Un-American Recovery How the Bush recovery has undone...

[Ilsa]

...the great balancing act of the New Deal.

http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/12/meyerson-h-12-29.html

By Harold Meyerson
Web Exclusive: 12.29.03

Snip

And there are some indices that make even the productivity increases pale by comparison. Corporations have been having a bang-up recovery all along, it turns out; they are about to experience their seventh straight quarter of profit growth. The operating earnings of the 500 companies on the Standard and Poor's index, researchers at Thomas First Call in Boston estimate, will rise by 21.9 percent over last year. Who could ask for anything more?

Well, the American people, for one. Since July the average hourly wage increase for the 85 million Americans who work in non-supervisory jobs in offices and factories is a flat 3 cents. Wages are up just 2.1 percent since November 2002 -- the slowest wage growth we've experienced in 40 years. Economists at the Economic Policy Institute have been comparing recoveries of late, looking into the growth in corporate-sector income in each of the nine recoveries the United States has gone through since the end of World War II. In the preceding eight, the share of the corporate income growth going to profits averaged 26 percent, and never exceeded 32 percent. In the current recovery, however, profits come to 46 percent of the corporations' additional income.

snip

The current administration is not responsible for the broad contours of this miserably misshapen recovery, but its every action merely increases the imbalance of power between America's employers and employees. But the Democrats' prescriptions for more broadly shared prosperity need some tweaking, too. With the globalization of high-end professions, no Democrat can assert quite so confidently the line that Bill Clinton used so often: What you earn is a result of what you learn. This year's crop of presidential candidates is taking more seriously the importance of labor standards in trade accords, and the right of workers to organize. But they've got a way to go to make the issue of stagnating incomes into the kind of battle cry it should be in the campaign against Bush. If they're not up to it, I say we outsource 'em all and bring in some pols from Bangalore.

Comment:
Loved Meyerson's suggestion of outsourcing the Administration, but I would hope he'd at least give the Dem candidates a chance to screw it up half as bad as *. Seems to fit with Krugman's ed.

(Please pardon if this is a dupe, but i didn't see it.)