Above: A WPA poster, ca. 1941-1943. Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The New Deal saved our savings
The Personal Savings Rate is the percentage of our disposable income that we save for the future. After the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Americans could save less and less, or not at all. They were just trying to survive. New Deal policies & programs changed all that, and Americans began to save again.
Here are the annual Personal Savings Rates from 1929-1941 (data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis):
1930: +4.5%
1931: +4.4%
1932: -0.2%
1933: -0.7% (the New Deal begins)
1934: +1.7%
1935: +5.1%
1936: +7.1%
1937: +6.7%
1938: +2.9%
1939: +5.4%
1940: +6.8%
1941: +13.9%
In recent decades, our savings have been decimated by right-wing economics
From 1942 to 1984, a time period where New Deal polices were still the dominant policies in America (things started changing significantly in 1981), the Personal Savings Rate exceeded 10% annually 38 times. Since 1984, i.e., since tax-cuts-for-the-rich, financial industry deregulation, and anti-unionism have really taken hold (think Reaganism, Bushism, Trumpism, and the Democratic Party's embrace of neoliberalism), the Personal Savings Rate has never exceeded 10% (or even reached 10%) when measured annually.
And yet still... tens of millions of Americans keep bumbling along, trusting in the "free market"; trusting in right-wing economics; and trusting in their millionaire & billionaire overlords. And the super-wealthy are loving every minute of it, enjoying their record wealth. Yes, they're bathing in cash, laughing at our dwindling savings, but we... like gleeful doofuses... keep fetching more buckets of warm bath money for them, grinning stupidly at our own economic humiliation.
There is no word in the English language that adequately describes this level of stupidity. Idiocy? Imbecility? Foolishness? Lunacy? No, they don't cover it. We have reached this new level of stupidity so quickly, so thoroughly, that there hasn't been time to invent a new word for it. Until such time, the best way to describe our new reality is to say that we are living in the Stupid Age. Yes, there was the Bronze Age, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Victorian Era, the Gilded Age, the New Deal Era, and now, unfortunately for us, the Stupid Age.
Recent Headlines:
"58% of Americans Have Less Than $1,000 in Savings, Survey Finds," Yahoo Finance, December 21, 2018
"1 in 3 Americans have less than $5,000 saved for retirement—here’s why so many people can't save," CNBC, August 27, 2018 (the main reason, according to a survey: "Income hasn't changed or has decreased.")
"For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades," Pew Research Center, August 7, 2018
"Americans Haven't Saved Enough for Retirement. What Are We Going to Do About It?" Harvard Business Review, March 28, 2018
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