Henry Blodget published a 13-word headline late Friday that spoke volumes: “Corporate Profits Just Hit An All-Time High, Wages Just Hit An All-Time Low.” There it is — the American economy in a nutshell.
Blodget included this chart, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, showing that American companies “are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before.”
The report added, of course, that while corporate profits have reached a height unseen since officials started keeping track, “wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low.” Blodget concluded, “In short, our current system and philosophy is creating a country of a few million overlords and 300+ million serfs.”
This is of extraordinary importance in its own right, but I’d be curious to hear how Mitt Romney and the congressional Republican leadership perceive facts like these. After all, the foundation of the GOP’s economic argument in 2012 is that the Obama administration’s brand of “socialism” has made it impossible for corporations to thrive. All of those pesky regulations and taxes serve as a weight around the corporate world’s shoulders, and once Republicans run the White House and Congress again, we’ll finally free corporations of these onerous burdens.
And yet, as of right now, corporate profits have hit an all-time high — even with that rascally Democrat in the Oval Office, imposing his anti-private-sector agenda on those poor, unsuspected captains of industry. For all of the political world’s differences, can we at least have bipartisan agreement that President Obama is the least effective socialist in history?
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