This week, the United States is facing what Politico calls a Category 5 economic storm as analysts debate whether the U.S. economy is in a recession and how to respond. Today, the Federal Reserve is announcing another interest rate hike, which it says will help fight against inflation and bring down prices, that are up by some 9% since last year as inflation reaches a 40-year high.
This week also marks 13 years since the U.S. last raised its federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour in 2009, which is the longest time without a raise since the federal minimum wage was first implemented during the Great Depression.
Over the last 30 to 40 years, we have experienced here in the United States a radical redistribution of wealth and income. All manner of economists, from all perspectives, have done the research. It’s all very well known. That has caused epoch-changing problems here in the United States that our political headlines are full of literally every day.
But the last four years have been a cap on that process, that really requires taking a deep breath. Number one, our society was unprepared for and did not well manage a pandemic, that it could have been and should have been much better prepared for, as many other countries were who don’t have our own wealth or our medical system. About the same time, we had an economic crash. Over half the labor force in this country lost their job, for a few weeks or the entire time of 2020 and 2021. We’ve had viral catastrophes before. We’ve had economic crashes. We never had them at the same time. That was a body blow to a working class that, as I said, has been suffering for 30 to 40 years.
As if that weren’t enough, we then had — when we thought we might be out of the worst of the crash and the pandemic, now, in the last year, as you just pointed out, we have
— source democracynow.org | Jul 27, 2022