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AlterNet reports
When Republicans in Congress passed a big, fat tax break bill in December, they insisted it meant American workers would be singing "Happy Days Are Here Again" all the way to the bank. The payoff from the tax cut would be raises totaling $4,000 to $9,000, the President's Council of Economic Advisers assured workers. But something bad happened to workers on their way to the repository. They never got that money.
In fact, their real wages declined because of higher inflation. At the same time, the amount workers had to pay in interest on loans for cars and credit cards increased. And, to top it off, Republicans threatened to make workers pay for the tax break with cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So now, workers across America are wondering, "Where's that raise?". It's nowhere to be found.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week that wages for production and nonsupervisory workers decreased by 0.1 percent from May 2017 to May 2018 when inflation is factored in. The compensation for all workers together, including supervisors, rose an underwhelming 0.1 percent from April 2018 to May 2018.
That's not what congressional Republicans promised workers. They said corporations, which got the biggest, fattest tax cuts of all, would use that extra money to increase wages. Some workers got one-time bonuses and an even smaller number received raises. But not many. The group Americans for Tax Fairness estimates it's 4.3 percent of all U.S. workers.
The New York Times story about this record breaker describes the phenomena this way: "Companies buy back their shares when they believe they have nothing better to do with their money than to return capital to shareholders." So despite promises from the GOP and the President's Council of Economic Advisers, corporations believed further enriching their own executives and shareholders was a much better way to use the money than increasing workers' wages--wages that have been stagnant for decades.
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Thursday June 21 2018, @10:39PM (22 children)
With the partisan bullshit, I almost thought I was on Ars or The Verge for a minute until I checked the URL bar. It's cool though, it's your site and if that's where you want to take it, more power to you. Just so happens Slashdot's been shaping back up lately..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 21 2018, @11:12PM (3 children)
You can leave, I think most everyone here can live with that :D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @12:10AM (1 child)
Oh I don't doubt it based on the level of echo in this particular chamber, I'm sure any dissenting voice isn't particularly welcome. That's probably why half the comments here boil down to throwaway one liners like yours.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @01:12AM
So you obviously don't pay attention. This site is quite well split between the various chambers of political thought. Sometimes the conservatives hop on quicker and sometimes the liberals do.
"dissenting voice"? You make it sound like you're about to be dragged off to the gulag. Do you NOT read anything by The Mighty Scuzzard? Jmorris? Runaway? Khallow? Entropy? Unauthorized? Apparently these are your compatriots and they post pretty often.
Go to hacker news if you want enforced reasonable discourse. Maybe some Reddit sub with hardcore moderators. I am perfectly aware of when I post snarky one liners and judgmental screeds with no citations, but I realized that real discussions are pointless unless same basic starting points can be agreed on.
Care for better discourse? Acknowledge reality and THEN offer your different interpretation.
Let us start with some easy ones?
Is the POTUS a liar?
Is he a decent person?
Has the US engaged in massive empire building by destroying other countries?
If your answers aren't yes, no, yes then there is zero point trying to discuss anything. Now what we should DO about those items is something up for debate, but if you're a Fox news brainwashed fool then there is nothing productive that can come from discussion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @02:00AM
Especially with a high uid like that.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 21 2018, @11:14PM (4 children)
My mouse has a scrollwheel.
When I encounter a topic that doesn't fascinate me, I scroll past that.
I DON'T feel a need to click the link and make a comment bitching about that story being included on the front page.
...and as we always say, ANYBODY can submit a story. [soylentnews.org]
Even you. [soylentnews.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Thursday June 21 2018, @11:28PM (3 children)
Sassy! But you're missing the point. Thing is, yes, I can keep scrolling but if the content here is just a rehash of every other tech/politics clickbait blog then what am I scrolling to? To survive and keep those donations rolling in, Soylent needs a differentiator. It isn't the community, let's be honest, this ain't exactly Hacker News level of discourse. A lot of us came here from Slashdot's cuz the signal to clickbait ratio went through the floor over there. But they're clawing back. And the community is still much larger over there and frankly much more balanced. When a reader of a blog offers criticism, the answer isn't to circle the wagons. But whatever. You do you.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday June 22 2018, @12:14AM (1 child)
Well, I just deleted a few of our political submissions. But nobody ever notices that.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Friday June 22 2018, @12:55AM
Duly noted!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @12:58AM
The discourse there is complete garbage. It's not exactly fun watching moron after moron repeat pro-proprietary software propaganda.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday June 22 2018, @01:36AM (6 children)
Do you have any evidence that the claims in the article are false, or are you just dismissing them as "partisan bullshit" because they don't agree with your previously held beliefs? If so, provide it. Otherwise, I'm going to attribute your reaction to the classic cognitive dissonance response of "My previously held beliefs say this information can't possibly be right, therefor it isn't."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Friday June 22 2018, @01:45AM (3 children)
What previously held beliefs?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday June 22 2018, @02:02AM (2 children)
You dismissed information without providing any reason whatsoever other than "it's partisan bullshit". That means either you believe:
- All information that potentially contradicts my currently held ideas about the effects of tax cuts is partisan bullshit, or
- I don't have any ideas about the effects of tax cuts, because any argument or piece of information regarding those effects is partisan bullshit.
Which is it?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by captain normal on Friday June 22 2018, @02:18AM (1 child)
The silence is deafening.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday June 22 2018, @06:48AM
And about as surprising as a bear moving its bowels in the woods.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by slinches on Friday June 22 2018, @02:47PM (1 child)
The claims in the article are irrelevant. It's a perfect example of distraction via statistics. They are saying that since the average hourly wage is flat that the tax cuts didn't help working people, which completely ignores personal income tax cuts those people are actually seeing. On top of that, the metric they chose doesn't necessarily mean what they imply it does. Average wages are flat, but if more young people have found work, their entry level incomes could be counteracting raises that more experienced employees have been getting. So the working people could be substantially better off with a reduction in average wages if employment is up.
But here's the kicker. Even if we consider their made up premise to be true and everyone is getting paid exactly what they were last year, ~70% of the taxpayers have elected the standard deduction in recent years, so at least that many are seeing their tax liability cut somewhere in the 20-30% range on average.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday June 22 2018, @06:54PM
IIRC, even with the optimistic assumption the tax cuts were temporary.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bobthecimmerian on Friday June 22 2018, @01:42AM (5 children)
The facts of the situation aren't partisan. The GOP lied its ass off about the impact of the tax cuts on non-wealthy Americans, and here we are.
Now if you don't like the fact that SoylentNews is running the article instead of discussing, say, the latest release of PHP or similar then you have a case. But it's not partisan news, just political news.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @01:48AM (1 child)
Stop it.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday June 22 2018, @06:48AM
What's the matter, AC, does the light burn?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by slinches on Friday June 22 2018, @05:04PM (2 children)
The facts aren't partisan, but the interpretation of what they mean certainly are. Average gross wages which the article is based on don't include the effect of personal income tax cuts on post-tax earnings, so they are excluding the direct impact of the tax cuts from the start.
That's not to say the analysis of $4000-9000 estimate was correct either. It's just disingenuous to conclude that the tax cuts weren't beneficial for the working class by looking only at average pre-tax wages.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Saturday June 23 2018, @09:54PM
Fair. But:
The Republicans were promising gross wage increases for middle-class Americans as a result of the tax cut. They didn't promise them immediately, but they promised them. So far the trend is not evident in the slightest.
The tax cuts reduced brackets, increased the standard deduction, doubled the child tax credit, but axed personal exemptions and reduced, eliminated, or capped some categories of itemized deductions. Depending upon your income level, the savings aren't that great.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Sunday June 24 2018, @05:00PM
I've moderated your post upwards, and I apologize. I misread some of the terms of the tax changes and missed that with the elimination of personal exemptions the child tax credit doubled. That change more than offsets the loss of personal exemptions. My understand of the tax changes for the middle class change because of that, they are much better than I thought. I would amend my original posts to clarify, but I don't think SoylentNews offers an edit feature. I withdraw my support for the interpretation offered in the article.