Quote:
Originally Posted by stekim
There are two problems with that theory! Well, there's more than two actually, but we'll just hit the big ones. First, America has always had poor people and the number of poor people, give or take, has been fairly constant since we started tracking it. There were poor people before the industrial revolution, poor people during its peak, and poor people as it started declining. There were poor people 1825, 1875, 1925, 1975, and 1990. And there will be poor people in 2020. Why? Because in a capitalist country wages are governed by supply and demand and some people will always be in the wrong bucket skill-wise. And many of those people will never, for whatever reason, do anything about it.
|
True there have always been poor people in America. My post was poorly worded.
However, supply and demand is not w/o manipulation. By putting up barriers to unionization , allowing guest worker programs and "free trade" the U.S. has kicked the stuffing out of the power of labor after its brief period of ascendency in the 50s.
I would like to see a link to your numbers on income. The sources that I look at refer to "household income"; in the past 30 years the percentage of households with 2 income earners has gone up. That has helped boost the "household" income numbers and they are still unimpressive.
This is from U.S. census bureau
From 1969 to 1996, median household income rose a very modest 6.3 percent in constant dollars (from $33,072 to $35,172). At the same time, per capita income rose by a robust 51 percent in constant dollars (from $11,975 to $18,136). The two data series are not inconsistent, because the median simply identifies the income level of the household in the middle of the income distribution while per capita income is calculated by dividing aggregate income by the total number of individuals in the universe. Although the two series are not inconsistent, the difference between the two is sufficiently large that an attempt to identify the reasons behind the difference seems useful. The material below will focus on changes in income inequality and changes in the size and composition of households as factors that help explain the different growth rates in the two income series.
The fact that median household income showed only a small gain during the same time period that per capita income rose sharply suggests that a major change occurred in income inequality. The distribution of income changed dramatically over the period, but it changed in such a way as to have a small effect on the median.
Quote:
|
Second, median personal income data simply does not support the notion that all of America's jobs a "low wage service jobs".
|
No, but if things have been stagnant before, they are taking a downward turn,now. Cassandra that I am, I think that things look grim. The numbers are manipulated to make the economy look better than it is. Inflation is certainly higher than the numbers suggest. The credit/ debt driven consumer activity has to slow. Baby boomers are retiring. What will America do for its' next act? We have already tried war and that is not going too well.