“I’m working harder and falling behind”

For the past decade, the incomes of average Americans have been flat while the productivity of the American economy continued to increase, and the United States continued to produce more goods and services per person.

Millions of Americans, including anybody who follows this web log, know this all too well.  But according to Time magazine, the news is starting to reach inside the Washington beltway.  Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor gave a major speech on this subject to the American Enterprise Institute.  His answers—school choice, federal help to parents in paying for school, family-friendly work policies, tax simplification and so on—touched only on the fringes of the problem.

The challenge to the Obama administration is whether they can come up with something better.

Michael Scherer of Time magazine, like so many in Washington, thinks impersonal economic trends are the problem.

Part of the shift can be attributed to increased income inequality owing to globalization and new technology — the wealthy becoming much wealthier, while the rest stayed the same. Part of it can be attributed to increased corporate profits, as new markets opened overseas and new technology lowered costs. Some of it has to do with how the figures are calculated. But the most important political takeaway of the chart is that at the turn of a new century, much of the U.S. stopped feeling the benefits of a growing national economy.

If the problem is the inexorable force of globalization and automation, which make the work of ordinary Americans objectively worth less and the worth of the elite objectively worth more, there is not much to be done.  But the question is: worth less to whom?   I acknowledge that the world’s richest 0.01 percent do not think they have any need for people like me.  Then again, I don’t see that people on my level need them.

But maybe the problem is that the corporate and governmental system is rigged to benefit people at the top at the expense of people at the bottom.   To the extent that this is the true explanation, the way forward is clear.   It is to un-rig the system.

Click on The Most Important Chart in American Politics for Scherer’s article in Time on the political implications of stagnant family incomes in the midst of rising productivity and output (GDP) per person.

Click on A Lost Decade in American Politics for background on productivity, GDP and family incomes by Jake Berliner of NDN, an economic research organization..

Click on Eric Cantor’s ‘Make Life Work’ Speech for the full text of his speech Tuesday.

Did the New Deal work?

Currently a strong effort is being made to discredit the New Deal by opponents of public works, unemployment insurance and other government programs to revive the economy in recession.

The case against the New Deal is that unemployment never fell to pre-1929 levels until the coming of World War Two.  But by other economic measures, the New Deal was in fact a success.  The top chart above measures Gross Domestic Product in terms of by what percentage it was higher than its low point in March 1933.  The bottom chart above measures industrial production by what percentage it was higher or lower than in October 1929 when the Great Depression began.

The two charts showed that economic recovery began when President Roosevelt took office, and faltered only in 1937 when he decided that his economic recovery program had achieved its goal and did not need to be continued.  Full recovery came in the run-up to World War Two.

Now it is impossible to be certain to what degree recovery was due to the New Deal and to what degree it was due to the natural swing of the economic cycle.   The only way you could have proof one way or the other would be to have two timelines, one with a New Deal and one without, which is impossible outside science fiction.   The case for the New Deal is that economic recovery started to falter in 1937 with President Franklin Roosevelt started to curtail government spending and return to a balanced budget.  The only way you could convince me that the New Deal was futile would be to show me a nation that brought about economic recovery through economic austerity.