Something rotten in Denmark....

Okay, so I keep hearing about how great the economy is, wages going up, and to tell the truth, I think something is fishy.

I look at myself. No new expenses, but due to insurance premiums, gas, heating costs, grocery bills, etc. The paltry 2% raise per year I have gotten the last three years do not cover the inflation. Yes, I make more money today that I did three years ago, BUT I have less disposable income.

I could understand if I had bought a boat or something, but everything else is status quo.

So what gives. How are these figures continuing to show progress. I HAVE a great job, so I am not in trouble, but I do have less.

Ideas??

The top 10% get everything. The bottom 90% don't.

If they say the economy is great, it's just another lie.

of doing.

Code broken.

Increasing jobs looks good on paper, but if all or most of those jobs pay a lot less than jobs that were lost, people will be hurting. Its this sort of cooking the stats and not telling the whole story that is going on.

As the right wing punditnuts are claiming. Feelings about the economy are not easily manipulated through the media. The economy has to do with how much money is actually in your wallet/bank account.

Bush and Cheney cronies must be doing fabulously well.

Look up old bills from three years ago - insurance, energy, food, entertainment, etc.

Then see what the difference is. And don't forget little things like "service fees" and various other "charges" that seem small - but they add up over time.

I have all of my "standard" bills that I pay on the same day every month. I also average my utility bills over the year, so the payment is alwasy the same.

Anyway, using my spreadsheets, I have about $230 less per paycheck for free money. That is basically about 35% of my disposable income from three years ago. So, I have 1/3 less cash to do what I please with after I pay my bills. Same job, some cars, same insurance, same house, just different everything else.

expenses, especially health insurance. My puny investment income seems to go down every year because of almost non-existent interest rates. If I weren't renting from relatives my rent would have doubled by now, but they still let me pay what we agreed to six years ago, thank god.

should have gone up this year.

One year CD's were selling for 2.1 % last year and are at 4.40 today.

They've always lied about the job numbers. I wouldn't suspect anything different here.

I'm looking for a job now, and I am getting a few more interviews lately, but beyond that I don't see much. There are jobs in retail, but that could be just the usual holiday shopping surge.

The "standards" they use are lacking indicators that would prove their numbers wrong. They just report on what they can manipulate.

Unemployment down?? Easy.. When 2 jobs are 'claimed' by a worker who lost his ONE good job, that's a net gain for the economy..but if the job lost paid $20 with benefits, and the two claimed are $7 an hour each with no benefit...well you see the problem.

Through repetition they give the impression that prosperity is the general concensus.

Then all they have to do is sit back and watch for the typical human response to kick in--"If the general concensus is that everything's great, then it must be just me." "If it's just me, then there's something wrong with me, and that is shameful." "If it is shameful to me, then I will not disclose it."

Imagine it--millions of people roaming the streets all with the need to hide the same "shameful secret". At best the financial problems don't get discussed. At worst, people overcompensate by overspending to hide their financial insecurities. The ending for this scenario will not be pretty.


But that's just my theory.

Except for the "They're Lying" part. That's just a fact.

$ 3.99 !!!

The high productivity growth during the same period has meant that American corporations, on average, have been getting more out of their workers for less, and this, combined with corporate tax cuts, has translated into an increase in corporate profits. In its February 10 issue, the business magazine Economist noted that in 2004 “America’s after-tax profits rose to their highest as a proportion of GDP for 75 years.... The flip side is that labor’s share of the cake has never been lower.... Over the past three years American corporate profits have risen by 60 percent, wage income by only 10 percent.”

Full analysis:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/wage-m16.shtml

Since this is a socialist source -- which means the misinformed will reflexively jeer it -- here is a piece from the fascist press that says much the same thing, albeit in the obligatory cheerleader/zieg-heil tones:

http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_malpass/malpass200407220747.asp

And here is an analysis from the Labor Research Association (the research arm of the American labor movement) explaining how forcible wage reduction fits into the global economy -- specifically the oligarchy's scheme to concentrate wealth, increase profits and lower wages everywhere on the planet:

http://www.laborresearch.org/story.php?id=385

Lastly, here is data from LRA reflecting the long-range downward trend in wages resulting from the corporate oligarchy's long-term war on American workers:

http://www.laborresearch.org/dis.shtml?rw_tab.txt

Literally, the American working class is being methodically reduced to serfdom: one of the specific purposes for which Bush was given the White House -- like his father, like Reagan before him, and Clinton too: NAFTA, genocide disguised as welfare "reform."

last I checked, any one of any group can be poor and in need of assistance.

whether relatively quickly, as by immediate homelessness and starvation, or more slowly (as by eventual homelessness, starvation and chronic illness due to denial of health care). By any definition, this is genocide: "the deliberate and systematic extermination of a racial, political or cultural group" (Webster's Collegiate #10). By official definition, the poor (regardless of race) are a "cultural group" -- e.g., "the culture of poverty" etc.

The ethos of welfare "reform" is an expression of the basic ethos of capitalism itself: that the only intrinsic value of an individual is the individual's potential for generating profit.

As to the infinite (and definitively white-American) bigotry underlying welfare "reform" -- a bigotry that appears diminished from the Jim Crow era only because its hatefulness has been carefully closeted -- here by Paul Krugman is what is perhaps the most important essay in U.S. history:

http://www.pkarchive.org/

(Click on "Columns," scroll down to "Tragedy in Black and White.")


Edit: clarification of instructions following link.

"Columns" is on the upper left hand side of the website. Then scroll down (way down) to 9.19.05 (19 September). It's there; I just re-confirmed.

Sorry I left out the "click on" part of the instructions.

(I had a direct link to this essay on my old computer, and when the computer died, I had its drive salvaged and installed in my new machine, but something is wrong with the installation -- there is no way to access any of the old material {I can assess a list of programs but nothing else}, and I will not have the time to take the new computer back to the tech people until next month. Otherwise I'd have given you the direct link, which apparently cannot be reconstructed from the Krugman site.)

Do they count only those currently receiving benefits or are they counting those who have previously received unemployment, whose benefits ran out, and who could not find work thereafter?

If only the former, then the unemployment figures could be very misleading.

figures are WAY off. People stop claiming UEP or never claim it to begin with, so a lot of these people are doing nothing out in society. Then going back to the other way of why the economic figures may be off is there are people who are doing odd jobs here and there, "under the table" and this still generates money(though only a small amount in the overall economy). Also lets take into account the expected boom in contract and construction work that the major Hurricanes of the past season generated. This of course is off set once again to some degree by the people who lost their jobs.

So I think it is still too early to tell where the economy is going yet. I think that stress in pricing with fuel supply will be the ultimate mitigating factor for everyone's economies, for the simple reason the price of fuel affects and shows up on everything. Until something else comes along to change those factors like better or alternate technology/fuel, the fuel will be one of the bigger driver's(no pun intended) of our economy

Unemployment statisticas are derived from the Current Population Surevey (CPS) conducted on behalf of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) by the Census Bureau.

Read about it at http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

just barely. Happily, I have finally paid off everything I owe anybody except the mortgage and that has made a huge difference.

Credit card debt is destroying our country.

Give it a while. Things will get better when the Dems get back in office.

It's the Gross Domestic Product. Everyone should have learned about it in high school. (I did.)




But let's take a look at Employee Compensation as a percentage of GDP and see how working people share in "the economy." Look at the thinner line and you'll se that, in the post-Carter era, working people rarely (only in the last years of Clinton/Gore) get more than a 59% share. Indeed, you'll see that the GOP leads in driving down the share that working people get for the wealth they create.





So, who benefits? Not surprisingly, it's the corporations. Here's the ratio of corporate profits to employee compensation. You'll see it's never been higher.





At the same time, thanks to BushCo, the effective federal tax rate corporations pay has never been lower.

You should start your own thread with that graphical explanation...

... is clear. Not once - not in any month in nearly five years - has BushCo seen an increase in private employment that matched or exceeded the average employment growth (due to a steadily increasing workforce) over the last fifty years! If employment had grown at merely an average rate, there would be more than ten million people employed that are not today. The following two charts should make that very clear. (In the five years between November 2000 and November 2005, employment has increased by only 1.5%.)

lol - and how about all the uncounted GDP on Ebay :eyes: