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is there's way more wage theft (not, "I got paid less than I deserve" but "I got paid less than I was legally owed") than robbery but we've got around 1000 cops nationwide pounding that beat and several hundred thousand on robbery.

For this you can't even argue there's the risk of violence. Package theft if done while no one is looking.

I see you're not familiar with modern median incomes. That was the case in the past, but not these days. Employees are being squeezed much tighter.

When Democrats abandoned the working class (ie most people) for ever more niche groups, like transgenders, that gave them a loss

I'm curious to know how you figure they did this. Their economic policies didn't change; the democrats are still the party that aims to reduce taxes on the 99% while the republicans still aim to reduce taxes for the top 1%. Their education policies didn't change; they still favor funding public education while the republicans still favor various "market based solutions" and other such tactics that are shown to reduce accessibility to education. What exactly do you think they did that favored "niche groups" over the working class?

Their economic policies most certainly did change. Supply and demand is a basic thing. By increasing how many H1B and other visas you increase supply. By favoring free trade you decrease job demand. You realize that Bill Clinton let China in the WTO and signed NAFTA into law. Thus we have less in real wages than in the 70s. I'll provide links, but despite all the talk about increasing productivity the reality is that most of the gains have gone to the top 1%. To be fair to the Democrats, this trend is consistent across both D and R administrations. Still, they have done exactly *nothing* to try and turn it around other than lip service about training for the new economy. Want to see Democrats that really pushed for the little guy (ie the 99%)? Think Teddy Roosevelt and breaking up trusts, which today would be more like huge corporations. Think FDR who despite his *many* faults was at least trying to do something. Think Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The Democrats were at one time the party of the little guy. No more.

Turns out that hating white males

Where did you see them doing this? What policies or proposals did you see that could be said to be aiming for that to happen?

If I say that preference will be given to women and minorities then what I have really said is that everyone other than white males will be given an advantage. That could be restated as everyone is equal but white males get penalized. Can it be more clear? In case that isn't clear enough they have run job descriptions that specifically asked for no white straight males.

Citations:

https://www.epi.org/productivi... https://www.theatlantic.com/bu... https://www.spiked-online.com/... https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lu...

>grocery stores

in the seventies THAT PAID enough for a family. what happened ? hint : https://www.epi.org/productivi...

:-) Forgot the data. Wishing for that edit button again. Here is a great summary from the Economic Policy Institute.

and as far as I know they haven't. You'd also expect Uber drive's to see higher hourly pay, but it's around $9 bucks/hr. But that looks to be in line with the figures from 2016. Maybe a little less if inflation is taken into account (remember inflation is higher for low paid employees since big ticket items like new cars have less inflation than food/rent/healthcare or even used cars).

It is funny that wage growth is suddenly considered a problem in the last decade. We are rich.

Between 1979 and 2007, the bottom 90% of the US only saw a total of 16.7% wage growth. From 2007 to 2016, the bottom 90% grew another 4%.

If you look at the 90th to 99th percentile, you see wage growth of 56.9% over the 1979 to 2007 time frame, and another 7.9% since.

It is only when you look at the top 1% that you see wage growth of 156.2% from 1979 to 2007 and -2.9% since.

So, 90% of us can legitimately complain about wage growth sucking since 1979. It has been much less than 1% per year. But this is only a problem now that the top 1% have fallen from their routine 4% per year wage growth that we have a problem?

Whatever. Cry me a river. Why does it seem that the media only represents the elite?

Recent wage growth trends look more like a slight downpayment on an income distribution correction to me. 90% of us would be vastly happier if we simply returned to a 1970's income distribution without any change in the overall total income. Over 40 years, that bulk of our nation has only recently crossed a total of 20% gain. The rest of you, especially the top 1% who have grown by 311% over those same 40 years, are welcome to at least show enough shame to shut up if not to lobby for change.

data

very little manufacturing or other heavy industry

Why do people keep saying this? Articles from 2015:

https://www.cmtc.com/blog/how-...

Although California has lost close to 40 percent (842,180) of its manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2012, it still holds the largest manufacturing market share of any other state. California controls 11.4 percent of the nation's manufacturing output. Texas produces 10 percent, followed far behind by Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan.

https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

The top 10 states ranked by total manufacturing employment in 2013 are California (1,251,400 jobs), Texas (871,700 jobs), Ohio (662,100 jobs), Illinois (579,600 jobs), Pennsylvania (563,500 jobs), Michigan (555,300 jobs), Indiana (491,900 jobs), Wisconsin (458,400 jobs), New York (455,100 jobs), and North Carolina (442,500 jobs).

CEO Pay Has Grown 90 Times Faster than Typical Worker Pay Since 1978:
https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

Their methodology (it includes direct and indirect compensation):
https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

CEO Pay Has Grown 90 Times Faster than Typical Worker Pay Since 1978:
https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

Their methodology (it includes direct and indirect compensation):
https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

there was more money lost to wage theft (e.g. when an employer doesn't pay wages earned, for example by forcing hourly workers into unpaid overtime or just plain shorting checks) than all burglaries combined.

Another good point: Texas spent $1.2 billion sending the national guard to police borders. They stopped 10,000 illegal immigrants. That's $120k per illegal immigrant. Those guys would have taken jobs paying $30k/yr tops (probably much less). We could have given $60k to every person put out of work by them and still come out ahead.

There's a line from Fred Pohl's The Space Merchant's that's appropriate here: Better to punish a 1000 innocent men than let one guilty one go free. No, that's not typo, go read the book.

In the US, which is a lot more socially - upward and downward - mobile,

That's the belief, and the basis of the 'American Dream', but it's not borne out by statistics. The US has some of the lowest economic (and hence social) mobility of OECD nations.

It's hard not to view the continued insistence that the US rewards hard work as anything more than a self-serving narrative by those at the top. Just as food stamps and cheap housing help hold off the revolution, so too does the belief that if people don't rock the boat and play by the rules, they (or at least) their children can enjoy the fruits of society.

It's not just hunger that sparks revolution. Knowing that your children will be poor, no matter how hard you or they work, will do the trick even if it takes longer.

Here's a nice chart explaining how income inequality was both solved and created. In the 20's/30's we had enormous income inequality -- even worse than today -- but workers organized, fought, died and voted together for their rights. As a results, union membership expands in the 40's,50's and income inequality goes down. Reagan -- who's first election win was as president of a labor union ironically -- dismantled unions and demonized them. Membership goes down, inequality goes up.
None of this, of course, excludes the ability for their to be bad unions or union leaders any more than there are bad/corrupt judges in any judiciary. But instead, that just as a good judiciary is important for a functioning country, so is a good union system for income inequality. Which should make sense, as income inequality was literally the problem unions were created to solve.

Amusingly, I invented a new social insurance that takes a tax that doesn't adjust year after year. I learned from Social Security's mistake: mine has a tax structure which necessarily draws revenue with increasing purchasing power. In other words: if you keep the tax rate the same, the tax revenue grows faster than inflation year after year.

As consequence, the program pays larger benefits over time without raising the taxes feeding it. It's not like Social Security where you say, "Hey, let's raise the Social Security payments by 15% along that lower end to get the elderly out of poverty!" "Oh that's great! Hmm, we'll have to increase the FICA tax yet again, perhaps to 15% this time." "Yes, and we'll have to raise the cap to take more of that tax from more income, suppressing wages while increasing the tax wedge and raising prices." You just sort of wait and watch it outpace cost-of-living adjustments on its own.

The fun part is I break another well-known, century-old, repeatedly-proven axiom in the process:

"a deficit-neutral stimulus package is an oxymoron: if the plan does not raise the near-term fiscal deficit, then it has not expanded net expenditures in the economy and will not lead to new jobs." (Mishel, et al)

I designed a deficit-neutral stimulus.

The short list is:

I designed the policy to mathematically guarantee a deficit-neutral stimulus heavily localized to recessions. As shown above, that's axiomatically-impossible.

The policy is an egalitarian social insurance and targets those areas of greatest need due to its mathematical construction. Egalitarian social insurances are inefficient because they poorly target need and instead wastefully distribute economic resources where there is less need (I didn't completely escape this; I only caused it to target by nature with perfect program efficiency, but not to target with perfect program efficiency of the theoretical ideal social insurance).

The policy increases its buying-power benefit--payments increase faster than inflation--and doesn't use tax raises or deficit spending in doing so. Typically, social insurances and welfare programs bloat: they stop working well, and then we raise taxes to shore up the budget.

The policy acts as a foundation under other social insurances, and so increases their efficiency. Those are more-targeted (unemployment, SNAP, WIC, HUD, etc.) and remain due to the above partially-violated axiom. The cost of running social programs diminishes over time due to this policy--it even lowers the cost of Social Security's OASDI program.

As you might gather from that last one, taxes would come down, all other things equal: the cost of other programs falls, so taxes also fall.

There's a compound tax effect: the program creates economic efficiency in such a way that there is greater taxable income for the same population, so you're able to supply the same services to that population for lower tax rates. That means we can lower taxes without cutting services due to secondary effects.

There's another compound tax effect: accounting the benefit as a sort of tax refund creates what amounts to a negative income tax. Beyond the threshold, income taxes are of course lower than current. There's no corresponding tax increase at the upper end because of an efficiency issue in our current fiscals which I took advantage of: this program is hugely expensive, but something else was so broken I was able to fix it and hide the expense in the noise. It pretty much looks like a tax cut; if you start with no social programs (and without their associated taxes), it's a major tax increase.

Because the benefit rises faster than inflation but the tax rates don't, there's no long-term impact on the rich (the tax rate isn't rising and the benefit is fractional compared to their incomes and taxes), whereas the poor and middle-cla

In Europe you top out at a level of material prosperity that Americans would find unacceptable. You have ZERO possibility for building wealth in Europe. There is no "economic mobility" in Europe.

I'm sorry, pal, but you're just wrong.

https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-c...

[Note: the raw data is available there if you would like to do your own analysis, uninformed though it may be.]

https://www.epi.org/publicatio...
https://www.epi.org/publicatio...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

https://www.epi.org/publicatio...
https://www.epi.org/publicatio...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

https://www.epi.org/publicatio...
https://www.epi.org/publicatio...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

That looks like pretty solid data. You tied the increase to teachers having better retirement packages, but that's definitely not the case. Teacher salaries have been flat or declining over most of that period, and pensions are generally tied to salary. If you look at pension data, it generally shows retired teachers getting paid pretty poorly. 65% of states have an average teacher pension under $25k/year.

A more recent look at education costs pegged it at $122k/student, but that's not a ton lower than what you cited. If you dig into where the money is going, it looks like salaries are actually falling, while benefits are going up. That's no surprise - health insurance costs have skyrocketed in the last few decades. Another sink is infrastructure. Schools are continuing to chase technology, and computers and networking are both expensive and quick to depreciate.

I don't disagree that it looks like school costs are rapidly going up without much to show for it. But does that mean that money is being spent ineffectively, has it kept kids from falling behind, or more likely, a mixture of the two?

See here. This in turn makes it easier to outsource. The reason TPP was and is so unpopular is that it's designed to make it easier to outsource jobs. Especially tech jobs, like the ones people here on /. have.

TPP is no friend of the American worker. Which is why I'm not at all surprised a wealthy plutocrat like Trump would favor it. What I am surprised is how much the Trump presidency is beginning to look like the Hilary presidency. If you'll recall she was in favor of TPP until pressure from the Bernie wing made her drop it.

Economic mobility index says that the US is closer to a feudal society than most European countries... (higher is worse in this case)

http://www.epi.org/publication...

So says a left wing "policy" organization. "If only we had more Socialism, life would be good!"

Economic mobility index says that the US is closer to a feudal society than most European countries... (higher is worse in this case)

http://www.epi.org/publication...

Can you read?
The reference is to multiple studies backed up with real data.
Stop whinging and read then try to find some data to support you speculation.
Here's the data.
http://www.epi.org/blog/black-...

This chart (#7) finds pay disparities on race and gender across all occupations:
http://www.epi.org/publication...

It doesn't adjust by industry. Different industries pay different rates for a job that may have a similar title.
A software developer on wall street gets paid a lot more than a software developer at a school

Here's the charts for "retail salespersons" https://www.bls.gov/oes/curren...

Gender and racial inequality holds across all job classifications.
Chart #7 of this series http://www.epi.org/publication...

I picked one line from that chart, retail salespersons. According to that chart, black female retail salespersons make $10.99/hr while white males make $20.12/hr

The bureau of labor statistics charts explain why: https://www.bls.gov/oes/curren...

If you are working sales in a retail store the average wage is around $11/hr
But if you are working sales in the manufacturing industries the salaries are $20+/hr

The EPI chart clearly doesn't adjust by industry. As usual, if you want to make more get a job that pays more.

This chart (#7) finds pay disparities on race and gender across all occupations:
http://www.epi.org/publication...

Gender and racial inequality holds across all job classifications.
Chart #7 of this series http://www.epi.org/publication...

On average, black women workers are paid only 67 cents on the dollar relative to white non-Hispanic men, after controlling for education, years of experience, and location (using 2016 data). This distressing statistic reflects the dual inequities faced by black women—they are subject to both a racial pay gap and a gender pay gap. A key focus of those committed to a fairer economy should be closing these gaps and accelerating economic progress for black women. A number of myths block steps toward real solutions, including the myth that racial and gender pay gaps are simply due to black women making unconstrained choices to pursue careers that pay less. In reality, occupational segregation is not simply a voluntary choice, but is clearly affected by discrimination both before and after people begin their careers. Further, racial and gender pay gaps persist even within occupations.

The chart shows the average wages of black women and white men in a range of occupations. In every occupation shown—both female-dominated and male-dominated—black women earn less than white men. White male physicians and surgeons earn, on average, $18.00 per hour more than black women doing the same job ($54.94 versus $36.94). The gap for retail salespersons is also shocking, at more than $9.00 an hour ($20.12 versus $10.99). The data confirm that black women are underpaid, period.

Hmm, the NYT and The Atlantic don't like tax cuts. Democrats don't like tax cuts. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, and not that the NYT and Atlantic are only reporting things that fit the Democrat agenda.

The NYT and Atlantic were just reporting on a 65-year study from the Congressional Research Office (in 2012, Congress was controlled by Republicans).

I.e. lower corporate taxes mean higher growth 'the coefficient of CIT rate is negative and statistically significant' .

That's not what history has shown. The study you cited was based on the Canadian economy. The data is significantly different here in the US.

http://www.epi.org/publication...

Care to list some other cherry-picked bull shit to show that the system which has consistently produced better education outcomes

Its kind of funny you complain about cherry-picking. Because that's what you did by focusing on the one item in the entire article which the authors literally spell out is the single statistic that the charter school supporters like to cite while ignoring all the others like:

Notably, the state’s charter schools scored worse on that test than their traditional public-school counterparts, according to an analysis of federal data.

Critics say Michigan’s laissez-faire attitude about charter-school regulation has led to marginal and, in some cases, terrible schools in the state’s poorest communities as part of a system dominated by for-profit operators.

The results in Michigan are so disappointing that even some supporters of school choice are critical of the state’s policies.

The summary is that charter schools in rich areas work out great just like public schools in rich areas work out great because being rich is great. But charter schools in poor areas work out worse than public schools in poor areas. And since black americans, on average have just a 14 cents for every dollar that white americans have, that means black people will end up attending the shittiest charter schools.

Furthermore, multiple independent researchers studying the three of the largest voucher systems in the country have all found that vouchers uniformly produce crappier outcomes than public education.

NYT: Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers as DeVos Era Begins

But even as school choice is poised to go national, a wave of new research has emerged suggesting that private school vouchers may harm students who receive them. The results are startling — the worst in the history of the field, researchers say.

The new voucher studies stand in marked contrast to research findings that well-regulated charter schools in Massachusetts and elsewhere have a strong, positive impact on test scores. But while vouchers and charters are often grouped under the umbrella of “school choice,” the best charters tend to be nonprofit public schools, open to all and accountable to public authorities. The less “private” that school choice programs are, the better they seem to work.

You mean this point:

"Top 10 H-1B employers are all IT offshore outsourcing firms, costing U.S. workers tens of thousands of jobs " http://www.epi.org/blog/top-10...

You might want to read the article.

Or mandating a $15 minimum wage without studying it first and then seeing it decrease earnings of those it was designed to help, at least according to one recent study (more research over time is still needed to say for sure). There's a much longer list for someone crankier than me to make.

It's well meaning but it's almost universally poorly thought out in terms of unintended consequences.

Bullshit. I was part of the effort to raise the minimum wage in Seattle to $15. The effort was studied and argued ad nauseam. We looked at all the data. Study after study shows that paying people a living wage is not only feasible, but improves the economy. It may be shocking to learn, but putting money into the hands of people who'll actually spend it in the community boosts the economy. Your spending is my income, my spending is your income. You get paid more, then you spend more. Then I make more and pay you back. That's how economies work.

(What hurts an economy? A few rich assholes sucking up all the money for themselves and then sending that money out of the economy to their Swiss bank accounts.)

This recent study came out contradicting previous results. It stated that increasing the minimum wage hurts workers. Turns out the new study wasn't peer reviewed. Another shocker. One problem of many is that the new study excluded minimum wage employers with multiple locations. Why? No good reason. If a restaurant was successful and opened a second location, it wasn't included in the study. No surprise that increasing the minimum wage looks bad if you methodically cut out the successful businesses.

http://www.epi.org/publication...

Like this income tax idea, which will perversely drive out the people who pay the most in property taxes and push them into driving into work from the suburbs. And Seattle already has miserable traffic.

Everyone wants to live close to downtown. Part of that is precisely because of the miserable traffic. We've got the hottest housing market in the nation. If a few people leave over the income tax, there's 10 times the number of people who'd love to buy their homes, move in, and pay that income tax. Our housing market will be completely fine with this tax change.

But, again, while the economic sun is shining the city has the leeway to try these grand but foolish experiments. Unfortunately, at some point the tech boom here will end and there will be a nasty bill to pay for it.

Yeah, sure. The internet is just a fad. It'll end soon. Keep telling yourself that.

The New York Times, "How a Rising Minimum Wage Affects Jobs in Seattle": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...

Washington Post, "Seattle’s higher minimum wage is actually working just fine": https://www.washingtonpost.com...

EPI.org, "The “high road” Seattle labor market and the effects of the minimum wage increase": http://www.epi.org/publication...

Seattle Minimum Wage Policy: http://murray.seattle.gov/mini...

We are mid-2017, and on January 1st, Schedule 1 employers with >500 employees and w/o providing medical benefits, now have a minimum wage of $15.00/hr, up from $13.00/hr (in the period that the UW study most recently concluded on.) Schedule 2 employers (w/ $13.00/hr. So by looking at the data for the next few years, we should get a clearer picture on the effects, since whatever effects there may have been, if they were systematic and attributable to the minimum wage increase, they should deepen and be more visible.

Time will tell.

I'm sorry, if I invest my capital in automation to make my employees more productive, I should give them some of the proceeds of those productivity gains? Hah.

Maybe after I exhaust all other better ideas of what to do with the money.

Most visa workers are not immigrants. Some may become immigrants, sure, but they are two different things.

In January 2010 there were 12.6 million permanent visa (green card) holders in the US. (source) In 2013 there were about 1.4 million temporary visa holders working in the US. (source)

While not all green card holders are working, it is clear that most visa workers are immigrants. Probably around 80-90%. All temporary visa holders are not immigrants, by definition, but that is clearly not what you meant since you used the word "most". Then again I don't think you knew what you meant, or understand the actual definitions of these terms.

Studies of this issue account for amount of experience when comparing sexes.
http://www.epi.org/publication...

>> Wage stagnation has taken the earnings of the middle class since the 70s.
> Citation needed.

http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

For the most part, wages have been stagnant across the board for pretty much everyone in the middle class and below for quite some time.

http://www.epi.org/publication...

It isn't just limited to those with a college degree.

In addition, the price increase of a degree has far, Far, FAR outpaced wages and will eventually reach a point that you'll have to consider if getting a degree ( and the enormous amount of debt that will come with it ) will be worth it or not in the future job markets.

Considering that CEO-to-regular employee pay is now around 300-to-1, and that CEO pay has increased almost 1000% since the 1970's, and regular employee compensation has only increased 10% in the same time frame, I'd say that there are serious socioeconomic impacts that needs to be addressed.

Personal opinion:
It's not ideal to enforce pay restrictions, but there has been a serious class divide over the last 40-50 years, culminating to a point where CEO's are paid absurd compensation packages, even in the event that they tank the company. Employees are now no longer considered valuable assets to a company that is not employee-owned. Something needs to be done to balance company salaries, and to prevent CEO's from running away with the lion's share when the employees are likely more responsible for the company's success than the CEO.

If proposed laws to restrict CEO pay are not constitutional, we should amend the constitution to allow it. Until we do, they will reap the unwarranted benefits incurred by the labor and sacrifices made by the under-paid employees.

Again, this is my personal opinion and I could be completely in the wrong, but I feel like SOMETHING needs to be done or else we're all going to be stuck with the shitty end of the stick for a long time to come.

http://www.epi.org/publication...

The problem is with a few IT body shops that specialize in outsourcing. Not off-shoring. See: http://www.epi.org/blog/new-da...

The idea is for places to simply close down their internal IT shop and send the work out to one of these hives. Often with the soon-to-be laid off current IT workers having to do a knowledge transfer for their foreign replacements. The use case of a few developers hired into a team to work along side them as equals is still not great, but it is not the source of most of the abuse either.

The solution is an accelerated permanent residency for foreigners with skills needed here. If we really need the skills, why futz around with temporary visas and indentured servitude?

Higher salaries for some subset of people can be beneficial. For example, increasing the minimum wage can boost consumption and stimulate the economy. In many ways it's just a transfer of wealth from the richer to the poorer. Fortunately, the poorer are better consumers and they stimulate the economy creating need for more stuff and maybe more jobs.

This is actually not true.

Give some research that backs up your claims. https://www.bloomberg.com/news... http://www.epi.org/publication... https://www.washingtonpost.com...

You're right that minimum wage raises are a transfer of money (and, in fact, buying power) from the richer to the poorer; the problem is the "richer" here make $12/hr, and the "poorer" just got bumped from $7.25/hr to $8.25/hr. Minimum wage isn't incorrect; but it doesn't magically create jobs. It concentrates income into fewer hands.

I never said how much I would increase the minimum wage. At a minimum, one needs to increase it to a living wage, so tax payers stop subsidizing the companies that exploit these workers. Since Bernie's done the research, let's start with $15/hr and set increases based on inflation.

Shorter version shot from the hip [slashdot.org].

https://9to5mac.com/2016/06/13...

In the short term, the problem's actually the same: it's cheaper to get humans to do a lot of things, and humans employ technical means to reduce their labor. For the foreseeable future, elimination of human labor is an amusing fantasy taken too seriously by delusional people.

So it will happen, but we just shouldn't worry about it. There should be a term for that, maybe AI denier.

Well it's been fun, but I probably will not read another response. Even if I don't accept your novelty or follow your logic, I do admire your spunk. Keep at it.

"Your purchasing power is directly tied to your productivity."

Wages and productivity became decoupled in 1973. Almost all the money from productivity growth since then has gone to the top 10% (half going to the top 1%).

This happened about when Noe-liberalism took hold under pro-business Presidents like Regan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama (and Canadian and British counterparts).

That, and save billions. For example, the EPA air rules cost $11.3 billion, saved $55–146 billion annually, including 6,800 to 17,000 lives. From 1990 to 2020, that's an expected $65 billion spent to save $2 trillion.

The White House's Office of Management and Budget found that the annual benefits of major federal rules over a decade ranged between $193 billion to $800 billion, with costs of only $57 billion to $84 billion (EPA air regulations were the greatest source of these benefits). Google cache link, because Trump deleted the original.

Yes.
Easily.
Among OECD countries, the US has the 5th lowest economic mobility.

More economic mobility than the US:
Denmark
Norway
Finland
Canada
Australia
Sweden
New Zealand
Germany
japan
Spain
France
Switzerland

Less economic mobility that the US:
UK
Italy
chile
Slovenia

http://www.epi.org/publication...

Productivity has been going up all throughout the housing crisis and since. There has been inflation throughout as well, yet real wages have been stagnant. This has happened through automation and globalization, which should have been good for everyone. But it's clear the rules of the system are set up to funnel the money from the middle class to the wealthy throughout this process, as poverty has been on the rise since 2000. I don't see how this trend gets reversed, people have their bread and circuses.

When wages don't keep up with inflation (which they haven't), inflation acts a hidden, regressive tax.

That's not how it works.

How it works is the company is enticed to outsource the work to a contractor because the contractor is actually cheaper --because most of the workers are H1B. http://www.epi.org/blog/new-da...

http://www.epi.org/blog/real-h...
The last generation has been marked by a stark disconnect between productivity growth (up 80 percent between 1973 and 2011) and slow or stunted wage growth. The real hourly wages of the median worker grew less than 4 percent over this span, and real hourly compensation (wages and benefits) grew only 10.7 percent.

Yeah, but what has increasing worker productivity gained us?
TL;DR - since ~1973, diddly-squat if you're a worker, pretty sweet if you own the place. Let's give those heroic jerb creators another tax break!

We've had 40 years of increasing worker productivity with ownership keeping 100% of the proceeds.

What's the old saw about Moore's law?
"If cars had improved as much as CPUs, you'd have a VW with the horespower of the Queen Mary that ran a million miles on a thimbleful of gas".
If management had shared 50% of the gains from automation with workers, we'd all work a 5 hour week and make a million dollars a year.

the inflationary pressure of just adding $x to everyone's income.

Like the cities that are implementing $15/hr minimum wage, it wouldn't be a sudden $x. (I should mention that this is all with an 'ideal' and thought out plan) You'd have a year of $1 just to make sure all systems are set up, then a year of $x/100, then $x/10, then $x/2, then $x. (Or an even more gradual roll out.) During this time wages would likely stagnate across the board, but income would increase. Min wage probably decreases in the same fashion until it's $0, rather than just being completely and instantly removed. Then $x is pegged to inflation.

With a gradual roll-out the year-over-year inflation should not be much larger than it would otherwise have been (disclaimer: I am not an economics shaman).

The other problem I don't know how you deal with is what prevents a UBI from simply raising the price of everything by the amount of UBI everyone gets? How do you guarantee food, shelter and clothing will be always available at UBI income rates without price controls?

While income increases, wages will depress, so at the end most people will see a financial wash except for the very bottom rung, who now has income, and the very top rung, who probably have higher taxes. After that, what "free market" forces actually exist are still in place. If property companies try to raise their rents by $x, they'll find a lot of tenants leaving (especially now that they are able to better move around the country, and aren't locked to a city). Similar things will happen for food and clothing: companies that try to super-hike will be undercut by those who just go with inflation.

A minimum wage hike doesn't lead to large inflation, and mincome is essentially a replacement for such a hike while also increasing the pool of people who have money to spend.

As for guaranteeing, that's where the government decides what $x is, based on the cost of basic housing, food, etc. This is one reason it might make more sense to have a per-state $x (and you deal with people changing states in much the same way you deal with immigration, except that after they move they would receive the amount from their prior state until they've been settled for Y months). Could companies hike to match $x? Maybe. What's stopping them from maxing out those prices right now, though?