A Census Bureau report released Tuesday said that U.S. salaries across the board increased minimally, about $500 a year between 2004 and 2005. It's also the first year that the poverty rate has not worsened since before President Bush took office. - CNN

It goes to show the Bush Administration economic policies are working

quote:

Originally posted by Lighteningrodd:
It goes to show the Bush Administration economic policies are working

There are a lot of gloom-mongers out there. A lot of countries would like to have the USA's 'problems' It really doesn't look as though there'll be anything more than a 'soft landing' in any fall.

"It goes to show the Bush Administration economic policies are working "

But for whom are they working?

Also from the article -

The modest salary increase is not enough to counter what Woolf's study calls a "sinkhole effect" on income, a disparity shifting middle- and upper-class families closer to the poverty level.

Since we know that CEO salaries have increased greatly ( Nearly two out of three CEOs saw their pay go up last year, with overall cash compensation rising 13.6% and long-term compensation increasing 15.6%. - Business Week, and the article I first quoted shows a $500 average increase, it doesn't seem that the bush policies are working for the majority of the people. That $500 is 1% of $50,000. This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. In 1992, the average CEO of an S&P 500 firm earned $2.7 million. By its peak in 2000, average pay for these CEOs had grown to over $14 million—an increase of more than 400 percent. The increase in CEO pay is even more striking in relative terms. Twelve years ago, CEOs at major U.S. corporations were paid 82 times the average earnings of a blue collar worker; last year they were paid more than 400 times the average earnings of a blue collar worker. (Robert M. Daines, Pritzker Professor of Law and Business, Stanford Law School, et al. The average cost of a market basket of goods and services in the United States increased by an average of 3.4 percent in 2005 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index (CPI). This commonly used rate of inflation is up from 2.7 percent in 2004. This marks the third consecutive year of inflation increases in the U.S. and matches the recent peak in 2000. ( Missouri Economics Research & Information Center The original CNN link points out that "the first year that the poverty rate has not worsened since before President Bush took office." Considering all these facts, it is obvious that bush's economic policies are hurting, not helping, the average American. The "acrosd the board" increase of $500 would seem to be made up of chiely CEOs' increases. Even if it weren't, it doesn't even keep up with inflation. The average worker has lost ground; the CEOs and their cohorts have gained greatly.