Chill out people. This is a survey from the Financial Times, not a US Government Statistical release. Tax receipts are booming (on Monday it was announced the budget deficit for 2005 will be at least $55 billion less than projected three months ago). That is a far more accurate link to incomes.
Tax receipts can't rise that fast without income growth. Just today CNN/Money released an article talking about the return of hiring for higher paying jobs, the best numbers in their report for four years.
Financial Times is not even an American paper, take this with a grain of salt.
Those tax receipts have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the repatriation of $400 billion in earnings from PRChina.
NOTHING. Not at all.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
"Financial Times is not even an American paper, take this with a grain of salt."
For a number of people here it is just a chance to bash the current administration. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. FR certainly has it's own version of DUmmies.
Tax receipts are increasing because Bush's tax cuts have stimulated the economy. This economy has nothing to do with Free trade.
In all fairness, given that "wages" do not typically include income from small businesses, and from various investments (including real estate) I will concede that some of the doom and gloom is probably not warranted. That said, I would also concede that wages for people who get most of their income via working for someone else probably have gone down, especially when normalized to inflation.
Haven't the deficits been lower every year than the enormous projections? The never tell us exactly what the deficit WAS. They only tell us the outlandish projections.
Not hardly.
Unless you are an economic central planner in the employ of the government or central bank.
Using tax revenue is meaningless because of the top heavy income and therefore tax burden distribution.
Same goes for the statistic generally cited by govt economists -- "per capita income" to tout the health of the economy.
Such numbers would mean something only if income distribution was uniform.
Fact is that real (inflation adjusted) wages for non supervisory employees have declined steadily since 1971. Non supervisory employees comprise 80% of wage earners. Source = US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Coincidentally 1971 is when trade as a percent of GNP exceeded 14%.