When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Monday, October 7, 2019
THE REAL ECONOMY - CONFIDENCE IN JOB SECURITY DIPS - "CHEAP" LABOR ILLEGALS GET MOST OF THE JOBS
Fannie Mae: American Confidence in Job Security Dipped in September
Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
1:21
The share of American consumers who are confident they will not lose their job over the next twelve months fell in September, according to a survey by mortgage giant Fannie Mae.
Fannie Mae measures job security as part of its monthly Home Purchase Sentiment Index. In September, the survey showed confidence in not loing a job falling to 69 percent, down from 77 percent a month earlier. This was the second straight monthly decline in this component of the index.
“Consumer sentiment remains relatively strong overall, though uncertainty about the economy and individual financial circumstances appear to be weighing on housing market attitudes a bit more than a month ago,” said Fannie Mae chief economist Doug Duncan. “Job confidence remains high but still well shy of its July reading.”
The September reading is the lowest since the summer of 2018.
The overall index fell 2.3 points in September to 91.5, retreating from a survey high in August. The fall in job security and a decline in confidence that home prices would rise contributed to the overall drop. These were partially offset by increases in the “Good Time to Buy” and “Good Time to Sell” components.
A homeless encampment at the corner of East 12th Street and 2nd Avenue is photographed in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, July 23, 2019. A work crew from the city began clearing the camp on Tuesday. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Income inequality is on the rise in California. In some Bay Area counties, the disparities are extreme.
An analysis of census data found a growing gap between rich and poor
By ERICA HELLERSTEIN | ehellerstein@bayareanewsgroup.com |
PUBLISHED: October 7, 2019 at 5:00 am | UPDATED: October 7, 2019 at 8:44 am
California is the Golden State — at least for those at the top of the income scale. For everyone else, the nickname may apply more to the sun than to money.
That’s one takeaway of a recent analysis of U.S.Census Bureau data by the California Budget and Policy Center (CBPC), which found a widening gap between the state’s haves and have-nots.
The CBPC analysis found major gains for California’s richest residents, modest gains for people with median incomes, and losses for the lowest income earners when adjusted for inflation.
Median household income in California, the CBPC reported, increased by 6.4%, from $70,744 in 2006 to $75,277 in 2018, adjusting for inflation. But for the top 5% of households, income grew by 18.6%, from $426,851 in 2006 to $506,421 in 2018, while households in the bottom 20% saw their average income fall by 5.3%, from $16,441 in 2006 to $15,562 in 2018. The analysis was based on the census agency’s latest American Community Survey report.
An increasing gap between rich and poor is not unique to California, as recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau show. From 2017 to 2018, the data indicate, income inequality also widened in eight other states, including Alabama, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Virginia and New Mexico, although in most other states it remained constant. Income inequality is typically measured through the Gini Index, which assigns a score of 0 to indicate perfect wealth distribution within a population and a score of 1 to represent total inequality. In 2018, the overall Gini Index for the U.S. was .485, which was “significantly higher” than its 2017 estimate of .482, the Bureau reported.
The trends in California are especially concerning, said Sara Kimberlin, senior policy analyst at CBPC, given the increases in the cost of living across the state. From 2006 to 2017, the organization found, inflation-adjusted median rent increased by 16% statewide, while median hourly wages for workers fell by half a percent.
“So that’s where the real challenge is that California has to face,” Kimberlin said. “We have two trends moving at the same time: Incomes remaining relatively flat for people in the middle and at the bottom of the income range, while the cost of living is going up.”
In the Bay Area, where the cost of housing has become a topic of national conversation, those tensions are felt acutely, said Megan Joseph, executive director of Rise Together, a regional coalition aimed at reducing poverty in the Bay Area.
The average income for top earners in many Bay Area counties in 2018 was even higher than the state average for the richest households, according to census data. And San Francisco County had the widest income disparity, with the top 5% of households making an average of $808,105, compared with $16,184 for the lowest 20%.
In San Mateo County, the richest earned $810,917 in 2018, while the bottom fifth collected $25,039. Alameda County reflected the statewide average more closely, with those at the top earning $539,883 and the bottom, $20,041. The CBPC report on the increasing income gap in the state, released on Sept. 26, did not include figures for individual counties.
“The Bay Area feels the income inequalities and the disparity between the numbers at the top and the stagnant wages at the bottom more than most other areas of California because of the cost of living,” Joseph said.
Alongside rising inequality, the data also showed high levels of poverty among Californians. An earlier analysis of census data from CBPC in September — based on the so-called supplemental poverty measure, which takes into account the cost of housing and other expenses — found that roughly 7.1 million people each year could not afford basic expenses between 2016 and 2018.
OPEN BORDERS: 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."
Report: California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
NEIL MUNRO
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%.
“The high cost of housing (71%) is the most common reason given by voters for wanting to leave California,” polling director Mark DiCamillo said. “However, high taxes (58%) and the state’s political culture (46%) are also prominently mentioned, particularly by Republicans and conservatives.”
Walters: California Paradox: Economy–and poverty–hit record highs
California’s median income rose to among the nation’s highest in 2018, but it ranked 50th in housing
By happenstance, events in the final week of September perfectly framed what one might call the California Paradox — a thriving, world-class economy with stubbornly high levels of poverty and a widening divide between the haves and have-nots.
The week began with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s keynote address to a United Nations-sponsored forum on the environment and economic growth, in which he crowed about California’s economic achievements.
“It’s an interesting fact, while this country is running $1 trillion-a-year deficits, California is running historic budget surpluses,” Newsom told the international audience. “It’s an interesting fact that California has enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate in its history, more consecutive months of net job creation than at any time in its history, and significantly outperforming the United States of America in GDP growth over a five-year period — not despite our environmental strategies, but because of our environmental strategies.
“As we change the way we produce and consume energy, it is spawning new companies, new energy, new growth. We lead in venture capital and green tech. Five to one — five to one, the number of clean energy jobs in the state of California versus fossil fuel jobs.”
But a few days later, the Census Bureau released new state-by-state data on income and poverty, underscoring once again that California is one of the leaders in both categories.
While California’s median personal income rose by 2.3% in 2018 to $75,277, one of the nation’s highest levels, it was one of only five states in which the “Gini index,” which measures income inequality, increased.
“New census figures released today show rising income inequality across the state and millions of California residents who are struggling to get by on extremely low incomes, while higher-income households experienced more income growth,” the California Budget & Policy Center said in its analysis of the Census Bureau data.
The organization noted that “from 2006 to 2018, the median household income in California increased by 6.4%, after adjusting for inflation, but the average real income for the lowest quintile of households (those in the bottom 20%) actually decreased by 5.3% while the inflation-adjusted average income for the top 5% of households increased by 18.6%, or nearly three times as much as the increase in the median income.”
That analysis is in line with another recent measure of wellbeing by an organization called the “Social Progress Imperative.” It merges dozens of economic and other factors to generate a “social progress index” for nations and their subdivisions, including states — and California doesn’t fare well.
It ranks 33rd among states and not surprisingly, its housing crisis is a major reason why. The index places it at 49th in the category of “basic human needs,” which includes a 50th place in “shelter.”
Finally, a few days after Newsom bragged about California’s economic achievements to the elite economic gathering in New York, UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies released its latest poll, revealing that half of the state’s voters have considered leaving the state.
“The high cost of housing (71%) is the most common reason given by voters for wanting to leave California,” polling director Mark DiCamillo said. “However, high taxes (58%) and the state’s political culture (46%) are also prominently mentioned, particularly by Republicans and conservatives.”
Moreover, just 50 percent of those surveyed agree that California is now the best place to live.
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