TODAY'S YOUNG PEOPLE won't do as well as their parents, workers' wages are declining and everybody is living in job insecurity.
And, of course, greedy CEOs and uncaring Wall Street are to blame. That according to many of today's media reports, social critics, government officials and at least one GOP candidate for president.This scenario has become conventional wisdom, and it would be fine except for one thing: It isn't true.
Yes, there are problems in the economy. Overall economic growth has been slow in the 1990s. Some of this can be laid at the door of the Bush-Clinton tax increases and their dampening effect on the economy.
But this isn't what Pat Buchanan, Labor Secretary Robert Reich and others talk about when they mean "economic insecurity." They mean that "20 years of declining wages and disappearing benefits are taking their toll on American life," as AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said recently.
But one study, by Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas economists W. Michael Cox and Beverly J. Fox, which looked at a broad range of economic indicators dating to the 1940s, has found that "America's recent economic gains are on a par with those gained historically."
For instance, when it comes to wages, it is true that the inflation-adjusted median wage for the American laborer has fallen 13 percent since 1979. But overall compensation packages, including health care, pensions and fringe benefits, was up - to an all-time high in 1994! These benefits are not taxed, and their share of compensation packages has doubled in the last 40 years.
In addition, the Labor Department reports that since 1990, better-paying jobs have grown faster than lower-paying ones. And Syracuse University researchers found that since 1984, more families saw total incomes go up than down.
At the same time, today's average corporate profits, the scourge of Buchanan and others, are well below the level they were in the 1960s: 10 percent of sales today vs. 15.1 percent then!
Yes, we hear about huge corporate layoffs and firings. But today's alternatives are maintaining an inefficient, cumbersome business with lots of employees - which makes it unlikely to survive long - or streamlining and becoming more competitive in the global economy, which brings new kinds of growth and jobs.
In addition, government's role has to be figured in. Too often, mandated benefits and federal regulations make it more cost-effective to have fewer employees.
This is not to minimize the concerns of those having trouble finding jobs or a middle-management person facing dismissal. But for politicians and the media to play on those fears as being solely the result of a "cutthroat" economy or corporate greed is irresponsible.