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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (65568)	2/6/2012 7:14:07 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

US employment has not stagnated for four decades, there are more people employed in the US now than in 1972. Income for the lowest 90% hasn't stagnated, neither has wages per person, even household wages are slightly up, and households are smaller, wages per person, and wages per worker, are up. --------- super-economy.blogspot.com …inequality in total compensation has not increased because the fixed costs of health insurance are a much larger percentage of the total compensation of lower-earnings workers. Burkhauser and Simon explore this explanation. They add the value of employer-provided health insurance as well as Medicaid and Medicare to the pre-tax, post-cash-transfer household income data and find that the bottom three income deciles actually exhibit higher growth than the top seven deciles from 1995 to 2008. …Warshawsky makes a similar discovery. Using unpublished BLS total compensation data, including employer health insurance expenditures, from 1999 to 2006, he finds that the growth in compensation by earnings decile (from the 30th to the 99th) averages 35 percent, with 41 percent growth at the 30th percentile (workers earning $10–$14 an hour) and only 35.8 percent growth at the 99th percentile (workers earning $59–$80 an hour). cato.org ...Wages, household earnings and earnings of tax units appear to grow slowly. Between 1970-2008 real wages grew 15%, median household income 16%, and according to Pickety&Saez taxable income of "The Bottom 99 Percent" by 12%... 1. Taxable income is only part of total income. In 2008 taxable income as reported by Pickety&Saez was only 58 percent of GDP, a decline from 1970. We can’t just ignore the rest of national income. There is a similar income-base problem with BLS wage data. 2. Average Household and Taxable Unit sizes have been shrinking since 1970, both growing at around one and a half time the rate of population. 3. Inflation is systematically miss-measured, as the Boskin-comission found. When calculating GDP a different and less biased inflation measure is used than CPI-U-RS. The Congressional Budget Office made their own estimates, accounting for the first two problems, though not for inflation. They confirms that the share of post-tax income going to the top one percent increased from 8% to 17% (a bit lower than Pickety&Saez, perhaps because of household size adjustment and a broader income base). Since the CBO estimate of income growth of 62 percent in the shorter period covered is very close to GDP numbers, their estimates of real middle class income growth are also higher, at 46 percent. A careful new study by Bruce Meyer and James Sullivan corrects for the aforementioned problems. Similar adjustments are done by Burkhauser et al. (2011) and Gordon (2009). Like the CBO, all these studies correspond better with GDP data, and produce higher estimates of middle class income growth (results summarized bellow). My simple method is combining the best income-distribution estimate (from Pickety&Saez) with the best income-growth estimates (from GDP numbers). This method shows that that between 1970-2008 the real per capita income of the "Bottom 99 Percent" grew by 80%, and the income of the "Bottom 90 Percent" grew by 60%. super-economy.blogspot.com