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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does the US, a society with low union membership rates have much higher median salaries both before and after taxes and government benefits than in Europe where there are lots of powerful unions? https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm
Healthcare costs in the USA eat those gains.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Healthcare costs in the USA eat those gains.
The OECD numbers adjust for both healthcare and education. Americans are still making 25% more than Western European counterparts.
What I'm seeing is a chart of real gains over the last decade. That's great!
It never does. This is just accelerating the pandemic-era wealth transfer that started with the rich getting trillions to prop up their assets while everyone else got $600.
How did the rich get trillions to prop up their assets?
It never does. This is just accelerating the pandemic-era wealth transfer that started with the rich getting trillions to prop up their assets while everyone else got $600.
How did the rich get trillions to prop up their assets?
The rich: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/17/fed-officials-owned-securiti...
- Powell held between $1.25 million and $2.5 million of municipal bonds. They were just a small portion of his total reported assets. While the bonds were purchased before 2019, they were held while the Fed last year bought more than $5 billion in munis, including one from the state of Illinois purchased by his family trust in 2016.
- Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren held between $151,000 and $800,000 worth of real estate investment trusts that owned mortgage-backed securities. He made as many as 37 separate trades in the four REITS while the Fed purchased almost $700 billion in MBS.
- Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin held $1.35 million to $3 million in individual corporate bonds purchased before 2020. They include bonds of Pepsi, Home Depot and Eli Lilly. The Fed last year opened a corporate bond-buying facility and purchased $46.5 billion of corporate bonds.
Those with the power to match prices with wage demands stay where they are, and the cost is transferred to those who cannot push wages, and those who lose their jobs.
That's actually how inflation is actually controlled - via the threat of unemployment and wage suppression.
Interest rate changes are the Wizard of Oz. Wage suppression and unemployment are the man behind the curtain.
We had an all-hands meeting recently where we got to submit anonymous questions. One of the questions was 'with inflation rising at 6%, will the company reconsider their 'standard' 2% raise?' The lady answering looks dead in the camera and goes 'Honestly? No' and goes on to talk about how we're reasonably competitive with the local market. Hey, credit where credit is due, at least she was a refreshingly straight shoo…
Whether or not employees are actually worth 6% more they should not have a problem finding a new job in this market (that will pay 6% more).
It never does. This is just accelerating the pandemic-era wealth transfer that started with the rich getting trillions to prop up their assets while everyone else got $600.
> It never does. The first thing in the article is a graph where 7 our of the 11 years shown have positive real wage growth. If worker pay never kept up with inflation, the country would be among the world’s poorest.
https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
The "distribution of family income" chart has been inflation adjusted. Note that for the bottom 10th and 50th percentiles, income has flatlined.
The 90th percentile income earners have seen their wages nearly double, after inflation adjustment.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...
"in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis."
Worker pay not keeping up with inflation is not merely an effect of inflation. It is the policy goal.
We had an all-hands meeting recently where we got to submit anonymous questions. One of the questions was 'with inflation rising at 6%, will the company reconsider their 'standard' 2% raise?' The lady answering looks dead in the camera and goes 'Honestly? No' and goes on to talk about how we're reasonably competitive with the local market. Hey, credit where credit is due, at least she was a refreshingly straight shoo…