Robert Reich: Dear GOP Establishment, Brace for a Painful Reckoning With the Reality You Created @alternet:
"You are the captains of American industry, the titans of Wall Street, and the billionaires who for decades have been the backbone of the Republican Party. You’ve invested your millions in the GOP in order to get lower taxes, wider tax loopholes, bigger subsidies, more generous bailouts, less regulation, lengthier patents and copyrights and stronger market power allowing you to raise prices, weaker unions and bigger trade deals allowing you outsource abroad to reduce wages, easier bankruptcy for you but harder bankruptcy for homeowners and student debtors, and judges who will let you to engage in insider trading and who won’t prosecute you for white-collar crimes. All of which have made you enormously wealthy. Congratulations. But I have some disturbing news for you. You’re paying a big price — and about to pay far more. First, as you may have noticed, most of your companies aren’t growing nearly as fast as they did before the Great Recession. Your sales are sputtering, and your stock prices are fragile. That’s because you forgot that your workers are also consumers. As you’ve pushed wages downward, you’ve also squeezed your customers so tight they can hardly afford to buy what you have to sell. Consumer spending comprises 70 percent of the American economy. But the typical family is earning less today than it did in 2000, in terms of real purchasing power. Most of the economic gains have gone to you and others like you who spend only a small fraction of what they rake in. That spells trouble for the economy — and for you."
