'As we should have learned from the Great Prosperity - the 30 years after World War II when America grew because most Americans shared in the nation's prosperity - we cannot have a growing and vibrant economy without a growing and vibrant middle class.' Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog Full Story »
Posted by Dwight Rousu
This is an excellent commentary that makes more sense than Republicans and Democrats. Our current members of Congress and Senate are no table to work together and it is the voters are the ones who cannot get jobs or get ahead.
This leading presentation of economic history is interesting but lacks clear references to back up the theories presented. Without it, we just have an opinion that would lead to ideologic debate.
An excellent historical piece from Reich’s blog–an opinion article, actually–but the opinion of one of the most influential business thinkers of our time, who is also considered one of the ten best cabinet members of the century. If you want to know from whence we came economically, this is a great start.
Reich puts the start date of America’s plunge into its current chaos at 1977. Reaching back into my memory, that was the decade of Nixon’s resignation, the first oil crisis that forever ended cheap gas, and the Iranian revolution which took the American Embassy hostage. In 1979, conservatives’ darling, Ronald Reagan, was elected president. An appropriate start date.
Starting more than three decades ago, trade and technology began driving a wedge between the earnings of people at the top and everyone else….Government could have ... More »
This advocacy piece has minimal journalistic merit. It mainly serves to show how clueless the author is about basic economics. He uses static analysis, which no economist has used for 20+ years. His ideology forces him to contradict the most basic fact about income, that people do not keep the same income all their lives! In fact most people in the bottom fifth are in higher brackets ten years later. And the income of people in the top 1% actually is down after ten years. And he does not seem to know that Obama did a super-Keynes: $830 billion in "stimulus" funds that actually made the economy worse. A good lesson in anti-Economics 101.
Th implication of the piece, government intervention to solve the problems of the middle class, ignores the vast differences from the post-WWII period and the post-Great Recession period. Mr. Reich should know better than to imply that the government can fix the economic challenges of the middle class.
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