Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth • Hacker News Board

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#341

Post by SauciestGNU » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 9:40 PM UTC

n4r9 wrote: post #303

bko wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you own your trailer without a mortgage. If you have a mortgage you're pretty much required to have insurance. Not getting insurance doesn't make this cheaper really as you'll just lose your property completely every few years. Besides insurance rates are often highly subsidized by federal government and actually a really good bargain

> Not getting insurance doesn't make this cheaper really as you'll just lose your property completely every few years It sounds a bit like the "Boots theory" of Discworld [0]. > insurance rates are often highly subsidized by federal government and actually a really good bargain This feels a bit inconsistent with your previous comment about living in Tornado Alley being "not exactly a bargain". What do you think about…

I've also heard anecdotes of people draining all their savings/retirement accounts to buy property in uninsurable areas of Florida because they can't get a mortgage. I don't see that working out well long term.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#342

Post by SauciestGNU » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

quantified wrote: post #338

magentaworker wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got it, that huge army is not free, that militarized police is not free, the CIA is not free, FBI, NSA, and all that huge security related organizations that nobody else in the world has except maybe Israel and not at the same scale.

That too. We need our security organizations, there are lots of unpatriotic profiteers in there, we could get a lot more value for our moeny on those. (Littoral battleships? F-35s? Let's just get actual spent-uranium-tipped unicorns.) The way we do infrastructure and social services leaves a lot of room for improvement. I'd pay 50% tax gladly if I got half my income in value back.

Hell looking at the state of international conflict today I can't even be that upset about defense spending on principle, it's just that what we spend on is stupid and immoral. Instead of domestic oppression and foreign genocide we could be helping Europe and Taiwan fend off threats from rival great powers.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#343

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 12:17 AM UTC

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…

> your apologism of capitalists is disgusting

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's the other way around!

BTW, you might enjoy watching the movie Silk Stockings.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#344

Post by tart-lemonade » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 1:08 AM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #330

closewith wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drop in demand for staples you're talking about is quite literally the poorest people eating less, using fewer basics, lowering their quality of life further.

As of 2016 (first search result) 90% of food/beverage is domestically produced = no tariffs. [1] The big goal with the tariffs, outside of gaining leverage on other countries, is to motivate domestic production and alternatives. Without tariffs it simply isn't realistically possible to compete in many industries because other countries have cheaper labor and less costly regulations. Of course the practical problem wi…

>90% of food/beverage is domestically produced = no tariffs

That's not true, even for items which undergo relatively little processing like milk:

1. Cows need feed, and in the US this is mostly corn. This corn is mechanically harvested, shucked, and transported.

2. Cows are milked by machine.

3. This milk is then transported to a larger processing facility where it gets filtered, clarified (fat removal for 2%, skim, etc), pasteurized, homogenized (fat is evenly dispersed), and bottled in a blown plastic jug.

4. After bottling, the milk gets palletized and trucked to grocery distribution centers, which will re-palletize it for shipment to individual stores.

At every step of the way, we use machines that require frequent maintenance and whose supply chains rely extensively on imported parts. On-shoring all of this would be expensive and risky both because Trump flip-flops so often and because our next administration may just reverse the tariffs.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

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Post by roywiggins » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:14 AM UTC

Gareth321 wrote: post #263

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)

The problem with comparing wages by cohort and average inflation is that inflation doesn't affect each cohort evenly. By and large, necessities continue to outpace top line inflation, and they have done so for decades. These include food, healthcare, housing, daycare, and education. Lower income people spend more of their income as a proportion on necessities, so they are impacted more than average by inflation. In o…

One thing is that 10th percentile wages did barely keep up with inflation from 1979-2019 (0.1% growth annualized), it's only since then that it showed an increase (3.1% annualized).

So it seems to me that any effects along those lines strong enough to exactly negate the apparent real wage growth in recent years must have either 1) been basically constant, so effective wages in this group actually declined 3.1% every year on average for forty years, making 2019 10th-percentile workers reduced to 28.4% of their forbears' wages, or 2) the inflation numbers were about representative for the 10th percentile worker from 1979-2019 and then suddenly and abruptly weren't, or 3) some combination of the two.

(or of course 4), the effect is real, nonzero, but not big enough to wipe out 3.1% apparent wage growth)

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

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Post by refurb » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 5:43 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #249

refurb wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s my point - the tax data says that people making millions each year are incredibly rare. Most people earning that kind of income get it in a once in a lifetime.

Ok. And the criticism is not about them.

The criticism applies just as much to the bottom 0.1%. It’s not a static group.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#347

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:39 AM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #149

alvah wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should there be an advantage to being poor?

Presumably you might want to give the poor a systemic advantage over the rich in order to balance the system and make it more democratic. Otherwise the rich will have more influence.

[deleted]

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

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Post by ben_w » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #332

ben_w wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments are on both sides of supply and demand: their powers to tax and spend mean they can put their metaphorical foot on the metaphorical scales to tip the balances whichever way they want, to a large degree, with rapid effect. Central planning is only one of many ways to do this, it can also be managed more locally; and Soviet-style central planning is only one many ways to do central planning, most large busi…

Corporations do do central planning, but they do so at the high risk of becoming unmanageable and then they fall, and a competitor replaces them. Government central planning just raises taxes to cover the inefficiencies, until eventually the economy collapses.

That's a similarity, not a difference.

Even regarding the scale of the organisation, there is lots of overlap between governments — at all levels, from countries, through states, to incorporated municipal governments — and businesses. You could reasonably compare Foxconn to Iceland or Wyoming (I would also list a US city, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP gives me a lot of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas rather than cities, that seems like it would extend beyond the bit with the tax collection rules?)

Even governments get bailouts and/or bankruptcies, both from above (e.g. https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/judiciary-news/2012/07/13...), and from outside (e.g. Greece).

And corporations, when big enough, become monopolies, and raise prices to cover inefficiencies, until something breaks.

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

#349

Post by ben_w » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 10:50 AM UTC

nickpp wrote: post #161

tpxl wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 F…

> 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.

Capitalism? Yes.

"Free market capitalism"? No.

While regulated capitalism is very effective at aligning everyone's interests, a free market operates without the intervention of government or any other external authority, and rapidly decays into a market for lemons[0] — or worse, arbitrarily negative contractual obligations, which is how serfdom functioned.

Even when the governments start off by only intervening to prevent those two issues, with minimum quality requirements and prohibitions against unfair contracts, they often find themselves having to also intervene directly in the markets, everything from the US ban on trading onion futures[1] to printing and destroying currency to keep inflation in a particular range designed to encourage the spending of money rather than its hoarding on the one hand without also preventing people from saving on the other, and even to intervene in the employment market because 100% employment drives a spiral of wage inflation that the system as a whole would not be able to cope with etc. etc.

Same deal as the Laffer curve: zero regulation is bad, micromanagement is bad, people argue about where the peak in the middle is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

Re: Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

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Post by actionfromafar » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:33 AM UTC

ac29 wrote: post #318

actionfromafar wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you assume future Iran- and Russia style price controls on gas for the domestic market?

You also have little nuggets like https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dio...

The Cultural Revolution marches on. Carbon Dioxide is woke.