Charleston Tea Party, PART II. This time we're not sure why we're protesting... money, right???

There was a tea party in Charleston this weekend that a couple of people I knew attended. It was a gigantic misguided mess, and was frustrating to see Fox News encouraging them on all day long.

There's a reason why countries that have more government-funded social programs and higher taxes consistently rank much higher than the United States on the Human Development Index. Instead of protesting taxes, we should be protesting how the money is being spent, and also how the money is being given to us in the first place.

Progress in Latin America as measured by the HDI and Gini index make me really sad for the USA. We're doing absolutely horrible by some aspects. Then again, to be clear, the USA ranks 15th on the HDI as of December 2008, which really isn't too bad. That ranking is still above the UK, Germany, Spain, and others. But, just because we're doing better than other countries that are arguably within the same system of Government as ours is not necessarily a good thing.


There's an incredibly strong correlation that as a country increases its GDP per capita, the two will meet up. As this graph shows, currently the US is the anomoly to this rule.

We've all heard that we're today getting paid less for the same amount of work, but it's actually quite different. Today, we're getting paid the same as we did in the 1970s for exponentially more work.

The post-war boom led to a great increase in productivity and real wages. Documented evidence showed that our economy was strong, the lower classes were actually moving up, and inequality was shrinking in our country. Then good ol' Reaganomics came in. For a time, productivity continued to rise, even faster than before, and real wages actually fell. Think about that. Things like that should not happen. That's like your boss saying that if you manage to be more productive, I'll pay you less. No wonder our poor are in need of help from the government--the poor's wages are simply not sufficient to move up the class ladder. Not even close.

One could argue that real wages are low because globalization drove the mean wage for industrial workers down, which in turn keeps our wages stagnant. That may be true, but whose fault is that? Certainly not the American workers' fault. What caused globalization was an insatiable need to bring home profit to shareholders, even when that meant shipping U.S. jobs overseas. If this means a rising level of unemployment at home and lower wages for the jobs that continue to stay behind in the U.S., then so be it. This is only a partisan issue insofar as different parties have different solutions, but as I gather, no one with any real power has yet to fully acknowledge the scope of this problem. Until it is fully realized, 'solutions' put out by both parties will be woefully inadequate. This isn't just Bush's fault, nor Obama's. The blame goes far deeper and is much more spread out.

Gini index graph from Visualizing Economics.com and the Wages vs. Productivity graph was from The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment