[Jorge]

An engineer who is 50 and was paid $60-90K/yr gets canned (because the company offshored his job to India or Philippines for $40k/year) now gets a job doing (you name it) for $45k/yr. New jobs in (name the industry) are created but the pay is less than it was last year. Has unemployment has gone down? Yes.

There might be drop in pay in some professions, like engineering, but overall real hourly earnings rose 1.5 percent last year for Americans in general. In fact real earnings have risen over the last three years.

And consumer spending also grew between 4 percent and 5 percent last year.

[AreaMan]

There might be drop in pay in some professions, like engineering, but overall real hourly earnings rose 1.5 percent last year for Americans in general...

You are correct. Care to tell me what the increase in productivity was?

Try at least double what earnings were.

[ninenot]

Wrongo, Jorge.

Insight Magazine/Wash Times: "What may not be understood is that 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs since 2001, and nearly 400,000 ran out of their federal unemployment benefits in January of this year alone. Indeed the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average salary for U.S. workers has fallen from $44,570 to $35,410 since 2001, with nearly 5 million Americans working at part-time employment to make ends meet. " 2/21/04, K. P. O'Meara