Bill Clinton and Republicans promised NAFTA would create jobs..

[JDPriestly]

33. Realy?

Can you give me the raw statistics on that?

And wages have risen at a higher pace than inflation?

The household income adjusted for inflation was $51,017 in 1995.

The household income adjusted for inflaiton was $50,978 in 2012.

That is an increase, but of only 39 cents in more 17 years. Just a little over 2 cents a year.

Wow! How impressive. You could almost pay the interest on your kid's student loan for that!

http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php

As for GDP numbers. I think they are worthless. A lot of noise with not much behind them. If I grow my vegetables in my back yard, my production does not rev up the national GDP. But if I go work for a farmer at below minimum wage doing the same thing I could do in my own garden and then after I finish my job on the farmer's land, I shop for groceries and buy the vegetables I would have produced in my own garden had the land belonged to me, my purchase counts toward the GDP. We compare our national worth to that of other countries but do not take into account the unmeasured value of the work done in those countries or in ours that are not reflected in the GDP. When women went into the workforce, our GDP rose. Think of all the babysitting costs and other costs associated with women working that had previously not counted toward the GDP. That is part, a great part of the hike in GDP,

Our government is very good at lying with statistics. You have to go back the original data and figure in the social realities. When my children were small, I was a stay-at-home mom in a different country. I made all my children's clothes, or nearly all of them. To the extent that other people were similarly "manufacturing" at home, that country's GDP was lowered. That adds up. Used to be people repaired their own cars more than they can today when so many parts of our cars that used to be mechanical are computerized. Now you have to take a car to the shop for some job you might have done yourself years ago. The GDP is not what it claims to be.

edited because I typed median wage instead of household income. If two people are working, the results are even worse. And the fact that we had the recession does not change the fact that wages have not grown to any measurable extent. The recession was in part due to the fact that wages did not rise enough to cover the increases in housing costs over that period.