THE BLOG
of John Gelles
Julry 18, 2009

At the
Very Heart of the Matter

We're talking about hard times. Today's jobs, wages and bills that won't be paid.

There are millions of Americans today, whose job, income and bills (not too long ago) may have been not what they wanted; but they did not scare their neighbors of a bleak economic future closing in on them.

Ask anyone you know, exactly what's the matter. You won't get an answer.

They know they want more than an answer—they want change— from no-job to jobs aplenty, from low to higher wages, from unpaid to bills paid on time.

One school of thought I agree with says wages are never as high as our bills, from time to time, because wages and profits compete with each other for every dollar of sales a business is able to garner.

If profit is high enough to protect your job, wages have to be low enough to lower sales and destroy your job.

This is the bug in the American system that everyone knows is killing us that no one is talking about. At the heart of the matter is a bug that a national wage dividend can fix overnight.

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