35k I assume of dollars per year? Which is roughly 2900000 roubles month. I have another question: why the fuck everything is so expensive? 2.9M ₽/month is a lot. You can buy flat every few months in Moscow. Something is wrong with your economy and policies if THAT considered small.
It's the policies.
Not enough stopping prices rising and not enough keeping the money from continuously flowing up.
Taxes on large companies and the extremely rich keep going down. Politicians distract voters by making them angry about other issues so they don't realize they are voting against bringing the money back down and building the middle class back up and supporting the lower class.
Because prices for goods and services are all relative to the amount of money circulating in an economy.
The US has been operating at a deficit for over 30 years now, in addition to ~15 years of near-0% interest rates. The amount of ’new’ money flooding in is obscene, and is largely to blame for the massive rate of inflation seen across the board.
In an ideal scenario, deficit alternating would be directed towards the lower income brackets, as those funds would circulate through the economy multiple times before winding up in the back accounts of the Uber-wealthy eventually.
Unfortunately what has been happening since the 80’s in the US (and the west more broadly), is that the vast majority this ‘new’ money is issued directly to the most wealthy portion of society, who then use it to buy up essential goods and services (eg. Housing) as an investment vehicle; lifting the prices across the board without any means for the remainder of society to be able to continue to afford necessities like shelter.
Circling back around to my first sentence, imagine that the amount of roubles in the economy doubled overnight, and all of that new wealth was given to the richest 100 oligarchs.
They would likely buy out the majority of apartments in and around Moscow, skyrocketing their value due to the increased demand, jack up rent as high as possible and squeeze every last rouble out of the general population who won’t have seen any increase in their wages.
Because NIBMYs keep voting against new housing which raises the rents, raises the cost to buy a house. In places that develop, rents are trending lower, while in places that don't the rents keep going up
Well you see the problem is that people who make 35k USD and live in USA have CoL to mach in USD and aren't in Moscow. My rent for my 1Br is $21,600 yr. That means $13,400 is for everything else for the rest of the whole year (based off of 35k annual).
So why am I not buying several flats a year? Because your looking at how one currency works in an entirely different economy. Not within it's own economy. Your wage probably buys you a TON somewhere else in the world too. The problem is that you aren't there, you are where you are now where that wage is far less effective
The figure referenced in this tweet is likely referring to the 2021 net compensation chart we saw making the rounds a few weeks back. Indeed, it's correct, ~50% of all Americans made less than 35k per year in net total compensation in 2021.
In 2022, that figure rose to ~40k. So the trend is going in the right direction, at least. And IIRC, the chart does include teenagers, college students, people working part time or underemployed, etc.
The difference between top 10% and top 1% is shocking. And if they included 0.1% it would probably make all the other bars too small to see the difference at all.
My favorite calculator/article from that website is the debt one. For the longest time the bottom 10% held negative wealth. Only recently did we move that number down to bottom 7% under biden
35->38 is roughly what inflation would give you from 2021 to 2022. And that's when the 40k figure came from. So, the implication is still fairly positive.
I looked around and the average salary Q4 last year was over $59k.. I don’t know what the meme used for the “half” metric, but if they used the entire population of the US that would certainly drive the average down by including people of non-working age. The average I cited probably doesn’t account for unemployment, but that’s only 3.7% so that’s not going to push the cited average much lower.
If half the working-age, non-disabled adults in this country were literally only making the meme wage or less it would be incredibly dire.
The average won't tell you the halfway point if the data isn't evenly distributed. The average of 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 500 is 50.9. The median is what you want for the halfway point of a set. This meme looks like it is a couple years out of date, most recent measured median from 2020 is 40,480. But the meme was accurate as of 2018.
That website seems to be doing the mean average. The median average is 41k currently, and back in 2020 median income was 35k, so the OP post might be a few years old.
The (mean) average might be 59k now, but half of people are making below 41k. Median is generally a better stat because excessive incomes on the ends don't skew it massively. Adjusted for inflation this is essentially the exact same situation workers have been in for half a century. Wage growth is non existent, adjusted for inflation.
This is explicitly just for full-time workers. There are links on that website that show the numbers for part-time workers, which are far, far lower. The ~40k number we were posting was the average for all workers.
It's important to remember that 39.5 hours a week is part time, and a lot of low-wage jobs keep employees under full time to lower benefit requirements. So all those types of jobs aren't included in your calculation. It's better to do the median of all workers.
The 40K number is for all workers above the age of 15
I don't know about you, but I earned little income until my 20s, so if you include dependents, there's a quite a few people with no income. While they only bring the midpoint down, it's also not a fair point of comparison
My buddy worked at an ice cream parlor part time after school. He was included into the statistics because he was a worker over 15. But he was also a dependent who lived with his parents.
So when you say half of workers make X, it includes dependents who work like 10 hours a week.
Yeah, and it includes doctors making 900k a year. Medians are good because they ignore the extreme ends. It is a literal fact that half of workers in America make under 41k a year. Maybe that fact is uncomfortable, but it's an actual fact so it's something you'll have to deal with.
It seems you don't actually disagree with anything I'm saying though.
To pretend like it says nothing about the state of the country is a complete joke.
Over half of people 18-29 are living with their parents, because you can't live on your own and save up for a house on the median income anymore. Hell, before I got laid off I was making 130k a year and still didn't move out because I knew at any point I could be let go (which is exactly what happened we got bought out and massive lay offs followed), and didn't want to throw all my money away renting.
People can't support themselves on 40k a year, so they're not. More people than ever are dependent on others to live, because they aren't being paid enough to live. I have friends (we're all in our mid 20s) who are making around the medium income. Two of them recently got let go, and were back living with their parents inside of a month because they weren't able to save any money between rent, food, and other basic necessities to live.
The issue is the ratio. A medium salary could get you a medium priced house 60 years ago. This is no longer the case, not even close.
Nobody cares what the actual number is. As long as median matches median, and spending power stays where it was in the 60s (or ideally improves, though that dream is dead), then that's good.
Wage growth stopped happening for the past half century. This isn't good. Capitalists have been hoarding metric fuckloads of wealth, and it hasn't trickled down (nobody in their right mind ever thought it would, but we now live in the world that conservatives 50 years ago wanted, and it's failing miserably).
There were plenty of other periods where wage growth outpaced prices over a 2-6 year span. The issue is there are also periods where prices outpace wages over similar spans.
What you end up with is 60 years of no wage growth. Biden didn't magically fix this. If he somehow fixed boom bust cycles and set forth unprecedented policies that will fix fundamental flaws in capitalism, fantastic (hint: he didn't). In reality, crises of overproduction still occur. We still need standard government intervention to stimulate the economy, e.g aggregate spending and interest rate changes.
Your best evidence for wage growth over the last 60 years is a graph showing that in terms of real spending power there was literally no gain between 1973 and 2019?
Productivity skyrocketed in that time, and so has real wealth for people in the top 5%. That hasn't been the case for workers, by your own cherry-picked statistics there were literally 0 gains made in 46 years.
Yes, but it's not like the stock market. In Japan the stock market peaked in 1989. If you invested all your money at that time you would have broken even after dividends now, maybe.
A peak in compensation doesn't work like that, since you couldn't "invest" in 1973 and "lose money".
It's more like from the 1964 to 1994 you have a flat graph with a peak, but from 1994 to the present it's been getting better for the last 30 years.
Productivity is another thing, for one, medical insurance costs employers a lot more and it's not included in wages, but included in total compensation
You're trying to ignore the peak by choosing arbitrary time periods and pretending like they happened in the past so we can ignore them. Like somehow going from 1994 -> 2024 is valid, but going from 1973 -> 2019 is invalid because it's in an arbitrarily different slot.
It's not arbitrary to use the peak and compare that to modern data. The reason being it allows the assessment of what real spending power the median worker had at their best in the last 60 years, and highlights how that wage growth was taken away to such an extent that it took half a century of scraps just to get back to the same spot.
It's not like something physically happened in the world that reduced total access to capital or wealth and it took society 60 years to rebuild, it's just the contradictions of capitalism taking real aggregate spending ability away from workers to massively inflate profits, as the data you've provided showcases so clearly.
That data doesn't exclude people based on sex, there are women in my family that had jobs in 1973. They were included in the data you sent.
Japan didn't destroy the global economy to such an extent that it took 60 years to recover. Neither did an increase in the number of women working. But even if we took your fantasy views as undeniable fact, it's still absolutely ridiculous that having more goods and more workers in a capitalist system would destroy the American economy to such an extent that it took literally half a century to recover.
In reality, it was simply heightened profit extraction. Stock buybacks were brought back, taxes were lowered for the wealthy and corporations, and so these companies had massively increased access to capital, and could use said capital to artificially inflate the value of their own stock instead of investing in the company (e.g via jobs, desaturating the labor market and increasing the value of labor).
You seem to think workers got shafted because something bad happened to the world economy. It's the opposite, rising Asian economies pulled billions of people out of poverty and they competed with the American worker. It's because the world economies caught up that the average worker had to get more education to keep up
Did you read my message? I literally said workers got shafted despite nothing bad happening to the world. That's precisely the problem.
It's fine for the economy to decline in response to negative material realities, e.g a hurricane wiping out a city, the local economy being a reflection of that physical tragedy makes sense, in some regard.
The problem is we took half a century to recover from literally nothing devastating on a materialist level, it was specifically regulations being laxed and allowing the natural tendencies of capitalism to flourish. This was always the goal of capitalists, they just emitted enough propaganda and exerted enough influence to finally get what they want. Having a class constantly trying to extract as much from workers as possible, and literally succeeding for so long, is a problem that needs to be solved. That class needs to be eradicated.
Also prices for many thing are way lower. The free healthcare and free education helps, but feeding your whole family for a few dollars a week does, too.
Shower thought: What if the journalists drawing attention to these problems are using twisted headlines to get the message past the same corporate masters? That the very voice of media is under the same yoke, struggling to get the word out?
Edit: So you change "Wage theft at all time high" to "Millennials claim fast food too expensive" to at least get people talking.
Yeah but I'd also start start asking why you're still voting Trump and believing he can be anyhow beneficial to your cause, or is that the other half making >35k a year who evidently then must have subconsciously self-organized like a swarm to unanimously vote for him?
If you want to be pedantic about how different countries abbreviate names and include Central and South America I bet the given figure is still accurate.
Do you correct people who say "Germany" instead of "Deutschland"? No, just typical USA hatred?
"Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Are you talking about the poverty line that moves with the number of kids you have or the median? They are two different measurements and the Poverty line for families with kids goes above the median.
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