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Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

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Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#161

Post by nickpp »

tpxl wrote: post #142
WalterBright wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government tries hard to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand, but so far has failed 100% of the time. The government can implement wage and price controls, but those still do not set the actual value. For example, in the USSR, the price of bread was fixed by the state. But the real price of bread was how long you were willing to wait in line for it. BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay yo…

> but so far has failed 100% of the time Labor rights have been a raging success. 40 hour work weeks, minimum wage, sick leave, vacation leave (in non-shithole countries). >BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to. What happens when competition with deeper pockets price dumps you into oblivion? Free market is a free market only when there is competition based on…

> What happens when competition with deeper pockets price dumps you into oblivion?

Funny you should ask. There was a famous case from the beginning of the last century where German bromide producers price-dumped it the U.S. in an effort to undermine Dow's efforts in the same direction. The result? They failed miserably.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Chemical_Company

> your apologism of capitalists is disgusting

Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again. It brought billions out of poverty and it still does to this very day, when allowed to work, of course.

If you find that disgusting - I am guessing you are a big fan of poverty. I would prefer a world in which everyone is rather rich (or at least well off), a world that no system other than capitalism is even close to providing.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#163

Post by reliabilityguy »

hvb2 wrote: post #141
reliabilityguy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which would mean food gets more expensive, right? Which in turn will create more pressure to increase the salaries until it reaches the equilibrium that satisfies everyone. The alternative is to use de-facto slave labor just for the sake of cheap food?

You're missing an important piece here. The lower your income is, the bigger the % you spend on necessities like food. So when those go up, the lower incomes are again hit the hardest as they spend a higher percentage of their total income on it. And these are necessities not nice to haves

> You're missing an important piece here.

I am not. You are confusing transient effects with the equilibrium state.

Btw, for low wage employees everything is a significant % of their wage. The only meaningful way to increase their wages is to decrease the supply of cheap labor. This is exactly what happened during Covid where no one was willing to work for $8/hr and the wages went up.

When people realize that their wage doesn’t guarantee good living they will look for a better job or demand a raise.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#164

Post by reliabilityguy »

hvb2 wrote: post #99
monero-xmr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhhh yes precisely. That helps the poor and hurts Wall Street

I genuinely wonder what you've done over the last few years. Rising salaries will lead to inflation. Expecting anything else is fantasy

> Rising salaries will lead to inflation. Expecting anything else is fantasy

No. Riding salaries do not lead to inflation by themselves. What leads to inflation is the increase in money circulating on the market. In other words: printing money leads to inflation.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#165

Post by dns_snek »

roywiggins wrote: post #36
yalogin wrote: post #24

What slowing wage growth? For the poorest the wages have essentially not increased for a long time right? It hasn’t even kept up with inflation. The recent bill actually makes it much worse.

As far as I can tell, over the last few years at least, that's mostly not true: wages outpaced inflation, and it outpaced inflation more for lower-income workers than higher. > In stark contrast to prior decades, low-wage workers experienced dramatically fast real wage growth between 2019 and 2023 https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/ ("real wages" are wages adjusted for inflation)

If these reports say that things are better for low income people, why do people living that reality overwhelmingly disagree? Any statistics derived from inflation figures are doomed to be wrong when the inflation data was wrong to begin with.

I'm not in the US, but our inflation data was just as wrong as I've heard the US data was. Official numbers were 10% but literally everything went up at least 20%. Everyone I spoke to had their cost of living increase by significantly more than the official inflation figures.

And when "real wage growth" over 4 years is deemed to be just 13%, it's essentially guaranteed that real wage growth was in fact negative when you consider the disparity between real and official inflation figures. Statistics such as food insecurity rate, personal savings rate, and credit card delinquency rate would certainly support that.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#166

Post by JumpCrisscross »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #134
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> absolutely do once the math of tariffs makes your manufacturing abroad not competitive with onshored one If someone bet on e.g. our Japan tariffs three months ago, they lost money. (Nobody did. The types that take Trump at his word on tariffs aren’t making economically significant decisions.)

I do not know why anyone would bet that the executive order defined tariffs would stay. It was and still clear as a day that Trump uses them to force people to the negotiation table. Obviously, negotiated deal may look different. Regardless, tariffs as an instrument have their merit with Trump or without Trump. Strategically, US has to bring manufacturing (and as much of a supply chains) back, there is no way around…

> do not know why anyone would bet that the executive order defined tariffs would stay

If nobody bets on the tariffs staying then manufacturing doesn’t come back. The restoring of manufacturing is the bet.

> US has to bring manufacturing (and as much of a supply chains) back

Sure. These tariffs don’t do that.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#167

Post by tossandthrow »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #138
tossandthrow wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All arguments against lower class people getting higher wages are IMHO wildly inappropriate. "you need lower wages to avoid wage compression", "you need lower wage so we can have more employed people"... If wage compression occurs, then companies have to deal with Theo senior employees seeking elsewhere - or pay them fairly.

> All arguments against lower class people getting higher wages are IMHO wildly inappropriate. This kind of emotional reasoning is wildly inappropriate IMHO. The commenter is not making an argument against lifting lower class wages. They’re making an observation of how economic theory may apply to this scenario. > pay them fairly Define “fairly”?

> Define “fairly”?

In this context of wage compression it is fairly easy as it is just ensuring that they are paid comparatively more than the more junior employees that apparently are getting the same or close to the same salary.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#168

Post by JumpCrisscross »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #164
hvb2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely wonder what you've done over the last few years. Rising salaries will lead to inflation. Expecting anything else is fantasy

> Rising salaries will lead to inflation. Expecting anything else is fantasy No. Riding salaries do not lead to inflation by themselves. What leads to inflation is the increase in money circulating on the market. In other words: printing money leads to inflation.

> Riding salaries do not lead to inflation by themselves. What leads to inflation is the increase in money circulating on the market

This is nonsense. If an economy doubles and the money supply grows 10%, you get deflation. If the money supply is stable and half the country gets bombed, you get inflation.

Price levels are a function of both money demand and money supply. Ignoring the demand side of the equation doesn’t work.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#169

Post by dgb23 »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #71
agent_turtle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots. I can't anymore, folks. Republicans passed the largest tax cuts for billionaires, increased the deficit by trillions, and kicked millions of people of medicaid. Meanwhile, Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs we've ever seen which affect the poorest the most. Yet…

> Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs Tariffs incentivize domestic production. See the case of chicken tax and pickup trucks. While we do pay for tariffs now, later down the road we should not as more things would be made domestically. If you don’t do tariffs, there is no way to force producers to onshore.

Only sector targeted tariffs paired with long term investment and commitment do that.
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