About Those Lazy Freeloading Americans on Welfare

To those who complain about the "47% freeloaders and Americans who are "too lazy to work", a history lesson is in order.

Following NAFTA and WTO in the 1990s opening the floodgates to Chinese and Indian imports, 17 million American jobs disappeared. The losses were not confined to the lowest paid low skilled workers. American skilled workers were also harmed including some of our highest skilled IT workers.

Fast forward to 2008 when the financial industry crashed the world economy. It was not war, drought, earthquake or any other natural disaster that crashed the world economy; the financial industry crashed the economy after they defeated financial regulation and enabled unlimited leverage in pursuit of unlimited profits.

In the years following the crash millions of young Americans graduated with college degrees (and student debt) to find that there was no appropriate job for them. Some took hourly menial jobs, some went back to school to try again to make the American myth work for them. Others stayed home with their parents, disgusted and disillusioned.

In the years since the crash corporate America has recovered and posted record profits. The nation’s GDP has risen to new highs. The stock market indices have hit new highs. But we have persistent large unemployment and underemployment, and by some measures the domestic economic teeters on the edge of falling back into recession.

American workers are not indestructible. After an individual who has done all the things that are supposed to guarantee success (education, hard work) gets screwed by seeing they job transferred to foreigners, or finds that the expectation of a good job for that expensive degree and high GPA was just an empty promise, that individual will most likely never believe in the American economic system again.

We have 49% of Americans on various forms of government assistance because the national business friendly policies of the past 20 years have left the nation without enough jobs and no alternative ways for the displaced individuals to earn a living. (citation: Wikipedia). The bitter truth is that the business-friendly policies have resulted in the highest GDP ever and more billionaires than ever have left tens of millions of American workers out of the fruits of the new economy.

This has created a persistent economic lethargy in America because those American workers who were so cavalierly replaced and discarded were also the American Consumers who supported 71% of domestic economic activity with their spending.(Wikipedia)

The macroeconomic effect of screwing American workers is measured and quantified by the metric “Wage Share” Wage Share is the proportion of the production of American businesses that is paid out to workers in the form of wages and salaries. Wage share in America peaked in the late 1970’s which was the heyday of the American Middle Class. Wage share began declining in the 1980’s with the passage of laws that made it easier to not pay American workers overtime, and failed to raise the national minimum wage to keep up with inflation. Wage share fell more sharply following the passage of NAFTA and adoption of the WTO that subjected American workers to competition workers in low-wage third world nations. (Citation: Wikipedia article on Wage Share).

People are people. We do not have a generation of 50 - 100 million people with defective DNA. The lack of widely enjoyed prosperity by American working people is the result of laws that America passed to make it easier for business to produce without paying wages to American workers. The result is an economic system that lets a very few people harvest the wealth produced by the nation’s workers, and leaves tens of millions of working Americans and their families out of the rewards. The ones at the bottom of the economic finish line – an increasingly large number – turn to the government for assistance with healthcare, food, and housing. In a democracy, the politicians cannot survive if they do not respond to the basic needs of the voters.

So now we have our business-friendly economy. We have more billionaires than ever – 536 according to Wiki – and more Americans receiving government assistance than ever – 151 million in total.

It raises the question: What is our national economic objective? If we want to have the most billionaires and the highest GDP, we have succeeded. We can bask I the glory of the incomprehensibly large amounts of wealth harvested by Gates, Buffet and others, a sort of sycophantic economic system where the workers gain satisfaction by seeing a few kings elevated to riches beyond counting. If on the other hand, we seek to have the highest GDP so that all working Americans share in the resultant prosperity, then we have failed miserably.

It would not break new ground to require American corporations to pay middle class wages to American workers. Through the industrial age corporations have repeatedly found ways to exploit public resources in pursuit of profits, and government has repeatedly stepped in and required companies to internalize the business costs that they would prefer to ignore. Think about the costly changes imposed on business to correct workplace hazards that sicken and kill employees; smog so thick that it kills people and degrades the quality of life for all nearby residents; water pollution so bad that no fish can survive in the rivers adjoining the factories. American workers are a resource in the economic environment. The consumer economy depends on American workers being paid a fair share of the production they produce.