Stop Me Before I Vote Again

The Larry and Ben show -- America's beloved stagonomic twins -- have a neat new trick in store for us and it's coming to wageling job sites near you. By means mysterious and confabulating these master magi will telepathically induce the total once and for all disappearance of... one trilllllion simoleons, and all of it straight out of the 'umble wages of us rubes.

Here's Dean "the dream" Baker:

"We use Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on the economy since 2007 and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections of economic performance through 2012 to estimate the total loss of wages and salaries resulting from the decrease in employment in the current downturn.... We find that the fall in employment from its 2007 levels will cost U.S. workers just over $1 trillion in lost wages and salaries during the five-year period 2008-2012.

The estimated lost wages and salaries exceed – by about $150 billion – the CBO’s estimate of the full ten-year cost of the health-care reform bill that recently passed in the House of Representatives.

From the standpoint of jobs – the economic variable that most concerns Americans – the recession is not even one-third over. Cumulative wage and salary losses so far (2008 and 2009) constitute less than one-third of the total expected missed earnings through 2012.

We have not yet seen the bottom of the labor market. Lost wages and salaries in 2010 will be more than 25 percent higher (after adjusting for inflation) than the losses experienced in 2009. Lost earnings in 2011 will be higher than they were in 2009; and 2012 will be almost three times as bad as 2008, the first full year of the recession...

We do not include the cost of lost health insurance or pension contributions, lost earnings resulting from declines in the usual hours of work for those workers who manage to keep their jobs, or any cuts in wages and salaries stemming from cost-cutting pressures brought on by the recession."