jayeff

I seriously doubt routine government stats qualify as propaganda. Anyway who needs propaganda when you can use your own eyes: I'm old enough to remember when a working mother was unusual. Now for most families a second income is a necessity.

Have you travelled through the "Heartland" recently, thousands of square miles of corporate farms (many not even American-owned) and communities which have been in decline for a century. The mid-west is home to some of the poorest parts of the US and there isn't the slightest prospect of improvement. Try visiting towns such as the one in which I live, where more than 20% are permanently on welfare and people won't even paint their homes because that would mean an increase in taxes.

The whole concept of onwards and upwards on the tails of business profits is transparent bullsh*t. If you take a man who was earning $20 an hour in a shoe factory or whatever, and give him a job selling shoes for $10 an hour, it doesn't take an economist to figure out he is going to be spending a whole lot less money in future. Repeat that across thousands of factories in hundreds of industries and before long, with the buying power of your customers reduced, prices are forced down and margins end up no better than before the first factory closed.

That was a reality no-one had a problem with back in the 70's. Politicians of both parties were comfortable admitting where we were headed, because then they could tell people not to worry, everyone would soon be doing clean, high-tech jobs and earning more than ever before. Unfortunately for most, that brave new world never happened and now we are exporting hi-tech jobs too. The best way to hide a lack of answers, is to pretend a problem doesn't exist, so these days we pretend that such scenarios are all a figment of fevered left-wing imaginations.