Who are you going to believe, the Bureau of Labor Statistics or your own lying eyes?<\/p>\n
Based on wage data from the BLS, it has become a settled, uncontroversial, widely-recognized \u201cfact\u201d that wages have not increased in the U.S. for many decades. Consequently the great American middle class is imploding and living standards are, at best, stagnating. All the financial payoff from rising productivity has gone to greedy \u201cmillionaires and billionaires\u201d such as Bill and Hillary Clinton. Thus a recent NYT column referred to \u201cthe fact that real wages have been flat for about four decades, while productivity has increased by 89 percent.\u201d Paul Krugman wrote last year, \u201cwages for ordinary workers have in fact been stagnant since the 1970s.\u201d Bernie Sanders laments that \u201cdespite some improvement, the 40-year decline of the American middle class continues . . . . Nearly all of the new income growth since the recession has gone to the top 1 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s just one problem. If we leave the never-never land of economic statistics and take a look at the real world, it is obvious that middle-class consumers live much better today than their parents ever did. There\u2019s all the free stuff on the Internet. Airbags and anti-lock brakes. Smart phones for the masses\u2014Maria, the lady who cleans Donald Trump\u2019s fantastic and exquisite and incredibly palatial executive suite, has a much better phone than The Donald had in his limo twenty-five years ago.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just electronics . . . <\/strong><\/p>\n . . . . Consider restaurants, a superfluous luxury that people can easily do without if they are living on a tight budget. And rather than focus on national trends\u2014the tens of thousands of Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts; the zillions of McDonalds and Burger Kings; the burgeoning gourmet burger category; the legions of middle-market \u201ccasual dining\u201d establishments such as Appleby\u2019s and Red Lobster; not to mention overpriced steakhouse chains such as Del Frisco\u2019s and Morton\u2019s\u2014let\u2019s look at a single town: Morristown, New Jersey, where I grew up.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a middle class town in an affluent part of northern New Jersey. It\u2019s hardly a boomtown like some parts of Florida or Texas, because Jersey\u2019s economy has been systematically mismanaged–battered by the high taxes and over-regulation of a corrupt Democratic legislature and three incompetent governors prior to Chris Christie. Morristown\u2019s affluence, relative to other towns in north Jersey, has declined in recent decades due to an influx of impecunious, hard-working Hispanic immigrants.<\/p>\n From Greasy Spoons to High-end Steakhouses<\/strong><\/p>\n I returned to the \u201cold neighborhood\u201d to see how things have changed. When it comes to restaurants, they have changed a lot. Back in the 1970s there were a few small eateries\u2014a couple of \u201cgreasy spoon\u201d lunch counters, a few pizzerias, a diner, a forlorn little Chinese restaurant called The August Moon, and an Italian \u201cbar and grill\u201d featuring weak drinks and pasta drowning in red sauce.<\/p>\n Today, by contrast, Morristown has dozens of restaurants that on weekends attract thousands of diners from the surrounding area. I did a census using Google Maps. In the downtown area alone there are no less than 64 restaurants, of which 10-15 are very expensive or fairly expensive. Some of the 64 are big places that can accommodate well over a hundred diners. I count 11 Asian, 8 Italian, 1 French, 5 steak houses \/ upscale American, 12 casual American, 6 Mexican, and 6 pubs. Also 4 coffee shops, 2 ice cream parlors, 7 delis, and 2 pizza joints.<\/p>\n Sure, a few of these places mainly serve the weekday lunch crowd–but not too many, because Morristown has only one large office building. The number of downtown workers has not increased much since the 1970s. These restaurants mainly depend on dinner business, particularly on weekends when droves of suburbanites\u2014both families and bar hoppers\u2014come to Morristown to spend money, hang out, and have a good time. Crowds spill out onto the sidewalk in front of hot bars. These are normal middle class Americans, not Barack and Bernie\u2019s \u201cmillionaires and billionaires.\u201d<\/p>\n This is new. When I was a kid nothing much happened in Morristown on a Saturday night. Despite Democratic mismanagement of the state\u2019s economy, living standards in northern New Jersey are far better than in the 1960s, which Paul Krugman naively hails as a time of unparalleled affluence. (By the way, if Krugman wandered down to Nassau and Witherspoon Streets he would notice a similar restaurant boom in his erstwhile hometown, Princeton, NJ.)<\/p>\n Never Mind<\/strong><\/p>\n Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and the New York Times<\/strong> are out of touch with reality, operating on a false premise. Despite the inequality hysteria, the middle class is alive and well, somehow surviving the systematic economic malfeasance known as Obamanomics. The last thing the middle class needs is the Sanders solution\u2014transferring funds from the private economy to Washington bureaucrats who already have much higher incomes than average Americans. As Scott Walker noted in the debate, six of the richest counties in the nation are in the DC area.<\/p>\n Copyright Thomas Doerflinger 2015. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who are you going to believe, the Bureau of Labor Statistics or your own lying eyes? Based on wage data from the BLS, it has become a settled, uncontroversial, widely-recognized \u201cfact\u201d that wages have not increased in the U.S. for … Continue reading