|
Four years after Oregon raised its minimum wage,
the Wall Street Journal examines conservative claims that it would hurt the
economy and finds "none of these fears materialized." Private, nonfarm payrolls and wages are
up, and "job growth is strong in industries employing many
minimum-wage workers." Think Progress
110306 GAO Director David
Walker continues to warm against US financial disaster: “Walker can talk in public about the
nation's impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in
Washington. As comptroller general of the United States — basically, the
government's chief accountant — he is serving a 15-year term that runs through
2013. Walker is committed to touring the US through the 2008 elections, “talking to anybody who will listen
about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom
generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign
lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.” Their basic message is this: If the US government conducts business as usual over the
next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46
trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total
net worth of every person in America, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and those
Google guys included. A hole that big could paralyze the US economy; according
to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as
much as all the taxes the government collects today. And every year that nothing is done about
it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061029/ap_on_go_ot/america_the_bankrupt New Study Finds America's Rich
Getting Richer As Middle-Class Income Stagnates: University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez finds in a
new study, "The Evolution of Top Incomes," that "over the past 25 years, and
especially in the last 10 years, America's very rich have grown much
richer. No one else fared as well." Saez and Thomas Piketty of the Centre for Economic Policy Research
examined 30 years of tax data and "found that the richest one-tenth of 1%
of Americans -- 129,584 households in 2004 -- reported income equal to 9.5% of
national pretax income." "However, median, or midpoint, family income
rose only 1.6% between 2001 and 2004, when adjusted for inflation, according to
the Federal Reserve. Median family real net worth -- a family's gross assets
minus liabilities -- rose only 1.5% during those four years. Those are very
sluggish income-growth rates compared with the 4 years between 1998 and
2001." One explanation: "The very wealthy simply own more
assets than the rest of us. That means they benefit more from the booming stock
market, which is reaching record highs." Bush's tax cuts have only
increased the income gap. "We've had a 30-year trend of income
inequality," said the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities' Jason
Furman. "What's
new in the last five years is the degree to which tax policy has made that
worse, rather than leaned against that trend." Think Progress 110306 Productivity....Via Dean Baker, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the
latest quarterly productivity numbers. In Q3, nonfarm business productivity
grew....0%. Now, this is not the first time productivity has leveled out for a
quarter. A 16-year chart is here. But 2 things make this slowdown
noteworthy. First, it follows weak Q2 productivity growth, which means we've
had 6 straight months of poor performance. Second, remember my wonky post yesterday about possible mismeasurement of the
increase in auto production? If that turns out to be a genuine error, it means
this quarter's productivity growth is overstated. We might have actually seen a
drop in productivity. Kevin Drum @ http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_11/009982.php |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
