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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

#311

Post by acuozzo »

tornikeo wrote: post #268
Tryk wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So by your logic we should consider lowering the minimum wage in order to ensure employment. Employment is not a means in itself, the point of being employed is to "make a living". If a job cannot sustain a person then it should not exist. People deserve to live with dignity, earning a living wage.

>People deserve to live with dignity, earning a living wage. Look, I get where that is coming from. But no one deserves anything, even clean air. Instead, you pay for things with other things (e.g. clean air in exhchange for slightly more expensive cars). A (shitty) job is better than no job. Minimum wage should be lowered. You gotta help people with something else. For instance by allowing to build higher density ho…

> no one deserves anything

https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/2021/03/udhr.pdf

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#313

Post by mindslight »

Gareth321 wrote: post #309
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These jobs are not going to return. 'The system' is too profitable in its current form. What will happen is tariffs will cause prices to rise as companies pass on this tax to consumers (which is inflationary). In fact, they may go up more than that, same way as they did during covid. Even if say two years from now a new congress and senate remove these tariffs. The prices will not go down. Companies will not build ne…

> These jobs are not going to return. 'The system' is too profitable in its current form. The system is set up to ensure efficient allocation of capital. If it's more profitable for manufacturers to produce goods in-country, that is exactly what they will do. It's a bold claim that tariffs will have no impact whatsoever on investment and spending, because it's clear that they absolutely will.

At best there are going to be a bunch of new bonded warehouses built, so that distributors don't have to front the cost (and uncertainty) of the new import taxes until they have customer cash in hand. Appropriately-implemented tariffs could have kept American industry here if implemented 2-3 decades ago. At this point it's closing the barn door after the horse left, started a new life, and watched his foals grow up and have their own families. The horse is not coming back.

Far too many people think of markets as some kind of magical supercomputational system. They're really just a heuristic that does avoid some spectacular failure modes, but easily gets stuck in local maximums. China did the work over decades to prime the pump so that industry picked up and moved, while our "leaders" facilitated the looting. One pathetic man throwing policy tantrums for spectacle isn't going to reverse these now-entrenched dynamics.

There is also the glaring issue that Chinese companies can just as easily set up factories in other countries with low US tariffs. They won't be paying import taxes on the equipment they bring there to do so (like setting up a factory in the US would require), and in fact they will probably receive favors from those countries' governments for the investment. So these ham-fisted import taxes actually encourage the expansion of Chinese influence into other countries.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#314

Post by RiverCrochet »

alvah wrote: post #81
deadbabe wrote: post #13

There is just no advantage to being poor in America.

Why should there be an advantage to being poor?

God created all humans equal in His image. Therefore when humans impose disadvantages on other humans just because they are poor, they go against God.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#315

Post by snapplebobapple »

jordanb wrote: post #291
fluxkernel wrote: post #4

Poorest workers are hit hardest by pretty much anything related to money.

In the middle of last century you saw the opposite where the lower you went on the income distribution the faster your income was increasing, relativy speaking.

The middle of last century saw a labour shortage and much weaker monopsony labor makret ibfluence so that makes sense. The title of this article should be "in a surprise to noone, jobs that can be done by the widest percentage of the population are highly competitive and least responsive to wage pressure"

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#316

Post by ModernMech »

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?

For starters, he could do what he did with CBS: threaten a potential merger. Or he could do what he did with Musk: threaten to revoke citizenship of the CEO or anyone on the board if they're foreign. Or do what he did with Harvard and Columbia: threaten to pull grants and revoke foreign visas of workers. Or do what he did with big law firms: threaten to pull security clearances.

Lots of options.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#317

Post by ModernMech »

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…

> If these reports say that things are better for low income people, why do people living that reality overwhelmingly disagree?

I'll give an example. In 2019, a 1bd apartment near me cost $800 per month. The McDonalds paid $7.50 per hour. Today the same 1bd costs $2000 per month, and the McDonalds pays $15 per hour.

So both can be true. Wages have gone up 100% for the low income worker, which is good news. But it's not enough to offset the cost of living increases, so they are actually worse off than they were before their wages went up.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#318

Post by ac29 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #152
fluxkernel wrote: post #4

Poorest workers are hit hardest by pretty much anything related to money.

Including tariffs. (Blanket) tariffs are almost like a special tax on poor people. Explanation: to a well off person, 25% higher gas or food prices is just an annoyance. Nothing in their day to day life will change because of that. To a poor person it's brutal.

> 25% higher gas or food prices [due to tariffs]

Not a great example since energy and food are overwhelming domestically produced in the US. That doesnt mean there is no effect of tariffs in those categories, but it is much more muted than the headline numbers might suggest.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#319

Post by guywithahat »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #65
monero-xmr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Wouldn’t the deportations increase the demand for low-paying jobs resulting in increasing salaries?

Yes, countries that go through population declines without new immigration have often seen strong wage growth. Famously after the Irish great famine agricultural wages rose ~30%, and lower-skill jobs saw strong wage growth

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#320

Post by kergonath »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #308
kergonath wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, of course, that this is completely backwards. Low unemployment shifts the balance of negociating power towards workers as companies have to compete to get them. See the massive growth in AI engineers’ wages for a nice illustration of this. High unemployment helps employers because they can put pressure on the workers, who are less likely to find a job with better conditions or at all. The fact that low unempl…

This is my bad. For some reason I got "unemployment rate" twisted in my head and thought it was related to the number of unfilled jobs So my reasoning was "if there are not many unfilled jobs, it makes it tougher for people to find work, meaning the unemployment rate is low" which of course does not logically follow My mistake

Then we agree :)

There are signs of upwards wage pressure in the last couple of years, we’ll see how sustainable that is.

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