Here’s the kernel of David Stockman’s statistics-dense post at the Brownstone Institute:
The average worker in the bottom half of the wage distribution generated earnings that do not even remotely support a middle-class living standard. In fact, this figure amounts to only 65% of the Federal poverty line for a household of 4 persons ($27,750) and is barely above the $14,580 poverty level for a single person household.
In other words, the overwhelming bulk of the 84.5 million workers in the bottom half of the wage distribution pulled in paychecks over the course of 2022 which were below or just above the Federal poverty line!
That is to say, the US economy is badly broken, yet you do not hear a peep from either wing of the Uniparty.
and here’s his peroration:
Why isn’t the US economy generating middle-income jobs at the scale needed to provide better opportunities to the 84.5 million workers below the median wage level?
The short answer, of course, is that the US economy desperately needs far less speculation on Wall Street and far more productive investment on Main Street—when, in fact, the opposite has been happening during the past two decades.
To wit, net real private investment (i.e. after inflation and D&A) declined from 6.7% of real GDP in the year 2000 to just 4.8% as of 2022. Yet given the fearsome competitive pressures of the global labor and product markets, the US economy actually needs net investment at rates well above historical levels.
He’s sounding themes I have for many years right here. His blames all of this on the way the Federal Reserve operates but I doubt that’s enough. I think we’re measuring success the wrong ways, in terms of the number of low-wage jobs being generated and the amount that people are spending on basic necessities. If you’re not going to include the price of food and fuel in your reckoning of inflation, you shouldn’t include it in other statistics, either.
