Building the Next Crisis

The stock market has hit record highs, corporations are making money, surely we have finally started to turn it around and will certainly be out of the economic doldrums any day now, right? Even today's job report was encouraging. Maybe, despite the sequester, which may still come back to haunt us, we are finally starting to cement the turnaround. Maybe.

Lurking underneath the positive news is the fact that the recovery is still fueling the growing income disparity between the few and the many. Most of the wealth generated by the recovery to date has gone to corporations, very little has found its way to workers. While corporate profits skyrocket, workers remain jobless or their incomes do not keep pace.

For all the talk we hear from both parties about building the middle class, there is no evidence that either party is particularly interested in doing that, and there is little evidence that the middle class is benefiting from the economic recovery. In fact, it seems that we are only exacerbating one of the problems that we should have used this crisis to address - the massive gulf in wealth between the wealthy and the rest. While corporations profit, little money goes to their employees and with jobless numbers still so high and consumer spending still sputtering, little of the money being brought in by corporations will go to hiring new workers or increasing output.

So in essence, we are only building towards the next crisis. The disparity in wealth is no foundation for a successful economy, let alone a successful country. It is harmful to our future prospects when those who strive to produce goods find themselves increasingly unable to purchase the very products they help create. This income disparity not only decreases consumer purchasing power, it reinforces the idea that not everyone has a stake in the American economy, which in turn undermines our faith in our own systems, deincentivizes participation in those systems, and therefore encourages people not to work hard as they see that it is unlikely they will be rewarded for that hard work.

If the prosperous future we all long for looks anything like the current economic recovery we should be nervous. Between the sequester and the stock market's vast outpacing of wages and hiring, America's economic recovery looks to be flimsy and ephemeral.