WAPO: The Boom Was a Bust for Ordinary People

[El Pinko]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/01/AR2008020102828_pf.html

The Boom Was a Bust for Ordinary People
By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Washington Post. Posted February 5, 2008.

....

The economy, for example, has been expanding, at least until now, and growth is supposed to guarantee general well-being. As long as the gross domestic product grows, World Money Watch's Web site assures us, "so will business, jobs and personal income."

But hellooo, we've had brisk growth for the past few years, as the president has tirelessly reminded us, only without those promised increases in personal income, at least not for the poor and the middle class. According to a study just released by the Economic Policy Institute, real wages actually fell last year. Growth, some of the economists are conceding in perplexity, has been "decoupled" from widely shared prosperity.

I first began to sense this in the boom years of the late 1990s, when I was working in entry-level jobs for my book "Nickel and Dimed." While the stock market soared and fortunes were being made in the time it takes to say "IPO," my $6-to-$8-an-hour co-workers lunched on hot dog buns because that was all they could afford and, in some cases, fretted about whether they could find a safe place to sleep.

....

We like to attribute our high productivity to technological advances and better education. But a revealing 2001 study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. also credited America's productivity growth to "managerial ... innovations" and cited Wal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that our productivity also relies on fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads and cutting back on breaks. That may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom, it can feel a lot like pain.

[Atman]

1. Just like the Reagan years.

Imagine that.

.

[JHB]

3. Nothing trickles down if you squeeze the bottom...

And dredging a channel for yachts is not a "rising tide".

[HereSince1628]

2. duh, send manufacturing overseas, have NLRB carry out war against workers

and you get a situation where the wage slaves are forced into lower and lower returns for their productivity.

Investment money hasn't "trickled" down in decades. Republican economic policy has been the economic strangling the proliteriat.

Nonetheless it's tax cut when there is a surplus, tax cut when there is a recession.

It's great for the Boyars.

It used to be great for the Kulaks. Around here even the Kulaks are having can't profit on rents.