Black Friday is a ridiculous creation of American retailers. It is hard to blame them for wanting to create hype and jumpstart sales ahead of Christmas by establishing a shopping holiday on a day many Americans get off from work. But the end result is something grotesque — a caricature of America’s prosperity.
The day contains a lot of human drama, not all of which is flattering to the nation’s image. On the one hand, there are the workers who man the tills and the shelves, presumably sacrificing the ability to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday. On the other, there are consumers who behave like animals, at times trampling, injuring and even killing one another.
This year, economic reality is putting additional pressures on both of these actors — the consumer and the worker. The former feels pressure to get something cheap because his wallet is light and his job situation precarious. The latter has little choice but to forgo travel and work the hours the day after Thanksgiving for basically the same reason.
Why is this? Six years on from the financial crisis, America’s economy has made historically slow progress toward recovery, held back by government policies that are focused on health insurance, the environment, immigration, “economic justice” — everything but economic growth. Yes, America has recovered the raw number of jobs that were lost in the crash, but the population has also grown, and the share of it currently working is inexorably stuck near its lowest point since the Carter era. If you eliminate Texas from the mix — with its growing economy and its oil boom —there are actually still fewer jobs in America today than there were in 2007. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark J. Perry has noted, the other 49 states are still short by about 350,000 jobs.
The stock market has recovered its old highs and then some, and that’s a good thing. But as even President Obama observed in September, people haven’t noticed a recovery, and “the reason they don’t feel it is because incomes and wages are not going up.”
He is correct — the jobs available today, on aggregate, do not pay as well as the ones that existed before the crash. Americans’ wages have stagnated horribly in the last six years. Measured in constant dollars, median weekly earnings were lower in the third quarter of 2014 than they were in 2007. Even a positive report released on Tuesday showing an upward revision of third quarter gross domestic product growth to 3.9 percent cut in half wage and salary growth that had been previously estimated for the second quarter.
What has Obama done to build an economy prosperous and robust enough that the average worker can get a raise after six years of economic pain? In 2009, with the good will of the nation behind him, Obama sold an economic stimulus strategy that failed.
Perhaps the new Republican Congress can help Obama refocus and try something else — a real “pivot to the economy” at long last. Instead of trying to “crucify” companies, wipe out coal towns and redirect Americans’ talents toward dead-end industries with generous subsidies, it’s time to leave businesses with room to grow and unleash this nation’s economic potential.
