From an economic standpoint, governments look at citizens as workers, consumers or both. Most people, of course, are both: We work and earn, and we spend.
Our dual economic roles inform the core of the affordability discussion at the center of current politics. For as long as everyone but the oldest of us can remember, both major parties have focused on and messaged to the individual as homo consumerus. Bill Clinton promised that tariff-eliminating “free trade” pacts like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization would improve our living standards by making imported goods cheaper. On that point, if the prices of imported stuff at Walmart is a good indicator, he seems to have been mostly right.
But Clinton had no good answer to protectionists who worried about offshoring the good manufacturing jobs that propped up the economy of the industrial Midwest. Cheaper prices are well and good, but the unemployed can’t buy anything.
Donald Trump promised to and claims to have reduced not only inflation but prices themselves. He has made progress on the former; the latter is hopeless.
Unlike Clinton, Trump pays occasional lip service to the importance of bringing back dignity and decent pay to working-class jobs, though his focus is sporadic and symbolic. This decades-old systemic problem — stagnant and declining wages — persists.
As the ad says, how much you earn doesn’t matter, it’s what you keep. Nor should you care much about how much you spend.
The political elites’ intense focus on the American consumer at the expense of the American worker serves two purposes. It distracts us from the decades-old problem of rising income inequality (currently being described as a K-shaped economy), which even a socialist-minded economist would find difficult to fix given capitalism’s natural tendency toward monopoly and the market’s expectation of constant GDP expansion. Keeping wages low — by suppressing unions, importing foreign workers, and maintaining at-will employment laws — maximizes the profits of the rich companies and individuals who own our politicians.
We, the consumers, are well taken care of. Producers source cheap goods around the world, forcing countless suppliers to compete for our purchases. But we workers are insecure, overworked and underpaid — and so are miserable.
What are we workers to do?
Like any other prescription that advises people to start thinking differently en masse, the solution to this situation is so unrealistic that it basically serves as an admission that everything is hopeless. If everyone stopped buying SUVs, we might make a dent in the climate crisis. If everyone stopped voting for one of the two major parties, alternative new movements could emerge. If we stopped allowing ourselves to be distracted by appeals to our consumer selves — we’d lower prices, or at least inflation, and how about a personal tariff rebate check personally signed by the president? — and focused instead on our beleaguered worker selves, we’d have a chance at achieving the living standards a demographer would expect from a nation as rich and powerful as the United States.
If we focused on income alongside or in lieu of expenses, we would demand a higher minimum wage. Not because we personally earn $7.25 an hour, but because higher minimum wages push up median wages.
We would demand something workers in other industrialized nations have, a real right to form and join a union. No more requirement that a union be certified by the National Labor Relations Board in order to be considered “official.” Employers who fire a worker for unionizing should be jailed. No category of worker, including public servants, should be banned from going on strike. Make America Unionized Again, watch wages grow.
Considering that self-employed freelancers account for a third of American workers, creating a system to provide them with health insurance, vacation pay, gig security and minimum fees is long overdue.
Worker solidarity should replicate the culture in Europe, where the elite class isn’t able to easily divide and conquer the workforce. If teachers go on strike, so should cops and coders and cartoonists and everyone else. Again, watch wages go up.
Of course, none of these income-expanding measures is possible as long as we keep equating the affordability crisis with high prices. At most, costs are only half of the equation. We need to start thinking and talking about raising wages too.
Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.” He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.
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Western economic woes stem from the fact that we consume more than we produce in the big picture. Military , social spending ect. Maybe the worker in certain situations produces way more than he consume’s in an individual situation but as a whole raising wages will not change the direction of the west.
The best bet the future holds for individual’s in the west is find a way to make a living with the least amount of dependence on anyone else. Between unproductive people living off of the productive work of others or government reappropriating the productive work for there quest of ultimate power around the world, there won’t be much left .
My prediction is a back to the land movement will continue to grow. More and more people wake up to the fact no matter how hard and productive you work others always have a great way to take it.
Fascinating; thank you!
The central method they used to destroy even so little as talking about the working class was Identity Politics. This is what neither liberals nor conservatives don’t understand. They got the liberals all loving the minorities; they got the conservatives all hating the minorities. Checkmate.
It would be nice if we could get back to talking about people, not according to their ethnicity, but according to how much money they have or do not have. Why? Because then we could maybe really get at the rich and take all their damn money away from them and give it to ourselves.
Of course, you boneheads on here are all rich, and so you don’t want any more money. You just want to impotently and constantly complain about niggers.
Good for you. You’re not a tool or anything. You aren’t doing what you have been told to do. Oh, no, not you. You’re a free-thinker. It’s just that your free thoughts happen to align perfectly with what the very rich want you to think. Congratulations.
Too late, Ted Rall. Jobs are disappearing around the world ever since ChatGPT arrived. Even China has had negative consumer spending for 6 months in a row now. It is all crashing. AI is a mess at the moment but it is not going away.
Higher wages just pushes the capitalists toward more robotics etc. The really prescient political figure whom we will all soon appreciate more, is Taiwanese-American Andrew Yang. As he said, it is time to just ‘give people the money’.
Tho it’s hard to see how the elites avoid the temptation to just kill most of humanity. We are mostly not needed. There are alleged ‘insider leaks’ saying the only peoples they plan to keep on a large scale are some whites and East Asians, the latter being the best hard workers, the former being the more inventive fixers and creators of things elites might want or need.
As is so often the case, RT has a perceptive op ed on its site, this one relevant to the topic as it is about the feudalization of America, and how young working people are being systematically excluded from the opportunities that we older folk took for granted before Reagan opened the door to the cabal that began strip-mining the economy. See “America’s Weimar moment: What DoorDash culture says about economic decline” at https://www.rt.com/news/629629-doordash-culture-economic-decline/
An interesting post. Kudos for pointing out the obvious fact that importing foreign works lowers wages. It has long been pointed out that periods of high immigration are periods where workers lost ground, and vice versa. Supply and demand.
But as regards raising the minimum wage: yes and no. The problem is that it’s hard/impossible to fight supply and demand, you can only work with it. When there are 1000 desperate workers competing for every new job opening, their wages will be low and it will be impossible for unions or statutes etc. to reverse this. The only real advantage to an actually enforced minimum wage is that it would remove much of the incentive for employers to import foreign workers: if they HAVE to pay $20/hour, and this rule is enforced in workplaces everywhere, there is no point in importing illegals etc. to work for $12. But this only sets a floor that must be consistent with actual production: if you go to Bangladesh and set a minimum wage of $20/hour it won’t bring prosperity, because they just don’t have the economic output relative to their population.
Unfortunately, I just heard that the Trump administration actually cut the wages for legal foreign agricultural workers by $4/hour, which of course will ripple through the citizen workforce as well…
And I have always been a bit insulted at the term ‘consumer’. I’d prefer citizen, or maybe person. End-user? We need a better word.
“Customer” is more appropriate. The word implies some kind of agency whereas “consumer” is merely a passive object to be used.
You haven’t worked hard for low pay until you try to make a living raising crops and livestock.
It’s sad to have to keep repeating that work is an obsolete construct and will disappear over the next 15-30 years when AI/robots take over doing all the “work” that humans now do.
No longer will anyone have to trade their labor for money to survive. Everything will be free!
Get ready for this future Rall. Perhaps you will choose to then draw comics and run a PODcast complaining about all the free stuff that the AI/robots are providing and how this corrupts the experience of being a human?
Complainers gotta complain…
If you’re an American manufacturer in the private sector you have it even worse, the government made trade deals to benefit the farmers, then the government takes any profits in taxes to directly bailout the farmers.
While property taxes on manufacturing businesses subsidies a majority of the communities budgets, agricultural land is exempt.
No matter the surplus of product the government will also force the population to consume the farmers production ( ethanol) a market with no ceiling.
Agriculture is a wise field to invest in and worst case the land can always be sold.
End usury. Use the military to remove 30-40 million illegal aliens. Then cut the Pentagon budget by a good 50%. Stop giving any type of welfare to young, able bodied men. Instead pay them a fair wage to be seasonal farm hands, with the promise of some sort of civil GI bill equivalent available after X amount of months to train up into a more skilled occupation. A lot of money could also be saved on property taxes by revamping the public school system. Instead of forcing 13 mandatory years of government indoctrination, release each individual student with a certificate of completion as soon as he meets minimum education goals. How many millions of student-years could be shaved off the books that way?
Maybe some of my suggestions are pie in the sky, I don’t know. But really, America could probably be fixed, even at this late hour, with some innovation and the WILL to do so.
Bill Clinton promised that tariff-eliminating “free trade” pacts like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization would improve our living standards by making imported goods cheaper.
White America has powdered muffin-headed POS Newt Gringrich to primarily thank for NAFTA.
Later on, White American business leaders, brought in any colored foreigner that could ease the ‘nigger bellyache’ of those Whites so domestic negroes would not have to be hired………….
pajeet indians were selected as premo, and Whites proliferated the MYTH that the cow worshipers were genuinely of ‘high intellect and uber-educated’…………
And look at how that mayonnaise brainchild turned out for White Americans.
There are simpleton whites on TUR alone who still defend the unwashed pajeet turds.