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> This comment is out of touch with the current economic reality in the US. Unemployment is the lowest it has been in decades and real wages are rising. To the

• adventured 8y ago
  How is that politically directed piece by the NY Times to the contrary? The U6 is back to where it was in 1999. Wages are growing at the fastest pace in a decade, with a labor market that keeps getting tighter, driving wage gains faster. The poverty rate and homelessness rate are both near record lows. The poverty rate has contracted rapidly in the last several years. That's due to the dramatic improvement in the job market over the past decade and a vast expansion over time in the US welfare state / social safety net, which is paid for by taxes from an aggressively expanding economy. Since January 2010, the US has added a Germany + France in terms of economic expansion ($6 trillion in GDP), while only adding 16m in population. US manufacturing, which is a critical supplier of decent blue collar jobs, has been persistently adding jobs for nearly a decade (1.3m manufacturing jobs added over that time). It's the first sustained period of manufacturing job growth since the late 1990s. It was widely proclaimed to be impossible that that could occur. If you want to bolster the conditions for the bottom 1/2, you do it with jobs, wage pressure through a tight labor market, and a strong social safety net paid for via taxes from a booming economy.