Paul Krugman is another powerful voice I've been listening to for some time now. This is from Think Progress:
Today, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that New York Times columnist and Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize in economics “for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity.” Krugman was the lone winner of the $1.4 million award. For at least three years, Krugman has been warning about the dangers of ballooning housing prices and the trade deficit. “One way or another, the economy will eventually eliminate both imbalances,” he wrote in August 2005. Read more at Krugman’s blog here.
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Paul Krugman is certainly among those who were warning us about where we find ourselves today. Here is another piece I found on Common Dreams that was first published on Friday, June 10, 2005 by the New York Times:
Losing Our Country
by Paul Krugman
Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security.
But as The Times's series on class in America reminds us, that was another country. The middle-class society I grew up in no longer exists.
Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.
Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.
But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.
Peace & blessings to all...
Molly
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