Sorry to deliver the news, but it’s time to worry about the next crash.
The combination of stagnant wages with most economic gains going to the top is once again endangering the economy.
Most Americans are still living in the shadow of the Great Recession that started in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009. More have jobs, to be sure. But they haven’t seen any rise in their wages, adjusted for inflation.
Many are worse off due to the escalating costs of housing, healthcare, and education. And the value of whatever assets they own is less than in 2007.Which suggests we’re careening toward the same sort of crash we had then, and possibly as bad as 1929.
Clear away the financial rubble from those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and what they as workers could produce. Each of these imbalances finally tipped the economy over.
The same imbalance has been growing again. The richest 1 percent of Americans now takes home about 20 percent of total income, and owns over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.
These are close to the peaks of 1928 and 2007.
The underlying problem isn’t that Americans have been living beyond their means. It’s that their means haven’t been keeping up with the growing economy. Most gains have gone to the top.
But the rich only spend a small fraction of what they earn. The economy depends on the spending of middle and working class families.
By the first quarter of this year, household debt was at an all-time high of $13.2 trillion. Almost 80 percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.
It was similar in the years leading up to the crash of 2007. Between 1983 and 2007, household debt soared while most economic gains went to the top. If the majority of households had taken home a larger share, they wouldn’t have needed to go so deeply into debt.
Similarly, between 1913 and 1928, the ratio of personal debt to the total national economy nearly doubled. After the 1929 crash, the government invented new ways to boost wages – Social Security, unemployment insurance, overtime pay, a minimum wage, the requirement that employers bargain with labor unions, and, finally, a full-employment program called World War II.
After the 2007 crash, the government bailed out the banks and pumped enough money into the economy to contain the slide. But apart from the Affordable Care Act, nothing was done to address the underlying problem of stagnant wages.
Trump and his Republican enablers are now reversing regulations put in place to stop Wall Street’s excessively risky lending.
But Trump’s real contributions to the next crash are his sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, rollback of overtime pay, burdens on labor organizing, tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy but not for most workers, cuts in programs for the poor, and proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid – all of which put more stress on the paychecks of most Americans.
Ten years after the start of the Great Recession, it’s important to understand that the real root of the collapse wasn’t a banking crisis. It was the growing imbalance between consumer spending and total output – brought on by stagnant wages and widening inequality.
You claim, on the opinion pages of the “failing” New York Times no less, that senior officials working for the president of the United States “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
“I would know,” you add dramatically. “I am one of them.”
Sorry, what was the point of this particular piece? And what is it that you want from the rest of us? A thank-you card? A round of applause? The nation’s undying gratitude?
Screw. You.
There is no redemption; no exoneration for you or your colleagues inside this shit-show of an administration. You think an op-ed in the paper of record is going to cut it? Gimme a break. You cannot write an article admitting to the president’s “anti-democratic” impulses while also saying you want his administration “to succeed.” You cannot publish a 965-word piece excoriating Donald Trump’s “worst inclinations” while omitting any and all references to his racism, bigotry, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism.
You did find space, however, to heap praise on yourself and your fellow officials. “Unsung heroes.” “Adults in the room.” “Quiet resistance.” “Steady state.”
The reality is that you and your fellow officials are enablers of Trump; you are his protectors and defenders. You say it yourself. Why were there only “whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment,” which provides for the cabinet to remove the president from office if he is unable to do the job? Why not invoke it and let Mike Pence take over? (Are you, by the way, Mike Pence?)
If as you claim — and we all agree! — that the president you serve “continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic” with “misguided impulses,” then how can you advocate for anything other than his swift removal from office?
Your defense is that “no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis.” Seriously? You don’t agree with former Secretary of State John Kerry that we’re already in the midst of “a genuine constitutional crisis,” given your own op-ed outlining his “erratic behavior” and “reckless decisions” and Bob Woodward’s new book describing “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” at the center of the Trump White House?
You are keen to remind the liberal readers of the New York Times that yours “is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left” and that you believe this administration’s policies have “already made America safer and more prosperous.” You cite “historic tax reform” and “effective deregulation” as the supposed “bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture.” But by tax reform, do you mean the Trump tax cuts that give the richest 1 percent of Americans almost half of the benefits? And by deregulation, do you mean the rescinding of Obama-era protections for the oceans; the lifting of controls on toxic air pollution; and the green light to Wall Street to once again cause havoc in the financial markets?
What is it, then, that you object to? Well, it seems, your biggest concern is “not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency,” but how Americans have “sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.”
Also, what did you think would happen when you signed up to work for a reality TV star who was accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women, and of rape by his first wife? Who stiffed hundreds of contractors, ripped off Trump University students, cheated on his third wife just months after she gave birth, and cut off health care coverage to his own nephew’s sick baby in a fit of rage?
You knew all of this and yet you still chose to work for him at the highest level of government. You now acknowledge that “the root of the problem is the president’s amorality.” But how about your own amorality? I hate to agree with your boss, but you are “gutless.” You’re a shameless coward, a cynical opportunist.
Don’t hide behind anonymity. Don’t pretend that you have “gone to great lengths” to restrain Trump and “put country first.”
Tell us your name. Quit your job. Call out this president in public.
Call him out for his bigotry, his mendacity, his sheer mental and emotional unfitness for the office he occupies. Call him out in front of a congressional committee. Or a court of law.
House of Brat 