But republicans imo don't think of the future for themselves or their children and grand childrenOur economy once again is based on easy credit and housing loans...the same shit that took us down in 2007 and will take us down again. Theres no real income in the pockets of american workers, no savings, no real wage growth, just easy credit and people borrowing off their homes.nope. i appreciate it. info for the sake of info is a good thing.but if we have the highest wage increase in a decade and we're still at best "even" how do we look at the last 10 years? was the inflationary rate lower?i never said it was keeping up and i never again said this was the coup de grace as people are trying to make it out to be. it's a positive step i hope we continue. if you and others insist on whipping your dicks out and peeing on the parade, go ahead. but it speaks more of you than us.So?
Sure, average pay rise over the last 12 months was 2.8%.
But the inflation rate is now up to 2.9%.
US Inflation Rate at 2.9% in June, Highest in 6 Years - Live Trading News
And it has risen over 70% in the last year.
United States Inflation Rate | 1914-2018 | Data | Chart | Calendar
That means the average pay rise is NOT keeping pace with inflation.
That is BAD news.
Except it's not really "a positive step", at best it's a neutral step, as I already pointed out it's inflationary (lagging indicator) and we're talking about the ECI which measures the costs of both wages and benefits.
So for example if the cost of employer provided health insurance rises so will the ECI since it's part of the calculation, does that mean workers got more value in total compensation? No it means workers got the exact same total compensation at a higher price tag and in the meantime their cost of living has increased so they're actually worse off from a buying power perspective and then businesses have to pass along those higher costs in the form of higher prices, which leads to decreasing buying power, rinse, wash, repeat.
I'm not trying to rain on your parade just pointing out that the devil is in the details not in the headline.
For a number of reasons, over the last 40 years average growth in real wages has been relatively flat (around 0.2% per year), in other words about break even for most workers, There are of course exceptions, like for example the information technology sector but we're talking on average.
One of the symptoms of this slow wage growth has been increased household borrowing just to maintain the same standard of living and the debt service generally wipes out those modest wage gains for a lot of people, so for a good number of workers they're actually going backwards in terms of purchasing power.