You know what's crazy, the minimum wage in North Carolina is still 7 dollars and change. How is that acceptable in today's world? Cheaper living was once a reason why people would move down there...
You know what's crazy, the minimum wage in North Carolina is still 7 dollars and change. How is that acceptable in today's world? Cheaper living was once a reason why people would move down there from New Jersey (where I'm from), but cheaper living in any state today seems to be a thing of the past.
Does it really matter, though? I live in NC as well and haven't seen a job paying minimum wage since pre-COVID. Most jobs seems to start out in the $13-15/hr range. At that point, minimum wage is...
Does it really matter, though? I live in NC as well and haven't seen a job paying minimum wage since pre-COVID. Most jobs seems to start out in the $13-15/hr range. At that point, minimum wage is a moot point.
Yeah, still too low, but this article supports my theory from a previous post that low-wage earners got a sizable boost in pay while the middle class did not.
Following up from @MortimerHoughton's question: How are companies recording record profits if most of the price increase is labor costs? Wages have largely kept up with inflation. But whose wages?...
Following up from @MortimerHoughton's question: How are companies recording record profits if most of the price increase is labor costs?
Wages have largely kept up with inflation. But whose wages?
In fact, lower-wage workers saw the highest median nominal wage growth rates.
In the post-COVID-19 recovery, the share of individuals with negative real wage growth rose sharply and reached 55.5 percent before falling back to the current 53.4 percent. The last time the percentage was this high was in 2011.
Despite the stronger wage growth due to the tightness of the labor market, a majority of workers are finding their wages falling even further behind inflation. For workers who experienced a decline in their real wage in second quarter 2022, the median decline was 8.6 percent.
With the sudden sharp hikes in prices, over half the USA is struggling to simply get by.
Next up, I would like to look at which corporate profits are up and why.
Keep in mind that this data is for the year with some of the highest inflation and modern numbers are trending down while wage growth is keeping up. What we were seeing in 2021 was the impact of...
Keep in mind that this data is for the year with some of the highest inflation and modern numbers are trending down while wage growth is keeping up.
What we were seeing in 2021 was the impact of the war between Russia and Ukraine and post COVID shortages. Now that those have cleared up and interest rates are high enough to kill the rampant inflation the wage growth has come back.
You should generally expect this to continue for the United States based on global trends, unless something very disruptive happens again like a war between China and Taiwan or the war between Ukraine and Russia coming nuclear.
Or some sort of global global warming created catastrophic event, like an ocean plankton die off or something like that.
Wage growth is going to keep holding up or even rising so long as we continue to block and restrict trade with countries like China. At the end of the day is a well-being of the people is twofold....
Wage growth is going to keep holding up or even rising so long as we continue to block and restrict trade with countries like China.
At the end of the day is a well-being of the people is twofold.
First, the fact that investing in the productivity of an individual is beneficial.
Second, having a culture in which excessive subsidies towards industry which harm consumers and suppress consumer demand are not accepted or allowed.
America, having those two things, was able to bypass that culture and the fact that investing in individuals created productivity by exporting our trade to authoritarian nations like China who dramatically pervert their markets with subsidies on their industry the cost of their consumers so that they can take a larger and larger share of the world manufacturing base.
Germany was a lesser problem, but they did the same thing.
Is no coincidence that the sudden move towards a lack of support of trade with the current global market has created this sudden trend of wage growth in the United States where we had relatively stagnant median real wages for years.
Continue to advocate for trade only with nations who do not suppress the wages of their workers, and we will see our own welfare continue to increase.
And tear down the global dollar system. Stop enabling these global trade imbalances to sustain themselves for such a long period of time.
I find the bi-modal distribution of wage growth to be interesting. The right half of the curve looks pretty natural, but the left half has a massive chunk in the 0% category, with the rest of the...
I find the bi-modal distribution of wage growth to be interesting. The right half of the curve looks pretty natural, but the left half has a massive chunk in the 0% category, with the rest of the bars on the left shorter than the ones on the right. I guess that backs up the macroeconomic idea that wages are less likely to go down. Presumably many of those 0% changes would have been negative but the labor market won’t tolerate that very well.
It looks very reminiscent of standardized test scores. You’ll usually see a massive bump just above the failure line with a suspiciously short line just below. The suspicion there is the graders take pity on the students and give them a point or two if they’re barely failing.
You know what's crazy, the minimum wage in North Carolina is still 7 dollars and change. How is that acceptable in today's world? Cheaper living was once a reason why people would move down there from New Jersey (where I'm from), but cheaper living in any state today seems to be a thing of the past.
Does it really matter, though? I live in NC as well and haven't seen a job paying minimum wage since pre-COVID. Most jobs seems to start out in the $13-15/hr range. At that point, minimum wage is a moot point.
Yeah, still too low, but this article supports my theory from a previous post that low-wage earners got a sizable boost in pay while the middle class did not.
Following up from @MortimerHoughton's question: How are companies recording record profits if most of the price increase is labor costs?
Wages have largely kept up with inflation. But whose wages?
So why are so many people hurting?
More workers find their wages falling even further behind inflation
With the sudden sharp hikes in prices, over half the USA is struggling to simply get by.
Next up, I would like to look at which corporate profits are up and why.
Keep in mind that this data is for the year with some of the highest inflation and modern numbers are trending down while wage growth is keeping up.
What we were seeing in 2021 was the impact of the war between Russia and Ukraine and post COVID shortages. Now that those have cleared up and interest rates are high enough to kill the rampant inflation the wage growth has come back.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
You should generally expect this to continue for the United States based on global trends, unless something very disruptive happens again like a war between China and Taiwan or the war between Ukraine and Russia coming nuclear.
Or some sort of global global warming created catastrophic event, like an ocean plankton die off or something like that.
Wage growth is going to keep holding up or even rising so long as we continue to block and restrict trade with countries like China.
At the end of the day is a well-being of the people is twofold.
First, the fact that investing in the productivity of an individual is beneficial.
Second, having a culture in which excessive subsidies towards industry which harm consumers and suppress consumer demand are not accepted or allowed.
America, having those two things, was able to bypass that culture and the fact that investing in individuals created productivity by exporting our trade to authoritarian nations like China who dramatically pervert their markets with subsidies on their industry the cost of their consumers so that they can take a larger and larger share of the world manufacturing base.
Germany was a lesser problem, but they did the same thing.
Is no coincidence that the sudden move towards a lack of support of trade with the current global market has created this sudden trend of wage growth in the United States where we had relatively stagnant median real wages for years.
Continue to advocate for trade only with nations who do not suppress the wages of their workers, and we will see our own welfare continue to increase.
And tear down the global dollar system. Stop enabling these global trade imbalances to sustain themselves for such a long period of time.
I find the bi-modal distribution of wage growth to be interesting. The right half of the curve looks pretty natural, but the left half has a massive chunk in the 0% category, with the rest of the bars on the left shorter than the ones on the right. I guess that backs up the macroeconomic idea that wages are less likely to go down. Presumably many of those 0% changes would have been negative but the labor market won’t tolerate that very well.
It looks very reminiscent of standardized test scores. You’ll usually see a massive bump just above the failure line with a suspiciously short line just below. The suspicion there is the graders take pity on the students and give them a point or two if they’re barely failing.