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%.
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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.
Munro:
Cornell Study Shows Stagnant Wages Hurting Marriage in U.S.
Getty Images
6 Sep 2019334
4:14
Fewer women get married when fewer men earn a decent salary in an
unstable economy, says a study from Cornell University.
“Most
American women hope to marry but current shortages of marriageable men—men with
a stable job and a good income—make this increasingly difficult, especially in
the current gig economy of unstable low-paying service jobs,” said lead author Daniel
Lichter, a professor at Cornell University. He continued:
Marriage is
still based on love, but it also is fundamentally an economic
transaction. Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage
bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed
their male suitors.
The study
looked at wages and marriage rates from 2008 to 2017, and concluded that
“promoting good jobs may ultimately be the best marriage promotion policy,” says the study, which is
titled “Mismatches in the Marriage Market,” and was
published in the Journal of
Marriage and Family.
The study is
useful for the populist wing of the GOP, because it shows that rising wages for
men in President Donald Trump’s low-immigration economy is good for women’s
romantic aspirations and marriage rates. Other data shows that married people —
especially women — are far more likely to vote GOP than single people.
Correspondingly,
the bad news about wages and marriage is good news for the Democratic Party,
which will get extra votes from women if federal policies continue to suppress
wages for American men.
The study did
not try to show how marriage rates have been impacted by the various federal
policies which have flatlined men’s wages for 40
years.
For example,
the federal policy of flooding the labor market with immigrants has flatlined
wages nationwide for at least two decades. Also, President Barack Obama’s
failure to curb opioids — and his reluctance to favor American workers over
‘DACA’ illegals — helped to push millions of Americans out of the workforce and
many into their graves.
The Cornell
study validated conservatives’ view that women are different from men, and
prefer to marry men who earn a higher wage or salary. The press statement said:
The study’s
authors developed estimates of the sociodemographic characteristics of
unmarried women’s potential spouses who resemble the husbands of otherwise
comparable married women. These estimates were compared with the actual
distribution of unmarried men at the national, state, and local levels.
Women’s
potential husbands had an average income that was about 58% higher than the
actual unmarried men currently available to unmarried women. They also were 30%
more likely to be employed and 19% more likely to have a college degree.
Middle-class
women have the best chance of finding a man who earns more money, the study
says.
Low-income
women live among men with very little income, partly because they are in jail
or are suffering from drugs. And the many women who earn above $40,000 a year
face intense competition for the relatively fewer number of men who make more
than $65,000 a year.
This shortage
of prosperous men means that many high-income women must marry down, the study
said.
“Women may instead ‘settle’ for a marital match that falls short of their aspirations in a spouse
... This will be expressed in new patterns of marital hypogamy or downward marital mobility,”
the study said.
The problem
is worse for women who seek husbands later in life, for example, after spending
years in university education:
For example, older women on average were much less likely a suitable marital match ... This is especially true among women who were highly educated
... A 10% increase in age among women with a college degree was associated with a 24.48 percentage point decrease in the likelihood of a suitable match. In contrast, age mattered much less among the least-educated women—those with a high school degree or less who had only a 4.47 percentage point decrease in finding a match. One implication was that delaying marriage, for whatever reason but perhaps especially if pursuing college degrees, had the effect of reducing women’s local-area access to demographically suited marital partners.
Future
studies will examine divorce rates among marriages where women recognize that
they earn more than their husbands.
Young Americans got a pay raise of 7.6 percent from late
2017 to late 2018 -- bigger than other groups -- b/c they are more likely to
switch jobs in Trump's low-immigration economy. http://bit.ly/2lWHQUD
Relocating to
California was once the goal of many Americans. But in recent years, the luster
of living in the “Golden State” has dimmed considerably. Those who still
desire to move to what was once widely viewed as a semi-paradise on the West
Coast might want to assess what they’ll find before pulling up stakes and
heading there.
The Los Angeles Times has
surveyed and published some unnerving California developments. In the area
served by this newspaper, Times investigators
discovered what certainly should be termed failing grades if the region were an
educational institution. It’s not, of course, but over recent months, the hard
truths they found include:
• 95 percent of
warrants for murder in Los Angeles and 75 percent of those on the “most wanted”
list contain the names of illegal immigrants.
• Over two/thirds of
the births in L.A. County are from illegal immigrant parentage and are paid for
by taxpayers.
• Nearly 35 percent of
inmates in the state’s detention centers are illegal immigrants.
• According to the FBI,
half of the gang members in Los Angeles are illegal immigrants from south of
the state’s border.
• In Los Angeles County, 5.1 million people
speak only English and 3.1 million speak only Spanish.
This information came
from the mass-circulation newspaper known for its liberal stance on almost all
issues. Featuring information about the effects of illegal immigration isn’t
its usual practice. The numbers we have cited didn’t appear in a single
article. The bad news compiled in this column was spread out over time. The bad
news has led many Californians to relocate themselves and their businesses to
other parts of the Golden State, even to other states.
Rather than simply
accept the conclusions reached above, I decided to ask a close friend who lives
in Los Angeles County if all of it was verifiable. He responded: “Yes it is.
But there are bigger problems that weren’t mentioned.” For instance, he pointed
to the growing number of vagrants living — and defecating — in the streets. He
said the water at the beaches is becoming hazardous to health and dangerous for
swimming. He told of business owners who have to get their sidewalks cleaned
each morning. And he reported that rats and disease-carrying insects have
proliferated. Los Angeles, he assured me, is filled with tents and absolute
filth.
He then added the
following:
Illegals are registered to vote. Many are
without a driver’s license and they get around in dilapidated autos without
insurance. A large number of these individuals find jobs and demand to be paid
only in cash. That way, there are no taxes paid or reported. While many
illegals are hard-working and otherwise model citizens, they are encouraged to
skirt the laws that everyone is supposed to obey. Even they would confirm what
the LA Times reported.
House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi has responded to the situation by calling for the imposition of a new
“windfall tax” on retirement incomes and stock market gains. She wants to
distribute the funds to unemployed illegal immigrants. Wasn’t it Karl Marx who
suggested this as the way to solve such problems (“From each according to his
abilities, to each according to his needs.”)?
Pelosi regularly scoffs
at President Trump’s plan to build a wall at the border. She never airs the
most important reason for her opposition to keeping illegals from simply
walking into the United States. But her reason for such a stance is obvious:
She expects that the illegals who have already arrived and those who continue
to cross into the United States will vote for Democrats. And she’ll do whatever
she can to care for them, protect them, and urge their relatives to cross the
border as well. Illegal immigrants, like many legal immigrants and native-born
Americans, are overwhelmingly ignorant of limitations on government that made
America great. As soon as they are given the privilege of voting, they will
speed the conversion of California and the entire United States into a
duplicate of Venezuela or Cuba where central governments have total power.
Sad to state,
California isn’t alone in suffering from these problems. Pelosi’s home city of
San Francisco is close behind Los Angeles in its degradation. Other cities are
close behind. The entire nation seems determined to commit suicide. Illegal
immigration must be eliminated.
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