IF THE ECONOMY IS REALLY THAT
GOOD, WHY ARE PEOPLE CHARGING IT UP AND NOT PAYING CASH?
"But other counties saw price retreats: median prices for existing homes dropped 8.1 percent in Santa Clara to $1.13 million, and fell 4.2 percent in Alameda to $862,000."
Credit card debt has reached $868 billion in the United States, and delinquencies are on the rise, the report note
Credit card debt has reached $868 billion in the United States, and delinquencies are on the rise, the report note
Amid recession fears, almost
half of Americans have anxiety over debt
One fifth of adults feel sick about money they owe
By KAREN
D'SOUZA | kdsouza@bayareanewsgroup.com |
Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:
Being buried by
mountains of debt can make you feel sick. Forty five percent of Americans said
that their debt makes them feel anxious at least once a month, according to Northwestern Mutual’s 2019
Planning and Progress Study, and 20 percent said it makes them
physically ill at least once a month.
Amid mounting fears of
recession, more people are grappling with the physical and mental toll caused
by financial stress. The study also showed that 15 percent of Americans think
they will be in debt for the rest of their lives and 35 percent feel guilty
about debt they are carrying. Adults now shoulder an average of $29,800 in
personal debt, the report showed. It
should be noted that there has been an improvement over last year’s debt loads,
which reached the crushing level of $38,000 in personal debt, but experts are
still ringing the alarm bell.
“The road to financial
security is long, even in the best of circumstances,” Emily Holbrook, senior
director of planning at Northwestern Mutual, said in a release. “By
carrying high levels of personal debt that road gets even longer, often
requiring all kinds of detours and other twists and turns. The fact that
there’s been some year-over-year improvement in debt levels is good, but the
numbers still remain worryingly high.”
The
generation with the most reported personal debt was Gen X, citing personal debt
at $36,000. Baby Boomers chalked up $28,600 while millennials tallied up
$27,900 in debt. Gen Z had a mere $14,700.
This
data tracks with recent reports from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York which
show that consumer debt is now well above where it was during the last housing
crisis. The leading sources of debt are mortgages and credit cards, according
to the Fed. Car loans and student loans also play a role.
“Our data, along with
national numbers, show that people continue to struggle with finding the right
balance between spending now versus saving for later,” said Holbrook. “But it’s important
to understand the impact that spiraling debt can have on a financial plan.
There are steps people can take to get control of their debt. It might start
with loan consolidation and a budget, then move to a longer-term plan that
includes guardrails to help people stay on track. The most important part is to
take action. It’s often those first few steps that can be the hardest and most
important.”
Credit card debt has reached $868 billion in the United States, and delinquencies are on the rise, the report note
Percent in 40 Years
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.
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:
NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More
Labor-Saving Machines
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
Munro:
Cornell Study Shows Stagnant Wages Hurting Marriage in U.S.
Getty Images
Fewer women get married when fewer men earn a decent salary in an
unstable economy, says a study from Cornell University.
Job-Hopping Young
Workers Getting Huge Wage Gains, Says Business Center | Breitbart
Credit card debt has reached $868 billion in the United States, and delinquencies are on the rise, the report note
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.
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 New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages
upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting
machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and
culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J
NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More
Labor-Saving Machines
.
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.
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
Job-Hopping Young
Workers Getting Huge Wage Gains, Says Business Center | Breitbart
Bay Area home sales fall steeply
High prices lead to lowest home sales in nearly a decade
By LOUIS
HANSEN | lhansen@bayareanewsgroup.com |
Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:
Prospective
Bay Area home buyers abandoned the market in August, as home sales dipped to a
nine-year, monthly low despite falling interest rates and more choices.
Sales
of existing and new homes fell 5.3 percent from the previous August, and were
off more than 20 percent from the historic norms for the month, according to a
report released Thursday by real estate data firm CoreLogic. Residential real
estate transactions have dropped 13 straight months.
Existing
home prices remained stable — at budget-busting levels for most buyers — in the
nine-county Bay Area region. The median home price in August was $843,000, down
2 percent from the previous year, according to CoreLogic data.
Sales
could have been even worse, cautioned CoreLogic analyst Andrew LePage. “The
recent drop in mortgage rates likely helped temper that decline,” he said.
Bay
Area home sales have slid, year-over-year, for the last 13 months. High demand
and low inventory have driven prices to among the highest in the country,
squeezing many buyers looking to get into a house or condo.
The
region saw hotspots in August in different counties: median prices jumped 4.7
percent to $649,000 in Contra Costa, grew 2.8 percent in San Mateo to $1.45
million, swelled 7.2 percent in Marin to $1.23 million, and increased 1.4
percent to $1.5 million in San Francisco, according to CoreLogic data.
But
other counties saw price retreats: median prices for existing homes dropped 8.1
percent in Santa Clara to $1.13 million, and fell 4.2 percent in Alameda to
$862,000.
Local
agents said the market has cooled since a peak last spring, when the median
sale price hit $928,000. Buyers have more options and have been more willing to
wait for the right home, neighborhood and school district. Entry-level homes,
priced around $1 million in Silicon Valley communities, have been the quickest
sellers.
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