The System Is Officially Broken

By Nick Hodge | Wednesday, April 27, 2016

One of the reasons I founded Outsider Club — several years ago now! — was because of the fallout from the financial crisis and the Establishment's response to it.

Stocks were breaking out to new all-time highs but there wasn't a shred of recovery in sight. Good jobs were replaced with worse jobs, lower paying jobs. A record number simply dropped out of the labor market altogether. But executives at banks — with shots of Federal free-money coursing through their veins — were being showered with record bonuses.

The mess they caused to begin with was nowhere near resolved — and still isn't — and the tools the Establishment used to resolve it only further exacerbated the underlying problems and widened the inequality gap.

The problem, I thought, was easy to see.

But here we are, several years later, inequality is a major theme of national elections, and the pundits and talking heads are still scratching their heads like it's some sort of complex conundrum.

It isn't.

For the past 30 years your elected officials — right and left, Reagan, Bushes, Clintons, and Obama — have pursued economic policy that simply hasn't delivered for large portions of the country.

It is a policy of Trickle Down economics. And the blatant truth is that absolutely nothing has trickled down.

Adjusted for inflation, the median income of a full-time male worker in the United States is lower than it was 40 years ago. At the lower bounds of the middle class, wages are as low as they were 60 years ago.

But something was different then — there was shared prosperity. Nearly everyone got two cars and a house in the suburbs.

Today not everyone benefits when the economy grows. That is not conjecture, that is fact.

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