Three Way News
Your Source. For everything. Really.
Contributors
- Hammer
- Jambo
- Libby Mae
Current Poll
Recurring features
Hammer's Favorites
- Dobson v. Sponge-Bob
- Calvin, the nest egg
- Pat's predictions
- Bachmann spins Cupertino
- 205 atheists assume the bench
- Fox spins Oil for Food
- Fact check: highest taxed state
- Gen. Myers v. Reality
- Janice Rogers Brown
- Killing Field
- Kline hates Big Bird
- Vote Luca Brasi!
- Cornyn's Stalinist Supreme Court
- Rumsfeld's hidden metrics
Jambo's Favories
- Dolphin research updates
- We all shine on
- If you have to write...
- Columnist NY Times should have
- Truth about taxes
- Fourth of July
- Movie objects
- Lost in supermarket
- Dysfunctional Farmer Labor party
- Punks you hated
- Some preacher from east
- Winning issues
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Median wages
Kevin Drum addressed middle class income growth:
What's more, the middle class is big. If there were significant pressure to keep middle class incomes rising in line with economic growth, it would take titanic amounts of government action to swim against that tide and direct the money instead to the rich. It's nearly impossible to see a mechanism that could allow this to happen.
But — government policies that affect #2 seem far more plausible. For example: Appoint members to the Federal Reserve who are obsessed with inflation and act to cool down the economy at the least sign that average hourly wages are rising. Make it harder to form unions in new industries, thus reducing the bargaining power of the working class. Support free trade agreements that put downward wage pressure on low-income workers. Support tax and deregulation policies that make middle class jobs less secure.
Drum argues that government policies encourage stagnant wages for the middle class and below. The economy continues to grow. The benefits of that growth have to flow somewhere. If not to the working class, then to the investor class.
Which candidates are willing to stand up for the middle class? Who is willing to commit to the idea that rising wages for working families is good? And who subscribes to the Fed policy of combating wage growth at all costs?
