There are many reasons I like working outside of Harold Meyerson's office. For one, he's funny, and will occasionally amble into my cubicle to share the wealth. He's got great stories, encyclopedic knowledge, and occasionally posts terrific death threats generated by his Post column on his door. But really, I'm just here because I'm hoping that proximity to paragraphs like this one will help me start turning out some rough facsimiles:
We live in a time when there's no such thing as purely good economic news. When the GDP surges - as it did by 4.8 percent in the first quarter of this year - something always lags behind, and that something is almost always the income of ordinary Americans. In that same first quarter, for instance, worker compensation rose by just 2.4 percent - half the rate (4.8 percent) by which inflation grew.
That gem kicks off Harold's contribution to The Democratic Strategist, Ruy Teixera, William Galston, and Stan Greenberg's new online magazine. To commemorate kickoff, they've solicited think pieces from a variety of luminaries which range from the self-serving to the banal to the brilliant. But Harold's is something special. For instance, the minimum wage argument I had earlier was based off the belief that there's plenty of cash, but it's all pooling at the tippy-top of the highest income decile. I should've just quoted Harold:
Once upon a time, in the period of great post-World War Two prosperity, median income rose at precisely the same rate as productivity (both increased by 104 percent between 1947 and 1973). Since then, however, productivity gains have outstripped the average American's income by a rate of three-to-one, and in recent years, by eight-to-one. As Northwestern University economists Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon have demonstrated, over the past couple of decades, all the income from productivity gains has gone to the wealthiest ten percent of Americans.
Yeah, what he said. Also:
the Democrats need to disenthrall themselves from many of the values and mindsets of the financial community. They need more Eliott Spitzers and Phil Angelideses to ride herd on corporate abuses and to invest public funds with an eye to social responsibility. More sweepingly, they need to make corporate and financial institutions answerable not just to shareholders and top management, but to their employees and communities as well. Doing that will take a reform and redefinition of corporate power at least as sweeping as that of the New Deal. Given the increasingly dominant role of finance in filling the party's coffers (the Rockefeller Republicans are all Democrats now), and in defining the party's "responsible" economics, this will be anything but easy. But the grim reality is that in the age of globalization, American capitalism as currently practiced is eroding mass prosperity in the nation as a whole. In that contest, Democrats' allegiance must be to their nation.
And -- eh, never mind. Just read the whole thing.
