From David Cay Johnston at Al Jazeera America:

Last year the median wage hit its lowest level since 1998, revealing that at least half of American workers are being left behind as the economy slowly recovers from the Great Recession.

But at the top, wages soared — the latest indication in a long-running trend of increasing inequality, with income gains going to top earners while the majority of workers see stagnant or falling wages.

Al Jazeera is the first news organization to report these figures from the Social Security Administration (SSA), which were released late in October.

The median wage — half of workers make more, half less — came to $27,519 last year, virtually unchanged from 2011. Measured in 2012 dollars, the median wage was down $4.

The 2012 median wage was at its lowest level since 1998, when the median stood at $26,984.

From its all-time peak in 2007, the median wage was down $980. That means someone at the midpoint in pay worked 52 weeks last year but earned about the equivalent of working just 50 weeks at 2007 pay levels, the last peak year for the economy.

The average wage, on the other hand, improved last year. It increased to $42,498, up $434, or 1 percent from 2011 after considering inflation. But the average wage remained below its $42,921 peak in 2007, I calculated from the SSA data.

These are just wage earners. When you take into account how many people aren’t working, the situation looks even more bleak. In essence this all means that wage income is actually falling for most people even as wage income increases for the top wage earners.

It is, however, exactly what you’d expect from the combined workings of fiscal, trade, immigration, healthcare, and economic policies.

One of the very few really interesting discussions going on in the media/blogosphere is over infrastructure spending. On the pro side is The Economist:

FOR a country as wealthy as America, the dilapidated state of its infrastructure sure is a sorry sight. Three weeks of motoring around Spain—an economic basket-case by comparison, with over twice the unemployment and less than two-thirds the per-capita income of the United States—has been an eye-opener for Babbage. Wide, well-engineered roads criss-cross the country, with clover-leaf accesses everywhere, and modern concrete bridges spanning ravines and gullies. Babbage returned to the crumbling freeways and surface streets of California more despondent than ever.

Once the envy of the world, America’s 47,000 miles (75,000km) of interstate highways and 115,000 miles of freeways and other dual-carriageways were built in a furious burst of road construction during the 1950s and 1960s. Half a century of heavy use later, and with little maintenance in between, America’s arteries have become clogged and cracked. “We’ve got about $2 trillion of deferred maintenance,” President Obama warned recently. The figure comes from a detailed study by the American Society of Civil Engineers. So far, however, the president’s plea to a divided Congress for $50 billion to begin fixing the country’s ageing infrastructure has fallen on determinedly deaf ears.

On the con side, James Pethokoukis:

If Democrats have one big economic idea, it’s this: build. Crank up the infrastructure spending. Last summer, for instance, President Obama floated a “grand bargain for middle-class jobs” to cut the US corporate tax rate and use billions of dollars in revenue generated by eliminating tax breaks to fund infrastructure projects. And in his State of the Union address, he called for $50 billion in new public works spending.

But that’s just a beginning. Progressives think the US suffers from a massive “public investment” deficit. They point to a much-hyped “report card” from the American Society of Civil Engineers — folks who like infrastructure spending, mind you — that calls for an additional $2 trillion in spending to get US road, bridges, and water works up to a solid “B” grade from the current “D+” by 2020.

[…]

But dig a little deeper and you find claims of a supposed infrastructure crisis are wildly overstated. US public construction spending has averaged 1.8% of GDP since 1993, with a low of 1.6% in the first quarter of this year and a high of 2.2% in the second quarter of 2009. Over the past two years, it’s averaged about 1.7%.

But is that a lot or a little compared to what our needs are? A Bloomberg piece last August highlights research that finds US public investment has tracked the OECD average since at least 1970. ”The US. is about where it should be — close to peer nations such as Canada, Germany and Australia,” concludes reporter Evan Soltas. “Nations that spend substantially more tend to be in a phase of catch-up growth, such as South Korea and Poland.”

I’m skeptical of the ASCE report for a reason I’ve mentioned here before. The report doesn’t evaluate the usefulness of the bridges it’s rating. Many of them probably should be taken out of service, possibly by simply blocking them and/or churning up the road on either side. A bridge that made sense seventy years ago doesn’t necessarily make sense today. Seventy years ago population distribution was enormously different from what it is today, we didn’t have interstates concentrating traffic on a relatively few large arteries, etc.

However, I’m also skeptical of Mr. Pethokoukis’s argument. It isn’t often a comment on a post is better than the post itself but the first comment on the Pethokoukis post, by TMLutas, an occasional commenter here whose observations are invariably sensible, is. I’ll reproduce it in full:

This is, unfortunately, the blind leading the blind. I want what everybody wants when they turn the faucet, for clean, safe water to come out of the tap. The way you determine that is not to compare spending with some other country and see if we track ok according to their spending levels but rather to go through all our governments, find out who has water pipes as part of their responsibilities, and get their inventories, lifespan estimates, and estimated cost to replace for each pipe.

You count the infrastructure pieces and calculate their TCO. Everything else is hogwash.

The scary part is, so far as I know, nobody has actually gone out and done the work. It’s all guesses and estimates all the way down. Some irresponsible governments, such as the city of Los Angeles, don’t even regularly inventory infrastructure investments like their sidewalks.

Instead of drawing a conclusion in advance of facts, it would be much better to create a framework where we have the facts as a routine matter and then do the simple math to draw a conclusion. For every infrastructure item, every government should be asked to put its inventory online and keep that inventory up to date. Pull all the inventories together and you can make real estimates as to infrastructure spending needs to maintain our civilization. Tack on expenditures to shut down ghost towns and expenditures to build up expanding jurisdictions and you have a budget that is based on reality.

This is a big job and the best time to have started it was about ten years ago because it’d be done by now. The second best time to start it is right now.

I’d like to add two observations. I’m skeptical about infrastructure spending, defined as building roads and bridges, for several reasons. First, contrary to what you might read from its supporters, I think the evidence is that we are enormously overbuilt. At this point every city in the United States with a population of 50,000 or more is served by a federal interstate. Building more federal interstates so that every town with a population of 25,000 or will probably add bupkis to the national productivity. It will simply be burning money and burning it by giving it to a relatively small number of politically connected large construction companies. That will have only a minor effect on increased consumption—they’ve already purchased their equipment, they’ve already hired their staffs, and the effect of giving them more money will be making them more profitable which will only be reflected on larger political contributions and price inflation in whatever the owners and stockholders of these large, politically connected construction companies buy.

It’s the same story with bridges. If memory serves we presently have 152 bridges across the Mississippi, most in the lower 1,500 miles. A bridge every 10 miles rather than every 15 miles probably won’t do much for productivity. The same story is repeated on every major waterway in the U. S. We’re overbuilt, not underbuilt.

Federal infrastructure spending tends to be for such new construction. It’s a lot easier to justify (and campaign on) than patching potholes in Poughkeepsie. Minor projects like that are usually tackled by state and local governments. If you really want to patch potholes in Poughkeepsie, reduce healthcare costs. I’d connect those dots but you can probably do so yourself by now.

The reason that infrastructure spending is such an evergreen among Democratic politicians is at least three-fold. They like to bring home the bacon. They like to please their union constituents. And far too many subscribe to a sort of folk Keynesianism in which any spending is fiscal stimulus (and investment!).

Thinking of the kinds of infrastructure being talked about either as fiscal stimulus or as investment relies on a terribly dated view of the American economy. It might have worked seventy years ago but it no longer does. It’s not an investment for the reasons I’ve outlined above and it’s not good fiscal stimulus because, frankly, we import too much. Imports subtract from GDP rather than adding to it. If you import everything you sell from somewhere else and then sell it at a gross margin of one or two percent, only the one or two percent counts as domestic growth and only the retailers’ employment is affected. That’s as good a description of Wal-Mart’s business model (or that of most major retailers these days) as I can produce in twenty-five words or less. Wal-Mart doesn’t add sales clerks or stock assistants when their volume goes up 1% or 2% or even 5%. They don’t need to.

The foregoing notwithstanding I could think of a dozen major infrastructure spending projects that desperately need doing right off the top of my head. None of them will be done because the private sector won’t tackle them, they won’t employ a lot of people, and they aren’t highly visible.

It’s darned hard to find a really clear-eyed, fair appraisal of the likelihood that Healthcare.gov, the web portal of the PPACA healthcare exchanges, will be fixed by November 30. The best I’ve found so far is by Arnold Kling who at least has some credentials for reasonable speculations. I think that this remark of his is probably true:

If it is still broken at the end of November, the chances increase that starting over is the fastest path to a working system. But starting over requires a stronger political consensus in favor of the policy that the system is supposed to implement. And we do not have that.

I continue to think that the Obama Administration would help itself more by devoting its full energies to making the darned thing work than blaming it on Republicans, trying to defend the president’s “if you like your insurance” claim, and trying to excuse the inexcuseable. I don’t think any of those strategies will reduce downside risk.

A “giant” carnivorous platypus once was the terror of Australian waterways:

Boffins have uncovered evidence that a giant, sharp-toothed, flesh-eating platypus once roamed the waterways of Australia.

[…]

The new species, named Obdurodon tharalkooschild*, would have been over three feet long, twice the size of the modern platypus, and had the necessary sharp teeth to eat not just crayfish and other small crustaceans, but frogs and small turtles as well.

“Discovery of this new species was a shock to us because prior to this, the fossil record suggested that the evolutionary tree of platypuses was relatively linear one,” said Dr. Michael Archer of the University of New South Wales, a co-author of the study. “Now we realise that there were unanticipated side branches on this tree, some of which became gigantic.”

I think I see the makings of a Syfy movie here—maybe one made by the same people who produced Sharknado. If there’s ever a tribunal for crimes against humanity by movie producers, those guys are in big trouble.

Today Tally turns 15 years 7 months of age. As you can see it’s quiet time now so she’s taking it easy. As the months go by the times when she’s taking it easy ever more greatly outnumber the times when she’s active and engaged. Sometimes she’ll play chase in the yard with the younger dogs or seek affection but those times are coming farther and farther apart. Recently, we’ve seen an increase in her dementia, manifested by doing something she’s never done much of in her whole life: barking. She now barks when she wants something. What does she want? It’s frequently pretty hard to tell.

She also has started to confuse day with night. She’s become a certified member of the All-Night Parcheesi Club (for those of you who are Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle fans).

Little by little she’s fading but as of today she’s still herself and enjoying her life.