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Wage Growth Is on Fire

There could have been better policies in place to help transition displaced laborers.



Your opinion of my position isn't a valid critique.


Or there could have been better policies in place to not increase the costs to those businesses. Yes my critique is entirely valid, theory alone does not validate your position, there are variables and real conditions that mitigate theory or invalidate it. So to continue to spout theory to real life conditions is not always realistic.
 
My statement was rather straight forward. Fishking claimed that the mortgage bubble wouldn't have popped if wages and employment were not in decline. I showed him this was not the case.

Hopefully that clears things up for you.

He actually has a point.

the economy has grown in large part for decades because of the expansion of easy credit. It has supplanted growth in wages for a number of years as the increase in buying power.

People are buying things now.. that previously they paid cash.. on credit. and for longer terms on credit.

that creates a bubble when the credit dries up.
 
you cant adhere to simple board courtesy to properly use the board quote functions and make your posts legible and able to be quoted without endless editing

If you need to employ this laughable excuse to avoid, in this case, dealing with the FACT that:

The US population has expanded from 309.3 million in 2010 to 325 in 2016, up 5.1%, while private-sector employment has grown from 105.4 million to 123.3 million, an increase of seventeen percent — more than three times the rate.​

… then feel free to do so. I've made it clear that you were dead wrong in claiming that "all the growth … didn't even beat population growth," and that's good enough for me.

>>don't blame me that you are in an echo chamber where everyone is ignoring you.

I've never blamed you for anything. And the idea that "everyone is Ignoring me" is also quite hilarious. There are a handful of RWers here who have no idea what they're talking about and who can't argue their way out of a paper bag who somehow believe that publicly stating that they Ignore my posts (which they often don't) will allow them to gain an advantage in these exchanges. It doesn't, of course. It simply weakens their already untenable positions.
 
Didn't read, too much unclear, jumbled bull****. Learn to use the quote function, I will not respond to your stupid formatting and it certainly looks like that is its intended function.

Good luck with that.
 
Whatever you need to tell yourself, if you cant adhere to simple board courtesy to properly use the board quote functions and make your posts legible and able to be quoted without endless editing don't blame me that you are in an echo chamber where everyone is ignoring you.

MMI has done that over and over again, purposely overwhelming you with his formatting and then when you give up he accepts yer pathetic surrender.
 
Good luck with that.

Luck won't do you or him any good. Something else is required, and it's clear that neither you nor the Conman or James or AE are up to it.

MMI has done that over and over again, purposely overwhelming you with his formatting and then when you give up he accepts yer pathetic surrender.

I have done that over and over again, purposely stating the facts about a situation like, in this case, the expansion of the employment market relative to the overall population while at the same time acknowledging the mitigating factor of the drop in LFPR. This corrected OppCost's erroneous claim that the population has increased at a faster rate than the number of employed Americans — jobs are up at three times the rate of population growth.

You and yer allies don't care about the facts. You just wanna peddle yer RW lies, nonsense, distortions, misrepresentations, foolishness, etc. Yer BS isn't "debate" — it's simply an unending load of crap.

>>when you give up he accepts yer pathetic surrender.

When you pretend that there's something about the way I format my posts that makes it difficult to respond to them, I properly dismiss it as childish whining designed to distract from reality.

Keep on losing, yer very good at it.
 
Wage growth will lead to inflation and higher interest rates. Hillary dodged a bullet. Trump will get the blame. :)

Trump will be blamed if his policies put us into another recession. That is far more likely. If inflation hits the Fed target of 2% it will be a good thing. Trump's picks are looking more and more like a train wreck waiting to happen. Historically Republicans deal with wage growth by getting people laid off.
 
Recovery is what happens after a crash or as I see it a reset back to reality. This was a major reset which baffles me why such a long slow recovery. We are now only achieving heights that we were at 10 years ago. We should be way above where we were. We can give Obama credit for the long slow recovery. It clearly happened under his watch. An argument can be made that things could have recovered faster under another leader or slower if not at all. The sudden surge in the stock market is clearly a response to the election and hopefully confidence in the new leader. We can only hope Trumps policies will convince industry to invest that money here and give the economy that push it needs to keep growing.

[Truncated your quote for space]
Wealth and income as a percent have been shifting from the bottom to the top since about 1980:

Capture.jpg

Things were in decline before 2008, but you can see the massive falloff from 2007 to 2010.

But when looking at the economy as a whole, it would appear things are doing really well, but when you break them out by quintile, you see a slightly different story. The only quintile that has gained is the top 20%.

Lots of people point to the top 1%....I point to the shift to the top 20% (I reside here btw). In my opinion, that's MUCH worse. The top 1% are about 3.2 million people. The top 20% represents about 60 million people. That has caused a shift in the way companies chase profits. They market very high end very high margin goods....But I digress, I'm getting off point.

Capture.jpg

Here we see that the top 20% (as supported by the first table I posted) saw HUGE gains as we exited the recession in the early 1990's. In 2000 Clinton and the Congress that backed him, thought it a good idea to run a surplus. I don't care how he achieved it, it took massive amounts of money out of the economy. in 2001 we saw a dip in our economy equal to 6.7% of GDP if you include the trade deficit. If the government spends 1 out of ever 4 dollars and it decides to spend less, it will decrease incomes and that decrease in income will cause a decrease in demand for goods and services AND at the same time cause a decrease in overall private savings (savings drain) AND an increase in private sector credit (borrowing), especially to those in the bottom 80% who, if the economy doesn't turn around, many will end up paying diproportionaly for the credit they took.

Here we see what happens when the deficit goes negative (also called surplus):

Capture.jpg

So government goes into surplus private sector must now find that lost income via a decrease in savings and an increase in debt. Which is why we see GDP continue to rise during this period. The underlying trends had shifted to an extremely unsustainable model, but the the average Joe, looking at the GDP numbers assumed everything was cool.

(I assume you can find a GDP chart yourself and see that GDP rose even though the government was taking money out of the economy. By my estimates, GDP should have fallen by almost 7%, but the US private sector made up for the government's spending shortfall by increasing debt and decreasing savings.

Ok so here we are today....2 recessions later. What's wrong? Remember the massive wealth shift from 1990-2000? The bottom 80% of the economy still has not recovered. I'm not going to look up the exact figure, but that 80% represents about 200-240 million working-aged people who have been in a recession since 1998. In the aggregate, the bottom 80% cannot generate the kinds of demand for goods and services unless they, as a group, have more disposable income.

The problem is that the wealthy have convinced our Congress and now a staggering number of people that they would create more jobs if they could just keep more money. That's BS. They won't hire more people until aggregate demand rises and aggregate demand won't rise until the people in the bottom 80% of America have more money.

In the meantime, the top 20% will look for fiscal gains in markets and speculation, Companies will keep money off-shore and engage in stock buybacks as a way to meet target earnings, rather than expand their business' via plant and equipment and training.

This is already too long and I'm just begining to scrape the iceberg.

Democrats are wrong, we don't have a revinue problem.

Conservitives are wrong, we don't have a spending problem.

The problem is, our ECONOMY (not the budget) is out of balance.
 
Trump will be blamed if his policies put us into another recession. That is far more likely. If inflation hits the Fed target of 2% it will be a good thing. Trump's picks are looking more and more like a train wreck waiting to happen. Historically Republicans deal with wage growth by getting people laid off.

The problem the Fed is going to have, is that the only way it can reach its target will be to continue to pay increasing amounts of interest on excess reserve balances. With over $2 trillion in excesss reserves it will be several years before the interest rates are determined using the pre-crisis models using the availiblity of reserves.
 
Wealth and income as a percent have been shifting from the bottom to the top since about 1980:

View attachment 67210620

Things were in decline before 2008, but you can see the massive falloff from 2007 to 2010.

But when looking at the economy as a whole, it would appear things are doing really well, but when you break them out by quintile, you see a slightly different story. The only quintile that has gained is the top 20%.

Lots of people point to the top 1%....I point to the shift to the top 20% (I reside here btw). In my opinion, that's MUCH worse. The top 1% are about 3.2 million people. The top 20% represents about 60 million people. That has caused a shift in the way companies chase profits. They market very high end very high margin goods....But I digress, I'm getting off point.

View attachment 67210621

Here we see that the top 20% (as supported by the first table I posted) saw HUGE gains as we exited the recession in the early 1990's. In 2000 Clinton and the Congress that backed him, thought it a good idea to run a surplus. I don't care how he achieved it, it took massive amounts of money out of the economy. in 2001 we saw a dip in our economy equal to 6.7% of GDP if you include the trade deficit. If the government spends 1 out of ever 4 dollars and it decides to spend less, it will decrease incomes and that decrease in income will cause a decrease in demand for goods and services AND at the same time cause a decrease in overall private savings (savings drain) AND an increase in private sector credit (borrowing), especially to those in the bottom 80% who, if the economy doesn't turn around, many will end up paying diproportionaly for the credit they took.

Here we see what happens when the deficit goes negative (also called surplus):

View attachment 67210622

So government goes into surplus private sector must now find that lost income via a decrease in savings and an increase in debt. Which is why we see GDP continue to rise during this period. The underlying trends had shifted to an extremely unsustainable model, but the the average Joe, looking at the GDP numbers assumed everything was cool.

(I assume you can find a GDP chart yourself and see that GDP rose even though the government was taking money out of the economy. By my estimates, GDP should have fallen by almost 7%, but the US private sector made up for the government's spending shortfall by increasing debt and decreasing savings.

Ok so here we are today....2 recessions later. What's wrong? Remember the massive wealth shift from 1990-2000? The bottom 80% of the economy still has not recovered. I'm not going to look up the exact figure, but that 80% represents about 200-240 million working-aged people who have been in a recession since 1998. In the aggregate, the bottom 80% cannot generate the kinds of demand for goods and services unless they, as a group, have more disposable income.

The problem is that the wealthy have convinced our Congress and now a staggering number of people that they would create more jobs if they could just keep more money. That's BS. They won't hire more people until aggregate demand rises and aggregate demand won't rise until the people in the bottom 80% of America have more money.

In the meantime, the top 20% will look for fiscal gains in markets and speculation, Companies will keep money off-shore and engage in stock buybacks as a way to meet target earnings, rather than expand their business' via plant and equipment and training.

This is already too long and I'm just begining to scrape the iceberg.

Democrats are wrong, we don't have a revinue problem.

Conservitives are wrong, we don't have a spending problem.

The problem is, our ECONOMY (not the budget) is out of balance.

All that proves is that the Great Recession hurt the poor more than the rich. The Great Recession is over.
 
Wealth and income as a percent have been shifting from the bottom to the top since about 1980:

View attachment 67210620

Things were in decline before 2008, but you can see the massive falloff from 2007 to 2010.

But when looking at the economy as a whole, it would appear things are doing really well, but when you break them out by quintile, you see a slightly different story. The only quintile that has gained is the top 20%.

Lots of people point to the top 1%....I point to the shift to the top 20% (I reside here btw). In my opinion, that's MUCH worse. The top 1% are about 3.2 million people. The top 20% represents about 60 million people. That has caused a shift in the way companies chase profits. They market very high end very high margin goods....But I digress, I'm getting off point.

View attachment 67210621

Here we see that the top 20% (as supported by the first table I posted) saw HUGE gains as we exited the recession in the early 1990's. In 2000 Clinton and the Congress that backed him, thought it a good idea to run a surplus. I don't care how he achieved it, it took massive amounts of money out of the economy. in 2001 we saw a dip in our economy equal to 6.7% of GDP if you include the trade deficit. If the government spends 1 out of ever 4 dollars and it decides to spend less, it will decrease incomes and that decrease in income will cause a decrease in demand for goods and services AND at the same time cause a decrease in overall private savings (savings drain) AND an increase in private sector credit (borrowing), especially to those in the bottom 80% who, if the economy doesn't turn around, many will end up paying diproportionaly for the credit they took.

Here we see what happens when the deficit goes negative (also called surplus):

View attachment 67210622

So government goes into surplus private sector must now find that lost income via a decrease in savings and an increase in debt. Which is why we see GDP continue to rise during this period. The underlying trends had shifted to an extremely unsustainable model, but the the average Joe, looking at the GDP numbers assumed everything was cool.

(I assume you can find a GDP chart yourself and see that GDP rose even though the government was taking money out of the economy. By my estimates, GDP should have fallen by almost 7%, but the US private sector made up for the government's spending shortfall by increasing debt and decreasing savings.

Ok so here we are today....2 recessions later. What's wrong? Remember the massive wealth shift from 1990-2000? The bottom 80% of the economy still has not recovered. I'm not going to look up the exact figure, but that 80% represents about 200-240 million working-aged people who have been in a recession since 1998. In the aggregate, the bottom 80% cannot generate the kinds of demand for goods and services unless they, as a group, have more disposable income.

The problem is that the wealthy have convinced our Congress and now a staggering number of people that they would create more jobs if they could just keep more money. That's BS. They won't hire more people until aggregate demand rises and aggregate demand won't rise until the people in the bottom 80% of America have more money.

In the meantime, the top 20% will look for fiscal gains in markets and speculation, Companies will keep money off-shore and engage in stock buybacks as a way to meet target earnings, rather than expand their business' via plant and equipment and training.

This is already too long and I'm just begining to scrape the iceberg.

Democrats are wrong, we don't have a revinue problem.

Conservitives are wrong, we don't have a spending problem.

The problem is, our ECONOMY (not the budget) is out of balance.

Conservatives are right.. we do however have a spending problem.. and that's one of the things keeping our economy out of balance.
 
All that proves is that the Great Recession hurt the poor more than the rich. The Great Recession is over.

Ummm? What?

Read that again. The problem started in 1980 and most of the wage gap happened from 1990-2000....The great recession was the result and the highlight of the failure of past (supply side) and current economic thinking. It continues and we can expect this to happen in the future.
 
Conservatives are right.. we do however have a spending problem.. and that's one of the things keeping our economy out of balance.

If by spending problem you mean the government is spending too little. I agree.

Or if by spending problem you mean the private sector is going too far into debt, again we agree.

If you mean the government is spending too much, I'd disagree and I'd politely ask where you think I went wrong in my post.

-Cheers.
 
If by spending problem you mean the government is spending too little. I agree.

Or if by spending problem you mean the private sector is going too far into debt, again we agree.

If you mean the government is spending too much, I'd disagree and I'd politely ask where you think I went wrong in my post.

-Cheers.

We are spending too much and we are not spending what we should be spending.. properly.

Where did you go wrong in your post. Well largely because you don't understand the why and how.

Lets start with this:

If the government spends 1 out of ever 4 dollars and it decides to spend less, it will decrease incomes and that decrease in income will cause a decrease in demand for goods and services AND at the same time cause a decrease in overall private savings (savings drain) AND an increase in private sector credit (borrowing), especially to those in the bottom 80% who, if the economy doesn't turn around, many will end up paying diproportionaly for the credit they took.

Three major problems. first is assumes that all dollars spent by the government end up in the US.. which they don't
Second.. it assumes that every dollar that is spent in the US has the same economic effect on demand. Which it doesn't. A tax credit that goes to Donald trump.. does less for aggregate demand than say a tax credit to 3000 people.

Third.. it assumes that value of every dollar spent is equal.. which its not. The value that's added on say spending on education.. is far greater than the value on food stamps.
 
We are spending too much and we are not spending what we should be spending.. properly.

Where did you go wrong in your post. Well largely because you don't understand the why and how.

Lets start with this:

Three major problems. first is assumes that all dollars spent by the government end up in the US.. which they don't
Second.. it assumes that every dollar that is spent in the US has the same economic effect on demand. Which it doesn't. A tax credit that goes to Donald trump.. does less for aggregate demand than say a tax credit to 3000 people.

Third.. it assumes that value of every dollar spent is equal.. which its not. The value that's added on say spending on education.. is far greater than the value on food stamps.

I assumed none of those things, but since you've now asked (except you forgot the "?") I'll explain why I didn't include them. I didn't explicitly state them as there is but a 5000-word limit and readers have limited tolerance for long posts. Having said that, there is nothing in my post that assumes that anything you said must be true.
 
It continues, with wage growth year over year at 2.9%
Not a rocket but strong.
Any higher, ie 4%, we'd be in Inflation country.

U.S. job growth slows, but wages rebound strongly
U.S. job growth slows, but wages rebound strongly | Reuters
By Lucia Mutikani | WASHINGTON | Jan 6, 2017
U.S. employment increased less than expected in December but a rebound in wages pointed to sustained labor market momentum that sets up the economy for stronger growth and further interest rate increases from the Federal Reserve this year.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by 156,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said on Friday. The gains, however, are more than sufficient to absorb new entrants into the labor market. Fed Chair Janet Yellen has said the economy needs to create just under 100,000 jobs a month to keep up with growth in the work-age population. Employers hired 19,000 more workers than previously reported in October and November.

"With wages on the rise and payrolls solid, the Fed is no doubt taking a healthy celebratory lap, feeling confident after this morning's report in their decision to hike in December, and cautiously optimistic as they look out to the new year," said Lindsey Piegza, chief economist at Stifel Fixed Income in Chicago.

The economy created 2.16 million jobs in 2016. Average hourly earnings increased 10 cents or 0.4% in December after slipping 0.1% in November. That pushed the year-on-year increase in earnings to 2.9%, the largest gain since June 2009, from 2.5% in November.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.7% from a nine-year low of 4.6% in November. Still, it remained below 4.8%, the Fed's estimate of the natural rate of unemployment, for two straight months. Economists had forecast payrolls rising by 178,000 jobs last month."...."
 
I assumed none of those things, but since you've now asked (except you forgot the "?") I'll explain why I didn't include them. I didn't explicitly state them as there is but a 5000-word limit and readers have limited tolerance for long posts. Having said that, there is nothing in my post that assumes that anything you said must be true.

Actually yes... your post assumes all of that.

but whatever.. you aren't interested in discussion.. just your ideology.
 
I heard on NPR today that wages rose 15% during Obama's term. Wages declined by 4% during Bush.
 
I heard on NPR today that wages rose 15% during Obama's term. Wages declined by 4% during Bush.

Again... that's another example of your faulty assessment.
 
How so? It's the truth.


Simple.. your statistic does not include where wages started.

Wages fell because of the recession. Wages coming back from that does not mean that there has been superior growth or that things are much better for people than previous times.
 
Wages coming back from that does not mean that there has been superior growth or that things are much better for people than previous times.

It's true that, in seeking to properly interpret all the macroeconomic data collected over recent years, we need to account for the wild volatility we've experienced in many measures — employment, GDP, federal outlays and receipts, housing stats, etc. Even those that are fairly stable, such as inflation, have been significantly impacted by the wild ride we've been on.

So I'll agree that efforts to draw lines between 43 and the Negro and to compare their relative performance to that of other presidents is gonna be complex. But I also think an honest and informed discussion is possible.

The US economy is anything but a controlled environment that allows for precise scientific analysis, but I'm confident that I can go over this stuff a lot more effectively with someone like you, jaeger, than I can with … people … like the ConMan or AE or many others on the Right here.
 
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