Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, tell me again you takers uh. makers. how if we give you lots of tax breaks that the economy will really start rolling and good times will trickle down to all!!Oh yeah right – the last time that happened was when labor unions were strong in the US and you had to pretend to care abo ut the workers – you know the ones you guys left high and dry when you moved their jobs to Asia and south of the border! You know the ones whose jobs you stole and now the jobs they can get don’t pay anywhere near the money they previously made and oh they don’t have any security either — but just like Charlie Brown keeps believing that Lucy isn’t going to pull that football out from under him – we’ll keep believing that you care about your employees….. and our wages will stagnate while you reap big rewards!!
From Think Progress – Corporate Profits Hit A New Record High Last Year
After-tax profits for American corporations hit another record high last year, rising to $1.68 trillion.
As this chart from Quartz shows, profits have been on a roll for some time, more than fully recovering what was lost during the recession:
Click to Enlarge
….But this wealth hasn’t trickled much further down. Despite the fact that workers have beenincreasing their productivity — helping to drive those corporate profits — they haven’t seen much of a reward. Wages are growing at the slowest rate since the 1960s, only just barely outpacing inflation. They have actually declined since 2007, and the trend extends back even further: American workers have experienced a “lost decade” of wage growth, as their pay stayed flat or declined between 2000 and 2012, despite a 25 percent bump in productivity. On the whole, corporate profits have grown 20 times faster than workers’ incomes since 2008. Full Story
Cheers to the state of Connecticut for being the first state to up the minimum wage to $10.10!
The First State To Pass A $10.10 Minimum Wage
Late Wednesday night, the Connecticut General Assembly passed a bill to raise the state’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2017, passing 87 to 54 in the House and 21 to 14 in the Senate. Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) says he will sign it into law on Thursday.
That will not only make Connecticut the state with the highest minimum wage, but will also make it the first to pass a wage at the level currently being pushed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats. It will raise pay for 227,000 workers in the state, about 15 percent of its workforce.
and you know what happens then those folks, unlike Mr Millionaire will put that money back into the economy when they go out and do silly things like, oh you know buy gas, clothes and food!!
and don’t even get me started on the Walton family. Bernie Sanders correctly pointed out that – “Today the Walton family of Wal-Mart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America.”
Six members of the Walton family appear on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. Christy Walton, widow of the late John Walton, leads the clan at No. 6 with a net worth of $25.3 billion as of March 2012. She is also the richest woman in the world for the seventh year in a row, according to Forbes. Here are the other five:
No. 9: Jim Walton, $23.7 billion
No. 10: Alice Walton, $23.3 billion
No. 11: S. Robson Walton, oldest son of Sam Walton, $23.1 billion
No. 103: Ann Walton Kroenke, $3.9 billion
No. 139: Nancy Walton Laurie, $3.4 billionThat’s a grand total of $102.7 billion for the whole family.
Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California-Berkeley, compared the Waltons’ cumulative net worth with that of the overall population, as cited in the Survey of Consumer Finances. (She used the Waltons’ wealth from 2010, which was valued at $89.5 billion.)
Allegretto found that in 2007, the wealth held by the six Waltons was equal to that of the bottom 30.5 percent of families in the U.S. In 2010, the Waltons’ share equaled the entire bottom 41.5 percent of families.
That 41.5 percent represents nearly 49 million families, notes Josh Bivens at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. While median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent, Bivens wrote, the wealth of the Walton family members rose from $73.3 billion in 2007 to $89.5 billion in 2010, or about 22 percent growth.
Now we all know that owners of businesses should make and have more money than their worker, but when you couple the above information with the Walton’s treatment of their employees in their stores when it comes to hours and benefits it is blatantly unfair. If you want to attract good employees who come to work and care about their job you pay a livable wage with benefits… just look at the companies that do that like Costco and Trader Joe’s……ok Edward down from your soapbox!!
So let’s end this rant with some music from Pete Seeger and maybe we can ask this question when it comes to Wal-Mart and its workers ……”Which Side Are You On”
