The simple fact is that the average wage earner is earning less. If wealth is being added to or maintained, its because both spouses are now working.
As I was saying, our debt is through the roof. That's how we're "rich" in crap that we can't afford.
Note that while the income growth has stagnated from 1979 to 2003, the number of mothers working has sky rocketed in the same time period. So, it now takes both parents working to keep even a bit ahead.
The simple fact is that the average wage earner is earning less. Then how has real per capita consumption risen at an average annual rate of 2.3% over the past 30 years?
If wealth is being added to or maintained, its because both spouses are now working.
Your chart measure the difference between 1950 and today. What kind of opportunities were available for women in the job market back then vs. the past 20 years? .
Note that while the income growth has stagnated from 1979 to 2003..
Since your linked article a previous post quoted Alan Greenspan at length, let's look at what he had to say recently about wages.
"Moreover, real earnings of the average worker have continued to rise. Over the past century, per capita real income has risen at an average rate of more than 2 percent per year, declining notably only during the Great Depression of the 1930s and immediately following World War II. Incomes trended higher whether we had a trade deficit or a trade surplus and whether international outsourcing was large or small."
"Productivity in the United States has increased generation after generation, creating ever-rising standards of living. This trend has persisted whether our competitive advantage came from the development of more efficient technologies in agriculture, textiles, and steel, or, more recently, from the design and fabrication of microprocessors and the harnessing of the human genome. Our knowledge-based skills in a business environment, supported by a rule of law, have enabled our workforce to create ever-greater value added--irrespective of what goods and services we have chosen to produce at home and what and how much we have chosen to import."
"The fact that, over the years, more than 94 percent of the workforce has been employed, on average, indicates that U.S. workers apparently have been sufficiently skilled and motivated to learn the new tasks that enable them to earn, on average, an ever-rising real wage."
Source
Are you going to come back and defend this nonsense from the Grandfather Economic Report or not?
