Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

If I were writing that piece

Here is an interesting way to deal numbers, with the complete post to be read from the link: Obama taxes us into recession  (Mish’s musings) Withheld income and employment taxes have been running about 8.3% higher year over year, comparing the same 33 business days between Tuesday, January 8 and Monday, February 25.…Regardless, there is […]

Wages driven down, now relative to market you’re over paid!

Update: spelling corrected in title. I heard and then went to look see that Caterpillar is working hard to control it’s costs. “Despite earning a record $4.9 billion profit last year and projecting even better results for 2012, the company is insisting on a six-year wage freeze and a pension freeze for most of the […]

Double Double — The Absolute Simplest Look at Wages and Pensions

By Noni Mausa Double Double —  The Absolute Simplest Look at Wages and Pensions       One of the best loved Canadian drinks is the famed Double-Double, a big coffee with two creams and two sugars from the Tim Horton’s coffee shop chain.  Millions of double-doubles warm grateful workers hands and wake up their brains on the […]

A Warm Wind At the Backs of Some, Generated Off the Backs of Others

This piece offers an understandable comparison between wages and dividend income and neatly summarizes the cost to wage earners. (h/t Mike Kimel) by Peter S. Meyers Myers Urbatsch PC A Warm Wind At the Backs of Some, Generated Off the Backs of Others Yesterday, I learned in this Mother Jones article that workers have increased […]

US labor market: wage and salary growth vs. payroll growth

I’ll make this quick, since I’m going to get in trouble for writing on a national holiday. But the pace of annual jobs growth is too slow to generate strong wage and salary income. Much empirical research has been dedicated to the estimation of consumption functions, generally finding that labor income is the primary driver […]

Are Earnings Rising or Stagnant?

In 2005 Kash Mansori of Angry Bear took a look at Are Earnings Rising or Stagnant? It is an issue worth periodic review: This question is not as easy to answer as it may first appear. In working on various posts last week I came across an apparent contradiction in the official data on compensation: […]

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

I try to like the NYTimes Economics Reporting. I really do. Heck, any place that publishes Uwe Reinhardt can’t be all bad. But David Leonhardt, as he does often enough that I hesitate to read his work, again goes beyond the pale today, and clearly does so deliberately. The offending paragraph: Twenty-two months after the […]

Labor market rents can cause business cycles

Robert Waldmann I’m not sure whether (more likely wherE) this has been noted in the literature, but wage differentials not due to differences in workers’ skill are enough to generate a business cycle. A verbal “model” after the jump. update: additional model with fixed capital added. The key reference from which this is not quite […]