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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

#251

Post by notahacker »

Gareth321 wrote: post #227
Tadpole9181 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, importantly, tariffs are payed by the importing party. This means they affect the base price of the product and cannot be made progressive. You could set up a deduction system... But that's retroactive (poor people still don't have that money for a whole year) and dramatically complicates their tax filing burden and financial record keeping requirements. The rich can afford lawyers and accountants, so the IRS ha…

> And, importantly, tariffs are payed by the importing party. This means they affect the base price of the product and cannot be made progressive. This is not correct. The cost of tariffs are shared by the distributor and customer. The proportion is determined by the elasticity of demand. By this I mean that for goods and services which people rely on, like gas, they will pay almost all of the cost of the tariff beca…

> Because so much menial labour is currently offshored, the primary benefactor of tariffs is expected to be the poor and working classes.

See, I was with you until this (OK, mostly with you, luxury goods are price inelastic so the buyer definitely pays).

The primary beneficiary of a carefully designed tariff policy might be some working class people in some industries (and some wealthy owners, natch), at the expense of direct and indirect customers of those industries who may or may not be poor themselves. But an idiot imposing blanket unpredictable tariffs with promises to negotiate "great deals" that lift them in future costs far more of those manufacturing jobs than it protects, because on the one hand it creates enormous supply chain risk to US manufacturing, and on the other hand overseas companies aren't investing in building new facilities in the US because of a 40% tariff levied until the POTUS changes his mind in a few months time...

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#252

Post by reliabilityguy »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #218
reliabilityguy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That particular outcome is possible when you make tariffs in a smart and predictable way. You would have to prove that claim. There is more than one way to achieve a specific goal. > Trumps tariffs are unpredictable and also make local producers pay more for raw material they need. It’s one of the consequences. There are other ones. Is your only objective is to ensure that local manufacturers pay the least amount p…

This isn't rocket science. If you want somebody to spend a lot of money and time setting up production in the US, tariffs have to be stable and predictable. If that doesn't make sense to you, I didn't know what to say.

And they are after the deals are signed, no?

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#253

Post by potato3732842 »

dns_snek wrote: post #165
roywiggins wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

>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.

All the math that underpins the usual idiots screeching about "muh compounding gains/interest" applies to the divergence between real inflation and official inflation as well. You can hide a lot of divergence between the real value of the currency and the official value by "simply" having the official number be low by a couple percent over time.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#254

Post by trevi »

westmeal wrote: post #221
chiefalchemist wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, importantly, tariffs are payed by the importing party. This means they affect the base price of the product and cannot be made progressive Yes. But that cost can be absorbed across the board. The manufacturer can lower their margins. The importer / distributor / wholesaler can do the same. The B2B / B2C seller can do the same. It doesn’t all necessarily get directly passed to the buyer. Another question that few…

But why would the manufacturer or distributor lower their margins? Charity?

Price elasticity of demand (=sensitivity to price changes). If the seller is afraid that higher prices will significantly impact sales (people won't buy the product or buy alternatives), it might accept a lower margin in order to maintain the volume.

Also market competition can be a factor: if competitors are not raising prices (or by smaller amounts), you might lose market share.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#255

Post by [deleted] »

refurb wrote: post #230
rester324 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but I don't understand your comment. Are you sure you are responding to the right message? The OP specifically called out trickle-down economics. Which is a myth, a false belief that somehow not taxing rich companies and not redistributing a country's wealth through taxes and other means, companies will do the right thing eventually, and they will raise the wages instead by their own incentives. Which they neve…

That’s not what “trickle down economics” is. It’s basically the Laffer curve which argues that tax receipts can actually go down with higher taxes rates as tax’s can discourage growth if high enough. Thus if you lower taxes, economics growth increases (overall tax receipts go up, not down).

[deleted]

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#256

Post by potato3732842 »

silisili wrote: post #113
bluefirebrand wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This probably means that those wages were being suppressed hard for years and they finally weren't able to hire people at that wage anymore

You're probably right, but it ultimately leads to wage compression which is for most of the middle class a disaster. You don't have to look far to see everyday people complaining about the price of a burger or movie ticket. IMHO, it doesn't "lift all boats", it pulls down the middle and upper middle classes. Yeah, the lower wage jobs made more money, but they didn't gain much if anything in affordability, since all o…

>IMHO, it doesn't "lift all boats", it pulls down the middle and upper middle classes.

It's hard to feel particularly bad for the them when the CurrentShitshow(TM) has largely been a result of the top-ish of the middle being comfortable enough that they're happy to peddle (sometimes at the behest of the most wealthy, sometimes organically) all sorts of bad ideas both economic and social that have kneecapped our economies and torn our societies apart. Like it wasn't the Uber Drivers who thought it would be a good idea to sell out the industrial portions of our economy and make race baiting a cornerstone of national politics.

I feel much greater sympathy for the cohort that currently works $15-25hr jobs and could have perhaps moved to $30-40 roles over time, bought a house and raised some kids in general economic stability if not for fairly self imposed costs and instability.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#257

Post by TimorousBestie »

xienze wrote: post #238
TimorousBestie wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-... 869k workers. The size of a country larger than Luxembourg.

Doesn't the fact that 98.9% of all workers earn more than the minimum wage kinda highlight that it's really not necessary for the federal government to increase it? Clearly it's nearly impossible except in limited circumstance to actually _find_ workers who'll accept the minimum wage, hence the fact that hardly anyone is paying it.

> But is anyone _actually_ getting paid the minimum wage these days?

Yes.

> Clearly it's nearly impossible except in limited circumstance

No, you exaggerate. It’s a large number of people. I wouldn’t say it’s nearly impossible to find someone from Indianapolis (pop. 879k, 2024 est.), and the number of Americans is much larger than the number of working Americans.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#258

Post by agent_turtle »

xienze wrote: post #238
TimorousBestie wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-... 869k workers. The size of a country larger than Luxembourg.

Doesn't the fact that 98.9% of all workers earn more than the minimum wage kinda highlight that it's really not necessary for the federal government to increase it? Clearly it's nearly impossible except in limited circumstance to actually _find_ workers who'll accept the minimum wage, hence the fact that hardly anyone is paying it.

7.26 is technically more than 7.25. Further, a low floor acts as a weight, depressing wages generally.

"Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would lift wages for over 33 million workers": https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-15-by-2025/

(For the record, 33 million is ~6 million more than the population of Australia)

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#259

Post by DrillShopper »

NekkoDroid wrote: post #240
Joeri wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the short term: fear of reprisals from Trump, as he clearly warned them not to raise prices. In the long term markets find a new equilibrium, as they always do when a new tax is imposed, and that is probably going to be a combination of lower margins, higher prices for the consumer and lower prices for foreign suppliers.

> fear of reprisals from Trump Realistically, what's he gonna do? Shut down the company, which he oh so desperatly wants in the US? Tax them more, driving their cost up more?

He's already weaponized the IRS, DOJ, and FTC, so there are a lot of ways he can fuck you for not bending the knee.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#260

Post by Rygian »

t43562 wrote: post #125
alvah wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should there be an advantage to being poor?

...because if there isn't then your democracy will turn into an oligarchy. The advantage needs to be somewhat against the richest and for the poorest if you're going to protect that.

s/will turn/has turned/
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