Because they're atypical, and the companies explicitly stated that to be the case?

Unless I'm missing stories where hourly employees were getting $1k Christmas bonuses during the GOAT Obama recovery. Cite?

But dude, those business' taxes hadn't even gone down yet. How did future reduction in tax rate make those employees suddenly $1k more valuable?

Do you think it is maybe possible that those bonuses are a PR move meant to flatter the people who are responsible for said tax reform and not economically based?

I'm not even necessarily saying that said tax reform couldn't naturally lead to higher wages in the long run. Maybe it will. But you have to admit that any such effect occurring immediately, before the tax reform had even kicked in, is likely artificial, yes?

Also, from September 2016,

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/...re-waltons-get

So.. lol Ins0?

It was kind of a bonus not getting laid off.

Notsureifserious.jpg


Have you never made a decision based on an event that you know will happen in the future?

Moreover, those bonuses were even more valuable to the companies this year than they would be next year. Those payroll expenses are deductible under the current tax rate. If they had waited until next year, they'd be losing out on some of the benefit due to the lower future rate. DUCY?


And I would call a $1k bonus atypical if the standard one is $200, but maybe that's just me.

Did you see what the average bonus was this year, instead of what the max was?

Warning to everybody: IRS released the new withholding tables and I read on the Bogleheads forum that a lot of people need to reduce their claimed allowances or they are going to under-withhold and owe a significant amount of taxes when they file.

I ran my own numbers and ended up having to change my allowances from 3 to 0 in order to withhold the correct amount.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/n1036--2018.pdf

You have to have a pretty good idea of what your tax liability is going to be in order to work the numbers out.

No, do you have numbers? Because if all these companies handed out $1k Christmas bonuses to hourly employees during the GOAT Obama economy too, then clearly this was all a sham. I've seen no evidence of that, however.

The article he cited was just on Walmart Q2 2016 bonuses and is mostly just bitching about how rich the Walton kids are. This must've been around the time that story about the Waltons having more money than the bottom 40% of Americans do. Though, given the financial habits of your average American, I might have more money than the bottom 35%, and that isn't saying much. Anyone with no debt and a dollar in their pocket is as rich as the bottom 35%.

InsoO can't figure out why bottom 35% just can't save all that extra money they bring in. Lolz InsoO.

They aren't bringing any extra money in, DUCY?

The unpleasant truth is that most of the people with a negative net worth have the tools necessary to change that, but it's too much work or they'd simply rather do something else.

I sympathize with them. I have 4000 hours logged in Dota2. Who knows what sort of productive things I could've been doing with that time. I probably wouldn't have been caught so flat-footed when my wife quit her job in October if I had been more responsible with our spending over the past few years, either. You can feel bad for people on the lower end of the wealth/income spectrum, but this is USA#1; they can probably take some steps to change their circumstances for the better.

Because Walmart pays its workers so little they need gov assistance. But with lord trump im sure thats all is changing and those bonus will allow them to save.

I think he was looking for BOOTSTRAPPINESS.

A typical Walmart worker this year got about $200, just like last year. The $1k was the max this year.

He covered this with the rest of his reply, all those losers having to get by on minimum wage part-time work and foodstamps just need to stop dicking around playing video games and go get themselves grownup jobs.

The logical next step is to subsidize the education (including living expenses) necessary to get "grownup jobs."

Yeah, start with this crowd and we'll see who's left over after the dust settles.

I don't have time today to post links to a few hundred recent articles that cite US companies complaining about the lack of qualified labor. Google can help you out, though.

Show up on time. Follow directions. Try not to **** up basic instructions. These three qualities alone can get you started in an apprenticeship in any number of trades. If that's not your style, then take advantage of the free job training or ridiculously inexpensive (free for poors) education you can get from your locally funded community colleges or "tech" schools. You'll have to keep working the retail shifts to have a roof over your head for the year or two it takes you to finish, but there's a pretty bright light at the end of the tunnel.

That won't work for everyone, but it'll put a massive dent in that bottom 35% financial stability crisis and then we refocus from there.

These low-paying retail jobs were never intended to be a permanent family-sustaining position. I don't understand why we keep pretending they should be.

Because our society, by design, includes millions of people who aren't capable of much else.

Whenever you hear "skills gap" just add in "at the wages we want to pay"

lol at what jobs are meant to be instead of what they are. Turns out all those jobs that were mean to be (according to whom?) just a step on the rung to a career turn out to be nearly permanent. Probably should start treating them that way instead of endless moralizing.

It's probably would be better to start at the top instead of the bottom.

This number is much smaller than most seem to believe. For every person with a medical condition or some cognitive ailment that prevents them from holding a typical family-sustaining job, there are probably a dozen more who would rather just not put forth the effort necessary to change their life trajectory. It shouldn't be the job of everyone else to facilitate their willful uselessness.

Or the number is as big as current stats suggest, and WAAF anyway, because no amount of Walton money is going to un**** our future if we have that many hopeless members of society. Idiocracy here we come.


Can't speak for all industries, but this is absolutely not the case in construction trades.

I'm sure this is just a hueheuism, but in a free market economy, this problem sorts itself out rather quickly. If there truly is an unmet demand for the product/service with a labor shortage, someone is going to raise their price to get the labor necessary to meet it.

"In a free market economy", that's just an abstraction of the real world, and in the real world the market doesn't always clear and that's exactly the problem. Economists who only stick with theory assume it does or it will, but in the real world it doesn't and those who stick with Econ 101 theory can't explain why. That's the whole reason why empiricism is taking hold in economics, because of the failure of plain economics to predict or explain what's actually happening.

In the US we've had an unprecedented experiment to move more people into higher education, and we have, but the "skills gap" still exists and is probably far more talked about than before the push for higher education. The reason is the skills gap isn't a problem of teaching people correct skills, it's the mismatch between what companies expect and what employees can offer. When training is pushed onto the employee via school debt there's only so much training an employee can do, and with employers having the upper hand in the job market due to never reaching full employment, lack of unionization, precarious work safeguards, monopsonization etc they can demand many more requirements of an employee before hiring them on and at a lower wage and because a larger percentage of company's revenue is from rents they can wait out employees because they're not totally dependent on them for revenue. See the requirements of 4 years experience for an unpaid internship, etc.

That mismatch is the "skills gap", but it's a labor gap, not that people are unmotivated to learn what companies want.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/o...d-zombies.html

Just realized I should qualify this a bit. At the start of the year I had changed my allowances from 2 to 3 after estimating my 2018 taxes based on the new tax law, without realizing the allowance formula was going to change.

So the change is more accurately described as going from claiming 2 last year to 0 this year.

Sure, but one of two things had to happen here in order to make your version of events coherent. Either

(1) The market value of those employees immediately went up by $1k due to the passage of tax reform that had not been implemented.

-or-

(2) Because tax reform, employers decided to pay above market wages to their employees.

I think we can agree that (2) makes absolutely no sense, so we are left with (1). But such a large (relative to the income of a low-level Walmart employee) immediate effect makes no economic sense at all; if you subscribe to the trickle-down theory, you would expect a gradual effect on wages as the businesses become more profitable.

Yeah, sure, they could do some arbitrage by paying Dec 31st instead of Jan 1st, so what?

Also, you are sort of arguing against yourself here by implying that the employer is incentivized to pay the employee more in the higher tax regime.

And also, this is again sort of my point. If they just slightly moved up the payment of something they were going to pay anyway, that is not a real economic benefit of tax reform. It is just a timing peculiarity arising from tax-code arbitrage with little net benefit to the employee.

Dude you had to be working as an hourly associate for twenty years to get the full $1k.

I'm not even arguing the the bonuses aren't atypical, by the way, I'm arguing about the underlying reasons for giving them. You realize that right?

--------------------------

It is blatantly obvious that the announcement of these bonuses, immediately after a law passed that had not yet been implemented, was not a direct economic impact of said law.

It was an extremely transparent attempt to attract public support for policies that are beneficial to these corporations and their shareholders.

This doesn't mean, necessarily, that this law can't boost wages down the line. But as I said above, you would obviously not expect such a thing to manifest itself as curiously public $1k bonuses.

says the trump voter, unironically and with conviction