks to the annual
low-skilled immigration scheme.
The Washington, DC-imposed mass immigration policy is a boon to corporate executives,
Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates as every one percent
increase in the immigrant composition of an occupation’s labor force reduces Americans’
hourly wages by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant workforce
reduces Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.
Mass immigration has come at the expense of America’s working
and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and
increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled
foreign nationals.
Four million young Americans enter the workforce every year, but
their job opportunities are further diminished as the U.S. imports roughly two
new foreign workers for every four American workers who enter the workforce. Even
though researchers say 30 percent of the workforce could lose their jobs due to automation by 2030, the U.S. has not
stopped importing more than a million foreign nationals every year.
For blue-collar American workers, mass immigration has not only
kept wages down but in many cases decreased wages, as Breitbart News reported. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues importing more foreign
nationals with whom working-class Americans are forced to compete. In
2016, the U.S. brought in about 1.8 million mostly low-skilled immigrants.
Study: Elite
Zip Codes Thrived in Obama Recovery, Rural America Left Behind
Getty Images
4:49
Wealthy
cities and elite zip codes thrived under the slow-moving economic recovery of
President Obama while rural American communities were left behind, a study
reveals.
The Economic Innovation Group research, highlighted by Axios, details the
massive economic inequality between the country’s coastal city elites and
middle America’s working class between the Great Recession in 2007 and Obama’s
economic recovery in 2016.
Between 2007 and 2016, the number of residents living in elite
zip codes grew by more than ten million, with an overwhelming faction of that
population growth being driven by mass immigration where the U.S. imports more
than 1.5 million illegal and legal immigrants annually.
The booming 44.5 million immigrant populations are concentrated mostly in the country’s major cities like Los Angeles, California,
Miami Florida, and New York City, New York. The rapidly growing U.S. population
— driven by immigration — is set to hit 404 millionby 2060, a boon for real estate developers, wealthy investors,
and corporations, all of which benefit greatly from dense populations and a
flooded labor market.
The economic study found that while the population grew in
wealthy cities, America’s rural population fell by nearly 3.5 million
residents.
Likewise, by 2016, elite zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million
jobs, which is more than the combined bottom 80 percent of American zip codes.
While it only took about five years for wealthy cities to replace the jobs lost
by the recession, it took “at risk” regions of the country a decade to recover,
and “distressed” U.S. communities are “unlikely ever to recover on current
trendlines,” the report predicts.
A map included in the research shows how rich, coastal metropolises
have boomed economically while entire portions of middle America have been left
behind as job and business gains remain concentrated at the top of the income
ladder.
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