AP Cracks showing in 3 pillars of economy: consumer confidence, orders for manufactured goods and home prices, flashing signals that growth may slow more heading into the important holiday shopping season Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Tuesday that risks from inflation or a worse-than-expected housing slump could further complicate matters for the economy. In his first speech in months, he made it clear that he would monitor the situation, particularly labor costs. In prepared remarks to the National Italian American Foundation in New York, the Fed chairman said substantial uncertainties surround the Feds outlook. He noted that the slowdown in the housing market could turn out to be deeper than expected, dragging down overall economic activity even more. In contrast, economic growth could rebound more strongly than expected, which could lead to rising inflation. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15938901/ <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15938901/>
IRS: Total 2004 Income less than 2000 Reported income totaled $7.044 trillion in 2004, the latest year for which data is available, down from more than $7.143 trillion in 2000, new IRS data shows. Total <http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.m arketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=TOT> reported income, in 2004 dollars, fell 1.4%, but because the population grew during that period average real incomes declined more than twice as much, falling $1,641, or 3%, to $53,974. The overall income declines of that extended era came despite a series of tax cuts that Pres. Bush and Congressional Republicans promoted as the best way to stimulate both short- and long-term growth after the Internet bubble burst on Wall Street in 2000 and the economy fell into a brief recession in 2001. The tax cuts contributed to a big decline in individual income tax receipts, which fell at a rate 14 times that of the drop in incomes. In 2004 individual income tax receipts were 21.6% smaller than in 2000 - and indeed smaller than they were in 1997, the new IRS report shows. The government collected $831.8 billion in individual income taxes in 2004, down from $980.4 billion in 2000 and $848.6 billion in 1997. Those figures have risen since then, but rather than pay for themselves through economic growth, the Bush tax cuts, at least through 2004, were financed with borrowed money. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/business/28tax.html <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/business/28tax.html> Gender Gap Narrows As Men's Pay Erodes By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2006 WASHINGTON Marie White is a health-care aide who looks after patients in their homes in Sonoma County, Calif. There's a shortage of workers in her female-dominated profession, which has helped workers unionize and command better pay over the past five years, driving the pay ceiling from $6.75 to $10.50 an hour. "By organizing, a good many of us have been able to get out of the minimum-wage category," White said. John Wilson of Los Angeles, meanwhile, is still trying to find a job that pays as much as he earned 12 years ago. Laid off in 1994 from a software-programming job that paid $50,000 a year with full health benefits, Wilson went to work as a security officer earning minimum wage. Now he works at the Lantana Media Campus in Santa Monica, providing security for celebrities including Ben Affleck and Cameron Diaz. He has worked his way up to $12.25 an hour but pays about $100 a month for health insurance for his 15-year-old daughter. Even though he is making half of what he did before, he feels lucky: Many security guards he knows, mostly men, earn minimum wage without benefits. White's and Wilson's experiences illustrate a noteworthy trend in the 21st-century economy: Women are closing in on men when it comes to wages, but not for the reasons anticipated or hoped for when gender pay equity became a rallying cry in the 1970s. Data show that the pay gap has been narrowing not because women have made great strides, labor experts say, but because men's wages are eroding. The disparity in median hourly pay between men and women narrowed to 18.3% in August from 21.5% five years earlier, according to recently released census figures. In fact, the US Labor Department noted recently that the wage differential in 2005 was the smallest since the department began tracking it 33 years ago, when it was 36.9%. Even when men's and women's work patterns are taken into account - men tend to work more hours - the pay gap is narrowing. The difference between men's and women's median annual earnings shrank from 26.3% to 23% between 2000 and 2005, with women earning an average $31,858 and men $41,386. Over the past 5 years, however - as the economy expanded, profits rose and unemployment fell - men's hourly wages declined a total of 2% while women's rose 3%, census records show. Women's gains were barely enough to keep up with inflation. "Wages generally have been depressed, but men's have been more depressed," said Michele Leber, chairwoman of the Washington, D.C.-based National Committee on Pay Equity, who called the trend "discouraging." Different effects Economists say the forces behind these trends show that men and women are experiencing the economy in different ways. In the U.S., men have tended to dominate in blue-collar and manufacturing jobs, which have been disappearing or seeing downward wage pressure for the past few decades. Women have been more prevalent in service jobs such as health care, which historically have been lower-paying but have seen wages rise in recent years. Indeed, economists note that among people with a high-school education or less, men's wages have been falling while women's are rising because of increased demand for service-sector jobs. Meanwhile, better-educated women have seen their pay rise but not as much as their male counterparts. So women's gains relative to men appear to be coming mostly in lower-wage jobs. The gap started narrowing in the 1980s largely because of women's increased access to education and better-paying jobs. In the 1990s their gains leveled out while men's wages rose at all skill levels, thanks to the economic expansion fueled by the dot-com boom, economists say. Women lost some ground in the recession following 2001, said Heather Boushey, an economist at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, and have seen their wage gains resume only recently. "This year [women's relative pay] reached a new peak, but I don't think it was much to get excited about, especially since the only reason was because men's wages fell faster," Boushey said. Some say a vanishing pay gap should be celebrated, whatever the reason. "All we care about is the ratio," said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard University economics professor who has studied women in the work force. "Wrong way" But other economists and pay-equity advocates say the whole idea of narrowing the gap was to help women and their families earn substantively more. "We're closing the wage gap in exactly the wrong way," said Rebecca Blank, dean of the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. "The idea was that women's wages were supposed to rise, not that men's wages would fall to women's level." http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003460505_wagegap04.html <http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003460505_wagegap04.html >
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