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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: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 22 2018, @12:23PM
Well, I can't speak for central California, but the stats overall say home ownership rate [wikipedia.org] has been relatively constant since the 1960s and actually trended UP until the early 2000s (where it was artificially high, obviously, resulting in the huge housing crash because people actually couldn't afford homes but were given mortgages anyway).
Basically, it's been between 60 and 70% since the 1950s. Recently, due to the trend of younger people marrying later (which is often the impetus for buying homes), it's been trending back down toward mid-1960s levels. What does seem to be true is that more Americans carry less equity in the houses they own these days on average, which is a concerning trend -- but not surprising considering the tendency toward consumer debt in recent decades.