9/7/2020
"The three richest people in America have as much wealth as the bottom half of all Americans combined," Robert Reich, labor secretary for the Clinton administration and a public policy professor at University of California, Berkeley, wrote Monday.
The wealth gap has been growing for a good while. Warren Buffet, the big-name investor, used to worry out loud about the shrinkage of the American middle class, that great driver of economic growth. Since Trump took office, a one-two punch from tax breaks for billionaires and blunders with COVID19 have sped up that shrinkage like soapy water on a cashmere sweater.
At the same time, the rocket economy that Trump crows about, the one he says will take the charts into a sharp V, hasn't happened yet.
Economics is not based on fairy tales. Some economists say now that our progress looks more like a K, with a waterline at the point where the K's lines meet. Above that line, you're doing well, and the stock market is your friend. Below that line -- well, you know. Down there, "essential workers" and the unemployed live and die and worry about eviction and food and COVID19 and getting through to Friday.
Talking about that K shape, one economist mentioned the Titanic. People above the waterline don't know what icebergs might be below, he said. Fact is, what's down there are people who are no longer part of the middle-class economy. Many of them are, indeed, underwater.
Yesterday, when Biden vowed to be the “strongest labor president you’ve ever had” in an event with AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, he was returning to one of the big drivers of middle-class wealth in the 20th century. The union movement tackled terrible living conditions and low wages and brought income growth to lower-wage Americans.
We've all heard arguments that unions are corrupt and unreasonable and are dragging down ... well, the stock market, wealth of the well-to-do, which has ballooned on Trump's watch.
The sins of unions are not the biggest concern for Americans right now.
Biden said, “If I’m in the oval office, guess who’s gonna be there with me? Unions, labor, you.”
Are unions really an answer to bringing back the middle class today? When cheap labor is so easy to find overseas, will unions have the power to create meaningful change? Would you join a union for your own profession?
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