Have you checked your bank account lately?

From Speak Out California:

"Not surprisingly, if you checked your bank account balance
recently, the wage gap is widening in California with the rich
getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

"The highly respected California Budget Project released a new
report this week, "A Generation of Widening Inequality: The
State of Working California, 1979 to 2006." Its findings are not
surprising. The wealthiest continue to gain capital and the
poorest continue to lose purchasing power with wages that barely
keep pace with inflation. Interestingly, the gap between
low-wage and high-wage workers has widened more in California
than in the country as a whole. California's high wage workers
are doing better than most, but our low-wage workers are doing
worse than their US counterparts. And what is happening to the
middle class? It's simply disappearing. Of course, now is the
time to go out and buy that yacht and airplane, but then again,
only the wealthy can afford them---and don't have to pay into
the public treasury to boot! The good news for them is that
they're getting rich enough to be able to afford one of each,
while working Californians continue to struggle, with the bottom
pay range having dropped 7.2% and 43% of new jobs paying less
than $11 an hour.

"Sadly, but not surprisingly, the economic recovery of the past
decade has not provided the historic broad increase in the
standard of living for workers but instead has created
"skyrocketing corporate profits". So much for the right-wing's
much ballyhooed "trickle down" economics."

From the weekly update on the goings-on in Sacramento for the week ending August 25, 2007.

Speak Out California is at www.speakoutca.org/weblog/