Stop blaming wage earners, the problem with the current globalised West is that most people's incomes have been forced lower over the last 30 to 40 years. Buying power has declined in the mass populace in real terms and as a result economies eventually suffer...take a look at the price of housing for example, far higher slice of people's incomes than in the boom years up to the time of Volker's heading the Reserve Bank in the US.
The cost of clothes, whitegoods and cars may have gone down, but they have an inbuilt short-term self destruct mode so people are forced to replace items far more frequently. My parents had the same fridge all their married life, it never broke down or even 'hiccuped'.
The real problem has been the funneling of wealth towards the top 1%. Take a read of the following link and you will get the drift. Also entertaining to read of the current extravagances of the 1%. Have to wonder if they didn't have previous lives at the Court of Versailles!
Exerpt,
"Back in the 18th century, Alexis de Tocqueville called America the “best poor man’s country." He believed that "equality of conditions" was the basic fact of life for Americans. How far we've come! Since then, the main benefits of economic growth have gone to the wealthy, including the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age whom Theodore Roosevelt condemned as “malefactors of great wealth” living at the expense of working people. By the 1920s, a fifth of American income and wealth went to the richest 1 percenters whose Newport mansions were that period’s Greenwich homes. President Franklin Roosevelt blamed these “economic royalists” for the crash of '29. Their recklessness had undermined the stability of banks and other financial institutions, and the gross misdistribution of income reduced effective demand for products and employment by limiting the purchasing power for the great bulk of the population.
Roosevelt’s New Deal sought to address these concerns with measures to restrain financial speculation and to redistribute wealth down the economic ladder. The Glass-Steagall Act and the Securities Act restricted the activities of banks and securities traders. The National Labor Relations Act (the “Wagner Act”) helped prevent business depression by strengthening unions to raise wages and increase purchasing power. Other measures sought to spread the wealth in order to promote purchasing power, including the Social Security Act, with retirement pensions, aid to families with dependent children, and unemployment insurance; the Fair Labor Standards Act, setting a national minimum wage and maximum hours; and tax reforms that lowered taxes on workers while raising them on estates, corporations and the wealthy. And the kicker: Through pronouncement and Employment Act (1946), the New Deal committed the U.S. to maintain full employment.
The New Deal reversed the flow of income and wealth to the rich. For 25 years after World War II, strong labor unions and government policy committed to raising the income of the great majority ensured that all Americans benefited from our country’s rising productivity and increasing income.
...The New Deal ushered in a period of unusually rapid and steady economic growth with the greatest gains going to the poor and the middle-class. Strong unions ensured that wages rose with productivity, government tax and spending policies helped to share the benefits of growth with the poor, the retired and the disabled. From 1947-'73, the bottom 90 percent received over two-thirds of economic growth.
Then, the political coalition behind the New Deal fragmented in the 1960s. Opponents seized the moment and reversed its policies. They began to funnel income toward the rich. With a policy agenda loosely characterized as “neoliberalism,” conservatives (including much of the economics profession) have swept away the New Deal’s focus on employment and economic equity to concentrate economic policy on fighting inflation by strengthening capital against labor. That has worked out very badly for most of America."
...and elsewhere, I might add. Remember Bob Hawke saying how marvellous everything was as our manufacturing industries were being obliterated, and that Australia would now become a "service economy"...what a maggot. A country needs to be productive in order to grow and sustain service based jobs. Restaurants going under all over the place now, so what type of re-deployment options will those workers have and if capable, will they be willing to take on a HECS burden to re-train at mature ages?
