EconomyImmigrationPoliticsimmigrationlabor marketmarriageMigrantmigrationwages
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24
Middle-class wages in
progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a
study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
“Earnings
for California’s workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have
generally declined or stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled
“California’s Workers Are Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.”
The report continued:
In 2018, the median hourly earnings for
workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting
for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly
earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile,
increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The
report admits that the state’s progressive economy is delivering more to
investors and less to wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector
[annual new income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6
percentage points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016,
California’s Gross Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop
shifted $146 billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in
2016.
The
report notes that wages finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits
the credit between the Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald
Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40
years of flat wages are partly hidden by a wave of new products and services.
They include almost-free entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap
imported coffee in supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the
impact of California’s flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing
costs, the report says, even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of
the establishment’s pro-immigration policies:
In
just the last decade alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far
outpaced the rise in the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting
that working families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to
make ends meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the
state is more than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even
if all adults are working full-time.
…
Specifically,
inflation-adjusted median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017,
while inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least
35 hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget
Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
The wage and
housing problems are made worse — especially for
families — by the
loss of employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by
cutting costs. The report says:
Many workers
are being paid little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker
productivity has risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans
sponsored by their employers, leaving individual workers on their own to
stretch limited dollars and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later
years affording the high cost of living and health care in California. And as
union representation has declined, most workers today cannot negotiate
collectively for better working conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as
retirement and health care, like their parents and grandparents did. On top of
all this, workers who take on contingent and independent work (often referred
to as “gig work”), which in many cases appears to be motivated by the need to
supplement their primary job or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely
granted the same rights and legal protections as traditional employees.
The
center’s report tries to blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the
declining clout of unions. But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan
elites’ policy of mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In 2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for Immigration
Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the economic impact
of migration:
TAYLOR:
If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have
been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good
carpenter. For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a
complete job, it was about $45 an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as
well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
…
Now, the
average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour.
They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not
being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece —
per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed.
Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now
being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity also damaged the unions by
shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007, the progressive Southern
Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title “Latino Gang
Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing Blacks.” In the same
year, an op-ed in the Los
Angeles Times described another murder by Latino gangs
as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic
cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The
center’s board members include the executive director of the state’s SEIU
union, a professor from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University
of California, Berkeley, and the research director at the “Program for
Environmental and Regional Equity” at the University of Southern California,
Los Angeles.
Outside California, President Donald
Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring employers to raise Americans’
wages in a hot economy. The Wall
Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall,
median weekly earnings rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same
quarter in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between
the ages of 25 and 34, that increase was 7.6%.
.
Please let us know if you're having issues with
commenting.S
THE INVITED INVADING HORDES: IT’S ALL
ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the
financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful
blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working
class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic
hardship not seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented
levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net
worth of the poorest half of the US population."
Warren's core insight
was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor force had
actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages. BEN SHAPIRO
BLOG…. SO,
WHAT DOES LA RAZA WARREN THINK WILL HAPPEN WHEN SHE HANDS 40 MILLION LOOTING
MEXCIANS AMNESTY SO THEY CAN BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY???
How
the Quest For Power Corrupted Elizabeth Warren
I first
met Elizabeth Warren when she was a professor at Harvard Law School, in 2004.
She was fresh off the publication of her bestselling book, "The Two-Income
Trap." There's no doubt she was politically liberal -- our only
face-to-face meeting involved a recruitment visit at the W Hotel in Los
Angeles, where she immediately made some sort of disparaging remark about Rush
Limbaugh -- but at the time, Warren was making waves for her iconoclastic
views. She wasn't a doctrinaire leftist, spewing Big Government nostrums. She
was a creative thinker.
That
creative thinking is obvious in "The Two-Income Trap," which
discusses the rising number of bankruptcies among middle-class parents,
particularly women with children. The book posits that women entered the
workforce figuring that by doing so, they could have double household income.
But so many women entered the workforce that they actually inflated prices for
basic goods like housing, thus driving debt skyward and leading to bankruptcies
for two-income families. The book argued that families with one income might
actually be better off, since families with two incomes spent nearly the full
combined income and then fell behind if one spouse lost a job. Families with
one income, by contrast, spent to the limit for one income, and if a spouse was
fired, the unemployed spouse would then look for work to replace that single
income.
Warren's
core insight was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor
force had actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages.
But her policy recommendations were even more fascinating. She explicitly
argued against "more government regulation of the housing market,"
slamming "complex regulations," since they "might actually
worsen the situation by diminishing the incentive to build new houses or
improve older ones." Instead, she argued in favor of school choice, since
pressure on housing prices came largely from families seeking to escape badly
run government school districts: "A well-designed voucher program would
fit the bill neatly."
Her
heterodox policy proposals didn't stop there. She refused to "join the
chorus calling for taxpayer-funded day care" on its own, calling it a
"sacred cow." At the very least, she suggested that
"government-subsidized day care would add one more indirect pressure on
mothers to join the workforce." She instead sought a more comprehensive
educational solution that would include "tax credits for stay-at-home
parents."
She
ardently opposed additional taxpayer subsidization of college loans, too, or
more taxpayer spending on higher education directly. Instead, she called for a
tuition freeze from state schools. She recommended tax incentives for families
to save rather than spend. She opposed radical solutions wholesale: "We
haven't suggested a complete overhaul of the tax structure, and we haven't
demanded that businesses cease and desist from ever closing another plant or
firing another worker. Nor have we suggested that the United States should
build a quasi-socialist safety net to rival the European model."
So, what
happened to Warren?
Power.
The other
half of iconoclastic Warren was typical progressive, anti-financial industry
Warren. In "The Two-Income Trap," she proposes reinstating state
usury laws, cutting off access to payday lenders and heavily regulating the
banking industry -- all in the name of protecting Americans from themselves.
While her position castigating the credit industry for deliberate obfuscation
of clients was praiseworthy, her quest to "protect consumers" quickly
morphed into a quest to create the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau -- an
independent agency without any serious checks or balances. But despite her best
efforts, she never became head of the CFPB, failing to woo Republican senators.
The result: an emboldened Warren who saw her popularity as tied to her Big Government
agenda. No more reaching across the aisle; no more iconoclastic policies.
Instead, she would be Ralph Nader II, with a feminist narrative to boot.
And so,
she's gaining ground in the 2020 presidential race as a Bernie Sanders
knockoff. Ironically, her great failing could be her lack of moderation -- the
moderation she abandoned in her quest for progressive power. If Elizabeth
Warren circa 2003 were running, she'd be the odds-on favorite for president.
But Warren circa 2019 would hate Warren circa 2003.
Ben Shapiro, 35, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of
"The Ben Shapiro Show" and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is
the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller "The Right Side Of
History." He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.
No comments:
Post a Comment