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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThis is why so many Americans are angry at and frustrated with those with wealth and power
- Between 1979 and 2013,productivity grew 64.9 percent, while hourly compensation of production and nonsupervisory workers, who comprise 80 percent of the private-sector workforce, grew just 8.2 percent. Productivity thus grew eight times faster than typical worker compensation.
- Much of this productivity growth accrued to those with the very highest wages. The top 1 percent of earners saw cumulative gains in annual wages of 153.6 percent between 1979 and 2012–far in excess of economy-wide productivity.
snip:
- Median hourly wages rose just 0.2 percent annually between 1979 and 2013, compared with an annual decline of 0.2 percent for the 10th percentile worker (i.e., the worker who earns more than only 10 percent of workers) and an annual gain of 1 percent for the 95th percentile worker.
- Between 2000 and 2013, hourly wages of the vast majority of workers either fell (bottom 30 percent) or were essentially flat (next 40 percent), and only the 95th percentile saw wage growth closely approaching 1 percent annually.
- The late 1990s was the only period between 1979 and 2013 when wage growth was robust and broadly shared; in fact, wage growth was actually strongest for the bottom 40 percent.
http://www.epi.org/publication/raising-americas-pay/
Some helpful graphs:
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zalinda
(5,621 posts)
TampaAnimusVortex
(785 posts)The fed gives it to the bankers and finance industry first, then as it trickles across the economy, they get first use - and therefore less of an inflation hit, than say the lower levels of the economy. It's all by design...
JHB
(38,213 posts)
Inflation-adjusted to 2013 dollars, just to be clear:
astrophuss42
(290 posts)Busting my rear to get half what my parents did.... But I'm just whiny obviously.
sarge43
(29,173 posts)snort
(2,334 posts)She had to work for it. Minimum wage: $250,000 per hour. Stop your whining!
KPN
(17,377 posts)Hillary will fix that. 
daleanime
(17,796 posts)cement it into place.
highoverheadspace
(307 posts)Its not trickle down, its pumped upward.
SoapBox
(18,791 posts)That's well said.
zentrum
(9,870 posts)
virgista
(48 posts)ellennelle
(614 posts)i closely use the concept of sucking, not pumping. as in hoovering.
they're cleaning us out, folks, sucking us dry!
the only way the trickle down image works is when they're pissing on us.
Duval
(4,280 posts)
HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)It's painfully evident we're losing ground in this battle. It's painfully evident that the captains of industry, business leaders and the government they purchased are not at all interested in making life easier for the middle/working/poor, but rather setting us on a path of economic dystopia that involves replacing millions of us with automation, off/in-shoring and doing absolutely NOTHING in terms of real world solutions to alleviate this catastrophe.
You can't tell someone to "make their own opportunity" when there's no opportunity to make or take advantage of. It's about as useless as telling a 10 year old to perform brain surgery.
snort
(2,334 posts)An exception to your rule.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)jwirr
(39,215 posts)paid for by the 1% does nothing to help.
LettuceSea
(337 posts)Old money has always thought they are better than them, and the new monies are well on their way.
Bad trade deals, jobs being shipped overseas, weak border, possible negative interest rates help perpetuate this, too.
Javaman
(65,711 posts)
Iwillnevergiveup
(9,298 posts)in various colors. Time to dig deep and donate to Bernie.
treestar
(82,383 posts)The accusation of not working hard enough. It is a deep puritanical strain in our culture. Notice nobody ever just works. They work HARD. Afraid to tax the rich just due to guilt - mist not have worked hard enough.
Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)The top of the economic societal pyramid has intentionally stifled wages, shipped factories to low wage countries, raised cost of living, imported lower wage workers here, etc. The business owners have done this ON PURPOSE to us! This is not some misplaced working class guilt bullshit.
Amimnoch
(4,558 posts)Right from the OP.
Hmm.. who was president during the period you mentioned where there WAS across-the board wage growth?
hmmm, think I'll K&R this OP. Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)blue collar workers wages stayed the same. Factories began the Great Exodus then due to nafta, promoted and signed by you know who.
Amimnoch
(4,558 posts)Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)
pampango
(24,692 posts)That period and the year or two at the end of the graph under Obama that looked like the beginning of an upward trend.
JoeyT
(6,785 posts)That was the dot-com bubble, which worked well to make sure anyone with even a basic competency with computers could pull down a really good salary. Clinton wasn't to blame for it blowing up, and he wasn't to blame for it popping. Either one was going to happen no matter who was in office.
aggiesal
(10,804 posts)Any time he say "Wage Inflation" he would adjust the interest rate
to mitigate the wage inflation.
Yes this was done ON PURPOSE.
HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)"Growing up" means you realize "life isn't fair".
"Enlightenment" means you know it's not fair by design.
marions ghost
(19,841 posts)
For education of the clueless.
treestar
(82,383 posts)They claim to work hard, they are not owed anything, etc. You rarely hear this kind of thing outside the Bernie supporters - when do real people complain about the corporations and that the people at the time are deliberately stifling them? They claim to be successful - it's in the American DNA not to complain and just work harder! I'm not blaming the victim except insofar as we all continue in that mentality no matter what.
Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)works some more. He's the hardest worker I know, he kicks ass. So you just want us to work ourselves to death?
In the American DNA to complain?! That is the most ridiculous comment I have ever heard! Blame the victim, that is what the right of center does, that is their M.O. I'm so sick and tired of that mentality, as are SOOO many ass-kicking hard working Americans working harder for less! We are tired of the %1's entitlement mentality, the REAL welfare queens!
malokvale77
(4,879 posts)I'm so sick of these people brushing us off like lint on Hillary's shoulder.
I will never again cast my vote to accommodate their comfort level.
treestar
(82,383 posts)allows this stuff to happen. I was simply making a comment about the society we live in, and am accused of "wanting us to work ourselves to death." That accusation is in bad faith. Notice you fell right into it, claiming your husband works so very hard. Of course, that's what we all claim! Nobody in this country just works, they work "hard" and boast of it. That's what I meant by the puritanical inheritance. It would be nice of people calmly considered this observation rather than mischaracterizing the argument.
It is also tough to get Americans to consider themselves victims. This is a cultural thing also. If there is anyone who is interested in discussing American culture in good faith, I would be interested.
Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)Culture in so-called "good faith" IS discussing what I am discussing. You just don't see it.
Most early, and I suppose it is the early puritanical settlers here of which you speak, Europeans who immigrated here had to work extra hard off or they froze to death or starved to death. That's why they boast of it because it was for their sheer survival.
Now we are literally almost forced to work to death. Have you noticed all the very elderly people working at Walmart, Home Depot, the local corporate grocery stores? I have. SS doesn't go a whole month, pensions have been stolen, 401Ks have been cut in half pilfered by the WS vultures, many of us do not even have a retirement account of any kind, are going to be paying off out houses well into our sixties, are looking at looming SS cuts, rising costs...if that is not being worked to death then what is, tree star?
Why average Americans allow this to happen?! Really?! Our American Dream has been stolen from us by conniving billionaires thinking they are entitled to have it all! We have been conned! We did not "allow" this to happen! Stop victim blaming! And REALLY examine American culture as it IS today, not some puritanical residue of yesteryear!
treestar
(82,383 posts)It is wrong of you to do that. I was merely observing American culture and the general American ideas about work. I do not deserve your outrage.
Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)stuff to happen."
That IS victim blaming.
FighttheFuture
(1,313 posts)That would easily explain your clueless anecdote of "You rarely hear this kind of thing outside the Bernie supporters".
treestar
(82,383 posts)Nobody in the real world buys all this stuff that we are subject to some "long term con." Most voters will see that as paranoid. I am talking about voters in general, not me. I see you had to assume I am one of them just for mentioning them. Why are Bernie supporters so quick to judge others? Almost like right wingers.
FighttheFuture
(1,313 posts)Many are aware of the con, to varying degrees, else Bernie and Trump would not be doing as well as they are. It's not paranoia when you can prove it by many different measures and programs put into place. It is stupidity to ignore it; especially for a very problematic candidate like Hillary.
If people choose to ignore this and because they treat politics like a football game and go with their team regardless of reality, or are so conditioned when they hear the word "conspiracy" thrown about all reasoning stops, that is their problem. Life will have to teach them as this country continues to devolve to Appalachian/3rd world living standards. Even then many will not connect the dots and be ripe for demagogues like Trump, or almost any Republican, because the opposition just offers more of the same ol' shit.
Now you are not talking about your self, of course. But all you offer is anecdotes "...because you talk to most people...", well, so can I, but so what? I also offer you a link to a decent page showing some of what has been going on. Thee's always more information to be found, but that's up to you to find out for yourself, or not. God forbid you might think you are entertaining "conspiracy" or be "almost like right wingers", better to stay ignorant!
whatthehey
(3,660 posts)Both how and by whom productivity is increased has shifted over the last decades. Henry Ford oversaw a massive boost in automotive production efficiency essentially by making people work at more specializrd tasks and more quickly. He raised their pay more to stem turnover (which was running at 370%) than for the later rationalization of expanding a customer base, because he turned their jobs into unremitting unrewarding monotonous toil and nobody would work like that for the lower wages, and that's even ignoring the puritanical internal detective force who monitored their personal habits in and outside work. Ford incidentally was little better than an illiterate idiot (which was famously litigated believe it or not); he rode the wave of his engineers and plant managers figuring these things out and was about as much a technical visionary as Kim Kardashian.
That, more or less, was the basic story of productivity gains for the next half century. Humans worked harder at lousier jobs and you couldn't keep them at their jobs without paying them. The productivity gains came from the workers and they made jobs terrible enough to successfully demand higher pay.
Then starting in the 70s and rapidly accelerating, productivity gains came not from harder and less pleasant work for humans but from replacing them, by machines or software or robotics or even just communication advances. While there are still unpleaant and hard jobs for sure, the percentage of those jobs is much much lower than it was in Ford's day. These productivity gains came from capital not from labor, and what labor was involved became more white collar. You can either hire an army of clerks to keep track of your accounts or buy, say, Quickbooks. Quickbooks has one army of higher-paid higher-educated staff but untold thousands of customers who no longer need those clerks. Toshiba has one army of engineers and technicians building CNC machines and untold thousands of customers who no longer need armies of horizontal borers, lathe operators, drill pressmen, grinders, etc.
Capital, not labor, increased productivity in those customer operations by buying that software and that equipment. It rendered their needed labor either fewer in number or lower in intolerability or both. This meant double decreasing pressure on pay demands. People were chasing fewer and for the most part less unpleasant jobs, because capital made it so. Now we can all sing kumbaya and wish that capital just decided to spread that productivity gain to people who did not provide it and benefitted from it (those still employed that is) but there was neither need nor impetus for it to do so, faced with a surfeit of workers doing generally speaking safer more pleasant jobs (likely vain reminder: the undeniable fact that unsafe horrible jobs still exist does not contradict the equally undeniable fact that jobs overall are now less so than they were.) Instead capital said, as it inevitably must, an anthropomorphized "these productivity gains are down to me; I keep the benefit."
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
marions ghost
(19,841 posts)those on top feel like they're doing something right.
They are ruthless.
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)between increased Federal taxes and Median Real wages increases. ummm?
Loudestlib
(980 posts)Can you tell me?
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)Loudestlib
(980 posts)I mistakenly thought that Hillary supporters were aware of her positions. Maybe you don't know why you support her.........
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Bernie supporters have all been evicted.
Cassidy
(223 posts)and explains why economics motivates many Trump (ugh) voters.
"Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.
What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who’s dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. "
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support
hfojvt
(37,573 posts)My own hourly wages
1993 - $5.10
1995 - $5.4 (until I was laid off on my March birthday, happy 33rd to me)
1996 - $5.5
1998 - $7.15
1999 - $7.25
2000 - $8.5
2002 - $10.69
2016 - $14.96
Adjusted for inflation (and throw in benefits)
1993 - $8.37 (one week of vacation, paid holidays)
1995 - $8.40 (same)
1996 - $8.31 (none)
1998 - $10.40 (still none)
1999 - $10.32 (none)
2000 - $11.70 (one week paid vacation, paid holidays - both of which I lost when company switched temp services)
2002 - $14.09 (paid holidays, 2 weeks vacation, sick leave, pension)
2016 - $14.96 (all of the above plus health insurance)
granted not much growth since 2002, but not losing ground either. Getting the moderately good job I did in 2002 (although it paid a little less than the job I was fired from) made for an instant 7% growth rate from 1993 to 2002
There are other factors too, From 1993-95 I was full time (plus self employed full time (but making almost NO money at my bookstore). In 1995 until March 1996 my only paid job was shoveling snow, so I made almost nothing (but the store continued to cover my residence expenses). For most of 1998-2001 I was full time temp. From 2002-May 2004 I was part time. 2004-Oct 2006 was full time, and getting health insurance free. 2006-Oct 2011 part time, 2011-Aug 2014 full time (and slightly higher wage).
The periods of full time work allowed me to put away some money, paid off my house in October 2005, so living expenses went down about $9,000 a year at that time (they could have been lower, but I paid that much to pay off the house.) That helps too.
Things could have been better. That factory where I was a temp could (should) have hired me in 2000 or 2001 and I would not have moved (and lost a bunch of money in real estate and had to buy a new house) but they could have been worse too.
xloadiex
(628 posts)At 8.50 per hour with a 1.00 raise 30 or 40 days later after getting in the union. I also had full benefits. Now, 26 years later, that same job starts at 11.39 per hour with not nearly the great benefits I received. That's about an 11 cent per year increase which is disgraceful.
hfojvt
(37,573 posts)$8.50 in 1990 is equivalent to $15.42 in today's money, and with the dollar raise you'd be at $17.23.
But you had a great job in 1990. Not everybody was getting that good of a job. My own job in February 1993 I think started at $4.50 per hour with a jump to $5.00 after sixty days. Even starting at $11.39 today is not that bad of a job.
chknltl
(10,558 posts)Republican Party represents top 1%, Democratic Party represents top 10%. The needs of the lower 90% are not being represented by those we elect which is why both Sanders and Trump have their attention.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)Taking money away from people who have to spend every dime. Genius.
This is why when people mention "Peter Schiff", it's time to just walk away laughing at them.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)
chwaliszewski
(1,528 posts)Ducksworthy
(55 posts)Farming has gone from a labor intensive activity to a capital intensive one where hundreds (in some areas thousands) of acres are needed to support the cost of the machinery needed to farm them. Banks and big agribusiness are competing for land, driving costs to astronomical levels. This leaves millions of rural residents, who lack sufficient capital to participate, disenfranchised from the rural economy, listening to Rush and the hate preachers on the radio telling them their problems are the fault of "urban" homosexuals and immigrants.
highprincipleswork
(3,111 posts)Indydem
(2,642 posts)There is a constant and consistent effort to act as if these trends started in 1979, on the eve of the Reagan presidency, but that is just plain false, and ignores the reality of these trends.
They STARTED in 1973, before Carter, and before Reagan. They started under Nixon/ Ford, and they are a direct result of the 73/74 stock market crash and then the following oil crisis.
People started buying cheap foreign made goods, especially autos, and inflation cut into business capital.
There are a lot of policies that played into this turn of events, but it started way before 1979.
creatives4innovation
(98 posts)Interesting point. That's about the time two things happened. One, America reached peak oil (the oil crisis) and then began outsourcing oil production to the ME and two, abandoned the (remnants of the) gold standard. That date roughly coincides with peak American economic power as well.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)I had a cousin go up there to work on that.
Nobody ever heard from him again. For all I know he became polar bear food.
freebrew
(1,917 posts)the BFEE never forgot the objective. The Great Depression was started and maintained on purpose, IMO.
WW2 interrupted the plans. Then Cuba, Bay of Pigs, the Soviets all kinds of shit going on.
!963 happened which eventually(MLK, RFK, war) caused Nixon's election.
Nixon devalued the dollar, took us off the gold-standard.
GHWB and Darth with all the other criminals have been playing us for decades.
I can't see HRC helping us.
Brother_Love
(82 posts)They invest their money and live off of dividends and if there's enough they use it for power and control. The few that do create US jobs only do so to play the game of control and power. Example: The Koch's do not need to work they are into the power and control.
MoreGOPoop
(417 posts)And, when you are working 2 or 3 jobs and doing the work of
2 or 3 people at each place, is it any wonder people are pissed?
PatrynXX
(5,668 posts)their brains go in the drink. 
ie companies would go bankrupt in a split second. no they won't , over time. if you suddenly did it maybe even then, the right people would be buying more goods.
BeanMusical
(4,389 posts)
CarrieLynne
(497 posts)
pansypoo53219
(23,034 posts)WALL STREET & CEO PAY! but hey, the reagan democrats REALLY stuck it to those greedy BLACKS + welfare leeches. DIVIDE & CONQUER. but the tabags blame govt. psst. the GOP stole your wallet.
whereisjustice
(2,941 posts)they've made a deal with Wall Street - we'll support sending millions of jobs (per year) to Asia and Mexico, you support us on a few social issues like gay marriage.
That's what it means to be a Third Way New Democrat.