So I was walking the woods last week with my friend, a Midwest-based power company executive. His company has laid off 10% of its work force over the past two years and isn’t in the rehiring mode. His firm is into “clean coal”, not wind or solar. While we were hiking basically in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York, he was constantly checking his blackberry for company missives and Yankee news updates, even though we passed through numerous coverage dead zones. We were talking about the economy and my friend was telling me about how the nation’s standard of living was continuing to get better and that job opportunities and wages were increasing.
Now my friend is a smart guy, a tip-top business school grad, who can out duel anyone in any game from poker to Scrabble and Monopoly. He still does his own rather complicated taxes and has built up a sizeable investment nest egg without the help of any financial advisor.
But I had to challenge him on the standard of living issue. Sure I say, the top sliver of workers at your level and above have made out well over the past decade. But the average guy has barely held his own. And if he has a mortgage, car loans, and a credit card balance, he’s now way behind. You kept your job, but your company now has fewer workers, and no one has gotten a pay raise in the past two years. So how is that emblematic of any recent progress? And the government economic statistics clearly show wages and benefits on a flat line to down for most workers over the past decade. And we haven’t even touched on the 10% unemployment numbers or the statistics that suggest that far more Americans are out of work.
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