mozz

mozz , 6 days ago to Work Reform in Study: American workers in labor unions has fallen from nearly 35% in 1954 to just 10.5% in 2018

Still pretty much 10% 😢

That’s not the whole story; raw number of members has ticked up but since unemployment is real low now and the rise is pretty slight, the percent of membership is still dropping. I’d love to be able to tell you it’s different, but that is the reality.

mozz OP , 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago) to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

New goalposts I do not have time for but fortunately there are a couple of articles which go into why this is wrong pretty comprehensively.

Edit: TL;DR in addition to normal interest-rate stuff and etc, he raised corporate tax by around a trillion dollars which he then sank into among other things domestic manufacturing and infrastructure, and he staffed the NLRB with actual labor people which enabled them to support a lot of these union fights which have been winning gains recently

I keep saying I don’t have time and then you keep suckering me into swinging at wherever the new goalposts are. That’s really it though

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

Thanks Obama

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

Dude you're putting up a spirited drive towards this conclusion you are trying to bolster. Sure. One more message maybe.

I don't actually disagree with anything you just said. There are two ways to look at that bleak reality.

1. One way to look at it is, hey, let's look at which direction things have been moving recently, and try to do more of the things that produce gains and less of the things that produce losses, because it's pretty fuckin urgent to fix all that.
2. The other way it to move the goalposts allllllll the way from "wages never caught up with the giant price jumps from the pandemic" to implicitly blaming Biden for everything that's happened throughout generations of neoliberal betrayal of the American dream, as a way of disagreeing with an article which is accurately describing some notable successes for the people most in need of help right now including wages catching up and exceeding the giant price jumps from the pandemic

I'm not into the idea of indefinitely disagreeing with every new location you wanna move the goalposts to. I will agree with you about how fucked things are on a generational time-scale, and the urgency of fixing it.

Which is why I like identifying honestly when and why things are moving in the right direction

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

I feel like we've been over this at this point

1. There are quite a lot of countries where the poorest 10% are fucked. The US isn't unique in that respect
2. A lot of countries are struggling to hold their heads above water at all, after the Covid apocalypse; the fact that by almost any metric you want to choose, the US is actually gaining right now puts it in an enviable position given what happened
3. The fact that the average worker, and the poorest 10% worker, are both making gains of significant size when usually they are the first ones to get fucked even harder when times are tough, is notable, and "we haven't fixed things for them yet or even close to it" doesn't negate that

Pick any or all

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

Yeah that's me, Mr. Deceptive, over here explaining what the cumulative wage growth is, and the cumulative inflation, so that people can compare the two and see which one is higher

I actually originally cited the source which simply said that inflation-adjusted wages had grown by 12%, incorporating both into a single number, but that led to a certain amount of confusion, so I separated it out into the two relevant numbers

You know, like a terribly deceptive person would do

(And yes, the poorest 10% of this country is still fucked and needs quite a lot of help. My point was not that they're doing okay now, it was that they have seen substantial gains relative to where they were, which is a notable thing, and that we should keep doing the things that got them going in the right direction for once in God knows how long.)

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

Yeah that's me, Mr. Dishonest, over here explaining what the cumulative wage growth is, and the cumulative inflation, so that people can compare the two and see which one is higher

I actually originally cited the source which simply said that inflation-adjusted wages had grown by 12%, incorporating both into a single number, but that led to a certain amount of confusion, so I separated it out into the two relevant numbers

You know, like a terribly dishonest person would do

(And yes, the poorest 10% of this country is still fucked and needs quite a lot of help. My point was not that they're doing okay now, it was that they have seen substantial gains relative to where they were, which is a notable thing, and that we should keep doing the things that got them going in the right direction for once in God knows how long.)

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

Yeah, I definitely don't know why I've spent so much time on this 🥲

This is like trying to explain to a drunk person why they can't drive home

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

Stock market

Who the fuck said anything about the stock market

The article talks about "growth" which is presumably GDP, which is a bullshit metric absolutely, but the overall context is:

The growth rate is high, the unemployment rate is at historic lows, household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class. There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them.

The stock market is based on total crap and can swing up or down by like tens of percents on a whim for literally no reason at all. The only reason stock market even got mentioned tangentially was because Trump said something about the stock market, and they mentioned that at the end of the article.

IDK why I've spent so much time on this. Honestly man it seems like you're literally just saying anything, casting about for some thing you can poo poo or disagree with that has nothing to do with what I or the article are saying.

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

Boy do I have some good news for you

The nation’s unemployment rate has sat below 4 percent for more than two years now, the longest such streak since the 1960s. With labor markets persistently tight, low-income workers have finally secured some leverage over their employers, and wage inequality has fallen as a result.

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

Dude if you have a disagreement with the article, let's have it. You tried to disagree with it in economic terms and it seems to me like you got tripped up on basic understanding of inflation-adjusted dollars versus non-inflation-adjusted dollars, which is why you're recasting the whole thing in emotional terms like "not some kind of economic saviour," but this new framing doesn't leave a lot to actually discuss. It just takes it into the realm of bickering and fact free opinion judgements.

The majority of people in the country believe that Trump is better on the economy than Biden, even though Trump is a fuckin trade war starting PPP fraud factory closing disaster. The idea that Biden is hurting the economy is not just un-heard-of, it is a majority view, which makes worthwhile a factual discussion of whether or not it is true.

The last article I posted before this morning that dealt with Biden in any capacity was almost a month ago. The thing about me posting article after article you are literally just making up. Comments, I post a lot of.

The article is a little bit explicitly "rah-rah Biden," I'll grant you that. On the other hand, if it's true, then that's legit, and I haven't really seen anything to illustrate that it might not be true other than a pretty large amount of obfuscation in the comments arguing other points that have more convenient answers (like "are low income workers doing okay yet" which they are not).

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

I mean, sure. 🙂 I was trying to consolidate comments into a single stream of conversation since it's already sort of turning into a bickering sprawl, but if you'd like to reply to it here instead of there, then I'm fine with that too:

---

Yes, lower income people in this country are still fucked. If anything I was saying made it sound like I thought they were not, that was not the intent. My point was that Biden has been helping them get out of it, to a certain degree, in a way that's actually very unusual for an American president (they generally don't give a shit about the working class). And that happened even during a historic level of economic challenge to tackle his way out of. And therefore that attacking him by pretending that the opposite is happening is erroneous at best and openly dishonest at worst.

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

See above

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

inflation has far outpaced them

This actually isn't fully true -- inflation hasn't outpaced wages at the bottom end, and the only place it's "far" outpaced them is at the top. (The Vox article talks about more details about how and why)

• Cumulative inflation from 2019 to 2023 is about 18% (which is fuckin massive, mostly due to the 2022 spike)

But then:

• Wages at the bottom (10th percentile) in that time went up by about 35% in current dollars, well outpacing inflation
• Median wages basically held steady with inflation, I think they're a couple percent behind it but basically the same as they were just with people unhappier when they look at their grocery bills
• Wages at the top (90th percentile) actually didn't hold pace with that historic inflation; for those people their constant dollar wages have been falling, yes

mozz OP , 14 days ago to U.S. News in Under Biden, U.S. economic growth becomes the ‘envy of the world’

Hm - I interpreted "recent" as one way, but yeah, that's fair, you could interpret "recent" as him meaning the last year or something. Here's a summary, then, of how wages at the bottom end have kept pace with inflation over the last few years. "Real wages of low-wage workers grew 12.1% between 2019 and 2023." Cumulative inflation over that time span has been about 18% (which is massive), but low-end wages in current dollars also grew by 35% cumulatively in that time, well outpacing inflation.

What numbers are you looking at that say low income wages haven't kept pace with inflation? Like what kind of cumulative current-dollar wages, and what cumulative inflation, are you claiming? If my stuff is propaganda numbers, then what are the real numbers?

Inflation-adjusted wages have ticked very slightly down at the median (like a few percent), gone down a bit at the top end, and gone up significantly both at the bottom end and in the average. It's a complex topic and you can find a variety of numbers both on the income and inflation sides, but they generally all paint that same story (which is, itself, complex enough that you can paint a bunch of different narratives from it, by putting up the numbers for average vs. median vs. lowest-quartile or etc).