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As we enter the Labor Day weekend when we are supposed to be celebrating hard-working Americans, we get the monthly personal income and spending numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Personal income rose .. 0.1% in July. pitab083013 compensation of employees, the core component of personal income, fell by $21.9 billion, the was the biggest monthly slide decline since May 2012. pi083013 Another view of declining employee compensation. Compensation Employees_0 And my favorite chart of declining real household income: household-income-monthly-median-growth-since-2000 Chicago Purchasing Managers Index printed at 53.0 in August, up from 52.3 in July. But there was a...

On August 29th, the day after the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, fast-food workers around the nation are planning to strike for better pay and working conditions. Workers going on strike are demanding $15 an hour wages, mirroring the demand for $2 an hour the organizers of the 1963 march made.

A front-page Wall Street Journal article published at the beginning of this week (see link below) and other news reports are calling public attention to the fact that, after many years of decline, manufacturing employment in the U.S. has modestly rebounded since the end of the Great Recession. Unfortunately, the Journal account and others appearing in major media outlets ignore data showing that even as the total number of manufacturing jobs increased by roughly 480,000 from 2009 to 2012, the number of factory jobs held by unionized workers fell by nearly 130,000. (Our source for these figures and those in...

GALESBURG, Ill. — In a week when he tried to focus attention on the struggles of the middle class, President Obama said in an interview that he was worried that years of widening income inequality and the lingering effects of the financial crisis had frayed the country’s social fabric and undermined Americans’ belief in opportunity. Upward mobility, Mr. Obama said in a 40-minute interview with The New York Times, “was part and parcel of who we were as Americans.” “And that’s what’s been eroding over the last 20, 30 years, well before the financial crisis,” he added. “If we don’t...

The average wage of a U.S. worker was $1,000 per week in the fourth quarter of 2012, or 4.7% higher from the same time in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In some areas, pay rose than 10%. In the San Francisco metropolitan area, the average wage grew by nearly 25%, more than any area in the country. Based on the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, these are the cities with the biggest increases in pay.Click here to see the cities where wages are soaringClick here to see the cities where wages are plummetingIn an...

Yesterday, Texas came a knocking. While most would assume that with the Lone Star State’s love of guns would pair the two together better than peas and carrots, Gov. Rick Perry will have to bring more than just a box of chocolates and some bright red roses. He aims to woo them with things like low taxes, fewer regulations and offer an economic incentive package. On top of the sweet talk, Perry has been laying ground work since the National Rifle Association’s annual convention last month (check out his intro video) and, as of his arrival yesterday, with TV and...

One of the most common arguments for allowing more immigration is that there is a “need” for foreign workers to do “jobs that Americans won’t do,” especially in agriculture. One of my most vivid memories of the late Armen Alchian, an internationally renowned economist at UCLA, involved a lunch at which one of the younger members of the economics department got up to go get some more coffee. Being a considerate sort, the young man asked, “Does anyone else need more coffee?” “Need?” Alchian said loudly, in a cutting tone that clearly conveyed his dismay and disgust at hearing an...

Real Wages Decline Again — Literally No One Notices Kenneth Thomas, Middle Class Political Economist Jun. 1, 2013, 12:09 PM You read it here first: Real wages fell 0.2% in 2012, down from $295.49 (1982-84 dollars) to $294.83 per week, according to the 2013 Economic Report of the President. Thus, a 1.9% increase in nominal wages was more than wiped out by inflation, marking the 40th consecutive year that real wages have remained below their 1972 peak. Yet no one in the media noticed, or at least none thought it newsworthy. I searched the web and the subscription-only Nexis news...

For folks too young or too unaware what has happened to our economy the past 30 years, here is an answer. Ronald Reagan, G.H.W. Bush and the Republican Party are responsible for what we know as "Reaganomics," an economy that continues today resulting in few "labor unions” and the resulting low wages and lack of worker benefits. Newly elected Reagan’s (1981) first attack on the middle class economy was his dismantling a labor union representing 11,000 striking air traffic controller employees, whom he “fired.” Their PATCO union was destroyed. Reagan and his rich, conservative friends (not one who needed job...

One of the measures I like to follow is the spread between real GDP growth and potential real GDP growth. Potential GDP is the highest level of real Gross Domestic Product output that can be sustained over the long term. As of the end of 2012, the output gap (potential – actual real GDP growth) logged in at $840 billion. And that is just for Q4 2012. Notice that the US has been running almost a trillion dollars in subpar performance per quarter since 2009. Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas from University of Chicago gave a lecture in 2011 where he...

Consumer spending propped up our weak economic numbers long enough to get President Obama through the election – which is one reason that he used to treat his “payroll tax cut” raid on Social Security funding as the most important #60Dollars in every American’s life, before suddenly and silently dropping it during the fiscal cliff showdown.

Americans are a lot better at belt-tightening than the people they send to Washington. As Americans’ income fell by 3.6 percent in January, President Obama and Congressional leaders were warning of the dire consequences of sequester, the budgetary booby trap that forces cuts of as little as a third of that from the mammoth federal spending plan. Working stiffs sucked it up and absorbed the biggest monthly drop in income in 20 years, while the elected officials insisted that the federal budget had no fat to trim. Financial planning experts say if Americans can take such a big bite out...

According to a new study by the George Soros-funded Center for Economic Policy and Research, minimum wage should be $21.72 an hour to keep up with the increase of worker productivity. Highlighting that study, The Huffington Post bemoaned President Barack Obama’s call for a higher minimum wage as a “far cry from what workers really deserve,” in a Feb. 13 blog post.

Watch this 4 Minutes 32 Seconds of Video. The Difference Between Liberal and Conservative Fred Barnes: Yeah, you were in your early years, you were a a Marxist. Thomas Sowell: Yes. Fred Barnes: Uh … What happened? How'd you … uh … get away from that? Thomas Sowell: Ah … I took a job in the government. I was still a Marxists. But uh, one summer of working in the government was enough to uh in turn … start, start, in turn, start turning me around. I went through the University of Chicago as a Marxist. After a year...

Muskegon County wants to build a new jail, and the county's prevailing wage law means local taxpayers could be on the hook for an extra $2 million for the project. Prevailing wage laws mandate that union-scale wages be paid on construction work funded by taxpayer dollars, regardless of the winning bidder. Local governments can do nothing about federal prevailing wage laws, which apply if federal dollars are used for a project. However, local governments only have to pay the prevailing wage on local projects if they have a local ordinance that requires it. Most of Michigan's 83 counties do not...

I post this item not to mock Mika Brzezinski. But her comments this morning were so illustrative of the liberal mindset--in ignoring fundamental principles of economics--that they are worth highlighting here. An entire Morning Joe segment had been devoted to discussing the wage dilemma in America. In the context of analyzing the right-to-work law soon to be signed in Michigan, the panel—apparently excepting Mika—agreed that we face hard choices here. We can artificially preserve high wages for a relative few, or let wages seek their natural level, providing more jobs at lower pay. As Joe Scarborough put it, we have...

Full Zero Hedge Article At This LinkIn the recent past we noted [6] the somewhat startling reality that "the single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045." While mathematics is our tool - as opposed to the mathemagics of some of the more politically biased media who did not like our message - the painful reality in America is that: for increasingly more Americans it is now more lucrative - in the form of actual disposable income...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Pamela Waldron makes $7.75 an hour as a cashier at the KFC in New York's Penn Station, where she has worked for eight years. That's just 50 cents above the New York state minimum wage. The 26-year old nursing student, and mother of two, says she has asked for a raise but her pleas have gone unheeded for weeks. Finally, on Thursday, around lunchtime she joined a protest of about 40 fast food workers who walked out of their shifts, carrying placards and shouting slogans to bring attention to their cause of fighting for higher wages...

With more than 15 million workers in in the sector, and leverage over workplace standards across the supply chain, retail wields enormous influence on Americans’ standard of living and the nation’s economic outlook. It connects producers and consumers, workers and jobs, and local social and economic development to the larger US economy. And over the next decade, retail will be the second largest source of new jobs in the United States. Given the vital role retail plays in our economy, the question of whether employees in the sector are compensated at a level that promotes American prosperity is of national...