Our New Low Wage Economy Revealed in New Numbers

All three of these stories came up in my research today by chance, and clarified everything for me.

After the Great Recession, business adjusted to the change and the possibility that it all could happen again. It was the “disaster” they need to lower wages and benefits. It worked.

Think Progress: Low-wage service employees at two federal buildings in Washington, DC are walking off the job on Tuesday to call attention to unlivable pay rates and widespread wage theft by federal contractors. The walkouts follow a May report from Demos that low labor standards among contractors make the federal government a larger low-wage employer than Walmart and McDonald’s combined. “We find that nearly two million private sector employees working on behalf of America earn wages too low to support a family,” the report said.

This is how the “wealthiest country in the world” treats its people. They've even found a way to freeload:

Large,profitable U.S. corporations actually paid just a 12.6 percent effective tax rate in 2010. That’s barely a third of the 35 percent corporate rate on the books, and it’s actually lower than the median effective tax rate for middle-class Americans. The number comes from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study intended to clarify the terms of debate as lawmakers weigh changes to the business tax code … the GAO’s work is based on actual corporate tax returns for 2010. The researchers found that large companies – those “with assets of $10 million or more” – that are profitable paid about 12.6 percent of their global income in U.S. taxes. The figure rises to 16.9 percent of global income if all foreign, state, and local taxes are factored in. Companies that took a loss for the year actually paid a higher rate than the profitable ones.

And yet they’re suffering from a “penalty tax” for being successful, right?

And what kind of jobs are we creating? We were warned…

The economy added 195,00 jobs in June and the unemployment rate remained the same, at 7.6 percent … leisure and hospitality added 75,000 jobs and retail added 37,000.