Posted at Hartmann Report on Dec. 3, 2023
Where Did America’s Middle Class Go? : The Hidden History of Monopolies
Then came the twin hits of trade liberalization in the 1970 — cutting tariffs and allowing cheap imports, so that American workers were competing with lower-paid, then-mostly Japanese workers—and Reagan’s massive tax cuts of the 1980s, which explicitly encouraged employers and CEOs to drain as much money out of their companies as they could rather than reinvest it or pay their employees well.
Since the 1970s, productivity has increased by 146%,16 but wages have actually either stagnated (if looking at household incomes; today many more are two-wage-earner households) or fallen (looking at individual incomes). CEO compensation has rocketed from 30 times the average worker’s to hundreds of times, in some industries even thousands of times (for example, Coca-Cola’s CEO, James Quincey, gets paid $16.7 million per year—or 1,016 times the typical employee’s pay).