by: Robert Reich
Luxury retailers are smiling. So are the owners of high-end restaurants, sellers of upscale cars, vacation planners, financial advisors, and personal coaches. For them and their customers and clients the recession is over. The recovery is now full speed.
But the rest of America isn't enjoying an economic recovery. It's still sick. Many Americans remain in critical condition.
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the economy grew at a 3 percent annual rate last quarter (far better than the measly 1.8 percent third quarter growth). Personal income also jumped. Americans raked in over $13 trillion, $3.3 billion more than previously thought.
Yet it's almost a certainty that all the gains went to the top 10 percent, and the lion's share to the top 1 percent. Over a third of the gains went to 15,600 super-rich households in the top one-tenth of one percent.
We don't know this for sure because all the data aren't in for 2011. But this is what happened in 2010, the most recent year for which we have reliable data, and there's no reason to believe the trajectory changed in 2011 or that it will change this year.
In fact, recoveries are becoming more and more lopsided.
The top 1 percent got 45 percent of Clinton-era economic growth, and 65 percent of the economic growth during the Bush era.
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by: Ben Hart
We keep hearing that inflation remains relatively low.
But a look at this Commodity Price Index chart indicates that the real inflation rate was over 20 percent for the past 12 months, more than 30 percent for food — even higher for commodities we really need to live.
Cotton is up 132 percent. Agricultural raw materials up 39 percent. Oil up 21 percent. Coal up 36 percent. Metals up 57 percent. Coffee up 70 percent. Wheat up 62 percent. Beef up 39 percent. Fish up 31 percent. Hard logs up 19 percent. Soft logs up 27 percent. Rubber up 79 percent. Wool up 57 percent. Fertilizer up 39 percent. Soy beans up 42 percent. Corn up 58 percent. Silver up 60 percent. Industrial Inputs Price Index up 51 percent. Commodity Food Price Index up 30 percent. Commodity Fuel Price Index up 20 percent. Overall Commodity Price Index up 20 percent.
This just over the last 12 months!
Let’s see, what else do we need to live?
Can you say catastrophe?
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by: Marian Wright Edelman
Levi Nation, age 12, and his sister Katherine, eight, eat Sunday dinners at their grandparents’ house in rural Kalkaska County, Michigan. They live with their parents, James and Lois, in an old trailer next door. Though both parents work, they can’t afford a better place—or health insurance or outings with the children. “Sometimes I wish we could go someplace like down to a water park or, like, the zoo,” Levi said.
At one time, the Nations owned a home. But like so many other American families, their standard of living has declined over the past decade even though they are a two-parent working family.
James’s family employment story echoes the Michigan story, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Cass learned when she met the family while on assignment for the Children’s Defense Fund. His father worked for General Motors in Flint until it offered him “a golden handshake and he took the check.” James said. James considers himself a member of “probably the last generation to be able to walk out of high school and get a decent job,” though he and his brother came too late to find well-paying work at GM and move up into the middle class.
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by: Micheal Snyder
The people out there that believe that the U.S. economy is experiencing a permanent recovery and that very bright days are ahead for us should have their heads examined. Unfortunately, what we are going through right now is simply just a period of "hopetimism" between two financial crashes. Things may seem relatively stable right now, but it won't last long. The truth is that the financial crisis of 2008 was just a warm up act for the economic horror show that is coming. Nothing really got fixed after the crash of 2008. We are living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and it has gotten even bigger since then. The "too big to fail" banks are larger now than they have ever been. Americans continue to run up credit card balances like there is no tomorrow. Tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs continue to leave the country. We continue to consume far more than we produce and we continue to become poorer as a nation. None of the problems that caused the crisis of 2008 have been solved and we are even weaker financially than we were back then. So why in the world are so many people so optimistic about the economy right now?.
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by: Derek Kravitz - AP Real Estate Writer
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The biggest civic bankruptcy in American history could leave residents of Alabama's most populous county paying astronomical rates for public services performed by a skeleton crew of county workers. Or it could simply mean tightening the belt another few notches, depending how much of Jefferson County's $4.15 billion debt will have to be paid.
It's even possible that, just as companies have benefited from bankruptcy, that the county surrounding Birmingham will emerge stronger for it.
For now, much is uncertain for following the county's Chapter 9 filing on Wednesday. The full impact on its 658,000 resident's won't be clear until after a judge approves the move at a hearing next month and local officials negotiate a plan with creditors for adjusting its debts. The outlook among some officials was grim a day after the filing, while others defended the move.
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by: Ravi Batra
Suppose I were to tell you that for the past two years the federal government has been spending nearly $1.5 million to create one job, what would your reaction be? Would it be one of disbelief and bewilderment? But suppose I were to prove my statement by citing official data, then how would you react? Well, you make up your own mind, but my response is that the administration's advisers should rethink their approach. Does it make sense to spend so much money to generate one job when the average wage is less than $50,000 per year? In fact, this policy is so foolish that it might even be better just to hand over the average salary to the unemployed so they stay calm, make both ends meet and create consumer demand.
Let me prove my point. The administration's tack is that we should keep spending money at the current rate to preserve jobs, even though the annual federal budget deficit has been around $1.4 trillion over the past two years. In fact, the government even plans to increase its shortfall by raising the size of the payroll tax cut. It seems apparent that the main purpose of excessive federal spending is to preserve or generate jobs. This is a point emphasized by every American president since 1976, and especially since 1981 when the federal deficit began to soar. This is also how most experts defend the deficit nowadays.
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