Income gap

Globalization, which was the economic strategy starting at the end of WW 2, continuing on through the cold war, came to an end in about 2010. The end was accelerated with the rise in nationalism associated with Trump and his Make America Great Again campaign. This was continued under Biden with the America First slogan and Trump has continued the trend in his second term. He has pushed his agenda by demanding that the EU pay more for their defense, that trade deals be fair, that the US quit paying for international organizations like the UN, WTO and WHO. He cancelled USAID. He is putting pressure on NATO countries to pay their fair share and his latest is withdrawing from 66 groups where the US has been paying a disproportionate share of the cost. There are many examples of how things changed and CEO pay is one. In the 1950’s the average CEO earned 20 times as much as the worker bees in the plants and today that ratio is 300 to one. Are the CEO’s of today 15 times more effective than in the past? Meanwhile real wages for those in the middle and bottom have stagnated and only in the past ten years have started to recover. The end of globalization is helping to stop the growth in the income gap but it is a slow process. As new manufacturing jobs return wages for working people will rise.