While discussing proposals for a 9/11-style commission to investigate the root causes of the financial crisis on This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, conservative pundit George Will rolled out one of his favorite arguments — the whole mess is your fault:
Assessing blame is not sterile, because from it you learn lessons about what not to do in the future. And surely, the reason we won’t have a commission is that the commission would have to say “There are about 300 million villains here, and they’re the great American people, who went on a 25-year shopping spree they could not afford.” 1980s we saved nine cents of every dollar of disposable income, 1990s a nickel; savings rate goes negative in 2005. You can’t go on that way.
(I would normally embed the video here, but ABC doesn’t appear to provide any way for people to do that. Tsk! Get with the times, people.)
Now, there’s no arguing that Americans have been saving less and less over the years. But Will makes it sound like that’s due to people piggishly gorging themselves without heed for the future.
As we’ve been saying for years, though, there’s a better explanation for why Americans’ saving rate has gone down: because workers’ wages have been stagnant for decades. Consider this slide from the Economic Policy Institute presentation that accompanied our most recent American Dream Survey:
(Click the image above for a full-size version of the slide.)
From the end of World War II to the late 1970s, as our economy became more and more productive, workers’ wages reflected those increases in productivity. A range of institutions (including unions) ensured that prosperity was shared broadly across the economy.
Then, as the conservative revolution revved up, something changed — wages were decoupled from productivity. We continued to become a more productive nation, but now the benefits of that extra production were flowing to the richest of the rich rather than being shared. While executive compensation soared, workers’ wages were stagnant. That meant over the years it took more and more of a worker’s paycheck just to tread water economically.
To get our economy back on track — to get it to the place that Will remembers, where Americans had a little money left to save at the end of the month — we need to give working Americans a chance again to share in the prosperity they help create, so they can go beyond just struggling to keep up and reach a place where they have a real chance to achieve the American Dream.
That’s one reason why the Employee Free Choice Act is so important. By empowering workers to join together in a union if they want to, it will give them the power to claim their fair share of the fruits of their labor. And that will move us a long step closer to an economy where prosperity is once again broadly shared — an economy that’s good for everybody, not just the few at the top.