Worst administration in history?
Real wages under Biden have declined for a record 18 months. This means that US incomes have been below inflation since the start of 2021 pic.twitter.com/TRC4aBF2QU
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 13, 2022
Even if the economy is on a roll, many Americans aren’t feeling the benefit.
Real wages effectively declined in 2018, according to figures from the PayScale Index, a formula from the Seattle-based salary comparison site. PayScale said the median increases, when adjusted for inflation, were only 1.1% in the last quarter and 1% over the past year. In fact, when adjusted for cost of living increases, real wages declined 1.3% in 2018, PayScale found.
That runs counter to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which showed an annual increase of 3.2% in average hourly earnings in December, but that’s before accounting for inflation. The PayScale data also stand in contrast to otherwise encouraging news about the labor market. The U.S. unemployment rate remained near a 49-year low of 3.9% in December.
Guest Post by Bill Bonner
POITOU, FRANCE – Whoa! What’s this?
The Dow popped up nearly 400 points yesterday. It is now just 4% off its all-time high of 26,616, reached on January 26 of this year.
And you know what that means.
Markets are either going up or going down. According to Dow theory, a market goes down after it hits its high for the cycle.
We had previously predicted that the high on January 26 would be the peak of the current cycle, and that the “primary trend” for stocks would, therefore, be down for the foreseeable future.
We’re not sure Dow theory makes any predictive sense. After all, you might just as well say, “Prices go up… until they go down.”
But we like the drama of it… and the big-picture view it gives us. It helps us recognize the long, large sweeps in market history, and reminds us that the most important thing is to be in the right place at the right time.
The latest place to be was in U.S. stocks, which ran up from under 1,000 on the Dow in 1982 to the aforementioned all-time high in January.
You didn’t have to know anything more. You didn’t have to do any real research. All you had to do was get on that train in August 1982 and stay on board.
Continue reading “Why America Hasn’t Had a Raise in Forty Years”
And just like that, a million hopeful voices cried out in horror…
Real average hourly earnings shrank by the most since 2012 in July…
For years hope has been soaring that household income will rise any minute now… and despite two years of disappointment, they remain optimistic…
Continue reading “Americans’ Real Wage Growth Slumps Most In 6 Years”
The average hourly wage paid to a key group of American workers has fallen from last year when accounting for inflation, as an economy that appears strong by several measures continues to fail to create bigger paychecks, the federal government said Tuesday.
For workers in “production and nonsupervisory” positions, the value of the average paycheck has declined in the past year. For those workers, average “real wages” — a measure of pay that takes inflation into account — fell from $22.62 in May 2017 to $22.59 in May 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.
This pool of workers includes those in manufacturing and construction jobs, as well as all “nonsupervisory” workers in service industries such health care or fast food. The group accounts for about four-fifths of the privately employed workers in America, according to BLS.