Penny For My Thoughts Because I'm Out of Pocket Change

Like I've written earlier, I can't understand why people think our economy's gotten better since the Great Recession. Far too many of us are living paycheck to paycheck and weighed under by too much debt.

Even FORBES Magazine is taking notice (via Peter Georgesceu):

Ostensibly, for the past ten years, our economy has been recovering from the 2008 collapse. During the past few years, our comeback seems to have gained momentum. All the official indicators say we’re back in boom times, with a bull market, low unemployment and steady job growth. But there is an alternative set of data that depicts a different America, where the overlooked majority struggles from month to month.

The Nation recently published a stunning overview of the working poor and underpaid. One of the most powerful data points in the piece described how empty the decline in unemployment actually is: having a job doesn’t exempt anyone from poverty anymore. About 12% of Americans (43 million) are considered poor, and yet they are employed. They earn an individual income below $12,140 per year, and slightly more than that for a family of two. If you include housing and medical expenses in the calculation, it raises the percentage of Americans living in poverty to 14%. That’s 45 million people...

If we link to that Nation article by Rejan Menon, we get more details:

For a fuller picture of American (in)security, however, it’s necessary to delve deeper into the relevant data, starting with hourly wages, which are the way more than 58 percent of adult workers are paid. The good news: Only 1.8 million, or 2.3 percent of them, subsist at or below minimum wage. The not-so-good news: One-third of all workers earn less than $12 an hour and 42 percent earn less than $15. That’s $24,960 and $31,200 a year. Imagine raising a family on such incomes, figuring in the cost of food, rent, childcare, car payments (since a car is often a necessity simply to get to a job in a country with inadequate public transportation), and medical costs.

The problem facing the working poor isn’t just low wages, but the widening gap between wages and rising prices. The government has increased the hourly federal minimum wage more than 20 times since it was set at 25 cents under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Between 2007 and 2009 it rose to $7.25, but over the past decade that sum lost nearly 10 percent of its purchasing power to inflation, which means that, in 2018, someone would have to work 41 additional days to make the equivalent of the 2009 minimum wage...

Take the poverty gap, which the OECD defines as the difference between a country’s official poverty line and the average income of those who fall below it. The United States has the second-largest poverty gap among wealthy countries; only Italy does worse...

No nation can honestly maintain itself under this kind of income inequality. At some point, the financial scams at the top can't find any more suckers, and the debt consumes itself (this is what happened with the housing speculation in 2007-08 causing the Great Recession). At some point, the public frustration at being constantly in debt will erupt.

The United States has been separate from the rest of the world when it comes to this kind of oppressive economic decay. Most other countries would have broken out the pitchforks and Molotov Cocktails by now. But in the U.S., we've been able to hide from the economic despair by leaving most of the class warfare to revolve around Race instead of Poverty (despite all the Progressives thinking our class struggle is economic, all of the violent moments in American history have been over racism SEE Tulsa, Rosewood, Japanese internment, Jim Crow and Slavery eras, etc).

But sooner or later, the corrupt minority rule of Republican oligarchs - who are suppressing voters by ethnicity, gender, and youth - worried more about their goddamned tax cuts than good wages for mos workers cannot contain the anger that's brewing. trump can siphon off that rage to confuse his voting base into blaming Illegals for all their ills, but what happens when the boogeymen are gone and the oligarchs are still raking in our wages? How many Latinos and Blacks and feminists are you gonna blame for your $7.65 an hour paycheck (without health benefits) before you realize it's your $21 million a year CEO ripping you off with wage theft?

If voters were genuinely rising up over "economic anxiety" they'd be in the streets demanding $15 an hour minimum wage, caps on CEO pay, ending the GOP 2017 Tax Cut Disaster that made income inequality worse, and relief for majority of Americans regarding college/health care/homeowner debts.

They sure as hell wouldn't be voting for the Tax-Cheat-in-Chief and his Republican buddies.