Monday, March 17, 2014

Is America on the wrong track?

I think so. Is it President Obama's fault? I don't think so. Haven't things have been sliding in this country for a long, long time?

In his column today, Paul Krugman acknowledges as much (my emphasis):

But over the past 40 years good jobs for ordinary workers have disappeared, not just from inner cities but everywhere: adjusted for inflation, wages have fallen for 60 percent of working American men. And as economic opportunity has shriveled for half the population, many behaviors that used to be held up as demonstrations of black cultural breakdown — the breakdown of marriage, drug abuse, and so on — have spread among working-class whites too.

1 comment:

Ed Crotty said...

Marx got a lot of this right -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_history#Feudalism

" Marx believed that capitalism always leads to monopolies and leads the people to poverty; yet the fewer the restrictions on the free market, (e.g. from the state and trade unions) the sooner it finds itself in crisis."

Marx is saying that government regulation of business and support of unions keeps the capitalists from overdoing it.

The real "Reagan Revolution" was that it signalled that the government would no longer use it's power to support labor or restrict and regulate capitalism.

Capital has "captured" the government. Since then, things have been great for capital and bad for labor.