{"id":25931,"date":"2010-08-11T10:41:51","date_gmt":"2010-08-11T15:41:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=25931"},"modified":"2013-12-05T04:09:44","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T09:09:44","slug":"is-u-s-economic-policy-protecting-people-or-corporations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2010\/08\/11\/is-u-s-economic-policy-protecting-people-or-corporations\/","title":{"rendered":"Is U.S. Economic Policy Protecting People or Corporations?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martin Hart-Landsberg, at Reports from the Economic Front, offers a provocative hypothesis.\u00a0 He observes that job loss in the U.S. has been tremendous<\/a>. One in 20 jobs has disappeared.\u00a0 Still, Congress drug its feet approving an extension of unemployment benefits.\u00a0 The extension has been approved, but benefits are hardly generous (on average, $309 a month<\/span> week).\u00a0 Further, millions of unemployed people are not collecting unemployment because they’re not eligible under current policy.<\/p>\n

Hart-Landsberg asks why there is a lack of “meaningful national efforts” to address the suffering of workers and their families?<\/p>\n

His hypothesis:\u00a0 Economic policy is not responsive to workers’ needs.\u00a0 Instead, it is heavily driven by what is best for corporations.\u00a0 And, it turns, out, corporations are doing swimmingly during the recession.\u00a0 They took a beating at first, but their profits are up.\u00a0 Downsizing appears to have benefited them.\u00a0 Consider this chart from the Economic Policy Institute<\/a> (EPI):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The EPI concurs with Hart-Landsberg.\u00a0 Looking at this data, Lawrence Mishel concludes:<\/p>\n

When employers are able to recover their profits many years before their employees can even hope to attain the income and employment levels they had \u00a0prior to recession\u2019s devastation, economic policy is clearly skewed in favor of corporations and not workers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin Hart-Landsberg, at Reports from the Economic Front, offers a provocative hypothesis.\u00a0 He observes that job loss in the U.S. has been tremendous. One in 20 jobs has disappeared.\u00a0 Still, Congress drug its feet approving an extension of unemployment benefits.\u00a0 The extension has been approved, but benefits are hardly generous (on average, $309 a month […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,36,98,12498,3920,304,76],"class_list":["post-25931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-economics","tag-capitalism","tag-economics-great-recession","tag-nation-united-states","tag-the-state","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25931"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59857,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25931\/revisions\/59857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}