How the 1% are cleaning out the rest of us: Part 2

Talk about hoisting yourself by your own petard!

The graphs at the bottom of this post are from the New York Times. They’re self explanatory. What isn’t clear is how the movers and shakers of the world can be so bloody stupid. The figures are for the USA but it all applies here in New Zealand and throughout most of the world.

At the top of the graphic you can see that for the last 30 years wages have pretty much stayed the same relative to inflation for 82% of the workforce. The top 18% however, have creamed it. (The top 1% and even more avaricious 0.1% have really creamed it; we’ll get to them at another time.) As a result, in order to be able to buy all the flash cars, flat screen TVs, the ever more fancy houses, and the iPads  that media advertising bombards we peasants with, we’ve been borrowing up to our ears. Hence the current mess, and a situation where the people doing the lending are almost as deep in it as the borrowers.

Almost, but not quite. In some cases, not at all. (Continued below the graphic).

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Monumental stupidity from the top

What is mind-bogglingly and infuriatingly stupid about all this is that–as you can see from the second graph–it’s all happened before and it was perfectly clear that it was going to happen again. Not only that, it happened in the previous century (the 1800s) as well! More than once!

Sheesh.

Here’s how it works–or not