The jobs recovered since the Wall Street blow-up and the Great Recession are much, much lower paying than the jobs destroyed by the Wall Street blow-up.
Until and unless we address the roots of the increasing inequality and the steady evisceration of the middle class, working families will never recover from the destruction caused by the recklessness of Wall Street and the use of phony investment instruments.
The United States Conference of Mayors just released a study showing:
• The average pay of jobs LOST in the Great Recession was more than $61,000.
• The average wage of jobs in this pitiful anemic recovery is just over $47,000.
• Higher paying construction and manufacturing jobs were lost in the Wall Street debacle of 2007 and 2008.
• The jobs created since have been in lower paying healthcare and hospitality.
For those who know Reagan and free market capitalism worshippers, wages were stagnant for 30 years prior to the Great Recession. For those who don’t believe in robust governmental economic action, wages have declined in this pitiful recovery, constantly exacerbating the very dangerous income inequality working people are struggling through.
Dr. Richard Levins and I wrote a book in 2010 called Getting America Back to Work about what the US needed to do to stimulate a strong and robust economy. The book is as useful today as it was the day it was released. In fact, the book still enjoys strong sales.
It is abundantly clear that deregulated free market capitalism caused our economic crisis and provides no answers to really resolve the crisis.
Photo source: rasdourian on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)