My take on a variety of topics that are shaping the U.S. in the 21st century.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
A different state of the union
Ian Welsh at Blogging of the President has a different take of where the US stands today. It's a bit over the top, but you can decide for yourself how much.
Mr Welsh may not be too far over the top in what he says. As Paul Harris pointed out in The Observer last Sunday, the poverty now endemic in America is not the result of vast unemployment, but rather too many low paid jobs. The poor have jobs, but cannot rise out of poverty even when two members of a household work full-time. Bush merrily rants on about the number of jobs created each month, but hides from the American people the truth - that most of those jobs are so poorly paid they are, in real terms, useless to the economy. Mister Walsh made, I believe, a valid point when he wrote: "It is also the result of deliberate Fed policies intended to restrict wage push inflation but allowing the sorts of asset inflation which benefit the wealthy and affluent." We are seeing a continuing upward trend of the Dow, that is not supported by an increasingly efficient economy. Whether the position is as irreversible as Mister Walsh indicates is debatable, given that Clinton left office leaving a healthy financial surplus, but I do believe that such a turnaround has to be at least as painful to ordinary Americans as he anticipates it would be.
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Mr Welsh may not be too far over the top in what he says. As Paul Harris pointed out in The Observer last Sunday, the poverty now endemic in America is not the result of vast unemployment, but rather too many low paid jobs. The poor have jobs, but cannot rise out of poverty even when two members of a household work full-time. Bush merrily rants on about the number of jobs created each month, but hides from the American people the truth - that most of those jobs are so poorly paid they are, in real terms, useless to the economy. Mister Walsh made, I believe, a valid point when he wrote: "It is also the result of deliberate Fed policies intended to restrict wage push inflation but allowing the sorts of asset inflation which benefit the wealthy and affluent." We are seeing a continuing upward trend of the Dow, that is not supported by an increasingly efficient economy.
Whether the position is as irreversible as Mister Walsh indicates is debatable, given that Clinton left office leaving a healthy financial surplus, but I do believe that such a turnaround has to be at least as painful to ordinary Americans as he anticipates it would be.
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