651–656 of 656 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damage done, mission accomplished... If you do something illegal and can get away with it relatively unscathed, then it isn't in practice illegal.
How do you know you've gotten away with it? That takes the rest of your life. (Well, statute of limitations.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate to sound like a conventional cis-man, but this is exactly the sort of situation where conventional cis-man energy is needed: Where are the CDC people growing a spine to stand up to this? This is obviously bad. The reason why bullies only understand 1 language (force) is exactly why counter-bullies who also speak that language are needed. And these are (usually) men (and some smaller percentage of women). (I'm…
Sorry, I couldn't get through your third paragraph without hearing the "Team America: World Police" pussies/dicks speech in the background. But your argument is inherently flawed. Part of the point of government is to regulate and direct the use of force. We have mechanisms that are supposed to apply force to "bullies". The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This hap…
The funny thing is that people have always said this exact thing except paraphrased in various ways (perhaps the term was less "bully" and something more conventionally a universal term of disparagement like "fascist"). I definitely didn't want Obama going after whistleblowers, increasing domestic surveillance and not closing Guantanamo when I voted him in... and I liked his healthcare plan, until it died...
I suspect that everyone says this when the person they didn't want in charge, now is, and starts doing things that their biased media always depicts only the negative side of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok. First, the 1st paper is interesting, but I can't digest it now. Added to the list for later. That said, temporarily ignoring the paper, income in absolute terms may have well increased, but from 2014 to 2024 we also had ~33% official CPI inflation ( edit: which is well above FED's goal ), which effectively eroded any gains average person may have managed to eke out. In other words, it is not a vibe whem that 100k…
Don't insult my intelligence like that. I would never quote nominal income to you. My post was inflation adjusted.
I am going through the paper now and the things that did jump at me that while you state that your post was inflation adjusted and I will admit that I am not sure it says what you claim to think it says. Lets go over relevant passages.
From quoted paper[1]:
"Wage compression was accompanied by rapid nominal wage growth and rising job-to-job separations—especially among young non-college (high school or less) workers. Comparing across states, post-pandemic labor market tightness became strongly predictive of real wage growth among low-wage workers (wage-Phillips curve), and aggregate wage compression."
In other words, higher absolute values were considered to be good predictors for wage-phillips curve ( which shows a relationship between the unemployment rate and wage growth ). I worry that you saw word real wage and made an assumption that it measures real wage. It doesn't. We can argue whether it is a good proxy, but from get go it is tougher sell. In other words, if methodology for attempting to derive real wage is off, the whole premise falls apart from where I sit.
"Moreover, despite substantial post-pandemic inflation–measured with the benchmark Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U)–real hourly earnings at the 10th percentile of the wage distribution rose by 7.8% between January 2020 and June 2023."
Ok. This is where it does get messy, because I genuinely do not want to get into the weeds here, but lets... for the sake of the argument assume all that including methodology is fine.
"Real US hourly wages rose by approximately 10 percentage points at all percentiles during the first quarter of the Covid-19 pandemic, from March through June of 2020. (As we show below, much of this spike reflected a change in composition of the workforce as low-wage workers disproportionately lost their jobs.) Thereafter, these quantiles diverged. The 10th wage percentile held its real value over the next three years, while the 50th and 90th real wage percentiles fell by around 6 and 8 percentage points, respectively. In net, the 90/10 ratio declined by about 8 percentage points over these three years "
In other words, for the period of time listed, assuming we accept the premise, methodology and so on, wages rose above inflation. And then, those same real wages fell on average of 8% between July 2000 and 2024. I don't know man, it sounds me, again if we accept premise, methodology and so, as if things got briefly better and got worse again. So my example of 100k became 92K..
FWIW, I am really curious of how you will defend it.
[1]https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w310...