On the recordDecember 5, 2017
Next, Mr. President, I have a couple of charts here. I don't know whether the Presiding Officer can see them from where he is sitting. I can barely see them from right here. The first chart we are going to take a look at deals with the--on this side over here, we have median household income for Americans since 1987. Over on this side, we have corporate profits in the billions of dollars. When we come back here to 1987, we look at the orange line here, and that is median household income in 2016 dollars. The median household income in 1987 was just a shade over $50,000. All of these years later, in 2017, it is just a little bit higher. It has gone up a little bit but not a whole lot--maybe close to $60,000, but I don't know that it is any higher than that. It has gone up a little bit, really, over the last few years. The green line here on our chart is corporate profits. When we go back to 1987, corporate profits were equal to about--it looks like $30,000 billion, and if I am not mistaken, that would be maybe $30 trillion. I hope I have that right. That was 1987. If you look at what has happened, it has gone up and down. This is during the great recession when we fell off the cliff and almost fell off the world. In 2007, 2008, we started to climb back out of it. Today, the corporate profits have roughly doubled in this country since 1987--roughly doubled--while median household income is growing a tiny bit but actually not that much.…
