Just Work Harder

That's Jeb! Bush's solution to income inequality:

“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it is 4% growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive. Workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. Means that people need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.”

And he's supposed to be the smarter brother. He's certainly no better informed. A little dose of reality:

With the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign underway and millions of Americans still hurting financially, both parties are looking for ways to address wage stagnation. That’s the good news. The bad news is that both parties are offering tax cuts as a solution. What has hurt workers’ paychecks is not what the government takes out, but what their employers no longer put in — a dynamic that tax cuts cannot eliminate.

Wage stagnation is a decades-long phenomenon. Between 1979 and 2014, while the gross domestic product grew 150 percent and productivity grew 75 percent, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage of the median worker rose just 5.6 percent — less than 0.2 percent a year. And since 2002, the bottom 80 percent of wage earners, including both male and female college graduates, have actually seen their wages stagnate or fall.

The Times article is pretty interesting, even for those of us who get lost outside the bare basics of economics. It seems that the problem -- wage stagnation and economic inequality -- is our focus on tax policy, when we know that cutting taxes -- and, necessarily, cutting government spending, or else the Republicans will pout -- has the opposite effect of what's been touted. (I was going to write "intended," but I'm not at all convinced that would be accurate.)

Via Digby.

Also, courtesy of Mahablog, some graphics from Mother Jones. Here's one that demonstrates vividly the information above:

Check it out at the link -- there's more, and it ain't pretty.