Wage Disparity

The election was lost by Democrats due to disgruntled people. There were many Trump created themes, some we never understood (Hannibal Lecter) and so on. We are going to ignore Trump for a second. The wages have been stagnant for decades. Howard Yaruss discusses all this without graphs in his book. Wages of the lower income bracket just have not moved much. A little with inflation. The upper income levels have gone up in all that time. Wealth has collected to the "1%."  The wealth issue, inheritance and so on, are discussed in the book. I won't summarize, but it is not anything solved soon. Briefly he mentions Thomas Piketty. Interesting concept. Link here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

But on to the book.

The book from 2022 outlines the developments. The future is very clearly the same trend. Cutting things from the budget for four years under Trump will lead to more disparity. The jobs of making things in America will not come. Well, the Chips Act brought some, infrastructure brought some. Daily consumer goods will have the tariff. None of those things will be made here by 2028. Nobody will bring a factory here from Asia. Service jobs is where all the growth is.

Less clear is the Democrats' role. Did they fail for 30 years? The politics have been rather centrist. Hillary and Obama were connected to Wall Street. Banks can't fail! Was there even anything that could be done with blue collar wages? Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been pushing the small effort to get even a little more fair deals. Biden improved Medicare issues. Actual politics of choosing our leader was based more on bath rooms used by trans people than jobs and the economy.

The book looks at options near the end. The taxes paid by Americans are not as progressive as we think. Aside from federal tax, the rest of taxes tend to even things out. Property taxes can be a big chunk for someone like me. Loopholes result in the 400 wealthiest Americans  paying 8% tax. Collecting wealth as stocks postpones any tax on it. 

Collecting taxes is a problem. As unpopular as taxes are, we need to hire clerks (they are not any "agents" in the common practice of spying and snooping) to go over records and send bills. Trillions have gone uncollected and could easily be collected.

Transferring money to the low income classes depends on funding. Andrew Yang proposed Universal Basic Income. It might simplify some bookkeeping, but "funding for the plan is unlikely to add up."

However, the long term trend for jobs will need to be looked at for all of us. Yuval Noval Harari has outlined the future for service jobs and a number of fields where AI will take over. He sees no jobs for cashiers or insurance agents. See Homo Deus and other books of his. We would then be left with manual jobs. Mowing a large lawn, planting trees, changing the broken windshield on cars and similar things robots will fail at for the next few decades. Or there are not enough robots. They will work jobs that run 24 hours a day. Like packing Amazon packages. In this situation Universal Basic Income will finally come in.

There are certainly efforts by the federal government that would create jobs. The problem is that they never get very far. The Democrat is in power for 2 years and then the House is lost. Two more years of no action, then perhaps a Republican president for four years (vetoes all spending). The six years of inaction leaves the public with the impression that the "government does not do anything." 

The wealth issue I mentioned earlier has affected our economy already, so it will in fact be a really hard job to make wages as important as wealth. And it will be hard to go back. Unions will probably not be effective in this either.

What if we did have funding and could make lives better? We do some of that, the ACA insurance subsidies help people in low income brackets with getting healthcare. Congress can indeed regulate things the employers provide like healthcare and we really need to have paid leave for maternity. The healthcare we have now is in a bad state, though millions are covered compared to before. It will get worse. Trump will undo all regulation of insurance. They will not be required to take sick patients at all. And yes, I know very well the insurance companies have already ruined some of the policies that you can get. Medicare Advantage is a plan that basically denies all but most simple emergency room care.

One problem is the nature of work. Less and less workers are needed in automated factories. The work just is not worth that much if there is a good supply of uneducated people that will take the jobs. The solution is then education? Maybe, but even there we do not have endless jobs for web designers. The countries that pay well to factory workers and service jobs have requirements for training. Their applied science and vocational schools give you a certificate that then allows you to apply for jobs that someone with a high scholl degree will not get.

Will our current workers want to get trained? No, they do not have time for it and it may cost. Other countries educate for free, some even give housing. And the blue collar workers will just work the jobs they have and move as little as possible, until they retire. There just is not motivation to get them to have some credentials. Experience is all they can offer.

So the problem is complicated here. And due to the superficial nature of people following politics they will not see any kind of  cause and effect from Democratic politicians. Both Biden and Harris had proposals that would help out in a few steps, eventually. They were not gifts to give voters directly. Harris did promise small business loans and housing startup support.  As opposed to that, the Trump messages were much easier to understand. "Deport foreigners" and "tax China" were understood by all his voters. The other promises were very vague. It was a used car salesman making promises. You only get to take home the car you bought from him in 2025.