Incomes.

[Arkady]

The Census is finally out with its 2014 report. The headline number was the massive decline in uninsured Americans, which is a real reversal from the Bush-era trend of more and more Americans being uncovered by health insurance. However, less publicized was an upward adjustment to 2013 median household income. The Census had previously reported it at $51,939 (the number the FRED site is still quoting), but now the Census has it at $53,585. In total, in inflation adjusted dollars, as of 2014 real household incomes were up 2% from the 2012 low. That's not the kind of progress we'd hope to see, but at least it's movement in the right direction. And, if you couple that with enhanced benefits in the form of broader health insurance coverage, most people should be finding noticeably more money in their pockets.

 

[marvin martian]

Unfortunately, wages are still stagnant in our alleged "recovery". With an alleged unemployment rate of 5.1% (lol), employers should be raising wages to compete for the low availability of workers. The fact that they aren't is the easiest way to tell the government's unemployment numbers are horseshit.

 

[4/15]

Wages have been stagnant since Ray Goon was president.

 

[Zam-Zam]

And then, there's that pesky wealth gap:

Fixing America's worsening wealth gap is more important to the country's ability to compete globally than boosting overall economic growth, according to a Harvard Business School survey of its alumni published on Tuesday.


The report, "The Challenge of Shared Prosperity," showed alumni of the elite school generally believed American companies have been recovering their competitive edge on the world stage since the financial crisis, but that U.S. inequality posed a large and growing threat.


"Two-thirds of respondents consider it a higher priority for American society to address rising inequality, middle-class stagnation, rising poverty or limited economic mobility than to boost overall economic growth," according to the report, which was based on a survey of 2,716 alumni around the globe.


http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/09/us-wealth-gap-a-bigger-problem-than-growth-harvard-survey.html

 

[Caroljo]

Unfortunately, wages are still stagnant in our alleged "recovery". With an alleged unemployment rate of 5.1% (lol), employers should be raising wages to compete for the low availability of workers. The fact that they aren't is the easiest way to tell the government's unemployment numbers are horseshit.

The real unemployment rate is over 10%......if they'd include all the people that have just given up.

 

[Spamature]

The real unemployment rate is over 10%......if they'd include all the people that have just given up.

Do you know that rate U6 has dropped even faster than rate normally announced ?

It was at 17.1% 5 yrs ago. So a drop of almost 7 percentage points in 5 yrs sounds like a pretty good job has been done in that area.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/02/chart-whats-the-real-unemployment-rate.html

PS. It's now 10.3% not 10.5%

 

[Arkady]

Unfortunately, wages are still stagnant in our alleged "recovery". With an alleged unemployment rate of 5.1% (lol), employers should be raising wages to compete for the low availability of workers. The fact that they aren't is the easiest way to tell the government's unemployment numbers are horseshit.

Here's wages and salaries adjusted for inflation:

As you can see, the overall trend for real private wages and salaries was downward between early 2009 and fourth quarter 2012 -- just as we'd expect when there was high unemployment, which put the bargaining power in the hands of employers. Since then, the inflation-adjusted index rose from 0.50439 to 0.51829, which is about a 2.7% increase (which, recall, is in excess of inflation). The inflation-adjusted index is now higher than it was at any point during the Bush presidency.

You said that the "fact" that wages are stagnant shows the alleged unemployment rate to be horseshit. Out of curiosity, did you think the same way in the Reagan/Bush era, when Republicans were heralding falling unemployment even as wages collapsed? Here's a reminder of what the historical trend looks like:

As you can see, real hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees declined swiftly throughout the Reagan/Bush era, but are actually up over the course of the Obama years. Were you aware of that?

The FRED site only has data back to 2006 when it comes to hourly earnings of all employees, but there, too, you'll see that in inflation-adjusted terms, hourly wages are higher today than before Obama took office:

Anyway, I thought you might appreciate some actual data against which to check your assumptions.

 

[as seen on tv]

The Census is finally out with its 2014 report. The headline number was the massive decline in uninsured Americans, which is a real reversal from the Bush-era trend of more and more Americans being uncovered by health insurance. However, less publicized was an upward adjustment to 2013 median household income. The Census had previously reported it at $51,939 (the number the FRED site is still quoting), but now the Census has it at $53,585. In total, in inflation adjusted dollars, as of 2014 real household incomes were up 2% from the 2012 low. That's not the kind of progress we'd hope to see, but at least it's movement in the right direction. And, if you couple that with enhanced benefits in the form of broader health insurance coverage, most people should be finding noticeably more money in their pockets.

please identify any actual "bush" policies that caused people to lose insurance. if you can't come up with such proof, then perhaps it would be more accurate to lay the blame for rising costs and reduced coverage someplace else?

 

[Lukey]

A) But it was down in 2014 from 2013:



B) Obamacare just dropped 400,000 "insured:"

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-14/obamacare-backfires-400000-immigrants-lose-benefits

 

[Arkady]

And then, there's that pesky wealth gap:

Fixing America's worsening wealth gap is more important to the country's ability to compete globally than boosting overall economic growth, according to a Harvard Business School survey of its alumni published on Tuesday.


The report, "The Challenge of Shared Prosperity," showed alumni of the elite school generally believed American companies have been recovering their competitive edge on the world stage since the financial crisis, but that U.S. inequality posed a large and growing threat.


"Two-thirds of respondents consider it a higher priority for American society to address rising inequality, middle-class stagnation, rising poverty or limited economic mobility than to boost overall economic growth," according to the report, which was based on a survey of 2,716 alumni around the globe.


http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/09/us-wealth-gap-a-bigger-problem-than-growth-harvard-survey.html

Yes, we'd fully expect the Obama-era wealth-gap to have gotten worse, for obvious policy reasons. The Fed has been willing to try monetary stimulus to get the economy moving again (which has helped to save us from the kind of radical contraction some other countries have had), but there's only so much monetary policy can hope to do in the face of the zero lower bound. At some point, you're just going to be plumping up returns on unearned income, by way of capital gains, and that mostly just increases the income of rich people.

Meanwhile, we've had a unprecedented shrinkage of government spending. So, not only are we not getting fiscal stimulus when we need it, we're actually experiencing a huge fiscal drag. And this takes the form of massive reductions of government employment. We have 561,000 fewer government employees today than we did when Bush was president. Do you know when the last time we shrunk government payrolls by that much over such a period?

It was a trick question. It never happened before. Even during the massive demobilization that followed WWII, we didn't shrink government payrolls by that much. This is a unique situation in history. And government jobs tend to be middle-class jobs: nothing you're going to get rich with, but enough to support the American dream and bolster the national median income. What do you think happens when wild-eyed anti-government zealots get their way and cause utterly unprecedented mass layoffs of middle-class government workers? It's no great mystery. We see the result: even in a period with growing real GDP per capita, poverty rises and real incomes fall. It's exactly what anyone with a decent understanding of economics was telling you would happen if we tried a reckless experiment with austerity in the wake of a financial crisis.

So, between the aristocracy-benefiting monetary efforts to keep the economy afloat and the middle-class-throttling fiscal efforts to drown government workers in the bathtub (to riff on Super Grover), you get the predictable result of growing the wealth gap. And this is just worsened by tax policies that have allowed the very rich to pay less and less (e.g., the raising of the estate tax exemption to an insanely high level).

 

[Deleted member 21794]

The Census is finally out with its 2014 report. The headline number was the massive decline in uninsured Americans, which is a real reversal from the Bush-era trend of more and more Americans being uncovered by health insurance. However, less publicized was an upward adjustment to 2013 median household income. The Census had previously reported it at $51,939 (the number the FRED site is still quoting), but now the Census has it at $53,585. In total, in inflation adjusted dollars, as of 2014 real household incomes were up 2% from the 2012 low. That's not the kind of progress we'd hope to see, but at least it's movement in the right direction. And, if you couple that with enhanced benefits in the form of broader health insurance coverage, most people should be finding noticeably more money in their pockets.

Too bad many of the *insured* can't even afford to use their coverage given the rising rates and deductibles.

 

[Arkady]

The real unemployment rate is over 10%......if they'd include all the people that have just given up.

Incorrect. I know that right-wingers have been instructed by their conservative media handlers to treat the U-6 report as the "real unemployment rate" (now that there's a Democrat in the White House - they'll dutifully forget it the moment it's a Republican). But that's simply not what U-6 measures. The numerator in the U-6 calculation includes people who have jobs, and so cannot be unemployed. U-6 is a measure of labor underutilization, not unemployment. But your right-wing handlers won't explain that to you, and they figure you're too lazy or credulous to bother looking it up yourself. Prove them wrong!

If you're looking for a "real unemployment rate" to cite, and you're dissatisfied with the official rate (U-3) because it doesn't sound bad enough for your partisan purposes, then at least pick a report that makes sense. U-5, unlike U-6, doesn't count any employed people in the numerator, so it could be called a "real unemployment rate" by sane and informed people. It stands at 6.2%, compared to 5.1% for the official U-3 rate.

 

[Arkady]

Do you know that rate U6 has dropped even faster than rate normally announced ?

It was at 17.1% 5 yrs ago. So a drop of almost 7 percentage points in 5 yrs sounds like a pretty good job has been done in that area.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/02/chart-whats-the-real-unemployment-rate.html

PS. It's now 10.3% not 10.5%

Those are the rules of the game for the stooges on the political right. When they talk about unemployment decreases, they use U-3, because it shows a smaller decrease, but when they talk about the percentage of unemployed, they use U-6, because it shows a higher number. You'd exhaust yourself trying to find any intellectually consistent principles about which numbers they think are important. They have no principles of any kind. They simply vomit back up the predigested talking points the conservative media handed them, without even beginning to grasp what they're saying.

 

[Arkady]

please identify any actual "bush" policies that caused people to lose insurance

Sure: Bush's opposition to health care reform.

 

[Arkady]

A) But it was down in 2014 from 2013:

View attachment 28123

B) Obamacare just dropped 400,000 "insured:"

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-14/obamacare-backfires-400000-immigrants-lose-benefits

The 2014 level is lower than the new 2013 level, but is higher than what the 2013 level was reported at prior to the latest adjustment. In other words, people are earning more than we THOUGHT they were earning last year, but not as much as it turns out they actually were earning last year. Will the 2014 number likewise get a big upward adjustment at some future point? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

 

[marvin martian]

Out of curiosity, did you think the same way in the Reagan/Bush era, when Republicans were heralding falling unemployment even as wages collapsed?

I think I would have, had I been old enough to care about that.

 

[Arkady]

Too bad many of the *insured* can't even afford to use their coverage given the rising rates and deductibles.

What makes you think that?

As I've mentioned before, it'll be a few years before we have any good idea how well Obamacare is working on the public-health front. Is getting more people on health insurance actually resulting in a healthier populace, or is it just helping to slow the rise of total healthcare spending? It's too early to tell. But, when I've tried to look into it with what few public health stats are already out for the last few years, it looks promising. Not only is life expectancy up in the US since Obamacare became law, it's up even relative to the pace of improvement in other leading nations, resulting in us starting to climb a little bit back up those rankings. After so many decades when we just kept slipping relative to the populations of other leading nations, that's some exciting preliminary data, don't you think?

 

[Deleted member 21794]

The 2014 level is lower than the new 2013 level, but is higher than what the 2013 level was reported at prior to the latest adjustment. In other words, people are earning more than we THOUGHT they were earning last year, but not as much as it turns out they actually were earning last year. Will the 2014 number likewise get a big upward adjustment at some future point? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Yet with all this fantastic news about the economy (if you consider slow European style growth good), rising wages, so many people getting awesome health insurance thanks to ObamaScam and things like the brilliantly-negotiated deal with Iran, why isn't all this awesomeness reflected in Obama's approval numbers and Democrats' prospects for the White House in 2016?

 

[Deleted member 21794]

What makes you think that?

As I've mentioned before, it'll be a few years before we have any good idea how well Obamacare is working on the public-health front. Is getting more people on health insurance actually resulting in a healthier populace, or is it just helping to slow the rise of total healthcare spending? It's too early to tell. But, when I've tried to look into it with what few public health stats are already out for the last few years, it looks promising. Not only is life expectancy up in the US since Obamacare became law, it's up even relative to other leading nations, resulting in us starting to climb a little bit back up those rankings. After so many decades when we just kept slipping relative to the populations of other leading nations, that's some exciting preliminary data, don't you think?

OK, so we all just need to ignore the rising premiums and deductibles, it'll turn around in a few years. Kinda like Medicare did, right? Oops, bad example. That overran original projections by over 700%. OK then how about Social Security? Oops... bad example, the *trust fund* has been systematically robbed for decades. But OK, we'll all just sit, hope and pray that this time will be different from the plethora of instances where big government liberal programs have cost substantially more than promised- even though there's just no data at all to support having such a hope.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Oh and what makes me think deductibles are going up? Those right wingers at Nuttington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/20/health-insurance-deductibles_n_7337406.html

Premiums? Sorry, no relief for you there either:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/manoj-jain-md-mph/rising-insurance-premiums_b_7554600.html

 

[Lukey]

The 2014 level is lower than the new 2013 level, but is higher than what the 2013 level was reported at prior to the latest adjustment. In other words, people are earning more than we THOUGHT they were earning last year, but not as much as it turns out they actually were earning last year. Will the 2014 number likewise get a big upward adjustment at some future point? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

If the economy is doing so well, with "full employment" and incomes rising, why would the fed risk losing what little credibility it had left by not moving off of ZIRP? And why are they putting NIRP on the table?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-17/what-yellen-said-about-negative-rates-coming-us