America’s Big Problem: Our Wages Are Too Damn Low

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

ImagesNobody gets paid enough in this country. Here's a statistic that will blow your head right out of your ass: if we were paid by how much we've increased our productivity over the last 30 years — in other words, if our wages kept pace with our productivity — the median household in America would, instead of earning just under $50,000 a year, make $92,000 a year.

That's $42,000 stolen from you every year.

You've become more valuable to your company by $42,000 a year, but they still pay you for the value you gave them way back in 1980.

$42,000 a year robbed from all of us.

By companies who keep what should be our wages as their profits.

And those profits are going nowhere. The money just sits there. Huge heaps of it. More than in all history. In 2009, US companies had $5.1 trillion in today's dollars in cash, sitting idle.

Money that could be put to work in the economy as wages to make people buy and spend so our economy could flourish.

Imagine how great an economy we'd have today if our median household income was $92,000 instead of $50,000.

There's got to be a law about this: when your productivity goes up, your pay should go up. Simple. The Pay-For-Productivity Bill.

Put it in Congress now.

The fact is this: we are a Walmart economy instead of a Ford economy.

Henry Ford paid his workers double the going rate because he wanted his workers to be able to buy the cars they made.

A virtuous circle.

But Walmart pays their workers so little, these workers have to go on foodstamps to get by. There should be a class action suit by all US tax payers: we want the $6.2 billion back that we give to Walmart workers every year out of our taxes in public assistance, because Walmart doesn't pay them enough to goddamn exist.

A very vicious circle — where we pay to help Walmart rip off its workers.

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