While we’re watching a bunch of millionaires play with their balls?

...and waiting for our $600 checks as part of the much-ballyhoed "Economic Stimulus Package," maybe it's time to look at the true state of the economy. The two of us running this thing live on both coasts in two of the most expensive of urban areas in the United States. Let's be blunt: our economy sucks, but tonight we get our bread and circus. Barbara Ehrenreich, who normally I cannot stand, write a fantastic book a few years back, called "Nickel and Dimed" where she gave up her relatively privileged life as a writer and took jobs incognito as a waitress, hotel maid, clean service worker, etc. She lived as they lived, in hotels and by-the-week rentals, and only broke character when she left for the next job and city. In today's Washington Post, Ms. Ehrenreich pens a rather poignant op-ed where she refers back to her experiences during this process and ridicules the complete lunacy of our country's economic situation:

 I t begins to sound a bit naughty -- all this talk about the need to "stimulate" the economy, as if we were discussing how to make a porn film. I don't mean to trivialize our economic difficulties or the need for effective government intervention, but we have to face a disconcerting fact: For years now, that strange stimulus-crazed beast, the economy, has been going its own way, increasingly disconnected from the toils and troubles of ordinary Americans. 

 

The economy, for example, has been expanding, at least until now, and growth is supposed to guarantee general well-being. As long as the gross domestic product grows, World Money Watch's Web site assures us, "so will business, jobs and personal income."

 So, the theory says that if Wal-Mart is growing, the economy is doing fine, right? Wait a minute, doesn't Wal-Mart pay their employees next to nothing, but keeps their prices low enough so they can barely afford to shop there? Don't they buy most of their stock from overseas manufacturing? 

 

We like to attribute our high productivity to technological advances and better education. But a revealing 2001 study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. also credited America's productivity growth to "managerial . . . innovations" and citedWal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that our productivity also relies on fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads and cutting back on breaks. That may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom, it can feel a lot like pain.

 When people don't feel like they have enough. Even Wal-Mart had to cut their prices last Christmas to save their shopping season. Their customers, including most of their own employees didn't have enough money to buy Christmas presents for their children.  This looks pretty familiar to Ehrenreich, as one of our most famous American entrepreneurs knew enough to keep this from happening:

Not that we hadn't been warned. A century ago, Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords. But, like Wal-Mart, too many of our employers today haven't figured out that their cruelly low wages would eventually curtail their own growth and profits.  

 Henry Ford was a notorious anti-semite, Nazi sympathizer and devoted an entire division of his company to spying on the private lives of his employees, a practice that Wal-Mart emulates today for some strange reason. On the other hand, for all his faults, Henry Ford knew enough about economics to pay his employees a fair wage, and keep his products fairly priced. Enjoy the commercials.