Employee wages have been declining for several decades, but employee wages took big hits during each of the Bush administrations, reported the Guardian. Bush-era capitalism is the reason why wages took the recent nosedive for so many American workers.
Wages enjoyed a fairly decent boost during the 1980s but slowed down from 1989 to 1993 during the first Bush administration. When Bill Clinton succeeded George H.W. Bush, lower- and middle-class wages started to improve and remained so for the rest of Clinton’s tenure. However, when George W. Bush won the White House in 2000, things got really bad for the lower- and middle-classes.
College degrees and high school diplomas became more and more worthless. According to an economic report from the Brookings Institute written by economist Robert Shapiro:
From 2002 to 2013, the incomes of most households stagnated or declined even as they aged through nine years of expansion and two years of recession. The only types of households with rising incomes over this recent period were those headed by people in their mid-to-late 20s and those headed by college graduates — and their gains were much smaller than those achieved by young and college-educated households in the 1980s and 1990s.
High school graduates suffered greatly, and college graduates weren’t worth as much. Much of the wage stagnation and job loss that occurred on Bush’s watch is largely attributed to the outsourcing of American jobs. Our jobs went to places like Bangalore and China because the Bush administration offered incentives to businesses that globalized.
