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From: The National Journal
by: Jonathan Rauch
This is an excellent read, it covers the reality of the American economy today and the truth. I just had to include it here.
"The higher you stood on the income ladder, the better you did; the highest-paid 1 percent of earners soared above and away from everyone else, practically occupying an economy of their own. By contrast, the bottom 90 percent of earners—which is to say, almost everyone—saw barely any increase, and much of what they did see came in the boom years of the late 1990s."
If the American economy were an automobile, you would say the transmission is failing. The engine works, but not all wheels are getting power. To put the matter less metaphorically: The economy no longer reliably and consistently transmits productivity gains to workers. The result is that many millions of Americans, in particular less-skilled men, are leaving the workforce, a phenomenon the country has never seen before on the present scale.
Well. That was a mouthful. It certainly bites off more than Washington’s polarized politicians can handle at the moment. In the next few months, they need to worry about the so-called fiscal cliff, the round of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that, if not averted, might start a recession. Plus a politically vexing debt-limit bill, which will need to be passed early in 2013. Plus a recovery that, for many Americans, feels more like a recession. (The median family income fell as much during the first two years of the recovery as it did during the two years of the recession itself, according to the Pew Research Center.) Plus a debt crisis and downturn in Europe. Isn’t that enough?
Sadly, no. The U.S. economy has weakened, and much needs fixing—beyond the fiscal cliff—if it’s to regain its strength. A reelected President Obama and a still-divided Congress face a lengthy To Do list for the economy. We’ve chosen eight entries: innovation, jobs, rising health care costs, entitlement programs, college-completion rates, infrastructure, housing, and retirement security. None of them will be easy to fix.
But first, let’s consider a nexus of troubling economic trends that seem to be driving and deepening many of the specific problems—and may prove to be the most intractable problem of all. If economic strength means anything, it is that the economy can make almost everyone better off, thereby strengthening the country’s social fabric as well as its balance sheet. Such an economy unites rather than divides us.
Today’s economy, by that standard, is struggling. Its ability to deliver rising living standards across the income spectrum is in decline, and perhaps also in question. “This is a fundamental problem,” says Robert J. Shapiro, the chairman of Sonecom, an economic consultancy in Washington. “This is America’s largest economic challenge. People can no longer depend on rising wages and salaries when the economy expands.”
As other articles in this issue suggest, a number of policy responses are on the agenda already, such as creating jobs, helping more students finish college, and reducing wage-denuding health care inflation. Others, such as reforming the federal disability program, have yet to attract much notice. In truth, however, the extent of Washington’s ability to repair the economy’s gearbox is an open question, because the problem is complex. It implicates not just one slipped gear but many: disruptions in long-established connections between productivity and earnings, between labor and capital, between top earners and everyone else, between men and work, between men and marriage. Together, they are bringing the economy to a place where a large and growing group of people—indeed, whole communities—are isolated from work, marriage, and higher education. That place might look like today’s America, only with a larger welfare state. But it might just as easily bring social unrest and class resentment of a magnitude the country hasn’t known before.
SLIPPING GEARS
Begin with Chart 1. It shows one of the most basic of all economic relationships, that between productivity and hourly compensation. Productivity measures the value of the output (brake pads, stock transactions) a worker produces in, say, a day; compensation is a measure of earnings that includes the value of benefits such as health insurance. The chart also shows compensation for all U.S. workers and specifically for workers in production and nonsupervisory jobs—blue-collar and clerical jobs, for example.
For decades, productivity and compensation rose in tandem. Their bond was the basis of the social compact between the economy and the public: If you work harder and better, you and your family will be better off. But in the past few decades, and especially during the past 10 years or so, the lines have diverged. This is slippage No. 1: Productivity is rising handsomely, but compensation of workers isn’t keeping up.
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