Surprise! Record Corporate Profits

Corporate profits for US corporations hit record highs in the third quarter.

 blue =wages    red=profits    This chart and more found here

Whew! I kind of wish I hadn’t even seen that chart. Huffington Post reports that special year end bonuses for many companies are in the works ahead of expected 2013 tax increases and of course the S&P 500 has more than doubled since the bottom of the recession.

And how about everybody else?

Average hourly pay, when adjusted for inflation, has fallen 0.7 percent over the past year, according to the Labor Department. And the unemployment rate in October was 7.9 percent — it was at a low of 4.4 percent in May 2007 before the recession.

All this reminds me of an old cartoon from WWII that I saw in a book. It shows a bemedaled general viewing a gorgeous sunrise (or perhaps sunset) and remarking to his aide.”Wonderful sunrise Lieutenant, do the troops have one too?”

4 thoughts on “Surprise! Record Corporate Profits

  1. …Bruce Lisman and his ilk insist that we need to cut taxes in order to unshackle the raw power of capitalism. Because obviously, our corporate masters just don’t have enough money yet.  

  2. I don’t believe in redistribution of wealth. I believe in re-redistribution. We’ve suffered under redistribution of wealth from those who worked for it to those who called their brokers about it since, well, civilization.

    It’s time to re-redistribute it back down to the people who sweated to earn it.

    We could start with livable wage and Eisenhower-era tax rates.

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