The same is true, of course, when it comes to setting government economic policies and setting priorities. If the numbers used to shape this policy — the policy-generating metrics — are geared a certain way, the policies ultimately produced are skewed that way.

Today, in Washington and state capitals around the country, the metrics that largely determine economic policies are not metrics that promote the interests of the American middle class. In consequence, not only is the size of this all-important demographic shrinking, but those still clinging to its benefits and perks are having a tougher and tougher time doing so.

Looking at three basic metrics used to set government policies tell this story clearly.

JOBS: In April the government reported that 165,000 new jobs were created. Not a great number, true, but one that policy-makers in Washington were happy to claim continued to show improvement in the job market.

Except they didn’t. Not from a middle class perspective.

Dig into this jobs report and you’ll see what it really shows is a continued shrinking of middle class living standards. Many of the new jobs created in April were part-time or less than 35 hours-per-week. New full-time jobs were mostly in low wage, little or no benefits sectors like retail. Higher paying jobs in government and construction shrank that month. The average wage of workers actually fell. Not a pretty middle class picture.

GROWTH: Economic growth is the present questing beast of both Democrats and Republicans, as well as most economists. The economic growth numbers that policy makers use have shown improvement in recent decades. Not for the middle class, however.

Since the late 1970s, more than 36 percent of all income growth has gone to the top .01 percent of Americans, and more than 55 percent to just the top 1 percent. National economic growth since 2011 has boosted the top 1 percent by another 11 percent, while there’s been a small decline for most other Americans — especially middle class Americans.

There’s no trickle down here. For the middle class, the economic growth metrics used by government planners are a poke in the eye.

INFLATION: Taking official government numbers on inflation at face value (a stretch, but we’ll overlook that here), there’s hardly been any in the last few years, in spite of the Fed’s quantitative easing (i.e. money printing) that pours $85 billion into the economy each month. This much ballyhooed fact has been labeled a great triumph by government economic planners, an economic stimulus that hasn’t caused inflation.

In fact, it’s only really been a boon for the very rich. For the middle class, especially older middle class Americans who generally opt for safety in their investments, this Fed approach to stimulus and inflation control has been a source of great pain.

For safety-oriented savers (the traditional source of investment capital for worthwhile projects), getting a half-percent return on government bonds when official inflation is running three rimes faster means automatic real world losses and decreasing spending power. And while 47 percent of American families have shares in a stock market endlessly pumped up by the Fed, only 10 percent have more than $5,000 in this market — and most of this is in pension funds that can’t be tapped without a large tax penalty, while Wall Street bank traders who almost never lose in today’s stock market (three of the six largest Wall Street banks didn’t lose money a single trading day last quarter) garner their profits immediately.

CONCLUSION

What get counted gets done, in both business and government policy making. What’s getting counted by government policy makers today, to an extraordinary extent, helps the very richest in our society — and most dramatically the investing and lending richest — rather than the middle class.

There’s other ways to figure government policy-making numbers. There’s other metrics that can be used to make policy. People in Washington might be encouraged to adopt these middle class-friendly metrics. Failing to do so, they should be shoveled out of office as soon as possible, and sent off to receive the sinecures they’ve earned servicing their Wall Street masters.

(Michael Silverstein’s newest novel, Murder At Bernstein’s, is the tale of a financial news billionaire who wants to be elected Mayor Of Philadelphia.)

Over bowls of cereal and side orders of kiwi fruit, I asked Kay what she thought the LEI report would show, how much it would change.

“Beats me. Eat your Kiwi,” said Kay.

“Guess,” I prodded.

“O.K.,” she replied. “I think it will go up .2 percent.”

“Boy this is good Kiwi,” I said. “I’m guessing it will go up…let’s see…go up .5 percent.”

Doing some quick math, this made the median average of the Kay and Mike LEI expectation .35

Dozens of highly paid economists are polled regularly by various Wall Street trackers. The closely watched “analyst expectations,” a median average of these experts’ prognosticating, move literally billions of dollars in the markets. The economists polled by MarketWatch, according to its website, forecast a .3 percent increase in the LEI. The economists surveyed by Bloomberg, according to its website, forecast a .2 percent increase.

The actual increase in the LEI reported at 10 o’clock this morning was .6. We all got it wrong. But the projection of Kay, a painter and graphic novelist, and Mike, who writes financial verse and comic novels, concocted in less than a minute over breakfast, beat the best-and-brightest on Wall Street in predicting this important economic number.

Here’s two possible conclusions to be drawn from this:

Stock markets these days are moved, often dramatically and in ways involving billions and billions of dollars, by things that are at best well meant guesswork, and at worst sheer nonsense meant to give an appearance of plausibility to the endless finagling of the financial system by Wall Street market fixers.

Or:

That Kay and Mike are unrecognized economic and financial geniuses who deserve wads of contributions for their heroic efforts in bringing profound new insights to the markets.

If you believe the former, contact your congressional reps and tell them to support the Brown-Vitter bill that seeks to limit the dangers to our economy of too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks. If you believe the latter, contact me at mike@wallstreetpoet.com, and receive instructions about where to send large contributions to Kay and me in the form of fiat money (all major currencies accepted), gold bullion, or Bitcoins.

(Michael Silverstein’s comic novels, Fifteen Feet Beneath Manhattan, The Bellman’s Revenge and Murder At Bernstein’s are all available from Amazon.)

A couple of months back the Senate, in a highly unusual bipartisan move, unanimously passed a resolution. In vague and general terms this resolution called for the break up of too-big-to-fail banks. Being just a resolution, of course, it had no force of law.

Then this April, two senators came forward with an actual legislative proposal that would, in essence, remove the implicit too-big-to-fail guarantee government provides for this country’s largest banks. The sponsors of this measure were Sherrod Brown, a very liberal Democrat from Ohio, and David Vitter, a very conservative Republican from Louisiana.

Changing from the high-minded sounding blather of a resolution to something that could actually dramatically change government policy toward huge banks immediately ended senatorial unanimity. The flagrantly misnamed “centrists” in both major parties immediately prepared to smother this legislation.

No surprise there. Today’s Washington centrists go to great lengths to protect the interests of Wall Street and its biggest banks. These institutions are a reliable source of much funding for centrist campaigns. Even more important to these Beltway worthies, they provide very highly paid sinecures in the form of corporate board memberships, big buck speaking engagements, lobbying gigs, hugely overcompensated academic posts, et. al. after centrists leave their well paid government work to take exorbitantly compensated gratuities for services rendered to Wall Street while they were still in the government’s employ.

Brown-Vitter thus faced a near certain disappearing act. But I had this idea how to give it a better shot at survival.

My notion was simple. I would get left-leaning groups in the Philadelphia area where I live to very publicly come together with right-leaning groups in the area to announce their support for Brown-Vitter. I figured the press would jump all over this. Two political groupings that are supposed to hate each other backing the same bill. No new war erupts in the Middle East that week, this one could have legs.

A gimmick, sure. But gimmicks gave rise to both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. And I live in Philadelphia. And Rocky took a chance. Yo!

This local action and its media spin-off, I hoped, would be replicated around the country. Brown-Vitter would get a much needed publicity boost. Washington’s centrists would start having to explain why they opposed a too-big-to-fail law not only backed by left and right, but supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans in the middle.

Maybe, just maybe, I also hoped, other areas where wings of our highly fractured political culture actually do agree might come to the fore and make this country a tad more governable. No change of every strongly held view required. No need to do a phony all encompassing group huggie huggie. Just a few genuinely needed moves to achieve mutually agreed upon ends. You know. Like sane people do it.

Such were my hopes. Here’s what I did. And here’s what happened.

The other day I had a meeting in Center City Philadelphia with some people who had seen an article of mine in a local blat about a different political issue, and who wanted to talk about it. In the discussion that followed I mentioned Brown-Vitter. These were highly sophisticated Democratic Party operatives. They nonetheless had never heard of the Brown-Vitter bill. I was amazed.

That was in the morning. That evening I went to a meeting of another liberal group that focuses mainly on city and state issues. It’s members are all activists, acquainted with the activities of other activists, with issues of interest to other activists generally. I mentioned my belief that Brown-Vitter was an exceptionally important piece of progressive legislation, and that this group might come together with a local conservative group, perhaps a local Tea Party, in hopes of using this joint clout to help Brown-Vitter on its way.

No one in this group of liberal activists had heard of Brown-Vitter either. Nor, for that matter, though they were interested in the idea, did anyone there know who might be contacted “on the other side” to follow up on my suggestion.

Here’s some conclusions I’ve reached from these personal encounters.

Brown-Vitter is not a hidden piece of legislation, buried in the current morass of congressional legislative hopes and shams. There have been excellent pieces done about it in The New York Times and a number of other high profile media. What has been lacking, however, is the all-important amplification from the highly organized and effective get-out-the-word-to-the-media machinery controlled by both Democratic and Republic centrists. The talk radio, Sunday TV, the phone and email contact files employed to raise money and get the troops riled up on issues party controllers want their troops focused on. Lack of this amplification is the reason why the people I spoke with had never heard of this particular piece of legislation, much less been encouraged to fight for it in the best ways possible.

I also got the very strong impression that communication between right and left in this country is now less and less of a person-to-person affair during which shared beliefs and traits as well as differences might be recognized. Rather, the “hate-thy-political-neighbor” business has become one of this country’s real growth industries, one that prospers by fostering anger and misunderstanding among Americans to the greatest extent possible.

I think this industry sucks. I disagree with a lot of other Americans, sometimes strongly, on a lot of issues. But I don’t hate them. Indeed, I think we can get together on a lot of things in ways that advance many shared priorities and beliefs, Brown-Vitter being one example.

That old proverb applies in politics as well as war. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

So let’s do it. Occupy Wall Street or MoveOn, find your local Tea Party organization. Or maybe Tea Party do it the other way around. Use Brown-Vitter to put the screws to the best-and-brightest on Wall Street. Rest assured, if you don’t, big banks on The Street will continue doing it to you.

(My new novel, Murder At Bernstein’s, is available from Amazon)

Anguish no more. The truth about the world and U.S. economies, the job market in this country, the institutions that control all our economic futures, and how the growing number of poor folks here and abroad are faring, was neatly summed up in just four headlines that appeared on today’s Bloomberg news website.

Here they are. Read ‘em and weep:

“Central Banks Keep Easing After Cuts Fail To Spur Growth”

“Temporary Workers Near U.S. Record Makes Kelly A Winner” [Kelly Services is a major supplier of temporary help]

“No Lehman Moments As Biggest Banks Deemed Too Big To Fail”

“U.S. Budgets Throw Poor Grandmas, Kids Off The Train”

Got it now? The people supposedly in control aren’t. They are panicking and in desperation are trying bizarre measures that aren’t working. The only effects of these actions by the best and brightest at the helm is to further enrich the very rich and screw everyone else.

Back to sleep now. A new round of campaign commercials on TV will soon come along that will convince you that in spite of the reality you’re seeing and living, things are really getting better. And if you can’t wait for them to appear, check out the daily dole of financial “news” assuring you the same thing spewed by corporate-controlled media.

As the immortal George Carlin noted, “The reason they call it the American dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

(My new novel, Murder At Bernstein’s, about a financial news billionaire who wants to be elected Mayor of Philadelphia, is now available from Amazon.)

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20130505_A_tea_party_for_progressives.html

However…

It did provide a great mechanism for protest, and was a proven means of keeping governments from getting too cozy with elements of an economy that needed to be kept in check so as not to abuse a citizenry. In other words, it helped keep the pigs in the pen where they could be fattened for the general good, rather than allowing them to rut unchecked in the garden.

Perhaps the most frequently noted historical example of this keep-’em-well-behaved function was Chancellor Bismarck’s social welfare reforms in 1880′s Germany. These “took the wind out of the sails of socailism,” as the phrase went, by adopting some of the best features of socialism while leaving a largely capitalist economy in place.

Which brings us to the present state of these badly dis-united United States. A flagrantly corrupt, out of control, influence buying Wall Street is blithely robbing the rest of society blind with the full connivance of a government it has bought or controls in other ways. There are many reasons this situation came into being and continues to exist. But the primary one is lack of a taming alternative. There’s no socialist alternative to take the wind out of this Wall Street pirate’s sails. There isn’t even a major non-socialist political party (you know, like the Democrats) that has not been bought and paid for.

So here’s my May Day suggestion. Bring back an aggressive, articulate, well led and honest socialist movement. Have it it clearly lay out its alternatives to the present economic system. Use the growing strength of this movement to scare the pants off the rutting pigs of The Street. And in a larger sense, use the socialist threat to help recreate the middle class-friendly capitalism that existed in this country before a clique that once help create wealth decided they deserved it all.

It really is time to put the pigs back in their pens.

(Michael Silverstein’s new novel, Murder At Bernstein’s, about a financial news billionaire who wants to get elected Mayor of Philadelphia, is now available on Amazon. Silverstein is a former senior editor with Bloomberg News, and National Public Radio’s Wall Street poet.)

A good idea? Maybe. After all, President Obama supports the same approach. So if this approach to reform business taxes has this kind of support, why not apply exactly the same approach to the Payroll Tax that supports Social Security?

Instead of applying a 6.2 percent Payroll Tax rate only to the income of middle class working taxpayers making less than $113,700 per year and their employers, spread the net and apply it to all earners at all income levels and to unearned income as well as earned income. Then, not use the extra income generated to reduce deficits, or boost funding in a Social Security Trust when the Social Security system is already well funded for decades, but instead use the extra revenue to reduce all payroll taxes to 4 or 4.5 percent, both for individuals and their company employers.

This is exactly what Republicans and President Obama want to do with business taxes. The rates of all payers here are flat, not progressive — everyone pays the same, a long time conservative preference. The total amount of taxes collected is not increased, merely shifted from individuals and businesses currently over-taxed to those currently untaxed. This is therefore not a tax hike, just a tax shift via net spreading — just like the Republican business tax proposal.

As to how this Republican-style Payroll Tax reform would benefit the overall economy, the results would be very positive indeed. The extra income to middle class workers would almost all get spent, pouring billions into sales of more products and services. Extra income for middle class workers would also keep more of them from becoming poor enough to need government entitlements, reducing government costs. Small-scale employers, who pay their own 6.2 share of the Payroll Tax, would also get a tremendous bottom line boost that would allow them to increase their hiring.

The argument that this Payroll Tax reform would reduce investment from those now excluded from this tax is foolish. The reason is that investment is best generated by sales increases, not tax breaks. Makers need takers to buy their goods and services. With the middle class richer, investment would pour into meeting the middle class’ greater capacity to buy what the makers make.

This Republican-style reform of the Payroll Tax would even have very solid backing from progressives in the Democratic Party. It’s the kind of middle class boost that progressives have always supported.

A Republican-style tax approach that Democratic progressives can support and that can give a huge boost to the overall economy without actually increasing overall tax levels. What is there not to like here?

(Michael Silverstein’s new novel, Murder At Bernstein’s, about a financial news billionaire who wants to get elected Mayor of Philadelphia, is now available on Amazon. Silverstein is a former senior editor with Bloomberg News, and National Public Radio’s Wall Street poet.)

In the economic realm, over a period of decades, I’ve watched as some very important words have come to be used systematically, pervasively, and brilliantly to make certain conclusions that benefit the rich seem undeniable, and thence go on to generate policies favorable to the rich and inimical to everyone else.

Take the word “growth,” for example. Economic growth is good, right? Policies that foster growth are the right policies for a government to promote, right? Well, not necessarily.

If all or virtually all the added wealth generated by this growth goes to the very top, the already rich who get richer because of it, and little if any trickles down to everyone else, what’s so good about this kind of growth? And why do everything possible to promote it, if doing so actually works against the interests of all but a few — as indeed has been the case with the growth in the American economy in recent decades.

Economic growth that isn’t fairly and appropriately apportioned isn’t a good thing. So why treat reports of “growth” in an economy as a sign of progress, without clearly specifying where its benefits are going? People who dig down into economic reports know what’s happening here. But reportage about “growth” generally is just a one-word outline picture that’s rarely filled in the details. This omission isn’t accidental either. Not just media laziness. It’s the end product of deliberate pro-rich word manipulation.

Then there’s words like “employment” and “unemployment.” More jobs are good, right? A lower unemployment rate means that the real world economy in which most people live is getting better, right? Well, not necessarily.

Again, people who burrow down into official numbers see the flaws of such thinking. Though millions of new jobs have indeed been created since the 2008 market crash, the percentage of Americans actually working is at the lowest level since 1979. Jobs, in other words, are being created slower than population increase. As to the quality of the new jobs being created, most are in low wage categories such as retail and hospitality, jobs that also offer few benefits, going nowhere jobs that leave people on the cusp of poverty.

Many of these jobs are also part-time, or second and even third jobs for individuals, which works to skew the unemployment numbers. People who drop out of the workforce are not even counted as unemployed. A growing number of these dropouts do so to collect disability from the government because the pay is better than they could get at a box store.

The bare employment and unemployment numbers used to tell Americans how the economy is doing, and which act in important ways to set government policies, are thus both skewed and highly deceptive — and they permit thinking and policies that don’t upset a pro-rich agenda.

And then there’s the “reform” word. Labor markets have been “reformed” like crazy in recent decades. Labor union power “reformed” drastically downward. “Reform” of Wall Street and the rich-friendly tax code meanwhile has been middling bordering on the piddling.

The tyrants in Orwell’s 1984 used newspeak to trim the size of language down to a point where even conceiving of less tyrannical government became impossible. The Ayn Randian word manipulators use a more subtle means of word control, giving words that can’t be avoided in economic debates meanings that always seem to serve their own purposes.

Today’s commonly used economic words tell a pleasant tale of economic recovery. The economy is growing. Employment and unemployment numbers are improving. Washington’s reform agenda is progressing nicely.

Every day in every way things are getting better and better. Except not really.

(Michael Silverstein’s new comic novel, Murder At Bernstein’s, about a financial news billionaire who wants to get elected Mayor of Philadelphia, is now available on Amazon. Silverstein is a former senior editor with Bloomberg News, and National Public Radio’s Wall Street poet.)

What follows is a manic romp that sucks in the world’s wackiest detective (who now bills himself a freelance intellectual), a financial poet praying for the big break, a head hunter prone to extreme sexual expressiveness, a Philadelphia lawyer who will take anyone as a client, a homicide detective seeking true love, a municipal repair crew run amok, and a parrot with a tendency to become offensive.

(Michael Silverstein’s new comic novel, Murder At Bernstein’s, about a financial news billionaire who wants to get elected Mayor of Philadelphia, is now available on Amazon.

Writing a novel, Mr. B.?

If only, Selig. Doing my taxes. Or starting them anyway. They are so, so, so…

Crazy? Irritating? Unfair?

All that, Selig. No time now to complain about them, though. Gotta run. Places to go. People to see. Derivatives to churn out.

You know, Mr. B., maybe we don’t really need taxes. I have an idea that might let us abolish them altogether.

Abolish taxes? Really?

Yes, sir. The other day I was speaking with one of the company’s bond traders…

Always an educational experience, Selig. Continue, please.

Well, sir, he mentioned how the Fed is buying $45 billion a month in long-term Treasury bonds.

That’s right, Selig.

And that comes out to $540 billion a year.

I don’t have my calculator with me, but that sounds right. Carry on.

Then on the radio, Mr. B., I heard that the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, this fiscal year was projecting the national government’s deficit would be $845 billion. Which means that this year one part of the government, The Fed, would be buying 64 percent of the debt issued by another part of the government, the Treasury, with both using the same collateral — the full faith and credit of the United States.

You see a problem here, Selig?

Of course not, sir. Who could possibly think such a thing? It got me thinking, though. If The Fed is already borrowing 64 percent of new debt issued by The Treasury to fund the deficit, why not borrow it all? Then there wouldn’t be all those arguments in Washington about how deficits are endangering the economy because there would always be a willing buyer for this debt.

Not a bad idea, Selig. But what has this got to do with taxes?

Well, Mr. B., if one part of government spending — the part funded by deficits — was all funded by The Fed’s buying bonds from the Treasury, why not have The Treasury issue bonds to cover the part of government spending now paid for with taxes? Then we could do away with income taxes altogether.

Great Reagan’s ghost! You’re right, Selig! Then all the extra spending possible because Americans would no longer be paying taxes would generate the biggest boom since sub-prime mortgage lending. I’m seeing Dow 50,000 here. But wait. Wouldn’t this notion play havoc with the country’s credit rating?

It probably would, Mr. B. In fact it might give the United States a credit rating a notch or two lower than the Bank of Cyprus. But so what? Low credit ratings may scare off private lenders, or make them demand higher interest on their loans. But when S&P lowered the credit rating of the U.S. from triple-A to AA+, borrowing of this country’s debt actually increased and at lower rates, too, because the main buyer is The Fed, and it doesn’t care about the country’s credit rating, doesn’t demand higher interest rates either, because in essence it is lending to itself.

I’m feeling a little dizzy here, Selig. No more deficit worries. No more income taxes. Surely this would have to catch up with the government somewhere down the road.

Not necessarily, sir. You know my wife reads her Bible regularly.

I do know that, Selig. I hope your good woman is well and she still prays for me.

She is well, sir, and she prays for you nightly. Fervently. As if our economic survival depended on your good will.

A prudent woman as well religious one. Good combination. But why do you mention her now, Selig?

Because when I told her my idea, she referred me to Leviticus in the Bible where it speaks about debt forgiveness every few years, and declaring a Jubilee celebration when one occurs.

So, Selig? So?

So, sir, every few years government leaders and Fed policy makers could go on a retreat together, and come back declaring a Jubilee on all outstanding government debt held by the Federal Reserve. Then the worrisome debt built up by deficits would disappear, income taxes would never have to come around again, and we could start the whole borrow-from-ourselves-to-pay-for-everything cycle all over again. And because this would be sanctioned by God, and no one in Washington would dare admit being a non-believer, there would be no objections.

Selig, I’ll admit I am impressed. Very impressed. I thought all the cleaning chemicals you’ve been inhaling in order to keep this washroom sparkling had probably damaged your brain. Now I see they have actually enhanced its operation. I’m even thinking we hold meetings of the company’s Ethic Committee down here in the future, have them do some washroom inhales, better to ensure we’re compliant with all government regulations.

I’ll work on the seating arrangements, sir.

Do that. Ha ha ha ha. Forgive me for tittering, Selig. But won’t people be surprised when they hear that this country’s new economic policies were devised by a man whose main job is unplugging toilets at Goldman Sachs?

Actually, Mr. B., I don’t think many people would find that surprising in the least.

(Michael Silverstein’s new comic novel, Murder At Bernstein’s, about a financial news billionaire who wants to get elected Mayor of Philadelphia, is now available on Amazon.)