Discussion: Fed Chief 'Puzzled' That Despite Good Economy, Few Workers Getting Raises

Not the least bit puzzling, we discovered trickle down economics is a myth 50 years ago

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Fed Chief ‘Puzzled’ That Despite Good Economy, Few Workers Getting Raises

As a retired COO, this does not surprise me at all. The first to get anything are my level, next come senior managers and if the “good times” last well over a year things may start to filter down to the senior workers bees. It will take at least 2 or more years before those at the bottom feel even a pittance.

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Yes, he left the lectern. Then he want to bowed down to Trump.

In all fairness, there seems to have been a paradigm shift for the better in the insular world of conservative economics. The fact that he acknowledges the data and the reality that fail to fit his think-tank model is the real source of puzzlement here.

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Nor did he bring Trump manufacturing jobs back to the USA from low paying countries!

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There will always be people who don’t want to be grunts languishing in offices and/or not smart enough to become engineers, techies or coders. You better be thinking about how these people are going to make a living if everyone else wants to survive in a peaceful world. The last election illustrated their power at the polls.

Trade unions have traditionally given these laborers a voice but now that is being systematically destroyed by conservative propaganda and fascist governments. You can not put square pegs in round holes. We are talking about human beings here not statistics. Anarchy follows those who assume that technology will replace sociology as the biggest driving force on this planet. Ai is only as good as how far it can provide actual clean water, food and decent shelter for the poorest among us.

Reality still counts and will become even more important as shortages of quality of life and public services become apparent.

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Ah, is the widdle man confused? He gave all those multinationals millions and they didn’t let it trickle down on the peon’s heads? Who could have guessed.

Register people to vote. Get to the polls. These are not patriotic people- they are screwing you over.

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Being raised as part of the ruling class isolates one from the knowledge that other people on this planet are not going to be moved and are quite capable of gumming up the works of your existence. Ignorance is no excuse.

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But Trump did bring back jobs for laid off workers in China’s biggest tech company. He was outraged that they had to go through such a horrible experience.

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It wasn’t the Butler who did it… It’s called stock dividends…

I have been. We have a shortage of skilled trades right now. Have had for years. We need people who can be plumbers, machinists, carpenters, electricians, mechanics and such. They are seeing their salaries rise.

Our educational system was designed to churn out people who sit in cubicles pushing paper. It was the wonder of the industrial age. It needs to be revamped for the future. Instead at best we are still churning out bookkeepers. At worst we are turning out people who cling to bronze age creation stories.

We have to import our scientists and engineers from the developing world.

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“So it’s a bit of a puzzle,” the chairman mused, somewhat philosophically. “I wouldn’t say it’s a mystery. But it’s, it’s a bit of a puzzle.”

BULLSHIT!

The Hundreds of $$$ Billions in Corporate tax cuts are being used to perform STOCK BUY-BACKS to increase the company stock price (and thus the Executive Compensation.) THAT IS WHY and YOU KNOW IT.
The minuscule Photo-Op Raises that were announced when the Tax Cut was signed into law were just that: PHOTO OPS.
they masked actual JOB CUTS at those companies and were only for the Daily News-Cycle Consumption by the feckless and compliant MSM.

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Also corporate taxes with no loopholes. That used to be one of the “tools.”

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Hi AP! Gosh, another great article, thanks.
But, you left out the bit where some experts predicted, based on past experience, that wealth would continue to accumulate to the top under the new deregulatory climate.
You also left out, near the end of this information piece, a reference to the huge deficit that will impact the middle classes - soon to be characterized by you for the next 8 years as “the struggling middle class” - in that the services, roads, schools, libraries, parks, health care, elder care, social security, oversight to make sure police and politicians aren’t blatantly taking too much in bribes will be removed or curtailed.
Your journalistic integrity does not allow you to speculate, I know, and all of us at TPM respect you for that.
However, if in future articles, you investigate the facts, past actions and their consequences, I think you might really have a neat little news organization going there.
Keep up the mediocre work!
RC

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Was this article taken from The Onion?

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Sure but what’s the ‘choice’? After 8 years of a democrat as president (and some time with a Dem congress too) wage growth was down from when he took office from 3.6% to 2.9% and most gains where wiped out by insurance costs that even with the ACA rose faster than wages. But hey, corporate profits went up by 57% so I guess the Dems base still came out on top…

Other than raising the bare minimum wage a person can be exploited for, the only politicians I see who want to address this problem are the exact same ones everyone here will tell you are ‘unelectable’ and ‘too radical’ to win a general election and fight harder to defeat than republicans.

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Also puzzling to the chief enabler of greedy plutocrats: The wetness of water and the dryness of deserts.

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No puzzle. If you aren’t at the table, you don’t get a piece of the pie. From the mid-1930s until the mid-1980s, American workers were at the table through their labor unions. Even companies that didn’t have unions believed they had to offer their workers good wages and benefits to keep those workers from organizing. But In the 1970s, companies began to adopt anti-union practices to get around the National Labor Relations Act and to keep the unions out. The Carter Administration and the unions could have gotten “labor law reform” legislation to curb most of these practices, but because of the Carter Administration’s incompetence and the unions’ legislative gluttony, the legislation fell apart. And then it was off to the races by the corporate community to kneecap union representation. So, it’s no puzzle why workers aren’t seeing wage increases. They are simply not at the table where the pie is being sliced up.

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Yellen wouldn’t be scratching her head. Jerome was installed to keep QE as long as possible. A side-effect is that the US leads with monetary policy rather than fiscal policy, reversing a natural order of centuries. Besides putting the cart before the horse (or Stackleberg follower before Stackelberg leader), you have a Congress confused about what spending and taxing is about, at least in economic terms. It is tremendously expensive to live on the technology frontier, which is where the US in the 1960s was still committed to dwelling. That meant civil rights, university access for all, public health, etc. Most of the high-end education, however, occurred on the coasts (Austin, Boulder, outliers maybe). Under Reagan, there began a pulling away from the 60-40 private-public economy split and tax, education and health levels needed to stay there. The irony is that US public debt to GDP would only be 30-40% to GDP, rather than the current 110% with institution collapse outside the defense sector. You pay higher wages to continue as an advanced economy. Anybody can get the unemployment rate down with low wages. Indeed, the US is about on par with Bangladesh with just over 4% unemployment.

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Hey Mr. Fed Chair!

After that so-called “tax cut” my paycheck went DOWN by $65 because my health insurance deduction increased by double digits!

But your Pimp Pals on Wall Street are getting even more of all that sweet Government welfare

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