I couldn't help but laugh at the part of your article that reads:
"But the citizens of this country still hold the power, and through their voice, they can turn the country right-side up again."
And just who the hell are we supposed to vote for... Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck???
The Weariness Index is easy to define. If CPI is an honest (?) price index (i.e. dollars per basket), and MOI is the mean of the inverse hourly wages or of the inverse yearly salary of a full-time worker (i.e. hours per dollar), then WearinessIndex = index(CPI*MOI) = index(CPI/(harmonic mean of wages)). Thus it is an index of mean hours worked to earn the basket.
I estimated this years ago based on very crude data from 1971 to 1986, and it had increased (gotten worse) 13% over that period. The Weariness Index is a universal sum, in the sense that it indexes an approximation to the total of something (the hours worked by everyone to earn their baskets). Thus it is like mean income (everybody's earnings) and CPI (everybody's cost of the basket), but not median income, which is insensitive to something happening to less than 50% of the workers. My index was sensitive to the felt economic disaster of the end of the 1970s.
Ok, but even in very too the left liberal la la land we smoke pot and it's legal law Oregon voted something like 77% no on driver's licenses for illegals. Pretty obvious who controls even the dialog. No matter what happens you can bet that the U.S. worker will lose on anything passed since cheap labor is such a huge part of this and they write in cheap labor into every bill "amnesty o no".
My comment was more or less wishful thinking (I didn't necessarily mean anything was "true").
This immigration debate has been raging for years, and I haven't seen either party address it in any meaningful way. So what is the answer?
NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” depicted a bourbon summit between President Obama and future Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) where the two get massively drunk.
McConnell warns Obama about his planned executive action on immigration, but when Obama asks whether he has a plan, McConnell insists Republicans will pass immigration reform. The two then burst out laughing at this suggestion.
This simply isn't true, especially on guest workers. It will FLOOD the U.S. market with already so many talented U.S. workers displaced and now either out of work or significantly underemployed.
Driver's licenses have been proved to be used for identity theft. That is why Oregon stopped giving illegals driver's licenses, they had a flood of identity theft going on.
Please don't bring the Obama kool-aid here. This is just the same ole special interests and corporate big money wanting their massive cheap labor supply, open border nonsense. It DOES displace U.S. workers and repress wages, and flooding the labor supply, legal or not, does the same thing. There is no high demand for labor, the U.S. cannot absorb millions of workers and all that is happening is Americans are out of a job.
Ya know meatpacking used to be a union, good job? Now it is minimum wage almost, all done by use of illegal labor. List goes on and on.
The source of all of this is the SSA, the same link at the top of the post. I believe you can go back years on their site but the result is in HTML, so you must convert.
Also, I calculate much of this from the original data published by SSA, but the two you are looking for are on their site, top link. Let us see your weariness index! I think America is pretty weary!
I need the sources for your second and third graphs, "Number of Workers Per Wage Bracket" and "Average Wage for Number of Workers", both given as SSA. Also I need them for as far back as possible, not just 2013. This is to calculate my statistic, the Weariness Index, which approximates the mean number of hours of work needed to earn a basket of goods. I tried to register in Economic Populist but it stalled after I answered the account details email.
Would the GOP pass a better and more suitable immigration bill? They're talking about building bigger and better high-tech fences (but only along the southern border). How will this be paid for? By cutting food stamps for the poor?
The bright light in Obama's amnesty program might be if we better used e-verify to bring more workers out of the shadows in the labor market — because employers won't be able to use the threat of deportation to depress wages and engage in wage theft by using "independent contractors".
And if "undocumented workers" became "documented", maybe real unemployment numbers could be better analyzed (after bringing these workers out of the "shadow economy").
These workers might also tend to be Democratic and pro-union as well, and might help organize for better wages — thereby putting upward pressure on everyone's wages overall.
This is only referencing CURRENT non-visa workers, as the guestworker visa programs should be eliminated until the labor market improves (as employers abuse these programs to undercut domestic wages with their false claims of "lacking skills"). H-1B visa workers taking domestic tech jobs should be abolished completely.
As far as farm workers (or other jobs that "Americans don't want to do"), this might also raise their wages as well, and might drive up the cost of food or other services (like the guys that do your landscaping — or the women that clean your homes, cares for your elderly or watches your kids).
If immigration is down and deportations are up, this amnesty program might work to some degree if we better secure our borders and better enforce current immigration laws by punishing employers that illegally use these workers for jobs (e.g. construction, etc.) that can't be offshored to low-wage countries.
The current labor market is over-saturated for many reasons, such as: 1) employers making current workers do more 2) computers, automation and robotics 3) offshoring. A flood of "new labor" might not materialize if they are already working under the table. But yes, NEW guestworker visas should be stopped dead in its tracks until we have REAL full employment and workers are paid better wages.
Also (as an aside) if these workers were permitted to get a driver's license, more could purchase auto insurance, and maybe bring down insurance rates. And if they were "legally" employed with valid Social Security numbers, more taxes might also be collected.
* This comment does not even touch on the "humanitarian" or "moral" aspects of splitting families apart — the "Dreamers", those who came here as children, who might only speak English, have already fully integrated in the country as ordinary Americans (many times, as role citizens), have gone to college, and have served in our military. Does this country tell them all to “go home” when they believe they are already home?
just a footnote to this; on friday, the MBA (mortgage bankers association) released their 3rd quarter mortgage delinquency survey, which unlike the Mortgage Monitor, is seasonally adjusted; they found that 2.39% of all mortgages were in the foreclosure process at the end of the quarter, down from 2.49% at the end of the 2nd quarter, while an additional 5.85% of home owners with a mortgage were at least one month overdue on their payments but not in foreclosure at the end of the quarter, down from a delinquency rate of 6.04% at the end of the 2nd quarter...so their numbers are a bit higher than BKFS, who are a mortgage servicing & analytics agency...
Pat Choate wrote an article predicting all of the nasty things that will happen economically as this President bypasses Congress. Of course it is the worst of the worst corporate agenda that will be passed since they own both parties and set the agenda.
God, this BUSINESS of making profits off of sick and dying people is disgusting to me. Great post, seems to be everywhere and most people have no idea on what is going on or how to fight it, esp. around death, people are too grief stricken.
William McPherson (a novelist, critic, and journalist) was the editor of the Washington Post Book World and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Recently he wrote a post titled Falling:
"Like a lot of other people, I started life comfortably middle-class, maybe upper-middle class; now, like a lot of other people walking the streets of America today, I am poor."
simply put, 1.76% of mortgages are still in foreclosure, and a lot of them have been that way for a long time...we really dont have information as to why; the servicers blame court delays, but the pipelines in non-judicial states are almost as long as in judicial states; could be some combination of chain of title and hence right to foreclose being lost in the poorly upkept automated systems, & banks feeling that homes are better cared for with someone living in them than being empty and prey for vandals...
Yes, I suggest a short term capital gains tax of 90% for anything over $1 million a year. Except in the case of option grants where the tax would be 90% on the first dollar of gain. If they don't work for it then they shouldn't keep it. Inflation of assets or simply trading them isn't work.
Atlanta Fed: "As reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 10 percent more people are working part-time in September 2014 than before the recession. Part-time workers generally earn less per hour than full-time workers, so lower hours and lower per-hour earnings both contribute to their lower incomes ... During the recovery, the median growth rate of full-time workers has been higher than that of part-time workers. In particular, wage declines were more common among part-time workers ... Education matters for wage growth, but the pattern of lower wage growth for part-time workers persists for people with broadly similar educational attainment." http://macroblog.typepad.com/macroblog/2014/11/wage-growth-of-part-time-...
Economic Policy Institute: "The weak labor market of the last seven years has put enormous downward pressure on wages, and there has been no significant pickup in nominal wage growth in recent years ... This lackluster wage growth is a clear indicator that there’s still considerable slack in the labor market. With so many Americans looking for work — and millions more who would be looking for work if job opportunities were stronger — employers simply don’t have to offer wage increases to get and keep the workers they need.” http://www.epi.org/blog/economy-adds-jobs-but-we-need-to-raise-americas-...
The last chart is the one to look at. It shows that yes, the real wage has been squeezed since 2008 by about $200 or so per year, and has not made a comeback. Also it shows that the median wage has been nearly flat since 2000, gaining a measly $500/year despite the mega-rich taking off in terms of earnings. But I was heartened that the situation isn't nearly as bad as the narrative suggests, especially considering that deflation rules in many areas that are growing in the economy (the tech sector).
Here is a suggestion: "give back" the regressive payroll tax (for everyone... insuring that it goes into their pay), and "make it up" with a real, solid, un-avoidable-using-trusts-and-donations and such tricks global DEATH TAX! No one needs more than $5 million in assets to live a nice life in this country, so limit all inheritance to $5 million per head. Then the progeny of the rich become as motivated as the self-made zillionaires. Use the multiple tools of coersion that is the US gov't to ensure that no richies export their money and sneek away. Help other gov'ts that want their dead richies to pay up, make 'em pay. Try to get every country in the world to use this approach to gov't funding.
You hard core re-distributionists out there should take heart... this does redistribute just about everything, if you are looking at a long enough time frame (70 years)... and socially stability wise, this is the time frame that really matters. You hard core property rights types should also be happy... no living person gets taxed! You subtle thinkers (conservatives?) who think that family rights should be carved out for family farms, etc.. To you I say tough luck. Family based inheritance has caused a great deal of misery over the millenia of history and needs to be removed from the world root and branch. Families don't earn money... individuals do. Therefore individuals should be allowed to keep (and spend) most of what they earn, (in their lifetimes) but should not be allowed to fund the next generation or set up perpetual tax-dodges. This is real populism. It lets everyone do their thing, lets the little guy keep his money (by paying little or no taxes), and lets the little guy become a zillionare if they can. Viva la American dream!
What would be the change in income subject to Social Security taxation if US citizens had the same total combined income, but it was distributed as a function of gross income in the same way it was distributed in 1979?
The Social Security trust fund is not in horrible financial shape - it will soon begin to run into the red, but has built a hefty surplus since its inception in the 1930s. The big increases in FICA taxes made in the 1980s were supposed to "fix" deficits for the future since it was assumed that productivity growth and the FICA tax increases would compensate for the demographic aging of the populace. If the fruits of productivity gains had gone to earners in the same proportions as earners had been getting in the '80's when the increases went into effect, those assumptions would have been correct, Social Security would in excellent shape.
Once again, if inequality were addressed and reversed only to the extent that pre-Reagan income distributions were restored, Social Security would be secured as a byproduct. Increases in capital gains taxes may be one of the mechanisms to redress our gross inequality, but I think it's a mistake to say that we're taxing billionaires for Social Security. Better to say that we should tax billionaires because their incomes have increased to levels far beyond anything reasonable or healthy for the economic and political health of our society. Fixing Social Security financial stability is just one byproduct of addressing inequality, but even more serious is corruption of our media and politics by the entrenchment of plutocratic aristocracy.
I couldn't help but laugh at the part of your article that reads:
"But the citizens of this country still hold the power, and through their voice, they can turn the country right-side up again."
And just who the hell are we supposed to vote for... Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck???
The Weariness Index is easy to define. If CPI is an honest (?) price index (i.e. dollars per basket), and MOI is the mean of the inverse hourly wages or of the inverse yearly salary of a full-time worker (i.e. hours per dollar), then WearinessIndex = index(CPI*MOI) = index(CPI/(harmonic mean of wages)). Thus it is an index of mean hours worked to earn the basket.
I estimated this years ago based on very crude data from 1971 to 1986, and it had increased (gotten worse) 13% over that period. The Weariness Index is a universal sum, in the sense that it indexes an approximation to the total of something (the hours worked by everyone to earn their baskets). Thus it is like mean income (everybody's earnings) and CPI (everybody's cost of the basket), but not median income, which is insensitive to something happening to less than 50% of the workers. My index was sensitive to the felt economic disaster of the end of the 1970s.
Ok, but even in very too the left liberal la la land we smoke pot and it's legal law Oregon voted something like 77% no on driver's licenses for illegals. Pretty obvious who controls even the dialog. No matter what happens you can bet that the U.S. worker will lose on anything passed since cheap labor is such a huge part of this and they write in cheap labor into every bill "amnesty o no".
My comment was more or less wishful thinking (I didn't necessarily mean anything was "true").
This immigration debate has been raging for years, and I haven't seen either party address it in any meaningful way. So what is the answer?
NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” depicted a bourbon summit between President Obama and future Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) where the two get massively drunk.
McConnell warns Obama about his planned executive action on immigration, but when Obama asks whether he has a plan, McConnell insists Republicans will pass immigration reform. The two then burst out laughing at this suggestion.
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/11/16/SNL-Envisions-Drunk-McC...
This simply isn't true, especially on guest workers. It will FLOOD the U.S. market with already so many talented U.S. workers displaced and now either out of work or significantly underemployed.
Driver's licenses have been proved to be used for identity theft. That is why Oregon stopped giving illegals driver's licenses, they had a flood of identity theft going on.
Please don't bring the Obama kool-aid here. This is just the same ole special interests and corporate big money wanting their massive cheap labor supply, open border nonsense. It DOES displace U.S. workers and repress wages, and flooding the labor supply, legal or not, does the same thing. There is no high demand for labor, the U.S. cannot absorb millions of workers and all that is happening is Americans are out of a job.
Ya know meatpacking used to be a union, good job? Now it is minimum wage almost, all done by use of illegal labor. List goes on and on.
The source of all of this is the SSA, the same link at the top of the post. I believe you can go back years on their site but the result is in HTML, so you must convert.
Also, I calculate much of this from the original data published by SSA, but the two you are looking for are on their site, top link. Let us see your weariness index! I think America is pretty weary!
I need the sources for your second and third graphs, "Number of Workers Per Wage Bracket" and "Average Wage for Number of Workers", both given as SSA. Also I need them for as far back as possible, not just 2013. This is to calculate my statistic, the Weariness Index, which approximates the mean number of hours of work needed to earn a basket of goods. I tried to register in Economic Populist but it stalled after I answered the account details email.
Would the GOP pass a better and more suitable immigration bill? They're talking about building bigger and better high-tech fences (but only along the southern border). How will this be paid for? By cutting food stamps for the poor?
The bright light in Obama's amnesty program might be if we better used e-verify to bring more workers out of the shadows in the labor market — because employers won't be able to use the threat of deportation to depress wages and engage in wage theft by using "independent contractors".
And if "undocumented workers" became "documented", maybe real unemployment numbers could be better analyzed (after bringing these workers out of the "shadow economy").
These workers might also tend to be Democratic and pro-union as well, and might help organize for better wages — thereby putting upward pressure on everyone's wages overall.
This is only referencing CURRENT non-visa workers, as the guestworker visa programs should be eliminated until the labor market improves (as employers abuse these programs to undercut domestic wages with their false claims of "lacking skills"). H-1B visa workers taking domestic tech jobs should be abolished completely.
As far as farm workers (or other jobs that "Americans don't want to do"), this might also raise their wages as well, and might drive up the cost of food or other services (like the guys that do your landscaping — or the women that clean your homes, cares for your elderly or watches your kids).
If immigration is down and deportations are up, this amnesty program might work to some degree if we better secure our borders and better enforce current immigration laws by punishing employers that illegally use these workers for jobs (e.g. construction, etc.) that can't be offshored to low-wage countries.
The current labor market is over-saturated for many reasons, such as: 1) employers making current workers do more 2) computers, automation and robotics 3) offshoring. A flood of "new labor" might not materialize if they are already working under the table. But yes, NEW guestworker visas should be stopped dead in its tracks until we have REAL full employment and workers are paid better wages.
Also (as an aside) if these workers were permitted to get a driver's license, more could purchase auto insurance, and maybe bring down insurance rates. And if they were "legally" employed with valid Social Security numbers, more taxes might also be collected.
* This comment does not even touch on the "humanitarian" or "moral" aspects of splitting families apart — the "Dreamers", those who came here as children, who might only speak English, have already fully integrated in the country as ordinary Americans (many times, as role citizens), have gone to college, and have served in our military. Does this country tell them all to “go home” when they believe they are already home?
just a footnote to this; on friday, the MBA (mortgage bankers association) released their 3rd quarter mortgage delinquency survey, which unlike the Mortgage Monitor, is seasonally adjusted; they found that 2.39% of all mortgages were in the foreclosure process at the end of the quarter, down from 2.49% at the end of the 2nd quarter, while an additional 5.85% of home owners with a mortgage were at least one month overdue on their payments but not in foreclosure at the end of the quarter, down from a delinquency rate of 6.04% at the end of the 2nd quarter...so their numbers are a bit higher than BKFS, who are a mortgage servicing & analytics agency...
Spiegal (German News) has a great article on how the economies are Zombie, going the way of Japan, increasing income inequality, etc. here.
Pat Choate wrote an article predicting all of the nasty things that will happen economically as this President bypasses Congress. Of course it is the worst of the worst corporate agenda that will be passed since they own both parties and set the agenda.
God, this BUSINESS of making profits off of sick and dying people is disgusting to me. Great post, seems to be everywhere and most people have no idea on what is going on or how to fight it, esp. around death, people are too grief stricken.
William McPherson (a novelist, critic, and journalist) was the editor of the Washington Post Book World and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Recently he wrote a post titled Falling:
"Like a lot of other people, I started life comfortably middle-class, maybe upper-middle class; now, like a lot of other people walking the streets of America today, I am poor."
http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2014_Fall_McPherson.php
simply put, 1.76% of mortgages are still in foreclosure, and a lot of them have been that way for a long time...we really dont have information as to why; the servicers blame court delays, but the pipelines in non-judicial states are almost as long as in judicial states; could be some combination of chain of title and hence right to foreclose being lost in the poorly upkept automated systems, & banks feeling that homes are better cared for with someone living in them than being empty and prey for vandals...
Wow, and the press, politicians "act like" the housing crisis is all better, no more problems, it's all good.
Yes, I suggest a short term capital gains tax of 90% for anything over $1 million a year. Except in the case of option grants where the tax would be 90% on the first dollar of gain. If they don't work for it then they shouldn't keep it. Inflation of assets or simply trading them isn't work.
I show the increase in part-time here in the CPS overview.
Part-time has gone down in 2014, but the levels are still higher than before the recession.
Atlanta Fed: "As reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 10 percent more people are working part-time in September 2014 than before the recession. Part-time workers generally earn less per hour than full-time workers, so lower hours and lower per-hour earnings both contribute to their lower incomes ... During the recovery, the median growth rate of full-time workers has been higher than that of part-time workers. In particular, wage declines were more common among part-time workers ... Education matters for wage growth, but the pattern of lower wage growth for part-time workers persists for people with broadly similar educational attainment."
http://macroblog.typepad.com/macroblog/2014/11/wage-growth-of-part-time-...
Economic Policy Institute: "The weak labor market of the last seven years has put enormous downward pressure on wages, and there has been no significant pickup in nominal wage growth in recent years ... This lackluster wage growth is a clear indicator that there’s still considerable slack in the labor market. With so many Americans looking for work — and millions more who would be looking for work if job opportunities were stronger — employers simply don’t have to offer wage increases to get and keep the workers they need.”
http://www.epi.org/blog/economy-adds-jobs-but-we-need-to-raise-americas-...
The last chart is the one to look at. It shows that yes, the real wage has been squeezed since 2008 by about $200 or so per year, and has not made a comeback. Also it shows that the median wage has been nearly flat since 2000, gaining a measly $500/year despite the mega-rich taking off in terms of earnings. But I was heartened that the situation isn't nearly as bad as the narrative suggests, especially considering that deflation rules in many areas that are growing in the economy (the tech sector).
Here is a suggestion: "give back" the regressive payroll tax (for everyone... insuring that it goes into their pay), and "make it up" with a real, solid, un-avoidable-using-trusts-and-donations and such tricks global DEATH TAX! No one needs more than $5 million in assets to live a nice life in this country, so limit all inheritance to $5 million per head. Then the progeny of the rich become as motivated as the self-made zillionaires. Use the multiple tools of coersion that is the US gov't to ensure that no richies export their money and sneek away. Help other gov'ts that want their dead richies to pay up, make 'em pay. Try to get every country in the world to use this approach to gov't funding.
You hard core re-distributionists out there should take heart... this does redistribute just about everything, if you are looking at a long enough time frame (70 years)... and socially stability wise, this is the time frame that really matters. You hard core property rights types should also be happy... no living person gets taxed! You subtle thinkers (conservatives?) who think that family rights should be carved out for family farms, etc.. To you I say tough luck. Family based inheritance has caused a great deal of misery over the millenia of history and needs to be removed from the world root and branch. Families don't earn money... individuals do. Therefore individuals should be allowed to keep (and spend) most of what they earn, (in their lifetimes) but should not be allowed to fund the next generation or set up perpetual tax-dodges. This is real populism. It lets everyone do their thing, lets the little guy keep his money (by paying little or no taxes), and lets the little guy become a zillionare if they can. Viva la American dream!
What would be the change in income subject to Social Security taxation if US citizens had the same total combined income, but it was distributed as a function of gross income in the same way it was distributed in 1979?
The Social Security trust fund is not in horrible financial shape - it will soon begin to run into the red, but has built a hefty surplus since its inception in the 1930s. The big increases in FICA taxes made in the 1980s were supposed to "fix" deficits for the future since it was assumed that productivity growth and the FICA tax increases would compensate for the demographic aging of the populace. If the fruits of productivity gains had gone to earners in the same proportions as earners had been getting in the '80's when the increases went into effect, those assumptions would have been correct, Social Security would in excellent shape.
Once again, if inequality were addressed and reversed only to the extent that pre-Reagan income distributions were restored, Social Security would be secured as a byproduct. Increases in capital gains taxes may be one of the mechanisms to redress our gross inequality, but I think it's a mistake to say that we're taxing billionaires for Social Security. Better to say that we should tax billionaires because their incomes have increased to levels far beyond anything reasonable or healthy for the economic and political health of our society. Fixing Social Security financial stability is just one byproduct of addressing inequality, but even more serious is corruption of our media and politics by the entrenchment of plutocratic aristocracy.
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