Casting yet another partisan-liberal meme by the wayside . . .
In 1999, under Saint Bill Clinton, at the very height of the tech/telecom bubble and the dot com mania, total wages paid out to payroll (W-2) employees, throughout the U.S. economy, increased by an outsized — and, of course, ultimately unsustainable — rate of 6.76 percent.
Why do I mention this?
Perspective, my friends. It’s high time, in my view, to debunk another meme of the far left’s.
Ever since the job market turned around last year, the move-the-goalposts and reality-denying far left, and their media minions, have shifted gears. Now, the meme is not that there are no jobs, it’s that the new jobs are not “good jobs,” or that the poor, suffering people are making less than they made previously. And, in similar fashion to a stopped clock being completely accurate, twice per day, they’ve even thrown out the occasional “statistic” to try to bolster their ravings. And, in fact, we’ve all seen the numbers; the so-called “average hourly earnings” figures, which, at least ostensibly, appear to show that wages have been relatively stagnant lately.
Well, as with virtually anything that is put out by the national partisan-liberal media, especially these days, you need to take what they say with a huge grain of salt. Fortunately, here in the realm of conservative blogging, we have the benefits of: knowledge, experience, patience, and the freakin’ Internet.
The “average hourly earnings” figures, with which the media/far left is preoccupied, measure wages that are paid out to production workers and to non-supervisorial workers in the services industries. In other words, the jobs in which people literally are on the production lines, assembling component parts, or the ones in which they are digging foundations or hauling lumber around on construction sites. The upshot? Because managerial-level positions are left out of the mix (e.g., construction forepersons, as opposed to just journeymen trades) 20 percent of the total W-2 workforce is not surveyed!
Earlier today, however, the BEA (the same agency that issues GDP numbers) came out with their comprehensive review of all wages and salary paid out to all W-2 employees, throughout the economy. The results?
From July 1, 2003 through June 30, 2004, aggregate wages paid out to all W-2 employees increased at a rate of . . . . 4.77 percent! And, get this: if we strip out government from the mix and focus only on the poor, disgruntled workers in the private sector, year-over-year wages increased at the rate of . . . 5.32 percent!
Hmm. Only 4.77 percent, huh? Only 5.32 percent, for private-sector workers, huh?
That’s about as “stagnant” as Jessica Simpson is “talented.”
Our staff attempted to reach Paul Krugman for comment, but, alas, were told that the Professor is unavailable. Apparently, he’s too busy trying to pull his head out of his . . .
Note: see here for the key data.
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