If wages aren’t rising now, they will never rise
by Tom Toles
I think what we are having now used to be called a boom. The long Obama economic recovery from the financial collapse of 2008, goosed by President Trump’s manic tax-cut-for-the-rich deficit explosion, has driven the unemployment rate down to small digits. But not as small as your wage increase.
What has happened? As Ronald Reagan once said, “There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers.” The simple answer here is that the rich have taken all the profits from the economy for themselves. All this wealth, coupled with some friendly Supreme Court rulings, has given them all the power they need to maintain this state of affairs. Simple. Just not easy, for the rest of us.
And the game continues. Corporations are now wringing the cloth so hard that we are at the ludicrous point of “noncompete” clauses for fast-food workers. What possible meaning or purpose can “noncompete” have at this level other than blatant squeezery? Hey, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, but you aren’t allowed to even seek employment in the other kitchen. You, my friend, are in the deep fryer.
As are all of us. The increasingly stale recommendations for how to thrive in this brave new economy just taunt us now. Get more education! Take on debt to get it! Lose your family home in the process!
The enabling class for this state of affairs, the top 10 percent, are still doing okay by paving this road to ruin on behalf of the top .01 percent. But they, too, are working themselves out of their well-paid employment, as the super-wealthy hardly need a bunch of brainy facilitators, explainers and justifiers anymore. At least not at the customary pay rates. With all the heavily indebted, homeless new graduates desperate for work shambling around, the top 10 percent are sure to be next in line for the big squeeze.
Well, then, they too can take their skills elsewhere, until they discover their heretofore-unnoticed noncompete clause.
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OCU
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