Pretty amazing headline ehh? Sometime in the past 24 hours between catnaps and a blogging marathon, I read the above headline and it stuck in my head. The reason it stick in my head is that I really have something to say about this issue that some of my readers might be interested in. See we are all here at this blog to make money right? That question leads me to another; do people who invest in the stock market actually make money by doing so? The answer to that question is long and complicated and involves both yes and no mixed in such a convoluted manner as to be almost impossible to explain in a way that will not make the average person so angry they start spitting ten-penny nails as a civil war style Gatling gun spat bullets.
Yes, people do make money through the stock exchanges. No, you are probably not going to be one of them. The system is rigged folks, and evidently, 85% of the people polled in the above survey knows or suspects it. Fatcats and investment fund managers are living high off the hog from the fees they collect from guileless investors day after day. They fly around first class and live in their posh New York apartments and vote no every time someone gets the idea that raising capital gains taxes might be better way to ease the deficit than cutting essential services that the poor depend on every day.
These same people have let the infrastructure of America go to pot in order to gain just a little bit more of a bottom line they can spread between their friends, family, and shareholders. These ladies and gentlemen, these are the predators of the Wall Street who freely prey on the lambs of Main Street.
Investment in the stock market used to be a sound way to hedge against the inevitable inflation that a capitalistic economy with no price controls experiences over time. Bubbles grow and burst, and yet somehow or another prices continue to go up while wages stay the same or go down. Labor is getting wise to this racket so the powers that be are moving to ensure that labor cannot collective organize and prevent a loss of quality of life that wages linked to the inflation index would prevent.
Statistics show that productivity has increased almost 70% since the 1970’s and yet when adjusted for inflation; we find that wages have only increased 7% for the majority of labor who make under $80,000 a year. In some industries, outsourcing of labor to third world economies has actually pushed down wages from $100 an hour to $10 an hour or less. Outsourcing has contributed to unemployment and wage stagnation for fifteen years now and yet these same fatcats claim that free trade was a success. A success? For who? Certainly not the middle class who built the fatcat fortunes by the sweat of their brows.
It is amazing what you learn when you survey average Americans about the economy and its direction compared to what the media and big business would have you believe. Eighty-five percent of us think the present day economy sucks for 100% of us who have had our wealth forcibly redistributed through trickle up economic central planning.