Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

On a different but related subject--

I've skimmed a couple articles lately on the Earned Income Tax Credit as a few conservatives are now pushing this as a better way to help the folks who they say do work and need help rather than increasing the minimum wage (which they insist largely helps middle and upper class high schoolers working after school, and not the working poor and middle class trying to survive). But its not clear enough conservatives want to expand the use of the credit. In fact, that Republican Dave Camp tax reform package reduces the amount of folks eligible for the EITC

walmart will pay low wages whether or not anyone is getting welfare because they can

Also the first day at work after you watch an orientation video they tell you to snoop on any of your fellow employees who start talking about unions. Or at least they did when I worked there when I was 18 (10+ years ago).

mixed myself up I agree gov is not an enabler bc walmart wouldnt raise pay if SNAP didn't exist

seems fair enough to raise the minimum wage in response to a large proportion of gainfully employed people having to rely on SNAP.

not necessarily a large proportion. let's say significant number of people.

allowing Walmart to employ people even full time without meeting their cost of living, with government forced to pick up the difference makes the current min wage law itself a subsidy (kinda analogizing to "tax expenditure" concept here)

raise the minimum wage

Yes. As soon as possible. This is would help millions of working poor, not just WalMart employees. I'd say $10/hr. should be the lowest amount even considered as proper compensation for any paid work of any description.

I question the logic in this guest editorial:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2014/02/28/maybe-raising-the-minimum-wage-isnt-such-a-good-idea-after-all/

Wow, the number of elisions (e.g. not mentioning that Douglas Holtz-Eakin was the head economic advisor for the McCain campaign and heads some right wing think tank), omissions (a single unlinked Texas A&M study that contradicts nearly all other available research on the minimum wage) and bad-faith logical fallacies (it's not the best way so let's not use it at all/it doesn't help everyone so we shouldn't help anyone) in that article are staggering.

"Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who is a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, doesn’t think so. In fact, he doesn’t think the federal government should have a minimum wage at all."

I mean do you need to read any further

a single unlinked Texas A&M study

it's MOUNTING EVIDENCE, dude. totally mounting.

No minimum wage is a deeply randian opinion. So is eating babies.

I'd be down w questioning the value of the minimum wage if we weren't living in an age of all-time high corporate profits and stock markets. But we are.

how does this apply to amazon mechanical turk!

Right, but that makes it sound like if you stopped subsidizing, the business model wouldn't work. Which is why the argument makes me a little uncomfortable. I support raising the minimum wage.

It does seem plausible that without government benefits Walmart would be forced to pay slightly higher wages. Same probably goes for other big companies that rely on minimum wage labor (such as the fast food industry). But it's hard to say because reducing government benefits would have lots of indirect effects on demand and such. In any case, the way I see it, that's not an argument for reducing benefits, but rather for raising the minimum wage.

My life as a retail worker, written by a former political journalist.

After recently having one of those bougie "honey I don't know if we're saving enough for retirement" conversations, this was sobering to read:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/

Savings account?

"Six months of living expenses" is a good lol to all "middle-class" New Yorkers.

Financial advisors have a vested interest in convincing as many people as possible that "good financial management" requires meeting a variety of difficult to meet goals through strategies that are more complicated than people would construct on their own. Basically, the hordes of financial 'advisors' out there are peddling watered down, simple-minded versions of how the wealthy manage much larger trusts and estates. In order to make enough work for the ever-increasing numbers of these parasites, these strategies are being pushed at people ever further down the income scale. It is an industry and they sell fear, uncertainty and doubt. Don't buy it.

I think the six months' savings things makes a lot of sense if you have a family. Maybe less so if you're single and can easily move to a cheaper rental or crash on a friend's couch or whatever. I agree that a lot of other stuff financial planner types tell you is just ludicrous and beyond imagination, like the amount you're supposed to save for your kids college, the amount you're supposed to save for retirement, etc.

Just having a savings account with as much money as you can wangle into it doesn't require a financial advisor to figure out. Stating flatly that it should contain "six months of living expenses" is more confusing than enlightening.

Very few people can tell you what "one month of living expenses" amounts to. I happen to keep detailed records of what we spend each month, going back to 2008, and the amounts vary so widely I'd have to massage the numbers quite a bit to come up with a number that even vaguely fits "six months of living expenses". As advice, this sounds simple, but as soon as you seriously try to put it to use, it becomes very, very nebulous and more likely to inspire fretting than guide action.

By way of contrast, saying "six months of your rent or mortgage payments" would at least allow a person to quickly and easily calculate a number so they can see what the goal is.

I inherited "a little money" from my mom two years ago, i.e. six months of my rent, pretty much. And rather than keep that as my emergency fund, I'm going to Europe this year.

I hear there's an old saying, "see Naples and die". Have a good time.

xp IDK, it seems kind of intuitive to me that "six months of living expenses" means six months of the things you couldn't or wouldn't want to cut even in an emergency -- food, rent/mortgage, basic utilities, etc.

student loans - the new burden of failure

student loans - the price of growing up in america without family money

student loans = graduate groans!

student loan (interest) = yacht owner gas money!

http://www.fastcompany.com/3027355/pixel-and-dimed-on-not-getting-by-in-the-gig-economy

hahaha as soon as I got to the part with the Thomas Friedman quote I was like "say no more, I would like to sign up for your newsletter"

most terrifying part is buried way in

I'm essentially competing for every hour of my employment.

buried but kind of implied at other points I think. Chilling piece, yeah. Also dovetails nicely with an interview I listened to last night with Jennifer Silva
http://scholar.harvard.edu/jsilva

available here:

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S131121 (Nov 21)

more about the non-tech-savvy In This Economy but some of the themes overlap

the silver lining is that it starts to sound toward the end like these platforms are shitty business models that will either change or fail

3. Half of Americans are "Poor" or "Low-Income"

This is based on the Census Department's Relative Poverty Measure (Table 4), which is "most commonly used in developed countries to measure poverty." The Economic Policy Institute uses the term "economically vulnerable." With this standard, 18 percent of Americans are below the poverty threshold and 32 percent are below twice the threshold, putting them in the low-income category.

The official poverty rate increased by 25 percent between 2000 and 2011. Seniors and children feel the greatest impact, with 55 percent of the elderly and almost 60 percent of children classified as poor or low-income under the relative poverty measure. Wider Opportunities for Women reports that "60 percent of women age 65 and older who live alone or live with a spouse have incomes insufficient to cover basic, daily expenses."

4. It's Much Worse for Black Families

Incredibly, while America's total wealth has risen from $12 trillion to $77 trillion in 25 years, the median net worth for black households has GONE DOWN over approximately the same time, from $7,150 to $6,446, adjusted for inflation. State of Working America reports that almost half of black children under the age of six are living in poverty.

http://www.nationofchange.org/more-evidence-half-america-or-near-poverty-1395672039

^^ worst part is how unsurprising it is.

time to live in 5th element cubies

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/timothy-geithner-book-052914

charles pierce otm

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/05/upshot/how-the-recession-reshaped-the-economy-in-255-charts.html?hp

nail salons and dog groomers booming

captain obvious: "a very ugly blame game going on that’s directed — is orchestrated — by people who are doing very nicely at the top to turn the sort of great middle class that itself is feeling squeezed against people at the bottom"

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/30/a_very_ugly_blame_game_how_great_recession_is_affecting_people_in_totally_unexpected_ways/

Bubble Paranoia Setting in as S&P 500 Surge Stirs Angst

I don't want most people to experience the misery of another bubble bursting but I feel like the post-recession gains in the economy have been accumulated by such a relatively small number of people that it wouldn't be as devastating.

I could easily see stocks falling 10% on no news, but to get more than that, I think something would have to happen in the "real" economy.

on the bright side, enough americans now live in poverty that something/anything must be done (besides cut taxes / deregulate big finance)?

http://theweek.com/article/index/268053/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-safe-from-poverty-mdash-and-that-might-be-a-good-thing

U.S. Economy Grew 5% in Third Quarter, Its Fastest Rate in More Than a Decade

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/business/us-q3-gdp-revised-up-to-5-percent.html

"As anthropologist David Graeber puts it, 'Whenever someone starts talking about the ‘free market,’ it’s a good idea to look around for the man with the gun.' Despite the endless talk of a 'free market,' our economy is shaped by myriad government policies—and no matter where we look, we see government policies working against everyday workers. Whether it’s letting the real value of the minimum wage decline, making it harder to unionize, or creating bankruptcy laws and intellectual-property regimes that primarily benefit capital and the 1 percent, the way the government structures markets is responsible for weakening labor and causing wages to stay stuck."

http://www.thenation.com/article/200257/score-wages-liberal-nihilism

i agree with konczal but i also feel like wages are gonna start increasing soon. not that that necessarily contradicts anything he's saying here. but the best thing to raise wages is a low unemployment rate. if unemployment were to continue declining and wages not go up, something is definitely up

unionization is weird because the types of industries that are/were unionized tended to pay relatively higher wages so it's hard to figure out what the _actual_ union premium is. it's not empirically clear anymore that there even is a significant premium. people were talking about this paper (https://economics.byu.edu/frandsen/Documents/unioneffects.pdf) a few weeks ago that found a negative premium (for those who don't trust or can't understand economists this is a good explanation of the result & problems with the research design from a credibly left-wing source http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17663/a_recent_study_says_unionized_companies_actually_pay_less._the_truth_is_a_b) (and here's matt yglesias http://www.vox.com/2015/2/3/7966951/frandsen-union-wages)

fancy high skill jobs that already pay a high premium don't really need unions and the industries that employ them benefit from the flexibility, but widespread unionization of service sector could be welfare improving

obama wants to raise the federal minimum wage to 10$. that's obviously not going to happen anytime soon, but citywide MWs seem to be catching on and don't seem to have much effect on employment (although they do increase prices) (http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/cwed/wp/economicimpacts_07.pdf) a lot depends on what happens in oakland & seattle, if the elasticity is still small around 15$ MW workers in other cities are gonna start making noise

i tend to think there's a limit to how much influence govts have on labor market outcomes for good or bad and that rather than try to chase the dream of higher wages we should just go straight for the jugular and redistribute. USA and sweden have the same pre-tax GINI coefficient etc

if unemployment were to continue declining and wages not go up, something is definitely up

this is exactly what's happening in the UK fwiw

real wages are actually _falling_ in the uk. labor productivity is also stalling though:

http://www.economicshelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/boe-labour-prod-2005-12.jpg

in the us it's more of a "mystery" since it's been increasing

http://www.voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/FromApr2012/saleheen%20fig1%2016%20aug.png

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/something-weird-going-us-economy-133929266.html