The rich get richer and the poor get???

It’s official. Not only are the rich getting wildly richer, not only is the middle class being eviscerated, but the poor are getting poorer. They are getting poorer not simply in relation to the wealthy, but in absolute terms. So says an analysis of US Census data by the Brookings Institute.

One example is the earnings of the bottom 20% of wage earners in Cincinnati. Since the recession which started in 2008 they have seen their incomes, when adjusted for inflation, decline a jaw-dropping 25%! And the decline has continued during the "recovery", falling 3% between 2013 and 2014.

Now this undoubtedly comes as no surprise to the poor, but it should shock the mainstream economists, who keep talking about an economic recovery. Recovery for whom? The banksters, the hedge fund managers, the rent-seekers, but not ordinary Americans, who continue to be trapped in a recession that is now 8 years old. There is no trickle down, only trickle up, up and away.

As if to put an exclamation point on this, the Supreme Court appears poised to deal another blow to the one institution which has the power to represent working Americans and fight against income inequality - labor unions in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Assn. It is no coincidence that the period of greatest prosperity for ordinary Americans the US, from 1940 until the late 1970s, was also the period of strong labor unions, which fought in both the economic and political spheres for the rights and dignity of American workers. The lead attorney for the anti-union side made it very clear that the goal of this case was to force unions to be "less involved in things like politics."

As I write this post, it appears that even the coupon clippers on Wall Street are beginning to understand that you can only milk this cow for so long, before things begin to fall apart. Despite assurances from mainstream economists that “recovery is just around the corner” (or that it is already here) we are beginning to see fears that the bubble is about to burst.

There is a joke about the left, that we have predicted 9 of the last 4 recessions. Maybe it’s time to revise the punch line. Mainstream economists have predicted 3 of the last 0 recoveries. This time, however, it is definitely not funny!