The bottom line on the economy

Re “Pretending the economy is OK,” Opinion, Aug. 8

Brad Schiller is correct. The economy is not where most Americans want it to be.

To go back to Reagan economic policies though, as he advocates, would be a big mistake.

Kansas and Louisiana, two states that have been led by Republican governors and Republican dominated state legislatures, have tried to do just that.

What’s the result? Financial bankruptcy. To try to fix a problem with a strategy destined to fail is no solution.

New ideas and policies are needed. Elliot Fein

Trabuco Canyon

Schiller’s article paints only one side of the economic equation.

For six years, the Republican-controlled Congress impeded attempts to raise the minimum wage, reform student loans, provide equal pay for women, pass the jobs act, rebuild the infrastructure of roads, bridges, and telecommunications, hire more teachers, stop tax breaks for corporations that send jobs overseas and help for the long-term unemployed.

The trickle down philosophy of the Republicans means that tax help goes to the wealthy, and they hope it trickles down to the rest of us.

Democrats prefer a more equitable distribution of our national wealth. Elizabeth Keranen

Bakersfield

The composition of the top 1% is not changing as often as Schiller wants readers to believe.

Social mobility is near this country’s all-time low.

In the 1960s, the CEO to average worker compensation ratio was 20-1, whereas now the ratio is over 300-1.

Schiller also mentions that the upward mobility of the minimum wage worker is “extraordinary.” A pay raise of nickels and dimes for workers at the minimum wage level is everything but extraordinary.

Minimum wage workers struggle to support a family while the top earners make enough in a

year to support their family for generations to come. Kyle Ause

Porter Ranch

Schiller has not included politics in his economic Rightward pandering.

Politics and economics are an extremely dovetailed reality. (In a nation whose religion is capitalism and free markets this is absolute.)

The Right’s obstructionism of Obama is as much a part of today's economic reality as sugar is to candy. Reports absent this recognition (and instruction) are absent worthiness. D.J. Ponder

Torrance

It would have been more accurate to call this piece: “Pretending The Donald is OK.” Manuel Carrillo

Venice

Schiller needs to learn more about our consumerdriven economy before blaming the pretense on the Obama administration and /or Congress.

Congress can only mandate a minimum wage (something no one can live on anyway) , and the GOP, as usual, fiercely opposes raising the minimum wage to a higher but still unlivable level.

What drives a consumer-driven economy is consumption. What drives consumption is the consumer, and only when there is money left over after basic living expenses.

What limits that? The wages paid to them, something exclusively controlled by employers who would rather pay obscene salaries and bonuses to executives who probably don’t deserve it. They won’t spend the millions obtained, unlike their workers who would. Hoarding cash is a bad idea inhibiting growth, money needs to be kept circulating.

When the economic enslavement of American workers end, consumption will increase dramatically. Frederick J . Fisher

El Segundo

I love it when I read Op-Ed pieces from the discredited theory of supply-side, trickle-down economics.

Schiller cherry picks years of the Reagan administration to compare with the economic situation we now face decades later.

He ignores the years since Reagan, when corporations have continually outsourced jobs to other countries, replaced people with robots, all the while enriching — at obscene levels — the very few at the top of the economic ladder.

He erroneously compares the poor economic situation Reagan encountered with that of the Depression-like crises Obama inherited from George W. Bush.

Schiller also apparently is unaware that legitimate, non-partisan, studies have shown that raising taxes does not necessarily damage an economy, and that lowering taxes does not necessarily benefit an economy.

Anything Schiller writes must be taken with a healthy dose of salt. Carl Falletta

Yorba Linda

Rather than cite a handful of selected statistics, Schiller should have provided a critique of the specific economic policies during the Obama years and how they were, in his opinion, unsuccessful.

But that would have required him to address the elephant in the room: The Republican Congress.

Since gaining a majority, the Republicans have stonewalled every subsequent move made by the administration, including the refusal to enact any type of jobs bill. Steven Codron

West Hills