Saturday, February 16, 2013

Moving in the Wrong Direction

So, the recession lowered the salaries of the 99%, and raised them for the 1%:
Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of earners during the economic recovery, but not at all for everybody else, according to new data.

The numbers, produced by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, show overall income growing by just 1.7 percent over the period. But there was a wide gap between the top 1 percent, whose earnings rose by 11.2 percent, and the other 99 percent, whose earnings declined by 0.4 percent.

Mr. Saez, a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, an economic laurel considered second only to the Nobel, concluded that “the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s.”
We need to raise the minimum wage, raise taxes on the rich, and reign in the financial industry, and we need to do that right now.

Or maybe guillotines.  I could go for  then too,

1 comment:

  1. Hello!!? What did you think the whole recession was for?

    (NOW, back to that job hunting . . . )

    ReplyDelete