Bitch about Biden thread

[Emily Lake]

You will never see the people who whine about "TDS" doing this with Trump.

There is no need for a dedicated "Bitch about Trump" thread, since bitching about Trump is what many threads in Political Discussion devolve into eventually anyway.

To be fair... devolution to bitching about Trump happens in just about every thread here, but in other parts of internet-world, any political discussion devolves to bitching about Biden (or Harris for a while, or pick the Dem of the Day). We just have an overrepresentation of progressives here.

 

[Derec]

Inflation, Inflation, Inflation, Inflation. By now you've devoted more posts to condemning Biden's inflation than you've spent ridiculing AOC!

This is a "Bitch about Biden" thread, so why is it strange that I focus on Biden's missteps?
As to AOC, she has become less active lately with crazy proposals, so less need to ridicule her. If she decides to run for Senate or, even worse, President, there will be more opportunity for that.

As I will try to explain to you, the inflation you complain of just wasn't that big a deal. Perhaps you know this already, but just want to complain about Biden and can't think of anything more pertinent.

Inflation getting as high as 9% is very much a big deal.

As others point out, inflation was a world-wide problem during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. The USA had less inflation than many or most other countries. To accuse rather than applaud USA governance for their relatively low inflation is ... Weird!

Just because other countries also had inflation, does that absolve the Biden administration from bad decisions it made?
Yes, other countries had a problem with inflation. Yes, the Pandemic was a huge shock to the system everywhere. And yes, some inflation was inevitable due to supply side shocks and because some level of fiscal stimulus was necessary. I have not argued otherwise.

But the Biden administration could have done better. Instead, it actually wanted to do worse, but was prevented by Manchin and Sinema from passing the $3.5T Spendapalooza.
Biden left fiscal stimulus in place even long after the economy reopened, putting too much liquidity into the market. For example the expanded child tax credit lasted through 2021. Student loan repayments did not resume until October 2023!

Compared with summer 2021, the Dollar is up over 15% against the Euro, up almost 15% against the Pound, up about 45% against the Yen, up over 25% against Australian, dollar etc. etc. Do you blame Biden for the STRONG dollar?? Can you grasp what a mockery this strong dollar turns your inflation rants into?

No, it does not. That some other countries did worse does not change the fact that US had higher inflation than was necessary. And neither does it change the fact that had Biden's full agenda been implemented, inflation would have been even worse.
Note also that for Europe at least, energy prices were a huge contributor to the inflation rate and there was an energy crisis due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. On the other hand, US enjoys huge domestic production of oil and gas, much to the chagrin of many lefty Democrats. See also Biden's rule to block most of US coastal waters from oil and gas development.

The minor inflation was turned into a make-believe big issue by anti-Biden and pro-Trump propaganda. Were you part of the solution? Or just another part of the problem?

I was neither in the White House, the Congress nor the Federal Reserve. So how could I have been part of either?

All else equal, if prices go up 10% and wages go up 10% that's a standoff. Yes, I know that you know this much, and will complain that "All else is NOT equal."

Exactly, it is not equal. Savings lose value, as do debts.

BUT your persistent but confused focus on this single economic indicator, as though a 5% inflation meant the destruction of 5% of real value, shows that you DO place too much emphasis on this one indicator.

It is one indicator, but an important one. Also, inflation peaked at >9%.
And you are ignoring knock-on effects, like the fact that inflation necessitated raising interest rates, which then led to restricted housing supply as people don't want to sell and lose their sub-3% mortgages.

The Stock market boomed ferociously under Biden, yielding much MUCH more than the inflation rate. Yes, yes, we understand that "exuberance" was involved, but stock market boom would NOT have happened if the inflation had a severe adverse effect on businesses or consumers.

Which helps those with significant moneys invested in the stock market.

Had inflation been low, but one of these arguably more important indicators been bad you'd have ranted about that and ignored the low inflation.

If other indicators were bad, they would be used to explain why people felt bad about the economy, sure.

Financial crises, whether due to inflation, deflation, unemployment or illiquidity have been common for centuries, especially under Republican administrations. The crisis of 2008 was the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes; it can be blamed on right-wing deregulation and the over-rated partisan Fed Chief Greenspan.

Talk about being partisan. Everything bad is due to Republicans, everything good due to Democrats.

The pandemic-caused inflation of 2022 was a rarity -- financial difficulty caused by something other than financial malfeasance! Yet you seem to think that THIS was the government-made crisis, blaming Biden and "Sgt. Sandy." What a joke!

I did not say that it was a government-made crisis. That would be silly.
But to deny that Biden could have handled the post-Pandemic recovery better by turning off the spigots of fiscal stimulus earlier does not mean I think he caused the crisis either. With you it's a binary thing. Either Biden is at fault for everything or for nothing. Reality is more complex than that.
As to Sgt. Sandy, if we take her as exemplifying the left wing of the Democratic Party, they did push Biden into a more left-wing economic policy. It is they who came up with the $3.5T Spendapalooza since it is a somewhat slimmed down version of Bernie's $6T spending plan (this figure includes infrastructure). It is the left-wing of the party who wanted Biden to pass the infrastructure bill and the Spendapalooza in tandem. It is Sgt. Sandy's squad mate Pvt. Cori Bush who pushed Biden into extending the eviction moratorium.

Over the relevant 3½ years the TOTAL price rise was about 16%, compared with about 8% that would have been normal with no virus. Whoopieeee! The way you rant about this small inflation -- almost trivially small in the scheme of things -- shows either a poor understanding of macroeconomics or a fixation on bad-mouthing your anti-heroes, Biden and Sgt. Sandy.

What "relevant" period are you using here? I am getting 19.2% using this inflation calculator between March 2020 and September 2023. Calculating exponential growth using 2% target rate over 3.5 years gives me 7.25%. So more than 2.5x worse!

And my points are
1) Biden administration could have done better had he turned off fiscal stimulus earlier
2) Biden administration, influenced by AOC's wing of the Party, wanted to do worse by passing another huge spending bill
3) Trivializing inflation like you are doing is not going to help you win over people who see higher prices wherever they shop

Myself and others have linked to article after article written by expert economists explaining the reasons for the recent inflation. Reasons distinct from your prejudiced explanation. Yet you continue to place the blame elsewhere! Over and over and over! Where did you get your PhD in economics, @Derec ?

I remember those discussions. There was a paper posted not by "expert economists" at all but sociologists I think who denied the role of fiscl spending in inflation. I also posted an article by an actual economist arguing otherwise. Not that it takes a PhD in economics to recognize how stuopid that argument is.
Note that I am not arguing that fiscal overspending was the sole cause of inflation, just that it was a major one. I am not denying the role of things like supply side disruptions at all.

Mild inflations -- like the "Biden inflation" you rant about -- can provide benefits to businesses!

Indeed. Prices rise but it takes some time for wages to catch up. Result - higher profit margins.
Partisan hacks that misinterpret that as profits causing inflation, rather than inflation causing higher profits.

I've been around the block enough to know that many organizations have useless employees they'd like to terminate, but can't do so easily. With inflation it's easy for employers to offer chunky merit raises to valued employees, while saying "Sorry" to the less deserving.

In the US companies can terminate employees easily.

Well, I hope this helps. But, to mix metaphors slightly, I offer food for thought but can't force a horse to drink!

Same.
I see you want to persist in the illusion that Biden did nothing wrong at all.

 

[Derec]

The reality is that America is suffering from trickle economics and austerity.

The post-Pandemic period was the opposite of austerity. Expanded child tax credit. Expanded unemployment benefits. Eviction moratorium with $46G in rental assistance. Stimulus checks.

But they put their anger to inflation. Which as you noted, wasn't all that bad in America.

But voters do not grade on curve compared with France or UK. They grade based on "are you better off now than you were four years ago".

Our country is starving itself, a country can't build a culvert without federal funds because the GOP has done wonders in cutting revenue by cutting taxes.

What? A culvert? And did you mean "county"?

And when they didn't, as would be the expected case, they took it out on the White House. And we got this asshole back in charge.

Yes, we got this asshole back in charge. For various reasons, many of which Biden was in control of. Like him withdrawing in Summer 2023 instead of a year later when it was too late to have a primary.

 

[laughing dog]

I agree. But this “Can I afford this” criteria is usually myopic. Many of the complaints blaming Biden for inflation came ftom people whose real income after the decline was still higher than it was under Trump. It was just bad timing for Biden.

And good timing for a presentable reason for those who were going to vote for Trump anyway. Like my one of my brothers who is clearly better off economically under Biden (fewer hours of work, much better benefits and much higher pay) than under Trump.

Again though, real income is an academic concept, leveraging the academic concept of CPI, which is based on an academic concept of a never-changing basket of commoditized goods.

That is the official method of calculating real income, but the concept is the purchasing power of the income.

I strongly suspect that many more people’s real incomes were higher in 2024 than 2020 but lower than in 2023. That means despite inflation, those people could afford to buy more stuff they wanted in 2024 than in 2020, but not in 2023.

I know what the concept is, LD....

Apparently you don't, because you go on about CPI. I did not mention CPI. This has nothing to do with the CPI. Real income refers to purchasing power regardless of how some statistician tries to empirically measure it. There are plenty of ways to measure real income that do not include the CPI - some indices are fixed weights, some are chained weights. To my knowledge, all give the the same general results - real personal income rose for most people from 2020 to 2024. and fell for many people from 2023 to 2004.

 

[laughing dog]

But voters do not grade on curve compared with France or UK. They grade based on "are you better off now than you were four years ago".

I don't that that is accurate. I think it is more accurate to most voters go back maybe 2 years at most.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I agree. But this “Can I afford this” criteria is usually myopic. Many of the complaints blaming Biden for inflation came ftom people whose real income after the decline was still higher than it was under Trump. It was just bad timing for Biden.

And good timing for a presentable reason for those who were going to vote for Trump anyway. Like my one of my brothers who is clearly better off economically under Biden (fewer hours of work, much better benefits and much higher pay) than under Trump.

Again though, real income is an academic concept, leveraging the academic concept of CPI, which is based on an academic concept of a never-changing basket of commoditized goods.

That is the official method of calculating real income, but the concept is the purchasing power of the income.

I strongly suspect that many more people’s real incomes were higher in 2024 than 2020 but lower than in 2023. That means despite inflation, those people could afford to buy more stuff they wanted in 2024 than in 2020, but not in 2023.

I know what the concept is, LD....

Apparently you don't, because you go on about CPI. I did not mention CPI. This has nothing to do with the CPI. Real income refers to purchasing power regardless of how some statistician tries to empirically measure it. There are plenty of ways to measure real income that do not include the CPI - some indices are fixed weights, some are chained weights. To my knowledge, all give the the same general results - real personal income rose for most people from 2020 to 2024. and fell for many people from 2023 to 2004.

Yeah, I tried to convince my doctor that my weight pegged to the US dollar, which explained the weight gain. She didn't buy it.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Borrow, but also tax. We've got these private equity firms buying the hell out of our country. Luxury businesses like sports teams (FSG, I still luv ya, YNWA!) but average corporations as well, property, housing, etc... They have too much fucking money at the moment. They shouldn't be turning America into a oligarchy.

The past decade or two has led me to re-evaluate venture capital, private equity, and the entire derivatives market. I still fundamentally think that capital, as a concept, is a necessary component for innovation and growth... but the risk-taking aspect of investment capital has really taken a predatory turn. Watching investment capital and derivatives markets essentially exploit economic downturns, pandemics, the housing crash etc. really bothers me.

The 80s had that too. While overleveraged buyouts are a problem (see Toys R Us), the problem is the private equity firms like FSG that are teaming massively wealthy folks to pool enough money to buy too much. Hicks and Gillette fucked up Liverpool FC by buying them overleveraged. That was awful. FSG came in, reliquidated the franchise and despite trying to make a profit, have helped return Liverpool FC to its pre-Hicks/Gillette glory and sustainability, which on its face is good. But in the aggregate, you have people like Ryan Reynolds et al buying Wrexham which is almost certainly going to end in disaster for the club because at some point there will be a cashing out and a location that can't support a Championship Club these days (problem in its own right) will collapse.

The wealthy are absorbing too much, and it is because we aren't taxing it enough.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What you're missing is that despite all of the math and the numbers and the academic studies done just right... actual people in both countries are struggling to pay the electric bills so they don't freeze during the winter. Just a few years ago, electricity was affordable.

Thank Pootin for that, not Biden.

And, locally, thank the voters. We passed a solar initiative that the power company warned us would raise rates and people are all upset because that happened.

So at the end of the day, sure... as long as nobody wants or needs to move, and they have a locked in mortgage instead of a rental apartment, and they have a car that is in great shape and they don't need to purchase one, and they don't buy anything beyond the bare necessities, and then only buy the generic stuff and no name-brand stuff... yeah, it's no big deal. Everything is fine, the academics doing math said so!

Ask the DOJ why they dropped the price-fixing investigation.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think Emily's point can be summarized as Prices went up but wages did not.
This rising inequality is the real problem, though exacerbated by inflation.

In Q4 2001 corporate (annual) profits after tax were $0.513 trillion; In Q4 2017 they were $1.865 trillion; In Q2 2024 they were $3.41 trillion. Over 22½ years, profits increased by a whopping factor of 6.65.
Over the same period, GDP went from $10.06 trillion to $29.02 trillion, an increase by a factor just of 2.88. Stated differently, in 2001 corporations got a 5.1% piece of the pie. In 2024 this was 11.8%. -- Corporate profits, as a share of "the pie", got a whopping 131% raise! And that is not the only source of inequality affecting needy Americans, some of whom need to work two jobs.

THIS is the real economic problem.; it is right-wing propaganda to focus on the inflation. Better is to understand that this wasn't the ordinary "wages-push-prices" inflation; this was "profits-push-prices."

Notably absent from your comparison is anything about what wages did. There has been a post elsewhere that showed that over Biden's term workers gained a net of 5%.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

THIS is the real economic problem.; it is right-wing propaganda to focus on the inflation. Better is to understand that this wasn't the ordinary "wages-push-prices" inflation; this was "profits-push-prices."

I don't think it's "right wing propaganda", and I think you're doing a disservice to all people by repeating this rallying cry.

The vast majority of people don't have an academic understanding of what inflation is. Colloquially, inflation means purchasing power. And not some hypothetical aggregated nationwide economic calculation of theoretical purchasing power, but the household-level "can I afford this" purchasing power.

Right wing rallying cry--purchasing power has gone up, not down.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I agree. But this “Can I afford this” criteria is usually myopic. Many of the complaints blaming Biden for inflation came ftom people whose real income after the decline was still higher than it was under Trump. It was just bad timing for Biden.

And good timing for a presentable reason for those who were going to vote for Trump anyway. Like my one of my brothers who is clearly better off economically under Biden (fewer hours of work, much better benefits and much higher pay) than under Trump.

Again though, real income is an academic concept, leveraging the academic concept of CPI, which is based on an academic concept of a never-changing basket of commoditized goods.

That is the official method of calculating real income, but the concept is the purchasing power of the income.

I strongly suspect that many more people’s real incomes were higher in 2024 than 2020 but lower than in 2023. That means despite inflation, those people could afford to buy more stuff they wanted in 2024 than in 2020, but not in 2023.

I can't address 2023 vs 2024, but you're definitely right about 2024 vs 2020. It's right wing noise pointing out the prices and ignoring wages.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I mean, let's be realistic here. CPI has some pretty serious flaws. Like, CPI-U Med has consistently shown medical trend to be massively lower than actual costs are. This is largely because CPI uses a "fixed basket" of medical goods that does NOT account for changes in technology, introduction of new drugs, or changing in treatment patterns over time. In reality, the medical "basket" gets bigger every year, and as a result CPI-U Med seriously underestimates the in-reality impact of medical trend.

Disagree. It doesn't track with actual medical spending because what we can buy has gone up considerably. That doesn't mean that what you could buy before has gone up.

Breakthrough! The Life Extension Corporation is now offering full rejuvenation, restores you to age 18. $100M. Did your medical costs just go up astronomically?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Borrow, but also tax. We've got these private equity firms buying the hell out of our country. Luxury businesses like sports teams (FSG, I still luv ya, YNWA!) but average corporations as well, property, housing, etc... They have too much fucking money at the moment. They shouldn't be turning America into a oligarchy.

The past decade or two has led me to re-evaluate venture capital, private equity, and the entire derivatives market. I still fundamentally think that capital, as a concept, is a necessary component for innovation and growth... but the risk-taking aspect of investment capital has really taken a predatory turn. Watching investment capital and derivatives markets essentially exploit economic downturns, pandemics, the housing crash etc. really bothers me.

1929 taught us the danger of too much leverage. We implemented safeguards, the world of finance figured out ways to sidestep the protections. That is very much not a good thing.

I would like to see some substantial restrictions on paying out dividends when a company has debt, but that's not going to solve all the abuses. I think we need to put some serious limits on the derivatives market, but I don't have any idea of what to do. I would also like to see big pay for the top people to be paid in shares (not options!) over time to make their income inherently tied to the long term performance of the company.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Inflation getting as high as 9% is very much a big deal.

It spiked that high for a little while, it didn't stay there.

As others point out, inflation was a world-wide problem during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. The USA had less inflation than many or most other countries. To accuse rather than applaud USA governance for their relatively low inflation is ... Weird!

Just because other countries also had inflation, does that absolve the Biden administration from bad decisions it made?
Yes, other countries had a problem with inflation. Yes, the Pandemic was a huge shock to the system everywhere. And yes, some inflation was inevitable due to supply side shocks and because some level of fiscal stimulus was necessary. I have not argued otherwise.

The reason we keep bringing it up is that there's no way Biden is responsible for something that happened everywhere. Don't judge him vs perfect, judge him vs his peers--other governments.

But the Biden administration could have done better. Instead, it actually wanted to do worse, but was prevented by Manchin and Sinema from passing the $3.5T Spendapalooza.

I don't believe it was ever intended to be passed. It was the starting point of negotiations, that's all.

Financial crises, whether due to inflation, deflation, unemployment or illiquidity have been common for centuries, especially under Republican administrations. The crisis of 2008 was the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes; it can be blamed on right-wing deregulation and the over-rated partisan Fed Chief Greenspan.

Talk about being partisan. Everything bad is due to Republicans, everything good due to Democrats.

Unfortunately, it's generally true. For quite some time now the Republican approach has been to create and/or amplify problems and then blame the Democrats.
Consider one of your hobby horses: illegal immigration. Nothing was done because after an agreement was reached The Felon scuttled it--he didn't want the problem solved.

I've been around the block enough to know that many organizations have useless employees they'd like to terminate, but can't do so easily. With inflation it's easy for employers to offer chunky merit raises to valued employees, while saying "Sorry" to the less deserving.

In the US companies can terminate employees easily.

So long as they are not a protected class.

Consider a discussion I was part of ~25 years ago. We had a problem employee--did his job ok, but kept using the computers to access websites that were infecting the machines. (And this was before it would have been easy to log and block the offenders.) And the boss wasn't comfortable with the notion of firing him but keeping his wife in her job as receptionist. And they were very uncomfortable with the idea of firing every black in the company.

 

[Swammerdami]

I think Emily's point can be summarized as Prices went up but wages did not.
This rising inequality is the real problem, though exacerbated by inflation.

In Q4 2001 corporate (annual) profits after tax were $0.513 trillion; In Q4 2017 they were $1.865 trillion; In Q2 2024 they were $3.41 trillion. Over 22½ years, profits increased by a whopping factor of 6.65.
Over the same period, GDP went from $10.06 trillion to $29.02 trillion, an increase by a factor just of 2.88. Stated differently, in 2001 corporations got a 5.1% piece of the pie. In 2024 this was 11.8%. -- Corporate profits, as a share of "the pie", got a whopping 131% raise! And that is not the only source of inequality affecting needy Americans, some of whom need to work two jobs.

THIS is the real economic problem.; it is right-wing propaganda to focus on the inflation. Better is to understand that this wasn't the ordinary "wages-push-prices" inflation; this was "profits-push-prices."

Notably absent from your comparison is anything about what wages did.

If A's percentage share of the pie INCREASED, then not-A's share DECREASED. I didn't know this was difficult math!

There has been a post elsewhere that showed that over Biden's term workers gained a net of 5%.

Wow! Talk about useless ill-defined statistics!
BUT let's take your claim at face value. In another post, you -- (or was it Derec, whose views are often similar to yours) -- bragged that prices went up 20% or more during the Biden term.

If my wages go up 5% and prices go up 20%, then I have lost 15% ! Again, I didn't think this math was difficult.

 

[Swammerdami]

Borrow, but also tax. We've got these private equity firms buying the hell out of our country. Luxury businesses like sports teams (FSG, I still luv ya, YNWA!) but average corporations as well, property, housing, etc... They have too much fucking money at the moment. They shouldn't be turning America into a oligarchy.

The past decade or two has led me to re-evaluate venture capital, private equity, and the entire derivatives market. I still fundamentally think that capital, as a concept, is a necessary component for innovation and growth... but the risk-taking aspect of investment capital has really taken a predatory turn. Watching investment capital and derivatives markets essentially exploit economic downturns, pandemics, the housing crash etc. really bothers me.

1929 taught us the danger of too much leverage. We implemented safeguards, the world of finance figured out ways to sidestep the protections. That is very much not a good thing.

I would like to see some substantial restrictions on paying out dividends when a company has debt, but that's not going to solve all the abuses. I think we need to put some serious limits on the derivatives market, but I don't have any idea of what to do....

One idea would be impose a small federal tax on every trade of a derivative. The tax would be small enough so that dealers (e.g. in commodities) would still be able to use derivatives to hedge their contracts and reduce the risk on their non-financial business. BUT the tax would be large enough to discourage the speculator's gambling which can produce or exacerbate financial crises.

Would such a tax increase price spreads, reduce liquidity, and discourage (but not eliminate) derivatives trading? YES. That's the purpose!

Speculation on derivatives is an example of what I call "hyper-efficiency." Other examples would include businesses who save a few pennies with re-sourcing moves, but then lose dollars when supply chains are disrupted. Follow my prescription, and GDP will suffer slightly, but the economic system will become more resilient and more stable.

Recently I posted a quote by Loren Eiseley in a Social Sciences thread. He does NOT speak of "hyper-efficiency" but I think his eloquent idea points in a direction similar to my remarks above.

All past civilizations of men have been localized and have had, therefore, the divergent mutative quality to which we have referred. They have offered choices to men. Ideas have been exchanged, along with technological innovations, but never on so vast, overwhelming, and single-directed a scale as in the present. Increasingly, there is but one way into the future: the technological way. The frightening aspect of this situation lies in the constriction of human choice. Western technology has released irrevocable forces, and the “one world” that has been talked about so glibly is frequently a distraught conformity produced by the centripetal forces of Western society. So great is its power over men that any other solution, any other philosophy, is silenced. Men, unknowingly, and whether for good or ill, appear to be making their last decisions about human destiny. To pursue the biological analogy, it is as though, instead of many adaptive organisms, a single gigantic animal embodied the only organic future of the world.

 

[Derec]

It spiked that high for a little while, it didn't stay there.

Of course. So?

The reason we keep bringing it up is that there's no way Biden is responsible for something that happened everywhere. Don't judge him vs perfect, judge him vs his peers--other governments.

I am going to judge him for what he could have done and should have done.
Had he stopped the Pandemic fiscal stimulus sooner, inflation would have been less pronounced. That was well within his powers. He did not have to drag the largess well into 2021, and in the case of student loan pause, 2023.

I don't believe it was ever intended to be passed. It was the starting point of negotiations, that's all.

It was definitely intended to be passed. Several progressives even voted against the infrastructure bill because Spendapalooza wasn't passed "in tandem" with it.

Unfortunately, it's generally true. For quite some time now the Republican approach has been to create and/or amplify problems and then blame the Democrats.
Consider one of your hobby horses: illegal immigration. Nothing was done because after an agreement was reached The Felon scuttled it--he didn't want the problem solved.

It's not a "hobby horse", it's a legitimate issue.
And I agree that Trump scuttled a deal, but that deal had come after years of neglect by the Biden administration. And why? Because the Democratic base, by and large, supports de-facto open borders. Remember the Democratic debates in 2019 when most candidates were in favor of decriminalizing illegal border crossings and were talking about letting more so-called "asylum seekers" in? And the likes of AOC even want to abolish any kind of immigration enforcement.

So long as they are not a protected class.

Consider a discussion I was part of ~25 years ago. We had a problem employee--did his job ok, but kept using the computers to access websites that were infecting the machines. (And this was before it would have been easy to log and block the offenders.) And the boss wasn't comfortable with the notion of firing him but keeping his wife in her job as receptionist. And they were very uncomfortable with the idea of firing every black in the company.

Firing somebody for cause is legal even if that person is black. And accessing non-work related websites is a legitimate cause.
Firing the wife just because she is married to him could be iffy though. And I do not see any reason why she should not be kept on. If she was mad at the company for firing her hubby for cause, she could quit herself.

This anecdote has nothing to do with your scenario though.[/QUOTE]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think Emily's point can be summarized as Prices went up but wages did not.
This rising inequality is the real problem, though exacerbated by inflation.

In Q4 2001 corporate (annual) profits after tax were $0.513 trillion; In Q4 2017 they were $1.865 trillion; In Q2 2024 they were $3.41 trillion. Over 22½ years, profits increased by a whopping factor of 6.65.
Over the same period, GDP went from $10.06 trillion to $29.02 trillion, an increase by a factor just of 2.88. Stated differently, in 2001 corporations got a 5.1% piece of the pie. In 2024 this was 11.8%. -- Corporate profits, as a share of "the pie", got a whopping 131% raise! And that is not the only source of inequality affecting needy Americans, some of whom need to work two jobs.

THIS is the real economic problem.; it is right-wing propaganda to focus on the inflation. Better is to understand that this wasn't the ordinary "wages-push-prices" inflation; this was "profits-push-prices."

Notably absent from your comparison is anything about what wages did.

If A's percentage share of the pie INCREASED, then not-A's share DECREASED. I didn't know this was difficult math!

But !A contains a lot more than just workers. And we perfectly well know the size of the pie changes over time.

There has been a post elsewhere that showed that over Biden's term workers gained a net of 5%.

Wow! Talk about useless ill-defined statistics!
BUT let's take your claim at face value. In another post, you -- (or was it Derec, whose views are often similar to yours) -- bragged that prices went up 20% or more during the Biden term.

If my wages go up 5% and prices go up 20%, then I have lost 15% ! Again, I didn't think this math was difficult.

Except that's not what happened. Wages went up 5% more than costs. Not merely 5%.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So long as they are not a protected class.

Consider a discussion I was part of ~25 years ago. We had a problem employee--did his job ok, but kept using the computers to access websites that were infecting the machines. (And this was before it would have been easy to log and block the offenders.) And the boss wasn't comfortable with the notion of firing him but keeping his wife in her job as receptionist. And they were very uncomfortable with the idea of firing every black in the company.

Firing somebody for cause is legal even if that person is black. And accessing non-work related websites is a legitimate cause.
Firing the wife just because she is married to him could be iffy though. And I do not see any reason why she should not be kept on. If she was mad at the company for firing her hubby for cause, she could quit herself.

This anecdote has nothing to do with your scenario though.

This is a case where appearances matter more than reality. Yes, it's for cause--but it's expensive to prove that in court.

As for the wife--the issue was whether she might do something bad in response to his being fired. Same reason that in many places when you're fired you're escorted out immediately, security clears out your desk.

 

[Swammerdami]

I think Emily's point can be summarized as Prices went up but wages did not.
This rising inequality is the real problem, though exacerbated by inflation.

In Q4 2001 corporate (annual) profits after tax were $0.513 trillion; In Q4 2017 they were $1.865 trillion; In Q2 2024 they were $3.41 trillion. Over 22½ years, profits increased by a whopping factor of 6.65.
Over the same period, GDP went from $10.06 trillion to $29.02 trillion, an increase by a factor just of 2.88. Stated differently, in 2001 corporations got a 5.1% piece of the pie. In 2024 this was 11.8%. -- Corporate profits, as a share of "the pie", got a whopping 131% raise! And that is not the only source of inequality affecting needy Americans, some of whom need to work two jobs.

THIS is the real economic problem.; it is right-wing propaganda to focus on the inflation. Better is to understand that this wasn't the ordinary "wages-push-prices" inflation; this was "profits-push-prices."

Notably absent from your comparison is anything about what wages did.

If A's percentage share of the pie INCREASED, then not-A's share DECREASED. I didn't know this was difficult math!

But !A contains a lot more than just workers. And we perfectly well know the size of the pie changes over time.

Corporate profits AFTER tax were $3.4 Trillion in 2024; and about $21 Billion in 1953. Yes, that's Trillion with a T. 11.8 is the multiplier to turn 1953 dollars into 2024 dollars, so call it $248 Trillion. Corporate profits have gotten a 1270% raise. GDP went from $390 Billion to $29.4 Trillion.

I wonder if you know what !A contains. Governments get a big share of the pie, BUT most of that becomes wages for government workers, or wages for workers for those supplying goods or services to governments, or transfer payments, e.g. SocSec, much of which will show up in a proxy for "wages" statistic.

And "wages" (or "!A") includes salaries paid to top corporate executives and other high earners. I don't keep track of the tax code but think much of executive stock option benefits is included in "profits."

IOW, almost all the pie ends up in individual hands. Corporate profits is a stat that facilitates guessing how much of the individuals' incomes' will be due to realized capital appreciation and dividends rather than actual working wages.

"And we perfectly well know the size of the pie changes over time." Yeah, everybody here does know that perfectly well. Which raises the question Why do you mention it? It's almost as though you are arguing:

$7.50 (in 2024 dollars or about 30¢ in then-nominal money) was a typical wage for unskilled labor in 1940, but let's be generous and double it for today! $15 per hour is a 100% pay hike!
Yes, corporate profits have gotten a 1500+% pay boost over the same period, but SO WHAT? Wages have increased; that's the important thing. To complain that the Super-rich did much MUCH better is just envy. They create jobs, brought us technical masterpieces like MS Windows, and so on.

Is that about right? Among other things you ignore that the cost of living is higher today INDEPENDENT of inflation: Cars and smart-phones are almost necessities today. And Americans expect some access to medical innovations.

There has been a post elsewhere that showed that over Biden's term workers gained a net of 5%.

Wow! Talk about useless ill-defined statistics!

I guessed your number was inflation-adjusted, but why not spend a word or two so I needn't have to guess?
And where did you get this number anyway? "Average household income" is a common proxy for wages, but that includes dividends, etc.
And even a better statistic for "wages" will usually include CEO salaries and the like.

Do you now understand why "Share of the Pie" is an informative stat?

Perhaps it would be better for you to comment on the following graph, rather than presenting confused and unexplained numbers and pointing out the "pie has increased."
And again note that "Wages" are, as usual, defined to include CEO salaries, etc. The decline in pie-share for unskilled labor is much worse than the graph suggests.