Economics professor Jennifer Pate sat down with PBS and American Public Media’s “Marketplace” this weekend to discuss the hollowing out of the American middle class.
On June 9, Pate told Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace:
We basically rely on companies to be the ones that determine how much income people make in this country, and then that becomes a question of well, every dollar I pay to my employee is a dollar I don’t make a profit. That trade-off I think makes it very hard for companies to sit down and say this is the right thing, so that’s why we should pay people more as opposed to saying oh they’re fine, they’re making ends meet.
A portion of her interview appeared the next day on a PBS NewsHour special, “How the Deck is Stacked.” She said:
People are either going up, which is called upward mobility, or more likely it’s downward mobility. We’re seeing a hollowing out of the middle. These are people who purchase goods and services across the year that leads to higher economic prosperity in our country.
Watch and listen here: