Wages for California workers continue to decline
By Kevin Martinez
15 July 2015
According to a recent report by the California Budget and Policy Center, typical workers at the middle of wage distribution saw their hourly wage continue to fall in 2014. As the median worker sees the purchasing power of his or her wages decline, social inequality widens. The median worker in California, who earns $19.18 an hour, or $39,800 a year, saw his or her inflation-adjusted wage decline by 1.8 percent since 2011, when wages stopped falling for workers across the wage distribution scale. This decline makes a mockery of the claims of economic recovery, particularly for workers who were in the middle-income brackets. Median workers are making significantly less than before 2006, on the eve of the Great Recession.
Luke Reidenbach, a policy analyst at the California Budget and Policy Center, told the Los Angeles Times, “Typically you’ve seen the middle class as the key to economic mobility, a way to climb the economic ladder. They are feeling a very specific pinch right now.”
Workers at all income levels, except the top 10 percent, saw their real wages decline from 2006 through 2011. While workers in both the upper- and lower-income brackets saw their wages increase since then, middle-income workers have not. While the national median wage has fallen 1.9 percent since 2006, the median wage earner in California saw a decline of 6.2 percent, triple the national average.
The report also analyzed U.S. Census data showing a widening gap between the top 10 percent of wage earners and the bottom 90 percent since 1979. In 2014, California’s median wage of $19.18 was 5.1 percent below the inflation-adjusted level of 1979, or $20.22. As the report says, “these diverging fortunes have led to a widening gulf between higher-wage workers and everyone else.” In 2014, someone in the 90th percentile made $2.60 for every dollar a median worker made, compared to $1.87 in 1979.
While California, compared to other states, has an increasingly better-educated and more-productive workforce, there has not been a corresponding rise in pay. According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the state’s overall productivity grew by 89.1 percent between 1979 and 2013, while total compensation for the typical worker, including health insurance and retirement benefits, grew only by 2.9 percent in real terms. This is wider than the national gap between earnings growth and productivity growth, which saw overall national productivity grow by 75.6 percent since 1979 while median hourly wages grew by 11.9 percent.
While California is the richest state, with the highest concentration of billionaires in the country, life for the typical worker is a daily struggle to make ends meet. This reality was also underscored by a report by the personal finance site MoneyRates.com, which compiled a list of the “Best states to make a living” using a combination of wages, taxes, cost of living, unemployment and workplace safety lists.
The site found that, “despite having one of the highest average wages in the nation, California could not overcome several negative attributes. That average wage is more than negated by high taxes and cost of living. On top of that, the unemployment rate and the frequency of workplace safety incidents are both higher in California than national average.”
California was ranked the sixth worst place to make a living. While the unemployment is officially 6.4 percent (May 2015, U.S. Department of Labor), the real figure, including those who have stopped looking for work, is undoubtedly higher, with a labor force participation rate as low as 62.5 percent, even lower than the national level, at 62.6 percent. The average number of workplace accidents is also higher, four incidents per 100 workers.
In 2012, Governor Jerry Brown pushed Proposition 30 through the ballot, an initiative that imposed a hefty regressive tax increase on workers and produced $6 billion in revenue as the mantra that “there is no money for public education” was used to blackmail voters in order to avoid yet another cut.
What is overlooked in these recent reports is that the cost of living in California is dramatically exacerbated by years of unprecedented attacks on social services, by both the Obama administration and state officials. Brown cut billions in education, MediCal, CalWORKS, affordable housing and other crucial social services. At the same time, tax breaks and loopholes for corporations have been pushed through in the name of promoting “growth.”
Many workers, of course, do not even make the median income and have to spend the bulk of their wages on transportation, health insurance, and other necessities to maintain life. A UCLA study found that Los Angeles is the least affordable place to rent in America. To afford median rent, a worker would have to earn $50 an hour, or $100,000 annually.
Workers in Los Angeles are particularly impoverished. Around 20 percent of the population lives below the official poverty line, including a quarter of its children, while the homeless population has increased 16 percent since 2013.
THE CRONY CLASS: always wants
endless hordes of ILLEGALS jumping our
borders and jobs to keep wages DEPRESSED!
*
OBAMA-CLINTONomics was created by BILLARY CLINTON!
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES
FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the
Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of
the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to
provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN
BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and
passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes”
provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
*
“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great
moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably
expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and
middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million
good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay
equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes
on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A
Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security
benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON
EXAMINER
JOBS 71% GO TO FOREIGNERS.
Report: 71 Percent of New Jobs Go to Foreign
Born Legal, Illegal Immigrants in NH | CNS News …. THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS
STILL GETS THE TAX BILLS FOR MEXICO’S CRIMES AND WELFARE STATE IN OUR OPEN BORDERS!
US income inequality continued to soar in 2014
While the growth of social inequality has dramatically accelerated following the 2008 crash, this is a continuation of a decades-long process. The report notes, “Top 1 percent incomes grew by 80.0% from 1993 to 2014. This implies that top 1 percent incomes captured almost 60% of the overall economic growth of real incomes per family over the period 1993-2014.”
In fact, the US government’s response to the 2008 crash has been dedicated to inflating the wealth of the super-rich while driving down incomes for the vast majority of the population. The White House has protected Wall Street executives from legal prosecution, while the Federal Reserve has handed out trillions of dollars in cheap money through “quantitative easing” programs, leading share values to triple on major US exchanges.
On Thursday, US President Barack Obama plans to unveil what he has called a major new policy initiative in a speech in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The proposal entails new federal rules that would make an additional 3 percent of the US population eligible for overtime pay. If adopted, the change would add a mere $1.3 billion to worker’s wages annually. This is a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars that have been transferred to the financial elite since the 2008 financial crisis.
JOBS
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
Keep wages depressed with endless hordes of illegals jumping our borders, jobs
and welfare lines!
“But any serious
look at the latest figures reveals why Jim Clifton, head of the Gallup polling
agency, has denounced the official unemployment rate as a “big lie” that
largely ignores the continued prevalence of mass unemployment in the United
States.”
“Obama’s trivial
proposal on overtime pay is in line with the record of his entire presidency,
which has sought to impose the full cost of the global capitalist crisis on the
backs of the working class, while doing everything possible to protect and
expand the wealth of the financial oligarchy that controls political life in
the United States.”
A NATION SURRENDERS TO LA RAZA SUPREMACY!
HOW MANY ILLEGALS WERE DEPORTED FROM YOUR
COUNTY?
A county by county chart:
Click on LOS ANGELES COUNTY which
deports 37,000 MEX CRIMINALS YEARLY.
This same county hands out ONE BILLION DOLLARS YEARL in welfare to
illegals. Not one LEGAL voted to be looted by Mexicans.
*
A
GLIMPSE OF MEX CRIMINALS IN LOS ANGELES ALONE:
200 MOST WANTED
(MURDER) CRIMINALS IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES:
SANCTUARY CITIES
Author
Jessica M. Vaughan, director of
policy Studies for the center, also reported that many of those illegals have
been rearrested after their release and charged with nearly 7,500 new charges,
including child sex abuse.
“Until lawmakers end the catch-and-release
policies of the Obama administration,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for
Immigration Studies, “any infrastructure improvements, new strategies, and
better metrics are pointless.”
SANCTUARY CITIES… But isn’t California a sanctuary
state???
ILLEGALS
ABOVE THE LAW AND LOOTING ACCORDINGLY!
“Sanctuary
policies are especially harmful when they let criminal immigrants be released
back to the street instead of removed to their home country, giving them the
opportunity to continue preying on the community, creating needless new
victims,” wrote Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for
Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank. More than 200 cities and local jurisdictions across the
country have such
policies, according to CIS.
MEXICO’S
BIGGEST EXPORT NEXT TO DRUGS: criminals!
“Sanctuary
policies are especially harmful when they let criminal immigrants be released
back to the street instead of removed to their home country, giving them the
opportunity to continue preying on the community, creating needless new
victims,” wrote Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for
Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank. More than 200 cities and local jurisdictions across the
country have such
policies, according to CIS.
But on
Thursday, the Clinton campaign clarified her position: “Hillary Clinton
believes that sanctuary cities can help further public safety, and she has
defended those policies going back years,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a campaign
spokeswoman, in a statement.
OBAMA-CLINTONomics: the final death of the
American middle-class
AMNESTY:
IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED.
"While it is
not spelt out directly, the BIS critique of the present policies is an
expression of the fact that, in the final analysis, the source of all forms of
profit is the surplus value extracted from the working class. Therefore, the
only way for capital to overcome its crisis and restore stability is a massive
increase in exploitation."
While the growth of social inequality has dramatically accelerated following the 2008 crash, this is a continuation of a decades-long process. The report notes, “Top 1 percent incomes grew by 80.0% from 1993 to 2014. This implies that top 1 percent incomes captured almost 60% of the overall economic growth of real incomes per family over the period 1993-2014.”
In fact, the US government’s response to the 2008 crash has been dedicated to inflating the wealth of the super-rich while driving down incomes for the vast majority of the population. The White House has protected Wall Street executives from legal prosecution, while the Federal Reserve has handed out trillions of dollars in cheap money through “quantitative easing” programs, leading share values to triple on major US exchanges.
On Thursday, US President Barack Obama plans to unveil what he has called a major new policy initiative in a speech in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The proposal entails new federal rules that would make an additional 3 percent of the US population eligible for overtime pay. If adopted, the change would add a mere $1.3 billion to worker’s wages annually. This is a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars that have been transferred to the financial elite since the 2008 financial crisis.
AMERICAN
BANKS and the CATASTROPHIC DEATH OF AMERICA
The
2008 crash and subsequent developments have revealed certain fundamental
realities about American society. All of the official institutions, including
the presidency, the courts, Congress and the financial regulators, have worked
single-mindedly to shield the banks and the financial elite and enable them to
grow even richer.
OBAMA-CLINTONomics was created by BILLARY CLINTON!
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES
FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the
Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of
the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to
provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN
BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and
passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes”
provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
*
“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great
moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably
expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and
middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million
good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay
equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes
on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A
Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security
benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON
EXAMINER
JOBS 71% GO TO FOREIGNERS.
Report: 71 Percent of New Jobs Go to Foreign
Born Legal, Illegal Immigrants in NH | CNS News …. THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS
STILL GETS THE TAX BILLS FOR MEXICO’S CRIMES AND WELFARE STATE IN OUR OPEN BORDERS!
US income inequality continued to soar in 2014
While the growth of social inequality has dramatically accelerated following the 2008 crash, this is a continuation of a decades-long process. The report notes, “Top 1 percent incomes grew by 80.0% from 1993 to 2014. This implies that top 1 percent incomes captured almost 60% of the overall economic growth of real incomes per family over the period 1993-2014.”
In fact, the US government’s response to the 2008 crash has been dedicated to inflating the wealth of the super-rich while driving down incomes for the vast majority of the population. The White House has protected Wall Street executives from legal prosecution, while the Federal Reserve has handed out trillions of dollars in cheap money through “quantitative easing” programs, leading share values to triple on major US exchanges.
On Thursday, US President Barack Obama plans to unveil what he has called a major new policy initiative in a speech in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The proposal entails new federal rules that would make an additional 3 percent of the US population eligible for overtime pay. If adopted, the change would add a mere $1.3 billion to worker’s wages annually. This is a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars that have been transferred to the financial elite since the 2008 financial crisis.
JOBS
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
Keep wages depressed with endless hordes of illegals jumping our borders, jobs
and welfare lines!
“But any serious
look at the latest figures reveals why Jim Clifton, head of the Gallup polling
agency, has denounced the official unemployment rate as a “big lie” that
largely ignores the continued prevalence of mass unemployment in the United
States.”
“Obama’s trivial
proposal on overtime pay is in line with the record of his entire presidency,
which has sought to impose the full cost of the global capitalist crisis on the
backs of the working class, while doing everything possible to protect and
expand the wealth of the financial oligarchy that controls political life in
the United States.”
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