That's absolutely true. The money went into bailouts. The bailouts were necessary because of speculation on fictitious assets and obscure derivative products. What did they do with the money? Buy more obscure derivatives, and speculation in asset markets. No structural reform was borne of the bailouts, the bubbles just got larger. Productivity, spending, and demand have all stagnated, so in order to signal any kind of growth, they moved the goalposts to include these 0% interest speculative bubbles in the GDP. No physical growth is taking place, just the opposite, prices are rising where they should be falling with decreased demand. Wages are not going to make a dent, your wages are shoveling sand against an ocean of bubble markets. Hedge funds that produce nothing are buying productive assets like factories, just to liquidate them and all the jobs they provide to make more money on margins. The solution isn't to raise wages, rather to reintroduce risk into investment. Even if your factory is only running at 2% growth per year, a hedge fund borrowing at 0% interest will acquire that business just to liquidate it for that 2% with no overhead risk via servicing the interest on the initial loaned capital.
The dot-com bubble burst, and the money became the mortgage bubble. The mortgage bubble burst and became a hybrid beast. Now tech companies like Twitter and Apple can get a 0% interest loan of a few billion dollars, buy back their own stock in inflate it's value, liquidate that stock to pay back the loan for the original amount of money, and then take the margin earnings and buy assets like real-estate that will inflate even faster. We move those interest rates by 1%, the whole castle comes down. The minimum wage argument is deflecting from the actual matters at hand, which is our whole economy has become Enron.
Stop talking about irrelevant wages and start talking about 0% interest rates. Remove the punch bowl and your money will be worth something again.
