Joel Mathis

The New York Times observes that American productivity is stagnant, and considers three theories why. During the 2008 recession, labor productivity soared. Was this because employers laid off their least productive workers first? Because everybody worked harder, fearful for their jobs? Or was it a measurement problem as government statistics-takers struggled to capture fast-moving changes in the economy? We don’t know for sure. None of the Times' three theories use this armchair psychoanalysis to consider one obvious reason American workers aren't more productive these days: It isn't friggin' worth it. Since the end of the Great Recession, Americans have become more and more aware — aided by growing discussion of income inequality and movements like Occupy Wall Street — of two very salient points: • For decades, American productivity has soared. • During those same decades, worker wages have stagnated. Here's The Atlantic, reporting in February 2015 :

Ben and I talk about Charles Murray's new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010" in this week's Scripps column. We jointly note : "He argues that America is increasingly, dangerously divided between an out-of-touch upper class and a lower class that has abandoned the virtues of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religiosity." My take: Here's the good news: Somebody influential on the right -- and Murray is beloved by many conservatives -- is acknowledging the growing class divide in America. That is a breakthrough. The bad news: Murray is big into victim blaming. If life among America's working class has declined during the last 50 years, Murray says it's because its members have abandoned the habits of work and marriage that made the country great. He offers a lot of statistics to prove his point. But there's a crucial piece missing in Murray's story. It is most apparent when he describes the "real&qu

A commenter asks : "Can liberals and conservatives politely agree that the only time an economy can grow is when 'income inequality' is widening?" Sure. Absolutely. In a hypothetical case where everybody's income was growing 10 percent a year, that 10 percent would add up to a lot more dollars for the rich guy than the poor guy. But a chart depicting their incomes would show more or less the same rate of growth rising in concert with each other, even as the gaps between the lines grew wider. That might eventually produce a problem—but then again, it might not. That's not really the situation in the United States, though. Here's a chart from the CBO's October report about income inequality. The 21st through 80th percentiles—essentially, the middle class—barely see their income edge up between 1979 and 2007. The Top 1 Percent? With a brief break for the post-9/11 recession, their income curves sharply, sharply up, diverging from the other lines p

Since I harp on income inequality a bit around here, it's important to take note of this New York Times story today : The share of income received by the top 1 percent — that potent symbol of inequality — dropped to 17 percent in 2009 from 23 percent in 2007, according to federal tax data. Within the group, average income fell to $957,000 in 2009 from $1.4 million in 2007. If the Top 1 Percent saw its share of income reduced, that means other groups saw their share of income rise. Good news, right? Well, not really. The same recession that kicked the Top 1 Percent in the teeth did the same thing to everybody else. The median household income has actually dropped in recent years, thanks also in large part to the recession . The problem with growing income inequality isn't merely that the rich are getting richer. That happens. The problem has been that the rich have gotten richer while everybody else has seen stagnating incomes to go along with increased productivity, and ofte

In the newest Weekly Standard , Matthew Continetti makes the case that conservatives don't really have to care about income inequality—whether it's growing or not— because it's not government's job to address such issues.  Inequalities of condition are a fact of life. Some people will always be poorer than others. So too, human altruism will always seek to alleviate the suffering of the destitute. There is a place for reasonable and prudent actions to improve well-being. But that does not mean the entire structure of our polity should be designed to achieve an egalitarian ideal. Such a goal is fantastic, utopian even, and one would think that the trillions of dollars the United States has spent in vain over the last 50 years to promote “equality as a fact and equality as a result” would give the egalitarians pause. That sounds principled, and maybe even a little bit appealing if you're of the right temperament. But it fundamentally ignores one simple fact: By virtu

So says I in this week's Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk : The flat tax is Republican-led class warfare. It makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, for no better purpose than making the rich richer and the poor poorer. We have progressive taxation -- in which people with higher incomes pay a higher tax rate than those at the lower end of the scale -- for a reason: People on the low end are less able to pay. Flat taxes invert that logic, giving the rich a huge tax break and often burdening the poor. The Tax Policy Center says a low-income family making $31,000 a year would lose its $5,147 tax return under Perry's plan, for example. (Herman Cain's plan is worse. Nearly everybody making under $50,000 would see a huge tax increase.) Perry's plan was unveiled the same day as a new Congressional Budget Office report showing economic inequality is widening in this country. From 1979 to 2007, people in the richest 1 percent grew their after-tax income by 27

Dennis Prager goes there in his column for NRO today : The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, was what groups they chose for extermination. For Hitler, first Jews and ultimately Slavs and other “non-Aryans” were declared the enemy and unworthy of life. For the Communists, the rich — the bourgeoisie, land owners, and capitalists — were labeled the enemy and regarded as unworthy of life. Hitler mass-murdered on the basis of race. The Communists on the basis of class. Yes, this is a column about the Occupy Wall Street movement. And it's clear that Prager would rather resort to tired old anti-Communist tropes rather than seriously examine the complaints of the protesters. Here's Prager, not getting it: Being on the left means that you divide the world between rich and poor much more than you divide it between good and evil. For the leftist, the existence of rich and poor — inequality — is what constitutes evil. M

Occupy Philly: Oct 9, 2011 from Joel Mathis on Vimeo . The Occupy Philly movement, as far as I can tell from my visit today, is dominated by neither fringe conspiracists nor the middle-class mainstream. Mostly, it seems to be made up of plucky twentysomethings who seem to have expected that the world they grew up in—the go-go 1990s and the "go shopping in the face of disaster" aughties—was the world they would inherit, and are cranky they didn't. Yes, there were Marxists and Socialists and anarchists scattered among the crowd. But the tired "dirty, smelly hippie" stereotype doesn't fit what I found. Much of the crowd was, to all appearances, Standard Urban Hipster—not exactly suburbanites, exactly, but not nearly so outré as to alienate the masses either. What it did seem to be, in fact, is a movement of privilege. The protesters were overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly literate—and Philadelphia, for all its greatness, isn't really either . Mo

Nothing makes middle-class conservatives angrier than suggesting millionaires should be paying more in taxes . One admires such folks for sticking so rigorously to a principle that won't benefit them in the least, but still one wonders—why? Anyway, I've heard from you in blog comments and at Facebook. I also received a couple of letters on the topic overnight. The first, from John Senuta in Wickliffe, Ohio: Hey Joel here is another way to look at it .The poor that don't want to work and live off you they look at you as RICH and they want alot more of your money to spend.They want your TAX rate to go to 75% so they could live better,you can afford it RIGHT????  And by the way a portion of your phone bill pays for a cell phone for them to use FREE.Do you have a cell phone????How much are yoiu paying???Let dig a little deeper into your pocket and help them out.... There's a presumption here that "the poor" are a bunch of lazy panhandlers trying to get t