American workers have been screwed for decades as they have been expected to work harder and harder and were paid less and less. They gutted it out and continued to spend using credit. They borrowed using credit cards, home equity, and any other way they could. Now, they are tapped out and no big business bailout is going to bring them back.
This point is aptly explained by Robert Herbert in the NY Times today:
One of the reasons the economy is so deeply in the tank is that ordinary Americans have not received a fair share of the economic advances of the past several years. You don’t hear much about this. Americans have been working harder and harder, and more and more efficiently (we are now the hardest working people on the planet, having passed the Japanese in this category), but ordinary workers have not been paid for this enhanced productivity.
The big three auto makers were in DC asking for nearly $40 BILLION yesterday (up from $25 BILLION a couple of weeks ago). This bailout included thousands and thousands of layoffs, plant closings, and model reductions. Yet, few believe this will actually assure survival of the US auto industry.
The sad truth is that business and workers don’t exist in a vacuum — both require the other for their survival. Because of this partnership, it is so amoral, and not very good business, to let the businesses financially rape the population that they rely on. Pay the workers less and less and expect that these same workers will be able to buy your products. That makes no sense and this is painfully clear now even to the semi-conscious.
DC can print all the money they want. They can have all the stimulus plans they can figure out. They can lower interest rates to stimulate business as they decimate anybody with a savings account. They can hand out money until America defaults on its NATIONAL DEBT. However, until Americans are put back to work being paid living wage salaries ($16 per hour minimum), there is little that will be accomplished.
Years ago I read that nearly all of the earnings from the biggest 500 companies in America were the result of financial transactions and not from the products they made. Manufacturing has declines steadily since the 1950s. America makes little and no society can survive that doesn’t make things.
If you want to figure out if America is getting out of this malaise, one needs to look no further than employment and average hourly wages. Jobs at Walmart that pay $7 per hour don’t count. In fact, jobs that pay less than $16 per hour are not even jobs. When you count employment, only count people employed who make $16 per hour or more.
America is doomed.
