Comments for Young People Today Can't Even Conceive of Wage Growth at http://www.cepr.net , comment 1 to 4 out of 4 comments http://www.cepr.net Sun, 19 May 2013 10:18:27 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/young-people-today-cant-even-conceive-of-wage-growth#comment-21889 Real wages are below what they were in 1964. Many commodities, other than labour power are also cheaper to purchase. The problem for the capitalist class is that it needs to sell a greater quantity of commodities cheapened through the increasing real productivity of the working class--pegged at about 1.3% a year. How can these sales be made without increasing real wages? How about increasing the real social wage? How about a National Health Service such as that in Britain? How about a cost of living increase for Social Security which takes the evisceration of the U.S. Dollar into account? How about increasing Social Security Taxes for those in the top 10% of the population, the ones who own/control 88% of the wealth the other 90% produce? Of course, saving capitalism is beyond the ken of most within the classes of capitalists and landlords. It would take another liberal President as popular as FDR to do that and right now, most workers have been made more concerned about the generic concept of 'taxes' thanks to the various pundits and politicians who Dean regularly takes to task. Thus, no such liberal could get elected. BTW, flooding the labour market with more commodified labour power will do nothing more than lower the price of that human commodity. The law of supply and demand operates with no moral compass. The only way to decrease the supply of labour power while increasing immigration would be to shorten the work week to say 30 hours at the same pay as 40 hours gets the worker now. Is anyone in the pro-immigration crowd posing this solution? If they are, their voices are not being amplified. - Mike B) Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:03:54 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/young-people-today-cant-even-conceive-of-wage-growth#comment-21864 The only path out of today's dead end is real wages rising as a proportion of productivity growth. Yet this is unmentionable here and in Europe. The irony is that this will benefit the upper classes too in the long run. Many investment counsellors are forcasting minimall real returns in the forseeable future due to the collapse in aggregate demand. An example is Credit Suisse Global Investment returns Yearbook 2013. - John Yard Sun, 10 Feb 2013 07:40:48 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/young-people-today-cant-even-conceive-of-wage-growth#comment-21851 Would wage growth, as described here, also increase aggregate demand spurring economic growth? And further wouldn't the same wage growth help to reduce the deficit? This lesson in the reality of the ratio of those who pay into Social Security vs. those who receive S.S. benefits is one that - like the myth of the invisible housing bubble - needs repeating many thousand times. Pete Peterson's billion dollars is paying returns in propaganda. I talk to people who were children during the Great Depression - whose parents never paid into Social Security, yet had comfortable retirements because of it - who believe this "logic" and think Social Security is unsustainable. - Union Member Sun, 10 Feb 2013 02:31:23 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/young-people-today-cant-even-conceive-of-wage-growth#comment-21844 [quote]This is the way the world used to work. It might not be easy for political reasons to get back to that world, but we should at least know that such a world did once exist and is still possible. [/quote] Beautifully put. But the [s]austerity nuts[/s] deficit hawks would have us burn all bridges and be forced to labor in their land of make-believe. - David Sat, 09 Feb 2013 13:08:37 +0100