upvote

points

by zozbot2342 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby smallmancontrov1 hours ago|
next
[-]
Oh good! I was worried that trickle down economics was self-serving nonsense pushed by think tank economists on behalf of their benefactors. Since it is economic fact rather than self-serving fiction, when I review its track record I will find that it caused an upward inflection in real wages, right? Right?

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Oops!

reply
upvoteby zardo1 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
As long as capital doesn't get involved in some kind of highly financialized spiral getting further and further divorced from the real economy, we should be good.
reply
upvoteby malfist1 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
That could never happen here. We have a history of strongly regulating capital and banks. Why look at all the executives we jailed for the 2008 financial crisis!
reply
upvoteby zozbot2341 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
Total labor compensation has in fact grown. Unfortunately, much of the non-wage compensation involves services like healthcare that has become a lot more expensive over time due to burdensome overregulation and an overall lack of price transparency.
reply
upvoteby gruez1 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
>Since it is economic fact rather than self-serving fiction [...]

You deride the weak justification for trickle down economics, then proceed to link wtfhappenedin1971.com, a site that tries to argue for the reintroduction of the gold standard through a gish-gallop of random charts?

reply
upvoteby smallmancontrov1 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
The gap between productivity and wages is striking, isn't it?

I'm not perfectly aligned with gold bug politics. Their faith in the Kindleberger world is misplaced and their tax aversion can make them useful to my opponents, but at the same time they tend to take the Cantillon Pump and Balance of Payments mechanisms seriously while my traditional allies do not.

No, I don't mind borrowing their charts. Why? Do you have a better go-to link for The Wedge?

reply
upvoteby gruez46 minutes ago|
parent|
[-]
>The gap between productivity and wages is striking, isn't it?

It's not. The (in)famous epi.org is flawed for all sorts of reasons, from excluding noproduction/supervisory workers (the highest compensated ones!), to excluding non-wage compensation (eg. benefits), to different deflators for compensation vs productivity. If you adjust for all of that, the chart is unremarkable.

https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/gr...

That incidentally, is the exact problem with the site. It presents a barrage of charts, without regard to relevance or rigor, and tries to persuade through sheer volume alone. Yet, if you scrutinize any of them, it quickly falls apart. That's probably why the site doesn't even bother justifying the charts, or even state the thesis, for that matter.

reply
upvoteby smallmancontrov22 minutes ago|
parent|
[-]
This smells like the think-tank "CEO comp justifies worker underpayment" and "health care inflation is wages" arguments, I'll look into your source but I can't pretend to have high hopes.

As for "gish gallop," right back atcha: those billionaire-funded think tanks firehose a lot of nonsense into the economic discourse (and curricula!)

reply
upvoteby _DeadFred_1 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
What percentage of increased productivity has gone back to the workers as increased financial health during the last say 20 years? Not increased wages. Their increase in end of day actual financial health versus end of day increase in actual financial health of the owning class? Not some Peter/Paul highlighting Peter 'wages have gone up' while ignoring any stealing from Paul 'actual financial health' has gone down metric.

300 years of thinking has established that copyright is the best way to sustain ongoing creation of knowledge and thought, yet the same crowd seem pretty fine gutting that 300 years of understanding because of their judgement that their desired use case for today outweighs the cost to society of lost future knowledge creation, so they seem plenty happy to ignore established thought when it benefits them.

reply
upvoteby zozbot23449 minutes ago|
parent|
[-]
People at the bottom end of the income scale are sharply deterred from holding any meaningful amounts of savings, because this can exclude them from 'means tested' benefits. This is effectively a disguised ~100% "wealth tax" that hits many among the most heavily disadvantaged and marginalized. We're essentially telling people that they have to be living literally hand-to-mouth before they're deemed to deserve any kind of broader social support.
reply