Posted on 03/20/2004 12:30:25 PM PST by sarcasm
You are again selectively reading the conclusion of the study. I dismiss the government propaganda.
BTW, is the average a total average (all earnings divided by all earners) or a median average? I also notice it uses the CPI, which is not a cost of living (real inflation) indice. Basically, this chart just leaves me guessing about real wage increases or declines. Personally, I know as many people that have lost income over the last 10 years as have increased it.
By "we" I presume you are referring to the Magnequench company of Valparaiso, Indiana. Under what Constitutional provision are you declaring public ownership of this company, and with it the right to tell the shareholders what they can and cannot do with their company? If it is public ownership of the means of production you are after, just say so. That way we can label you, correctly, as "socialist" and proceed apace.
I don't think you would really like the world you would create with this business of using political power to force private entities to bend to your will. It may not always be your will that gets forced.
Are you proposing we stop them? Under what authority? Do you own Intel? If not, buy it and do what you want with it... or move to a socialist country where the government owns the industry and you get a vote. Advocating socialism here is not a good move. Americans have never really taken to the idea. Especially not after seeing how well it has "worked" everywhere it has been tried.
And no, I am not using "socialist" as an epithet. I am using it in its dictionary sense of "someone who advocates public ownership of the means of production." If you advocate using political force to make decisions on behalf of owners who are now to have no say in what is done with their property, then you are advocating socialism. You scare me more than the Chinese do. At least the Chinese are in China.
The class warfare hoo-hah adds another data point to the "socialist at work" hypothesis.
I do not mind you moaning and wringing your hands over this, because that might be the limit of what you can do. But if you're going to start building political support for socialism, or even "socialism lite," with the government telling Americans where they can and can't invest their money, all in the name of "the public good" as defined by you, you will not get me as an ally. Your way lies the "dictatorship of the proletariat," and I've seen how that movie ends. No thanks.
So now you've cited a British graph of American wages that are supposedly "deflated by consumer prices" as well as a Canadian study.
And you've bashed my U.S. government study.
I'm seeing a pattern here from you. Do you have *any* American sources??
Here's a question for you: If Salary increases "fall," have salaries still increased??
The one in post 60 that broke out wages by education? It did show decline within educational categories, but Americans now have more education. The GED is so easy to get that most everyone who would have had less than high school education now has at least that. And large numbers now graduate from college who are in no way college material by older standards.
I am sure that free trade is good, but am not quite as sure on outsourcing. In as much as wages may have gone down in certain categories, I fear the real explanation would have been deterioration in how hard some Americans work, not anything international. Now, there are vast numbers engaged in non-productive work (lawsuits, for example, and keeping statistics for government regulations), and that stuff lowers everyone's wages.
Hello! Is there anybody in there? Knock, knock, knock, knock.
That non-government link breaks out the salary increases as being in the 3.5 to 4% range, falling from earlier increases, but still increasing a full 1% faster than inflation.
Sheesh...
If I have to qualify for one of those, count me as the last.
I just don't see the point in allowing a nation like China to gain wealth.
Federal income taxes, thanks to GWB's two major income tax cuts, are now down to $45 per year for a family of four earning $40,000 annually.
That's less than $4 per month. How much do you think that $4 per month is going to change the *average* hourly wage for Americans?
You're becoming arrogant again.
That non-government link breaks out the salary increases as being in the 3.5 to 4% range, falling from earlier increases, but still increasing a full 1% faster than inflation.
The Canadian study that you sometimes love and sometimes hate breaks down the increases based on education levels. Yours does not. Your "study" also does not indicate the number or nature of the businesses surveyed. Not enough data - please feel free to try again
Perhaps not quite obselete. But getting there.
The central problem with applying Ricardo's free trade ideas in today's economy is that he assumes that certain factors of production are relatively immobile, specifically labor.
Post Internet, and the advent of large educated work forces in the 3rd world, that's just not true anymore. Labor has been commoditized and is now easily transferable across borders.
Free Trade is like any other widespread dogma, with all the usual divisions amongst its adherents. Some people cling to dogma for reasons of self-interest, others because of intellectual laziness and inertia, or as in this case-- blind quasi-religious faith.
Heck. The flat-earth theory worked fine for a while. Newtownian phsyics was once thought to be the final frontier. Then came Einstein and relativity. And even Einstein was uncomfortable with quantum physics.
Bottom line... people like to be comfortable in their delusions. That's the history of man.
You're neglecting the minor detail of state and local taxes. Please don't give us the bilge about property taxes in rural Alabama.
One of the links that I posted early on to this thread shows that average wages in China have DECLINED for the past three years in a row. Chinese banks are technically insolvent, and more than half of all Chinese (government-owned) factories lose money each year.
The *myth* about China is that their low wages give them a competitive advantage, however.
The *reality* is that China is globally competitive only because they brutally punish their own citizens with a near worthless (officially) currency.
By undervaluing the Yuan versus the U.S. Dollar, China in effect props up the foreign exchange value of the Dollar. That "propped up" Dollar allows Americans to purchase far more Chinese goods and services than would otherwise be profitable to us here.
In other words, the Chinese government is subsidizing American consumer purchases at the expense of their own people (oil costs far more for them to import because of this, for instance).
And Americans are intuitively taking advantage of these deep discounts.
Whether that transfers net wealth to China or not is therefor somewhat debatable.
Yes, but what your Canadian study doesn't point out is that more Americans obtain more education each year...making data on the educational level wages of 1960 meaningless compared to 2000 simply because so many more Americans fit into the "college" catagory now than back then.
Your Canadian study also uses a non-standard CPI calculation to adjust their wage data, and even then they conclude that American wages increased (albeit at a slower pace).
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