cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15086405
Bureau of Labor Statistics releases latest estimate of how much labor receives of national income, showing bleak decline
When Jesse Motte began working at a Starbucks inside a Target store in Columbia, South Carolina, more than two years ago, $15 an hour sounded great. He was excited to start because it was the most he had ever made after working for years in the service industry.
The excitement has dissipated due to his inconsistent and erratic work schedule, the rising costs of necessities and the minuscule raises he and his co-workers receive annually. His most recent annual wage increase was $0.37 an hour.
Motte is not alone. This week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest estimate for the share labor receives of national income for the first quarter of 2024. The statistics shows the income workers receive compared to the productivity their labor generates.
According to BLS, this income share has declined for non-farm workers from around two-thirds, 64.1% in the first quarter of 2001, to 55.8% in the first quarter of 2024.
I’ve been echoing this online for a while now, glad to know I’m not alone. Ronald Reagan isn’t some ghost controlling the country like a Sith Lord. That fuck’s been dead for decades by now. Everytime I see someone dredge up Reagan’s name for problems we’re experiencing right now, I can only think about how the people perpetuating those problems are getting off essentially blameless.
Nobody’s arguing that he’s still pulling strings man. They’re saying he got the ball rolling. That is policies have reverberated up until this day. That he started a trend that others continued.
Reagan had one of the highest approval ratings in modern US history; he didn’t force these policies on an unwilling country and he sure as hell didn’t draft them himself. My original point still stands that blaming current problems on an administration from forty years ago is harmfully reductive. The people we should be blaming are alive today and hold seats in Congress right now. We can worry about the historiography later.
Do you feel anyone who’s blaming the Reagan policies is claiming we shouldn’t do anything about today? Are you suggesting they’re all pining for time machines? In fact I’ll go further and ask this do you really think you can address the problems of today without understanding how they began? How can you even approach economic policy reform without looking back and understanding what went wrong?
Also there’s a long long history in our world of horrible evil brutal leaders being popular at the time. So I don’t think we need to go into that absurd argument any further.
The people blaming Reagan are fighting a 3 decade old culture war.
Fact is, things really weren’t all that bad in the 80s and 90s.
They only really started getting bad after the financial crisis in 2008.
And which party got both the presidency and a majority in Congress that year? Hint: doesn’t start with R.
People were talking about it during Reagan’s Presidency.
There were giant homeless encampments in all major cities throughout the 1980s.
Read Hunter Thompson’s book “Hell’s Angels.” There’s a chapter that talks about the economics of being a biker/hippie/artist circa 1970. A part time waitress in New York could afford to support herself and her musician boyfreind. A biker could put in six months as a Union stevedore and make enough to hit the road for two years of carousing.
And the idea that Obama caused the melt down of 2008 is pretty hilarious.
A financial crisis that was caused by those and the policies that sprung from those policies. The trends that were started then. The idea that you look at something as gargantuan as the economy and think that it’s not affected by things that happened decades before is insane. Also weird to complain about culture War when that’s what Reagan began. Though it’s policy that we’re concerned with at the moment. Policy.
Also the 2008 financial crisis started under Bush. I dont know why you think you could change history on that one.
Not changing history. Just saying that democrats had all the power they could want and failed to implement change to make things better. Literally after running on a campaign of Change.
Things weren’t all that bad for land-owning whites, you mean.
And the president wasn’t in charge of the banks. Or housing.
Well said, I regret that I have but one upvote to give you, PP boy.