Kevin Kallaugher has the best cartoon to date on our current economic situation: Fun art, simple concept, nice use of visual sarcasm and graphic metaphor.
Even if you no longer read the paper, if you've been looking at political cartoons, you've seen references to the study behind it. The coverage boils it down to the fact that 95 percent of the gains in the economy since the Great Recession have gone to the one-percent, but it's more complex than that, as most economic issues are.
A lot of the lost income since the crash came from depressed (sorry -- "recessed") stock prices, so it's only natural that, as stock prices rebounded, the recovery would benefit not those who hold stock -- that would be a measure of net wealth, not net income, and would include middleclass people with 401ks -- but those who actively churn their stocks.
The one-percent.
As Mike Luckovich puts it, those who swing the hammers are not getting the benefit of the recovery, because that's basically not where things are getting better. It's that weird shadow economy, the Las Vegas/Wall Street economy based on betting on what people think things are worth, that currently yields the profits.
75 years ago, when speculators cratered the US economy and people got mad enough to do something about it, we put in place laws that were intended to keep the tail from wagging the dog.
And then, starting in the 1970s, we began to ease up on those regulations and let the stock traders once more be the focus of our economy. As the study notes:
That's a real problem, if you want to see a resurgence of middle-class prosperity, because, while current wealth in that top tier is based on stock prices, the basic economy remains simply an expanded barter system in which people create some stuff and use it to get some other stuff.
It's been a few centuries since those transactions happened on the village level, and certainly since the fellow with the sheep traded a leg of mutton to the blacksmith for a sack of nails.
But I recall, perhaps 20 years ago, when I used to get my hair cut by a young woman who became pregnant out of wedlock and not by anyone who was going to pitch in much. So, when she left the salon, I helped her out by having her continue to cut my hair in her home. After the baby was born, she got a job in a local ribbon factory, and, while the pay wasn't great and cutting my hair was still worth doing, she wasn't on welfare.
But then the factory moved to the Carolinas, an employer-friendly region that was home to sweatshop companies like J.P. Stevens -- immortalized in the movie "Norma Rae" -- that progressives had been boycotting even before Crystal Lee Sutton took her stand.
She didn't move down there to keep her job, because it didn't pay enough to be worth the U-Haul. It's just as well: A lot of companies went first to the Carolinas but then, once Free Trade was in place, moved again to even friendlier sweatshop locales, overseas.
When that process began in earnest, when manufacturing began to go overseas in large numbers, people said, "But what about jobs here?" and the answer was "We'll become a service economy."
Like Arlo, I never quite understood what that meant, but, like Arlo, I began to suspect that it was more of a mantra than an actual analysis.
Of course, this was in 1999, before all the high-tech service jobs (like working in a call center, a well-known path to riches) went overseas as well.
What's left now, in this country, is half a barter system. We still need the nails, but we don't have the leg of mutton anymore.
The stop-gap solution has been to open up credit so that people with lousy jobs can continue to acquire goods as if they had decent jobs. Of course, it means that you are now paying three whole sheep for the bag of nails, even though the blacksmith only gets a leg.
Meanwhile, however, we're hoping that the people in the countries to which we have shifted all those jobs will step up their purchases of the stuff they make for us. It's kinda sorta working, especially as the rich folks over there just invest in the stock that is stored over here rather than going to the trouble of cutting us out of the game entirely.
Having foreign investors admittedly takes some of the "we" out of things. But it doesn't really matter, since it was the royal "we" in the first place, and not the kind of "we" that has anything at all to do with you or me.
In this Liza Donnelly cartoon, that's the royal we in the comfy chairs and the us-we in the white jacket. It's a service economy and so we're serving the drinks. At the current minimum wage. No need to raise our pay, boss, we happy jes' to have a job at all!
A few days ago, I noted that, for all the sturm-und-drang-und-extended-coverage over mass murder, if we really cared, we'd do something about the gun problem. But we don't care and so we don't act.
Ditto with the economy.
Derf Backderf has written about his friendship in high school with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, but he has not commented on how growing up with a sociopath may have given him the necessary background for cartoons about our service economy:
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