Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog, [8]
Another day, another data point proving what anyone with two functioning braincells already knows.
That for most citizens, the U.S. economy is a neo-feudal Banana Republic oligarch hellhole. The facts are indisputable at this point, and the trend goes back decades when it comes to the American male. All the way back to 1973, in fact, just two years after the U.S. defaulted on gold and the economy started its grotesque transformation into a Wall Street controlled, financialized gulag.
Just yesterday, I highlighted some very depressing data from the Census in the post:
Census Data Proves It – There Was No Economic Recovery Unless You Were Already Rich [9]
Now we learn the following, from the Wall Street Journal [10]:
The typical man with a full-time job–the one at the statistical middle of the middle–earned $50,383 last year, the Census Bureau reported this week.
The typical man with a full-time job in 1973 earned $53,294, measured in 2014 dollars to adjust for inflation.
You read that right: The median male worker who was employed year-round and full time earned less in 2014 than a similarly situated worker earned four decades ago. And those are the ones who had jobs.
This one fact, tucked in Table A-4 of the Census Bureau’s annual report on income [11], is both a symptom of an economy that isn’t delivering for many ordinary Americans and at least one reason for the dissatisfaction, anger, and distrust that voters are displaying in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Now here’s a chart of the middle class death spiral:
[10]
On a related note, billionaire and CEO of “Too Big to Fail and Jail” JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, decided to weigh in on income inequality earlier today. Here’s some of what he had to say courtesy of Yahoo.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says it’s OK that chief executives get paid way more than their average employees — and that cutting down on executive compensation wouldn’t help eliminate income inequality.
“It is true that income inequality has kind of gotten worse,” Dimon said, but “you can take the compensation of every CEO in America and make it zero and it wouldn’t put a dent into it. What really matters is growth.”
How enlightened. Considering the U.S. has seen massive GDP growth since 1973, yet median wages for males haven’t budged, I wonder how growth is supposed to suddenly reverse the trend. Does he even think before speaking?
But he wasn’t done. Apparently, Mr. Dimon felt a need to double down on his remarkable disconnectedness with the following:
As for the middle class, Dimon reportedly said Thursday: “It’s not right to say we’re worse off … If you go back 20 years ago, cars were worse, the air was worse. People didn’t have iPhones.”
That’s what you get when you ask a billionaire executive from a taxpayer bailed out, unaccountable industry for his thoughts on income inequality.
