The Bush administration focused on productivity, not wages or unemployment.
By Doug Cunningham
David Cay Johnston: : “Think about this, the bottom 50 million workers – that’s one in three workers in America – you know what their average pay is? Six thousand dollars.”
The real picture of what’s happening to American workers, their wages, their jobs and their future prospects is frightening. And according to author and financial columnist David Cay Johnston the damage done is caused by tax, economic and trade policies that are systematically dismantling the working and middle classes in America.
Johnston says data from the Social Security administration shows that from 1950-1980 income for the majority of workers at the base of our economy grew faster than any other segment.
But when the Reagan revolution, and later George W. Bush, cut taxes for the wealthy worker wages took a dive. If Reagan’s policies had not been adopted, Johnston says, it would mean 20 grand a year more in your pocket.
Johnston 2: “The average wage in this country would be twenty thousand dollars a year higher. People would have four hundred dollars a week more income on average if we’d continued the policies we previously had and all else had been equal.”
Johnston says a reversal of the Reagan and Bush tax and economic policies would be a very good thing for jobs creation and worker wages.
Johnston 2: “When we had high taxes we had economic growth. When we had high taxes we had higher wages. When we had high taxes we had more jobs, and job growth. And we need to recognize that we’ve been sold a bill of goods here that is discouraging economic growth, discouraging a growing number of jobs at home, that literally is subsidizing manufacturers to move jobs out of America and send them to China.”
Rightardia agrees. The middle class needs to wake up. Although the cuts were large and drove revenue down sharply, when the budget deficit stood at 1.2 percent of GDP.
By 2009, it had increased to 9.9 percent of the economy. An analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indicates that the Bush tax cuts accounted for only about 25 percent of the deficit this year. The recession that followed the Bush tax cuts had the biggest impact on the deficit.
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