July 24 2015. Something depressing this way has gone—and it is the income—in real terms–of most Americans. Check the figures. You guys have been getting nowhere—or sliding downwards—since the early 70s. And, mostly, you have neither noticed nor reacted.

AMERICAN DECLINE HAS BEEN GOING ON SO LONG IT IS BECOMING INSTITUTIONALIZED.

WHY DO AMERICANS ACCEPT THIS? THESE ARE SINGULARLY DEPRESSING FIGURES

I HAVE A SUSPICION THAT THEY UNDERSTATE THE CASE

The facts don’t exactly pour in because the main media—which is mostly in feel-good mode—doesn’t seem to like covering them. They clearly believe that the American public can’t handle the truth—or that covering it will cost advertising dollars. Or—to cut to the chase, that the truth does not suit the owners’ agenda.

Whichever way, the American public is kept singularly ill-informed.

It’s not an accident. It’s policy.

Wrong policy.

If there is ever an autopsy carried out on the great experiment that is/was the United States of America, I cannot but speculate about the verdict.

“Death through ignorance, inertia, and distraction,” would appeal highly likely.

It would be a sound verdict.

The following is from the NYT. Same depressing picture—just phrased differently.

A new research paper in the latest issue of Monthly Labor Review by the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms and amplifies our point.

The new paper takes a detailed look at compensation from 2007 to 2014. The main findings:

• For the bottom 80 percent of civilian workers, real hourly compensation fell or stagnated over the period.
• The median worker’s wages fell by 4 percent over the period, while compensation fell by nearly 2 percent.
• For lower income workers, compensation fell by more than wages; from the median to the 80^th percentile, wages fell faster than compensation. Either way, the result is lost economic ground for the vast majority of Americans amid widening inequality.

Even among the top 20 percent of workers, only those at the highest reaches of the income scale show consistently healthy gains in wages and compensation.

The researchers also found that for most workers there was no way to escape poor wage growth. In 19 out of 20 occupations in the study, the compensation of typical workers fell, flattened or barely grew from 2007 to 2014; only one category – management – had notable gains in median compensation over the period. For higher-paid workers at the 90th percentile of the pay scale, only three occupations had notable compensation gains – management, computer and mathematical jobs, and business and financial operations.

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