Jay,

C’mon. You’re talking about symptoms as if they are causes. Consumer spending makes up 70% of our economic activity in America. Almost all of that spending is from people with family incomes between $25,000 and $80,000. Without spending, there is no growth. And as for savings? Yeah, if your wages were systematically gutted, you would save less, too. And also, where are the benefits for saving? Interest rates on savings accounts are at an average of .06% vs. the annual averages of the 1970s which were at 6% or higher.

Regarding “value-over-replacement” — I didn’t address it because it’s not a real term. People cannot be valued on supply and demand. People are not commodities in our economic system. Instead, perhaps you should reconsider the costs of turnover, which are related to this sports-related term “value-over-replacement” — it costs between 16%-20% of annual salary to replace employees.

http://cepr.net/calculators/turnover_calc.html

You talk about the loss of bargaining power as if it’s the fault of workers in America that they lost it, and not, instead, that it was taken from them.

By the way, your dirty little secret? There’s a word for it. It’s called eugenics:

“Here’s a dirty little secret that nobody wants to admit: as the cost of ‘respectable’ living rises and more and more people decide either not to have kids or to have smaller families, this problem solves itself as low-wealth households gradually age out of the population.”

You’re suggesting that being a low-income worker or being of part of the working poor is a genetic issue, not a plotted one. As if the war against the working class didn’t systematically take away bargaining power with unions, savings with pensions and low-interest rates, and wages with lobbying and political circle-jerking.

We don’t have a caste system. If a business needs a custodian, they need a custodian. The person who fills that job should be paid a living wage, despite their ability to be replaced, despite the dollar value you can associate to their work. Who knows what jobs automation will replace — even mind-worker jobs are being replaced (writing, graphic design, etc.). If my job can be replaced by automation, should I be forced to accept starvation wages as a result? Is that the America you dreamed of?