Monday, January 7, 2019

Barry Ritholtz doesn't live in Realville, calls recent wage gains "decent" when they are peanuts


Decent wage gains are showing up in paychecks. That should continue for a while. Workers had an average gain in hourly wages of 3.2 percent in December, well above the average of 2.4 percent during the past five years . . ..

There's nothing wrong with his facts, just his perspective, which isn't long-term. He's content to compare his data to the Obama era, which sucked big-time. Note how he doesn't say that, however, big New York liberal that he is. 

Year over year, the average gain in 2018 isn't even Bush-league let alone Clinton-league. And certainly not pre-Reagan-league, when workers in this country got much bigger raises on average than they do in this supposedly booming economy.

Barry likes charts. Here's the only one that counts, showing that raises for 80% of workers on average can't hold a candle to the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s (when Democrats couldn't stop complaining about George W. Bush's horrible economy).

Employers remain stingy, and there is no employment boom, or else they'd be hiring all the old people the greedy bastards fired in 2009 because they made too much money.

I KNOW.