Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold. ...
The number of Americans making $50 million or more, the top income category in the data, fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 last year. But that’s only part of the story.
The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!
You read that right. In the Great Recession year of 2009 (officially just the first half of the year), the average pay of the very highest-income Americans was more than five times their average wages and bonuses in 2008. And even though their numbers shrank by 43 percent, this group’s total compensation was 3.2 times larger in 2009 than in 2008, accounting for 0.6 percent of all pay. These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.
...
[Author from comments section]
Noel Chun, I think the generosity of millions of American blue collar workers who willingly and deliberately gave up their jobs so the poor in the police state called China and in the democracy called India, as well as other impoverished nations, can have a better economic life is the greatest untold story of human kindness in history.
Oh, but wait, they didn’t act out of altruism. In fact, they did not act at all. They were fired.
The trade rules, like tax rules, tend to be read by very few people and to be shaped mostly by campaign contributions to politicians, who pass laws and approve treaties. The subsidies for moving work offshore come from our elected officials, who depend on those getting the subsidies for the money to get elected.
The duty of a sovereign government is first to its own people, not to the people of another country. Read Adam Smith on policies that benefit the majority being by their nature good policies. What is going on here is not Darwinian economics, but bought-and-paid for economics.
Jim O., I am sure you appreciate my satirical comments above, but you also make an important point without quite explicitly stating it, capitalism and freedom are not linked (see China and Singapore) nor are capitalism and democracy (see India), no matter how much some people say they are.
Click for Full Text!
