Census Bureau Reveals Grim Facts about Real Earnings of Men

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: September 16, 2018 at 3:14:50 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Census Bureau Reveals Grim Facts about Real Earnings of Men
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]
>
> Census Bureau Reveals Grim Facts about Real Earnings of Men
> By Yves Smith
> Sep 14 2018
> <https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/09/census-bureau-reveals-grim-facts-real-earnings-men.html>
>
> By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive 
> international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street
>
> Women weren’t so lucky either. But who got the spoils?
>
> On the surface, the annual household income data released by the Census Bureautoday, looks mediocre. But beneath the 
> surface, it looks grim – grim for whom? Ha, we’ll get to that.
>
> So the mediocre news right up front: < Median household income in 2017, adjusted for inflation (via CPI), inched up a 
> measly 1.8% to $61,372. “Household income” is the entire pre-tax “money income” of a household, including wages, 
> interest, dividends, Social Security, Workers Comp, child support, and the like, but excluding capital gains. The 
> mediocre news is that median household income has finally inched above where it had been 18 years ago, in 1999:
>
> Now the grim news: bitter reality for men.
>
> But it’s not great for women either: For women who were working full-time year-round in 2017, median wages (income 
> obtained only from working) declined 1.1% on an inflation-adjusted basis to $41,977 – from a record in 2016 of 
> $42,448.
>
> So a hiccup perhaps in a well-deserved series of increases going back to 1960. The female-to-male earnings ratio 
> remained at the record level of 80.5%, first achieved in 2016, up from the 60%-range before 1982.
>
> But for men – oh dude! Median real earnings for men who worked full-time year-round fell a full 3.0% in 2017 to 
> $52,146. On an inflation-adjusted basis, men had earned more than that in 1972 ($53,609). This translates into 45 
> years of real-earnings decline for men:
>
> Men have suffered the brunt of the real-wage repression over the past four decades, obtained in part via inflation, 
> an insidious process where wages inch up, but not quite enough to keep up with the Fed-engineered loss of purchasing 
> power of the dollar – a process Wall Street economists praise with conviction.
>
> In addition, even a slight but systematic and purposeful miscalculation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is 
> used to adjust this inflation-adjusted income data — for example a percentage point or less each year — is 
> cumulative; and over the span of four decades, the real-real earnings decline is large. Wonder why many men are 
> frustrated?
>
> So who got the spoils?
>
> “Earnings” in this data set are the fruits of labor – so wages, salaries, and the like. But “household income” 
> includes “money income” from other sources:
>
>    • Earnings
>    • Unemployment compensation
>    • Workers’ compensation
>    • Social security
>    • Supplemental security income
>    • Public assistance
>    • Veterans’ payments
>    • Survivor benefits
>    • Disability benefits
>    • Pension or retirement income
>    • Interest
>    • Dividends
>    • Rents, royalties, and estates and trusts
>    • Educational assistance
>    • Alimony
>    • Child support
>    • Financial assistance from outside of the household
>    • Other income
>
> “Household income” is measured on a pre-tax basis. But it does notinclude noncash benefits, such as food stamps, 
> subsidized housing benefits, or healthcare benefits — a hefty amount for executives at big companies.
>
> While household income includes income from investment (items 10, 11, 12, and 13 in the list above), it does 
> notinclude capital gains and other forms of capital appreciation of any kind, from portfolio gains and home-price 
> appreciation to stock options.
>
> In terms of the income distribution, the proceeds from investment (items 10, 11, 12, and 13 in the list above) play a 
> critical role at the upper end. Again, this income does not include capital gains! This is how the median household 
> income, pre-tax and adjusted for inflation, has grown by income segment (quintiles) and for the top 5%:
>
> [snip]
>
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