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Nearly 1 out of every 3 renters did not pay their April rent.
The coronavirus tore apart the U.S. economy, leaving many people unemployed or furloughed for the time being. The ripple effects of those firings left many landlords without a check on the first of the month. According to data from the National Multifamily Housing Council and a consortium of real-estate data distributors, 69% of renters paid their landlords for April compared with 81% who paid for March. For an annual comparison, 82% of renters paid their landlords in April 2019. The rental statistics included renters who had issued partial payments in the data. Some renters who are waiting on a paycheck may still make their rent payment before the end of April. The data set included only data from those who rent apartments and did not include single-family homes or low-income housing facilities. In total, data from more than 13.4 million renters was included in the report.
More Americans Are Going on Strike
For decades, the
decline of the American labor movement corresponded to a decline in major
strike activity. But new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or
BLS, indicates a recent and significant increase in the number of Americans who
are participating in strikes or work stoppages. As a report from the
left-leaning Economic Policy Institute explained on Tuesday, strike activity
“surged” in 2018 and 2019, “marking a 35-year high for the number of workers
involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period.” 2019 alone marked
“the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers
since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible
to track work stoppages by size.” Union membership is declining, but workers
themselves are in fighting shape.
EPI credits the
strike surge to several factors. Unemployment is low, which bestows some
flexibility on workers depending on their industry. If a work environment
becomes intolerable or an employer penalizes workers for striking or
organizing, a worker could find better employment elsewhere. (Though federal
labor law does prohibit employers from retaliating against workers for
participating in protected organizing activity, employers often do so anyway,
and under Trump, the conservative makeup of the National Labor Relations Board
disadvantages unions when they try to seek legal remedies for the behavior.)
The other reason
undermines one of Donald Trump’s central economic claims. Though the president
points to low unemployment as proof that his policies are successful, the
economy isn’t booming for everyone. Wage growth continues to underperform.
People can find jobs, in other words, but those jobs often don’t pay well. As the
costs of private health insurance rise, adding another strain on household
budgets, Americans are finding that employment and prosperity are two separate
concepts.
Without a union,
exploited workers have few options at their disposal. They can take their
concerns to management, and hope someone in power feels pity. They can stage
some kind of protest, and risk the consequences. Or they can find another job,
and hope their new workplace is more equitable than the last. Lackluster wage
growth suggests that this last option is not as viable as some right-to-work
advocates claim. Unions afford workers more protection. Not only do they
bargain for better wages and benefits, union contracts typically include
just-cause provisions, which make it more difficult for managers to arbitrarily
fire people for staging any sort of protest at work. Discipline follows a set
process, which gives a worker chances to improve. Retaliation still happens,
but would likely happen more often were it not for union contracts, which are
designed to act as a layer of insulation between workers and managers with ill
intent.
The new BLS data
reveals that despite their relatively small numbers, unionized workers are
exercising the power afforded them by their contracts. Elected officials ought
to listen to what this activity tells them. A strike wave is a symptom that the
economy is actually not as healthy as it superficially looks. Nobody withholds
their labor unless they’ve exhausted all other options. Strikes and stoppages
stem from exasperation, sometimes even desperation. Workers know they’re
playing a rigged game, and they’re running out of patience.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the
economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion
deficit.”
Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz
President Donald Trump told business and political
leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has
lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview,
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s
characterization is “just wrong.”
“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and
misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the
annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”
In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a
“blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging
wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than
ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle
class.”
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel
Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic
policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans
over each of the past three years.
“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide,
drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not
Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.
“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since
the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that
at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the
economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion
deficit.”
As the presidential race inches closer to the general election
in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in
broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED
DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME
“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting
crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic
presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the
economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how
they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate
and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies
that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business
investment.
“To every business looking for a place where they are free to
invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth
than the United States,” he said in Davos.
Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on
European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may
continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America
and China.
“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi
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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!!!
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
THE (REAL) TRUMP ECONOMY - AS HE FLOODS U.S. WITH FOREIGNER WORKERS ONE-THIRD CAN'T PAY RENT - “A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
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