How in the hell do you post that and ignore the dramatic leap in the mid 1980s? Are you posting this from your Jade Helm bunker?
11 pages in but... The US has always been a regulated capitalist system that recognizes that businesses can gain advantage over workers i.e. sweatshop laws, child labor laws, overtime laws. But it always a cold class war because business can literally buy legislation, no more so than in 2015 with Citizens United. Business has the right to use any legal means to gain profits but the people have the right to ensure the general welfare by any legislation they can get passed. When I drive around Houston and I pass miles and miles of strip centers, my thought is every one of those thousands of retail stores is run by people making minimum wage. I wonder how they can get by on $20,000. But they have no voice in the halls of Congress. I also wonder how it is that Business in the US today does not realize the benefits of better paid consumers. They cut to the bone for profit and park it overseas while their consumer base crumbles. Money is made when money moves, not when it sits. How much more robust would the consumer economy be if all those millions of base level workers had $30,000 instead of $20,000? It would massively inflate demand. The way we working now, lowering worker wages to the level of third world competitors seems counter productive in the long run.
is your concern the increase in income growth of the top 1% or the lack of income growth of the bottom 90%?
Immigration from latin america and elsewhere maintains a healthy supply of workers who are willing to work for low wages, which plays a part in the lack of income growth.
Yep, it's all connected. Fiat currency, jewish bankers, illuminati. It's a very short ride to total bat guano town from the mainstream these days.
Yes, raising the minimum wage cascades up. When the minimum wage goes up, the new "close to minimum wage" jobs respond by raising their wages so that they can continue to get people who are roughly the same level above minimum wage workers as they were before. Then, this ripple moves through the lower end of the income distribution, raising wages. This is a good thing, your commentary about "wealth transfer" notwithstanding. We've been transferring wealth from the middle class to the rich constantly over the last 40 years, to our economy's and our worker's detriment. Time to turn that thing around.
It ignores that a lot of other things happened starting in the early 70's. And, of course, the chart itself shows that the 1% didn't start getting enriched until the mid 80's, implying no real correlation with a 1971 fiat change.
Note the great big uptick in 1% earnings right around the time that Reagan lowered tax rates. That certainly looks more like a proximate cause than ending the gold standard.
I would guess that uptick was related to the booming economy combined with the lower rates, followed by another uptick once Bush lowered rates yet again. Lower tax rates are fantastic for the richest among us, not so good for the rest of us.
The overall scope of the Reagan economic doctrine (i.e. favoring supply side) hasn't really been repealed or changed since it was implemented. The only points of stagnation or decline for the 1% clearly correlate with the overall performance of the economy (the 2000 bubble, the 2008 crash, etc).
Its true and should be noted this was also true of many countries around the world. Taxes and regulations came down
Which jobs are the immigrants taking...? Some economists make the argument that the American economy depends on illegal workers. Why do you exclude the poor...?
There were a lot of things that came together in the 80's that probably all contributed in different ways - lower tax rates for the wealthy, technology revolution, free trade and globalization (more outsourcing), decline of labor unions, etc.
There are two trends, the stagnation of wages for the lower 90% started in the '70s. The dramatic rise in income for the top 1% started in the mid-80s. You seem to suck at interpreting the written word, this is exactly as I posted.
