The Fed controls our money supply: they inflate it/deflate it. They have different "tools" to do that, but, if i understand it correctly, it all boils down to inflating/deflating our money supply, which is composed of things like paper money, coins, stocks, bonds, mortgages, cds, ect.
They always tell us that we need inflation to have a healthy economy. They tell us deflation is the worst thing that could happen and imply that it would lead to extreme poverty for the general public.
My impression is that inflation has caused poverty and that our productivity gains should be leading to deflation.
Somehow, I get the impression that the federal reserve banks are using their control of our money supply to rip us off. The primary cause of this seems to me to be usury.
But all that aside, if you take all the "wages" in america they add up to less than half of our gdp. Moreover, those "wages" used to come to that figure include "investment income." Rendering the statistic somewhat meaningless.
Government consumes (including the money they borrow to fund their operations) less than one quarter of gdp.
The overwhelming majority of american workers have seen their real wages decline over the past several decades. Yet, the richest one or two percent have seen their "wages" dramatically increase/skyrocket.
Put it this way, our nation produces 16 trillion dollars a year. Our government consumes less than 4 trillion dollars a year. That would leave 12 trillion dollars. If you ignored the fact that government workers get a wage and just divided up the 12 trillion equally among all 300 million americans, each one would get 40 thousand dollars a year. So, a family of 8 would get an income of 400 thousand dollars and if they had a government job or received government benefits, even more than that.
In other words, the fruits of our labor are not declining, they are increasing, but we are getting less and less of them. One way that seems to be accomplished is by over-inflating the economy and then lying to us about it. Another way that seems to be accomplished is by paying most of us disgustingly low wages, for what we produce (as a result of the massive productivity gains which have compounded over the centuries, since the industrial revolution).
The only real wealth creating machine that I know of is compounded gains in productivity. Trying to do that with interest on loans/usury/stock market gambling, on the other hand, seems to be an illusion/an economy wrecker/poverty creator. Although, as we can plainly see, everyone working still produces wealth and productivity gains keep on compounding, even though all that nonsense is going on. Still, it does seem to be driving the overwhelming majority of americans into poverty and making a relatively tiny fraction fantastically rich.