Rod Blum’s column lacked solutions

To the editor:

Rep. Rod Blum's Labor Day guest column 'Let's get America working again” starts off being a celebration of the American worker, but ends up prescribing the same old and ineffective policies.

Blum acknowledges that pay has been stagnating for the average worker over the last several decades. But when he turns his sights to solutions, he says nothing at all about policies that will increase the economic well-being of American workers. Raising the minimum wage is the most obvious and easiest way of increasing the wages of Americans, especially low-income Americans who work full time but still struggle to make ends meet.

Instead, his policy prescriptions look like they could have been pulled out of any Republican news release from the last 30 years: Cut corporate taxes, welfare reform, cut red tape. There is no evidence that these policies create jobs with decent wages. What these policies do, however, is concentrate more of the national income in the hands of the rich few. The productivity of the American worker has steadily increased over the last several decades, but little of that economic growth actually has benefitted workers. As research by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty shows, over 90 percent of new income is captured by the 1 percent of richest Americans.

Arguing that we should decrease corporate regulations and taxes is one thing, but let us not pretend like it has any relationship to improving the economic lives of the vast majority of American workers.

Wes Shirley

Cedar Rapids