By Jared Bernstein Jared Bernstein Bio Follow Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of 'The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity'. May 8 at 8:09 AM In a job market like ours, with low union coverage and weak worker bargaining power, it takes persistently low unemployment to drive up the income of low- and moderate-wage workers.
For that, you must look at not just wage trends, by wage levels: the dollar values underlying the lines in the figure. Then you must compare that wage to the cost of maintaining a living standard that most of us would consider reasonable.Consider, for example, the level of the 20th percentile wage, a good proxy for the earnings of low-wage workers. In 2018, it was about $12. For someone working full-time, full-year that comes to around $24,000.
Why do the budgets come in so much higher than the poverty line? Because the poverty line is based on the price of food in the 1950s, whereas the family budgets price out the full, contemporary market basket faced by working families with kids. The fact that the Ohio budget is about the same as the state’s median income doesn’t mean that half of Ohioan families are poor.
Spoken like a billionaire
People getting paid more is somehow bad because our buddies at the big unions are pissed -Biden economic adviser
Trump is killing it... we will reelect him.
You are owned by Bezos, Your CEO is personally responsible for this. You do not deserve to collect ad revenue for reporting a nationwide issue that your corporate empire caused in no small part .
It’s been 2 years give him time
Lol. If a Democrat were in the WH you'd be orgasmic .