for an idea of how bloated these white collar jobs are, one way to figure it out is to compare entry level salaries are here to what entry level positions pay in areas where there is no min wage, and then see how big the gap that gap is relative to the gap you find in purely market driven wages in both regions.

ie: if uber drivers in stockholm make the same as uber drivers in NYC, but a junior accountant in stockholm bottoms out at around 25k (where there is no min wage) whereas a junior accountant in NYC bottoms out at 45k/y because of the min wage, that's a big deal.

and small differences matter because they define the income trajectory of people in those industries. how much you have to pay an experienced accountant is always directed tied to how much you have to pay a junior accountant. it serves as even more of a distortion than you would expect proportionally because people who are making 80k/y are a lot less motivated to upgrade their credentials to make a power play for the director role at 120k than someone making 40k/y is motivated to upgrade credentials to get to 60k.

... and it's even more impactful in areas that don't require tangible skills or designations because the gap between the min wage and a market wage becomes larger. a min wage of zero is often way too high when roles carry tertiary benefits which is why unpaid internships for certain companies are highly sought after.

Your talking as if a large population wins enough to save money , which there isn’t that many anymore ....
The wealth gap is reminiscent of the 1930 ...
Counting inflation , reducing to almost non existant the possibility of saving when you have 0 or negative interest rates ....
How can you see that situation as being equal opportunity ?
Capitalism, to be successful , needs to work for the majority of its population , not just for the tier up, even if that would cost some % of earning from the top earners .


Sounds like a Roman Empire ..... gives them games and bread and the rest they shouldn’t complain .

When you say 100K, are taking into account inflation ?

And why you take household income and not what works is all about imo , which is individual employment that should be taken into account .
Household income doesn’t reflect a correct estimate of salary imo.
Some people can work less hours and less pay because they are supported by a spouse for example .
But if the support wasn’t there, maybe the job wouldn’t exist or simply put , wouldn’t be viable full time ...

yes, it's inflation adjusted. but household income is just a shitty way of framing it. there're a lot of things that contribute to why more people are above/below certain thresholds, namely that big cities have min wages nearly 2x what the federal min wage is, and far more people live in these urban areas than ever before (where the cost of living is obviously far higher).

a more appropriate comparison is looking at specific vocations and how much they pay after factoring inflation in.


sticking with the accounting theme, you can see level 1 accountants (a consistent definition) have seen a slight decline. in 1960 it was $468 which is equal to $52,000 in modern day dollars.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?...iew=1up&seq=37

18k in 1982 (48k inflation adjusted).

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1982/10/rpt2full.pdf

unfortunately the us gov seems to have stopped labelling professions by experience level and so you only get an industry wide average,
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm#43-0000

which makes it a lot more difficult to compare. we do now have all sorts of websites that estimate it though, and at the entry level every site like payscale seems to peg the median entry level accountant as making somewhere around 40k or 45k after bonuses. that's lower than the min wage in big cities when you take into account the hours they tend to put in, because if you've ever known accountants, you'd know that a work week is very rarely under 40 hours and during tax season often as high as 80 hours a week.



shockingly!!! the entry level wage for this profession as for many others eerily mirrors the fluctuations of the inflation adjusted min wage over time.

it's been an important tool of corruption all the way back to FDR, the OG.

Why is this shocking? Has entry level accounting become more valuable relative to other jobs over the past few decades? Shouldn't most entry level professions mirror fluctuations in inflation adjusted min wage over time?

The only time those should not move in-step is when a profession becomes more valuable for some reason. For example, there's a shortage of IT professionals, so I'd imagine entry level IT is doing better than other professions relative to min wage.

... i thought the exclamation marks made it pretty clear i was being facetious.

but yea, that's the point. the min wage has consistently offered wage inflation to people who make it into those bubbles and he thinks that it's absurd that there're people out there working as an uber driver for less than the min wage.

that's what's comical about that type of libertarian critique. officially you're against the min wage, but when it comes to acknowledging the consequences of it the head goes in the sand. it hurts. a lot of people see themselves as independent, self sufficient boot strappers and telling them that the gap between their pay and a fair market wage would make them effectively lower than someone on welfare. ouch.

it's at least not that big of a fall from grace for people in the 50-100k ballpark though. for doctors on the other hand.... when you look to other comparably developed countries that don't place arbitrary restrictions on the number of people able to enter the field, they're making closer to 3x what they'd otherwise have made.

https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2...port-6011814#2

land of the free!

Powell currently talking about how much it's changed minority lives to have the labor market tighten up. Trump is the sole architect of that, but gets zero credit for improving minority lives far more than any president in 30 years. We live in a weird world.

Are you sarcastic ?
trump did 1 trillion more debts in his first 3 years than Obama did similarly ....
Not that hard to « create wealth » when you create huge deficit for no good reason .

Obama added $10 trillion to the debt, started in an economic recovery, yet labor force participation free fell the entire time.

Two things happened with Trump:

1. There was a massive effort at deregulation, something which has been choking the life out of American businesses for well over a decade.

2. Small business confidence soared on Trump's election, to the highest level in 16 years. It went up 20 points, from the 80s to over 100, and stayed there.

That was the engine of jobs growth and a robust economy gaining hold. The rest is noise.

Yup, that is just empty Trump boosterism.









GTFOH with nobody but Trump could have made all of those Obama trend lines continue as they were already going.

There is no argument that Trump needed to pour mountains of debt on an already heated economy and that it had any measurable impact compared to where things were trending regardless.

Yes, that's correct. Only Trump could have done this (or someone willing to do massive deregulation and boost business confidence, anyway).

The labor force participation graph doesn't lie.



Nor does the small business confidence graph:



That massive jump is in November 2016. The economy was running out of steam and confidence flagging even after Obama printed $10 trillion in debt during his presidency (50% of GDP!) PLUS multiple QEs to juice a terrible recovery that had bad fundamentals. Business confidence and investment was flagging by end of this long tepid run. Trump was a huge shot in the arm for small business, boosting business confidence by 20 points (the largest jump ever). This directly went into hiring and investing and set up years of further growth.

All you have to do is look at 2015/16 Obama era experts who projected far lower expansion and far high unemployment than what actually happened once Trump got in.

You know you are being disingenuous.

That is not how you normalize a progression line. You do not mark the high and low point and say 'see, look at that gap'.

All through Obama's run you see normal fluctuations but the trend line when plotted remains the same. Up and to the right and exactly predictive of where Trump's trend lines went.


Trump throwing trillions in debt on an already surging economy did exactly what you would expect it to do. Ensure the trend continued if there was, in fact, any signs of softening.

It is still a sh*tty strategy regardless. Don't let results based thinking trick you into thinking otherwise. There is not a GOP gov't in history who would applaud Trump for that and if Clinton had ballooned the debt when taking over much of the GOP would have literally fell over dead.

So this is just Trumpist revision that what was always known to be bad and unsustainable is great under Trump even though it is not sustainable and would inevitably lead to some painful correction when the next POTUS came in and had to throttle back.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/b...eat-gilti.html

« The budget deficit has jumped more than 50 percent since Mr. Trump took office and is expected to top $1 trillion in 2020, partly as a result of the tax law. »

And that is what ?
During from trump words , one of the greatest economic times ever ?

your the kind of people who thinks creating debts create wealth .
Shrug .

Ps: funny thing is , if what trump did would of been done by a Democrat president, you would probably said it was bad socialist economic to create huge amount of debts during a growth economic era ....

I'm marking the point at which Trump got elected,. Small business confidence literally jumped 20 points to 16 year highs during November. I mean, lol? WTF is wrong with you?

Except that economies don't work like that. Obama's own economists predicted a substantial slowdown; the economy was already substantially slowing by the time Trump took over.

If we can agree the last 3 years of Obama had around the same economic era with the first 3 years of trump (nvm 2020 covid):
GDP for Obama = 2.3 % per year
GDP for trump = 2.58 % per year

That seems to me pretty similar , and that includes huge tax cut in 2017 by trump that create high budget deficit since then.

im pretty sure if you gave Obama last 3 years a 50% more budget deficit with that cut like trump , Obama would of done much better ...

Anyone not ignorant of HOW economies work would never say what you did.

That is exactly how it works.

Look at these graphs and if you have any knowledge and skill plot the trend lines.





You truly have no business in this discussion if you want to focus on any of the numerous dips in Obama's lines and say those are what are illustrative when in fact the lines could not be more clear up and to the right.

Go read up and learn something and understand what a positive slope is and how it indicates where things are going.



Demonstrate for me that you can create the slope line in both of Obama's charts above extending thru 2020 by adding the slope line to both. Please make me laugh by demonstrating how you would show Obama's lines suddenly plummeting if not for Trump. FLOL.

I think you are just ignorant of trend lines and forecasting in economics and how they are done.

if you want to **** on obama for what seems to be a decisive trend that's one thing but raising work force participation by a half a percent over 4 years doesn't really instill a lot confidence in his dynamism.

for one, if we're specifically looking at min wage, federal powers have little influence over that at the state level. nyc recently bumped it to $15/h for instance.

but even if he could reduce the min wage it wouldn't benefit poor people left out of the labor market as much as it would crush mid income salaries. gdp would probably be through the roof though.

this is the thread for loling at capitalism. not for petty arguments on which right wing puppet was in charge while the line went up.

Victor,
Go reread the thread. It's successful people laughing at socialists and outright communists and destroying them in debates without even trying. (to be fair, anyone anti-capitalist has vast amounts of evidence and history and morality against them).
I have far more knowledge than you, sir. For one I have a math degree, and can do things more sophisticated than the "hurr durr it will keep going up forever!!!!" that is the entire premise of your argument.

This is gibberish.

We never covered that in my math degree! Thanks bro.

No, it's actually very simple. Contrary to your "hurr durr lines always go up", if you actually look at your own graphs, economic expansions run out after approximately 8 years and follow with a recession. This one has been going for 11 years now. Obama's own economists predicted that the expansion would slow soon.

Trump's actions kept it all going very nicely. That massive 20 points jump to small business confidence on his election is just incredible. It means jobs, investment, risk taking. The stuff that keeps economies going.

Compare my analysis with your "Hurr durr lines keep up forever!" And then reread your post.