Excellent Piece From Guardian: Bush Jr.
Responsible for U.S. Wage Collapse of U.S. Workers:
Summary below:
Love this part.
Then came the downturn. The second Bush era, under George W, was painful for almost all but twentysomething college graduates, who even survived the 2008 crash with barely a scratch, and was worst for those without a high school diploma. Shapiro says the least educated saw their incomes “devastated” after 2001.
“Across the three younger age-cohorts, the median income of households headed by people without high school diplomas fell an average of 1.9% per year as they aged through the 2002-2007 expansion; and over the entire period from 2002 to 2013, their median incomes fell by an average of 1.8% year as they aged,” the report says.
Between 2010 and 2013, households where the main earner had been aged 25 to 29 back in 1982 suffered even more if they quit education before going to high school. They lost 7.1% in income in each year as vast numbers either took a cut in pay, in hours or were made unemploye
The rise and fall of the average workers’ wages documented in the report chimes with the business cycle and the trend in Europe, which followed a similar trajectory.
The average German worker made income gains through the same period before a deregulation of the labour market under the Social democrat Gerhard Schroeder brought about an effective freeze in wages from 2003.
In the UK, the chancellor at the time, Gordon Brown, reacted to the downturn by switching on the government spending taps. He introduced tax credits as an income top-up to offset the trend for flat or falling real wages. It was a policy that insulated British workers from a trend that clobbered Americans and to a lesser extent German workers.
Retelling the economic story of the 1980s, Shapiro says the US benefited from a mix of Reagan’s expansionary policies in defence and infrastructure and the collapse of commodity prices after the inflationary oil shocks of the 1970s.
George Bush senior was forced to cope with the borrowing hangover from the Reagan years before Clinton assumed the presidency.
It’s no surprise Shapiro is a cheerleader for the Clinton years, which he argues developed employment and productivity boosting policies that favoured women, minorities and low-income employees like no other time in recent history.
What happened after 2001 and Bush junior’s failure to protect workers from globalisation is something that the next president must address, he says. What he calls “the dark side of globalisation”, which was driven by China’s over-investment in export industries, sending oil prices soaring while still flooding world markets with cheap goods, is still with us.
Beijing’s shift away from export subsidies has sent oil prices dropping again, offering the west an opportunity, but unless government offer workers some insulation, the radical politics of Trump ..
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/the-collapse-in-us-workers-wages-can-be-directly-attributed-to-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush-report/