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  • Putrid?????

    Our "wage growth" is "decaying, rotting, emitting a fetid smell", as per top search on google.

    I know I'm not supposed to shoot the messenger (not Crash, I'm referring to "theweek") but I need to get past the bullshit. I don't get what audience "theweek" is targeting with headlines like that. Who are they thinking will not bother to read that article if they simply used a word more appropriate to describe the situation, and not otherwise?

    Perhaps they are trying to simply improve people's vocabulary. It is part of some master plan for education from Melania. This weekend I'm just going to have to take care of the fragrant growth in my backyard. It is so dang fragrant I can't stand it!
  • edited May 2018
    Grinning here. But this is no shit:
    "...This is the dirty secret of American macroeconomic policymaking since the late 1970s. Business lobbying, bipartisan drives for less public investment, Federal Reserve policy: All of it is built on the implicit assumption that properly managing the economy requires breaking workers' bargaining power and continuously swatting down their demands for better compensation.People rarely speak in these terms, of course. It's too brutal, and policymakers aren't sociopaths. What's going on usually gets hidden under mounds of economic jargon. But straightforward language does occasionally slip out: Volcker himself literally said that "the standard of living of the average American has to decline" to beat inflation, and his colleagues celebrated mass wage reductions. That spirit continued though the 1990s, when Fed Chair Alan Greenspan said "traumatized workers" were what allowed strong growth to combine with low inflation. Even the ostensibly progressive Janet Yellen, long before she became Fed chair, described widespread job insecurity as a good thing, arguing that it would keep prices down.

    This wasn't the result of a failed economic strategy. It was the result of a successful one. Now we have low unemployment and low inflation and booming business profits. And it's all made possible by widespread stagnation in living standards for everyone in the middle class on down. Workers can no longer put serious pressure on their employers: They've been scattered, demoralized, stripped of their unions, and transformed into disposable commodities...."
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