A Booming Economy, Bush Style
Median weekly earnings of the nation's 105.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $659 in the second quarter of 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.5 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 4.0 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.
That 4.0 inflation excludes energy prices. So not counting increased costs of gasoline, electricity, natural gas and heating oil, wage-earning people (that's all of us non-CEOs) saw our real pay decline by 2.5% in the past year.
But we got rid of that estate tax, so things are bound to pick up soon.
It boggles my mind how blind most people in the corporate/government/media power elite are to the dangers of our current economic situation. We've got income inequality the likes of which we haven't seen since right before the damn depression, personal debt levels (mortgage and credit cards) the likes of which we haven't seen since, well, ever, and an economy that's based on "financial products," cheap oil, and crappily-made shit from China that we sell out of giant concrete boxes.
This is the kind of thing people talk about when they use the term "house of cards." It won't be appocalyptic if (when) it collapses, but it would be a hell of a lot better if this was something we did intentionally rather than just playing Jenga as long as we can.