Earnings of the Poor Are Stuck on Nuthin’

Here’s a different way of looking at the American economy, courtesy of David Leonhardt:

This is similar to my chart from Wednesday except that Leonhardt shows incomes of the poor going up slightly while I show them going down slightly. Either way, the natural question is: where did all the money go? The answer, of course, is that it mostly went to the men and women who nearly destroyed the world ten years ago until Barack Obama bailed them out. Now they’re busily working with Donald Trump to lower their own taxes and repeal the modest regulations that were put on their banks.

As near as I can tell, they are hellbent on causing another financial meltdown sometime in the next decade. And why not? The last one worked out pretty well for them.

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OUR DEADLINE MATH PROBLEM

It’s risky, but also unavoidable: A full one-third of the dollars that we need to pay for the journalism you rely on has to get raised in December. A good December means our newsroom is fully staffed, well-resourced, and on the beat. A bad one portends budget trouble and hard choices.

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We simply can’t afford to come up short. There is no cushion in our razor-thin budget—no backup, no alternative sources of revenue to balance our books. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the fierce journalism we do. That’s why we need you to show up for us right now.

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