“I wrote a book in 2015 called More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First. I did the update for early 2016 for the US edition. And in the chapter about economics, one of the chapters about poverty and so on, I was getting US data. And I saw this chart, and it showed the income, the earnings of the 80 percent of the population, roughly, they call it non-managerial, non-supervisory workers, regular working people," he said.
"The chart of their earnings after inflation since the 70s, plotted against corporate earnings and corporate profits. It was absolutely stunning. Earnings for most Americans after inflation, completely flat since 1974. Flat. And everything else up like a hockey stick, but the top 20 percent and for corporate earnings and profits. And that was the moment I thought, it’s totally failed.”
Posobiec responded by describing what he sees happening today:
“There’s a phrase I’ve heard to describe it... they call it the ‘silent recession.’ Because you have so many people stuck in this economic stagnancy. Then you've got young people — millennials, Gen Z — that are trying to break into the system but are facing all of these headwinds. But you've got so many people who, to use the slang, ‘ they've already secured their bag,’ and so they don’t even see that all of this is going on around them because if you're already in the real estate market, if you're already in the stock market, life seems great because they’re above that line, in the hockey stick territory.”
Later in the show, Hilton turned to California as an example of broader systemic failure:
“I used to make a joke in my speeches about how, well, there is one area where we’re not the worst in America. Their great success story: roads. Are roads in California only 47th out of 50? When I wrote this letter, well, it’s the Wall Street Journal, I better get my facts right. I went and checked every single data point that I was about to make my joke about the roads. I looked it up. Now we’re 50th on that as well.
"I mean, it’s absolutely stunning. It’s a total failure. And the point that everyone needs to understand around the country is this is what happens when the Left get everything that they want because they’ve been in power with no restraint whatsoever.
"Every statewide office, the super majority in the legislature, so that they can pass anything that they want. Republicans have had no input or ability to constrain that. They run all the big cities, all the big counties. This is what you get. We’ve seen this far-left experiment play out here in California better than anywhere else. And the results are a total disaster.
"And the people hurt the most are regular working-class Californians, small businesses, those who can least afford. I mean, we haven’t even got into crime. I mean, homelessness, the squalor of our great cities. It’s just, you know, education we haven’t talked about, reading scores, math scores, the worst in the country. I mean, everything is a disaster.”
