That’s like saying that workers who manufactured stuff by hand were less skilled than workers who manufactured stuff on assembly lines because the assembly line workers were more productive…or that the assembly line workers had more innate ability (because companies invested in automation) than their earlier counter parts. This simply isn’t true.
If the workers themselves are the reason that companies are more productive these days then they should be able to pool their labor as a resource and command better salaries, since they can always take their higher skills elsewhere. I see no indications that the workers today are more educated, skilled or innately more productive than their earlier counterparts…and every indication that what has become more productive is the TOOLS and techniques and business practices being used. In my field, for instance, where once it took a highly skilled network engineer to do a task, now it can be done by a much lower skilled technician using an expert system, automation and GUI based setup tools. This isn’t to say that highly skilled network engineers aren’t still in demand (I seem to still be putting bread on the table, for instance), just that many jobs I previously had to be dedicated to can now be done by less skilled people who make a lot less money than I do…freeing me up to do MORE things than I could before.
The difference is the tools available now, the automation and the user friendly aspects of the new interfaces and technology that allows for this…not my own or my fellow IT folks innate ability over the IT guys (myself included) of 10 or 20 years ago.
I would not say that an assembly-line worker is necessarily more skilled, but that his skill is more lucrative. Captialism pays for results. A skill that lets someone make ten widgets in an hour will be more highly rewarded than a skill that lets you only produce one.
And what makes you think that they won’t? Are we somehow immune from the sort of labor unrest of the 20’s?
There is a lot of competition from emerging economies for certain jobs, but why not all? A CEO may may be able to hold wages down by threatening to move jobs to India, but why is his own job safe? General Motors had American executives and built small cars in America at a loss. Toyota had foreign executives and built small cars in America at a profit. If competition is good, let the bosses compete for their jobs, too.
This particular part of the thread started with the claim that wealth in the U.S. has been redistributing upward for the past few decades. Do you dispute that claim, xtisme, or do you simply claim that redistribution is justified because investment has been the sole driver of the productivity gains during that period?
And if today’s workers are no more skilled then yesterday’s, what about everyone else? People have been running companies and buying new tools for more than a century. What are today’s CEO’s and financiers doing so much differently than their counterparts from a generation ago that merits them a larger slice of the productivity pie?
And yet, their share of national wealth has decreased or remained the same. How come?
Right - and picking the end date to be at the trough of the worst recession in 80 years ISN’T cherry-picking?
The reason I picked 2000 to 2008 is because you guys were insinuating that there was something about George Bush, or Republican policies, or Reaganomics, or something right wing that has caused poor wage-earning folk to take it in the teeth. So if you want to examine the results of actual policies, it seems only fair to consider the period not including a major transitory spike that happened to bottom out right now.
For one thing, the recession is woldwide, and hard to pin on the pesky Republicans.
For another, even if they were partly or even mostly at fault, it still says very little about the period from 1980 to 2008.
And finally, the Obama administration is predicting major job growth and major GDP growth in the next two or three years, so the ‘net job creation’ number from 1980 on is going to look very different in a few years. It hardly seems fair to make sweeping judgments about the effects of past policies while only counting the worst half of the recession/recovery.
This is what i was talking about when I said that there’s enough ways to slice the data for partisans to prove any point they want. Why is ‘median family income’ the correct measure? I already gave you the data for hourly wages, which shows an increase. That seems to me to be a much more direct measure of how working people actually did. Median family income can be affected by many things that have nothing to do with wage growth: loss of investment income, change in work profiles (shorter work weeks, people staying in school longer), increases in self-employment, changes in family size, all sorts of things.
And you can’t just wave away health care. Health care costs are increasing, and therefore more employee compensation is going to health care. Health care is more expensive in part because it’s more effective, so working class people are growing in wealth by their ability to access better health care. This matters. And even if it didn’t, any analysis of why wage growth has slowed down HAS to consider health care costs to business, since it’s a major factor.
But even without the increase in health care benefits, employee wages have gone up.
A generation ago houses were smaller, health costs lower (because the population was younger and because health care couldn’t do as much), transportation was lousier, and most people didn’t have to pay for cable, cell phones, internet connections, and the increase in power for their bigger homes filled with toys.
People could easily live the way they did in a generation ago. They just have to sell their second car, live in a smaller house, cancel their cable TV and internet services, get rid of their air conditioner, and the person who stays at home can hang the laundry out to dry and save money on the purchase and maintenance of a dryer and the added electrical bills.
Basically, what you’re saying is that the standard of living for low-income earners has declined in a generation. That is demonstrably not true. But if the standard of living has increased dramatically, which it has, then the fact that people work more and buy more stuff is a personal finance decision, like choosing to take on more debt, rather than being a problem with the wages they are paid.
In constant dollars, the median value of a home in 1960 was 30,600. In 2000, the median value of a home was 116,600. By 2000, people had voluntarily chosen to take on mortgages three times the size of the ones their parents took on.
As for income, your tax.com cite slices and dices the numbers by all kinds of characteristics, and comes up with numbers I’m not seeing in the actual data.
For example, table P-36 on this page has the median income for full-time wage earners.
Men saw their income rising from 29,800 in 1955 to 47,779 in 2008. It is true, however, that median income for individual male full-time workers has not increased since 1972. What is interesting to note, however, is that women have seen dramatic gains in that period. So it may be that men have seen their wages stagnate because of wage competition from women. That may in turn lead to a reduction in the growth of household incomes, because the gains of women have partially offset the men.
Are you suggesting that George W. Bush’s term of office ended in 2008? If so, I’ll provide you with some educational material - they may not have covered US civics very well in Canuckistan primary education.
Perhaps if you read your own link you’d see the median wage declined. It was higher in 2001 than it was in 2007, the last year your table shows.
Ask an economist what’s responsible for increased productivity, and the most likely answer you’ll get is: new technology. So if we really wanted to reward the people who are responsible for productivity growth, we’d shower riches on engineers and scientists. But we don’t. We shower riches on the CEOs who buy their products and make use of them.
But buying a new inventory control system is hardly a sign of managerial brilliance. It’s just something that every company eventually does once a better one is invented, and the CEO who signs the purchase order to buy it is no more responsible for productivity growth than the workers who use it. They’re both piggybacking off of someone else’s invention, and there’s no special reason why either one should be thought more deserving of sharing in the rewards. They both should.
Long story short, workers in thriving economies should thrive too. When they don’t, countries almost inevitably decline, and bread and circuses can never make up for it. The only time that earnings have been so concentrated in the hands of the top 1% as they are now was in 1928. Go figure.
The top 1 percent received 21.8 percent of all reported income in 2005, up significantly from 19.8 percent the year before and more than double their share of income in 1980. The peak was in 1928, when the top 1 percent reported 23.9 percent of all income.
That’s from IRS tax data. If they’re making a bigger share of the pie, everybody else is making a smaller share. That’s as Janet and John as I’m going to get with you on this, if you still don’t get it of if you’re going to continue to pretend not to get it to try and get a reaction and then run away, as on previous threads, (known as trolling on other boards), then that’s up to you. I’ve provided an adequte explanation for sentient beings here.
So, when you say ‘median’ what you meant was ‘mean’, ehe?
Median income 2007 (in 2007 dollars)
$50,233
Median income 2006 (in 2007 dollars)
$49,568
…
Median Income 1990 (in 2007 dollars)
$46,049
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t 50,233 a bigger number than 49,568…or 46,049?
Mean, however (which isn’t what you said)
Mean income 2007 (in 2007 dollars)
$67,609
Mean income 2006 (in 2007 dollars)
$68,459
…
Mean income 1990 (in 2007 dollars)
$57,521
(it actually goes down more in the period between 1991 and 1992)
Horseshit. ‘We’ don’t shower money on the rich, THEY are the one’s who provide the capital that allows companies to develop and build all the productivity enhancers. Good grief…you are seriously letting your rhetoric run away with you lately.
No it hasn’t. We already had this argument which you ended up running away from. It turned out the author of your own source, an expert on wealth, vehemently disagreed with you. Remember?
If you’re going to include the Bush growth it’s fair to include the Bush bust too, especially as it got going during his term in office. And it wasn’t a “transitory spike”, it was a “bubble.” It’s only fair to look at how good growth/employment was after the bubble burst. The result? A whopping 1.9% average GDP growth from the pro-growth business-friendly policies during the Bush term in office and zero job creation.
Median family income is used because it best shows how the median family is doing. It’s not a partisan thing, it used to be the default indicator for econonomists until it went to shit and conservative economists started clutching around for something else. A few years ago they were claiming that it didn’t matter that incomes were stagnant as home equity was skyrocketing all thanks to Bush’s pro-growth business-friendly policies. Yeah.
Same thing. It’s all about median iincome. Healthcare increases make GDP/compensation look good but don’t do anything for the average Ammerican that he didn’t have before.
The cite comes from the country’s acknowledges expert on all this, take it up with her. I’m going with the expert on this one.
And it’s fine having all that capital but you need labor to do something with it. The question is what is a fair share for everybody. Personally I’m all for as much as possible going to wealthy people but aware of the fact that enough needs to go to low/middle earners so that the system doesn’t become unstable, as per 1928/2008.
I understand what you are claiming just fine - it is just that you are wrong in claiming it. Redistribution means taking it from A and giving it to B. Being allowed to keep more of what you made, and/or making more than someone else, does not constitute a redistribution from someone else to me. Your allegation that it is, is incorrect.
If you have a real cite, that really shows this, please produce it. Since you don’t - well, don’t do anything. You are doing a better job demonstrating the inadequacies of your position than I ever could.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - it’s spelled “adequate”. At least by sentient beings.
:rolleyes: It fell between 2007 and 2008. Perhaps you noticed that recession thingy? Housing bubble burst? Banking crisis? It was in all the papers.
(thus the comment earlier that you were cherry picking numbers, ehe?)
From your own cite:
So…we had the dot com bubble burst, then 9/11, then a recession in 2001 (which caused the economy to go down for several years), then a small recovery where things picked up between 2004 through 2007, then a major nose dive when the latest series crisis hit…which we are still dealing with. If you want to look at the numbers without the spin, then simply click on the link I provided earlier. YOUR cite is trying to cherry pick numbers and to demonstrate how much better Clinton was than Bush (which I’d agree with, btw) without any context for events.
[ul]
[li] If something such as money or property is redistributed, it is shared among people or organizations in a different way from the way that it was previously shared. VERB [/li]
[LIST]
[li] Wealth was redistributed more equitably among society. ‘be’ V-ed [/li][li] Taxes could be used to redistribute income. V n [/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li] redistribution N-UNCOUNT /r’iːdɪstrɪbj’uːʃən/ http://www.google.co.uk/dictionary/flash/SpeakerOffA16.png [/li]
[LIST]
[li] …some redistribution of income so that the better off can help to keep the worse off out of poverty. + [/li][/ul]
[/LIST]
So, the dictionary definition of redistribution says that if something is redistributed, it’s shared in a different way to the way it ws before. And that’s exactly what happened between 1980 and 2008! And it also says that taxes can be used to redistribute wealth too. That also happened, income/capital gains taxes (mainly falling on the wealthy) being cut and payroll taxes (mainly falling on low/middle income people) being raised specifically to cover the revenue shortfall caused by the cut in income taxes.
[/LIST]
[/LIST]
Dick Dastardly, you’re not allowed to call other posters trolls here in any forum except the BBQ Pit. Implying they aren’t sentient isn’t a good idea either. Don’t do this again.
That’s fine. What I originally said was they fell in that period, which they did. The overarching point I made was that they were stagnant, which even with the increase they made up to 2007 is true when you include the increase in the cost of living over that time. Historically, wages have always gone up much faster than prices. That isn’t happening anymore and won’t happen under Obama either because his policies are essentially no different from Bush’s. Like I said, what we need before we have any sustained recovery is a big redistribution of wealth to make up for the one we’ve had since 1980.
Hogwash. Wealth is distributed among the people of the U.S. (the richest 1% have some share of the combined net wealth, etc.). If that share changes from one year to the next, then redistribution is taking place. It doesn’t have to be some highwayman stopping a stage full of nobles at gunpoint and making sure they all have the same number of tiaras. We’re simply looking at a measurable statistic, and how it changes over time.
“Allowed” by whom? If the tax burden, for example, is changed to fall more heavily on one group than another, then that is clearly a factor influencing the distribution.
And the fact that you phrase this in terms of individuals means you’re utterly missing the point. The richest 1% of the population is not the same group of people from one year to the next. Some rich people will spend lavishly, make bad investments, or die; some anonymous worker is creating the next big thing and will strike it rich. Over the last 30 years, I expect there’s been a great deal of turnover within that top 1%. Despite the fact that it is not the same individuals, we can still define various groups, how much they have, how much they make, and how those numbers change over time.
xtisme, did you miss my questions in post #102? Answer if you would, please:
