Robert Reich is right: No one ever mentions this on the teevee. (Instead, we have people like Mrs. Alan Greenspan and Mika Brzezinski giving us stern lectures about tightening our belts.) In real dollars, adjusted for inflation, people are actually making less than they made thirty years ago. This is a massive systemic problem and it will require a major course correction to fix (and no, I don't mean cutting unemployment benefits):
Missing from almost all discussion of America’s dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June’s decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent.
In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.
Robert Reich
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