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US College Grads See Slim-to-Nothing Wage Gains Since Recession (bloomberg.com)
The worth of a college degree is losing its luster in the US job market. From a report on Bloomberg: Wages for college graduates across many majors have fallen since the 2007-09 recession, according to an analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington using Census bureau figures. Young job-seekers appear to be the biggest losers. What you study matters for your salary, the data show. Chemical and computer engineering majors have held down some of the best earnings of at least $60,000 a year for entry level positions since the recession, while business and science graduates's paychecks have fallen. A biology major at the start of their career earned $31,000 on an annual average in 2015, down $4,000 from five years earlier. "It has been like this for the past five, six years now," said Ban Cheah, a research professor at Georgetown who compiled the data. "It's a little depressing."
The last generation calls me a shit
My degree in gender studies didn't let me work at google
a lonely tear falls upon the erection
Keep the next generation impoverished so they don't get too uppity/powerful.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Seriously, lets blame the baby boomers for this. It's ALWAYS their fault. Just look at the dumbass from their age group they elected.
Do you people not read about why the middle class is under siege and will be taxed into oblivion? Insourced/outsourced, whatever, as long as your at the bottom of the food chain and the special religion can get its Usury. Usury = Your profit after costs with your paycheck. 2 jobs, not a problem, we didn't want you researching why your middle class jobs are in the shitter on purpose.
Do not pay attention to the cabal behind the curtain, its not the issue, its Joe the workman, he took your cookie, thats it!!!
Good times are here again. The stock market is above 20k, housing prices are at all time highs, everything is peachy!
The Oligarchy is working... don't you see?
The profits go to the ones who deserve it, the ones in power. The rest get what's left.
What's left will never grow, only shrink. We've seen that over the last 40+ years.
Wage stagnation has taken the earnings of the middle class since the 70s. About the only thing keeping wages going up in that time has been union action and increases in the minimum wage. Since the min wage certainly has not been keeping up with inflation _and_ unions are at an all time low, none of this is a surprise.
For those of you who want the world to be better without a government acting as the means to corral all of us cats wandering around need to start showing us who think otherwise how that's going to work. Because the ideas you've espoused so far have failed. Profits as an end goal only promote avarice and greed as valued traits. This is where such thinking has lead us.
There's so much cash floating around at the top level of the economy that inflation has outstripped wage gains for over two decades.
Donald Trump has failed his promise to the middle class. Where are all the jobs? Where are the wages? Why aren't computer programmers being sought for mining jobs? Why aren't miners building skyscrapers? Why hasn't Mexico paid for the wall, and why hasn't the wall been built by the Teachers' Union?
We still have 2% inflation so stagnant wages are actually a wage cut. That's what these articles miss.
MsMash, not suprised you missed this, probally because it's really not relevant, as it seems slashdot is now struggling to stay relevant. Thanks to you and your misguided collegues..
movign past that,, whats the bigger p[icture..
how do we as a society get a handle on rising living costs?? Well Hmm stop cow-towing to those whom feel entitled..
Stoopid.
Its a shame that those whom feel entitled are complaining and this it has to surface here..
Its your first JOB whats your REAL expectation???
you get what u get, not what you deserve.
this take away is.. it starts with you.. The lower wage you draw the lower the ammenities around you will get from a value perspective..
YOU CANT MAKE THE $ FOR EVER, AT SOME POINT YOU'LL BURN OUT, your employer will definitely take advantage of that..
were pulling in 60K a year in the early 90s
Aging demographic and the growing wealth gap are deflationary it's going to hurt when it happens
love is just extroverted narcissism
Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Demand for workers falls. Why is it people treat supply and demand as a never-ending cornucopia of benefit. Raw, unfettered capitalism has a downside. Who knew?
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I feel like this boils down to what skillsets you have and how willing you are to move to use them.
1. If you ignored the EVERYONE HAS TO COLLEGE advice of the 2000s and learned a skilled trade instead you'd be doing rather well right now. We have such a shortage of CNC operators that local companies have teamed up with the VocTech highschool to offer an adult education class. You earn your GED and CNC/welding certifications in 8 weeks (going 2 days a week) and walk out earning $50k/year. CNC have billboards everywhere. $25/hr with 401k, medical, dental and vision.
Even within engineering there are winners and losers. I just got poached on linked in for a 30% raise in another state. If you have the right words on your resume companies are looking. Just talking about my niche: Simulink, dSpace (Hardware-in-the loop), embedded, RTOS, etc are all doing very well across automotive and aerospace.
"Biology" is a great starter degree for pre-med or other advanced degree. A BS Bio on its own qualifies you to earn $31k a year.
2. Fewer Americans Moved Last Year Than At Any Time On Census Bureau Record. Since we followed food out of Africa humans have been migrating to earn a life. I see job postings around here that can't be filled because my college peers insist on living in location X. "I don't want to leave Seattle. It's so wonderful. I can't afford to go out. Live with 2 roommates but I'm 'living my dream'".
8 fucking years of "recovery"?
And you wonder how Trump won....
So the person behind the counter that screws up my order at my local fast food joint should be worth $15/hour, but a biology grad is only worth $15.50/hr? ($31k/2000 hours) A different form of income inequality.
it's not complicated. We've never had a recovery. We've been in a slow-rolling depression, prolonged by leftwing economic policies - just like the last depression.
Don't forget to pay back the 20,30,40 THOUSANDS of dollars in college debt, for your worthless degree that pays 20-50,000 per year, while finding an apartment, transportation, food, mandatory health care, trying to have a social life. Trade schools are "worth" more than a liberal arts degree, but no one wants to have a discussion on the high price of "big college"...paying presidents, deans, sports coaches hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and some professors only working a few days a month. Nope, don't talk about that...just continue to rail on CEO's of big oil, big pharma etc.
Would that not imply the recession was over?
If you thought it was, you are buying into yet more Fake News.
Or would you prefer to believe some arbitrary proclamation that the recession is over instead of actual proof... like wages hardly rising.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Making those wages in a comfy office sure doesn't beat flipping burgers for a living.
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.
Be willing to change, locations and careers as necessary. Be flexible.
There ARE places and jobs in the grand old USA where wages are going up. If you don't get that raise you want where you are, start looking for a location and career that is in demand and JUMP. Sooner rather than later.
I've lived in 4 different states in my long career and I am willing to pull up the tent stakes and move if it means more money. I've also had multiple kinds of jobs, from Electronic Engineering to Network engineering to Software Development.... And last year I got one of the biggest raises of my life by changing jobs...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Probably one of the best reasons I've heard to say: Let's give Trump a chance. flame suit on. AlleyTrotter
In general people earning at the median income (roughly 56k) have not seen their incomes recover past their pre-recession levels, and people at the first and second quintile (from the bottom, roughly 33k) have not recovered to their pre-recession incomes. Fresh out of school, the average college graduate makes about $50.5K.
So what recent college grads are experiencing is representative of what at about half of the people in the country are experiencing -- namely those with average to below average income. That bio grad making $31K is roughly as far below what he'd have been making pre-recession as anyone else making that amount is.
Some of this divergence is natural, in that the wealthy tend to have more volatile incomes; those incomes are more likely to be based on the performance of asset markets. However it's striking to see such robust sustained income growth for the top 5% with stagnation for the median and below. Whatever they're putting their money into, it's not trickling down.
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Good. College graduates rarely have the skill sets someone who has actually been working in the field an equivalent amount of time has. Education that is up to date is always more readily available on the net than it is in a stale college course. An autodidact is almost always far more valuable than someone who followed a canned path. This is not only because they've done more but because they have developed, and broadly demonstrate, the critical quality of self-motivation.
You know what most college degrees really say? That you were willing to let people waste your time on irrelevancies when you could have been out deep-diving into something. Or even worse, that you aren't capable of deep-diving into something.
I'm talking about degrees in useful subjects when I allow that some college graduates do manage to become useful during, and because of, college. Degrees in soft subjects aren't that. They're completely worthless. Not that history, philosophy and so forth are absolutely worthless; just that degrees in them are. You want to learn history (and you should) or dig into philosophy, just start reading.
You're almost always better off learning how to think for yourself than you are thinking the way someone else tells you to. Serious problem solving is not compatible with camp-following.
I guess it could use this time as a 'told you so' moment but I will wait until the USD crashes and gets destroyed by the inflation that everybody is convinced doesn't exist or is not high enough.
All the idiots that believe that the economy is in the expansion of the money supply. The economy is in the expansion of productivity, it is not in the rising prices for those products. Of-course all that the Fed ever wanted was 'to create a feeling of wealth', as if believing you are wealthy actually makes you wealthy.
The reality is that the USA economy has been going down the hill since 1890, when the Sherman act was passed. Then it was only a number of milestones to get by, the introduction of the income taxes and the IRS, the introduction of the Federal Reserve bank in 1913 and taking away the pretence that it will not be used to monetize US government debt in 1917.
The 1925-1929 with the government of USA with the Fed creating the biggest bubble in farming stocks up to that date by printing money to buy bad UK debt from France.
1929-1945, the depression that the government has created with all the jobs programs, New Deal, growth of the income taxes, minimum wage, all sorts of price and wage controls, getting the gold out of the people's pockets, introduction of the SS (payroll taxes), later leading to the introduction of the Medicare, Medicaid, using paper money not backed by anything to implement the space race, the cold war, hot wars, eventually running out of money to pay for all that and defaulting on the USD in 1971.
After that it was even faster, the companies started moving away from all the inflation created by the government money destruction. The destruction of real interest rates to keep government borrowing going destroyed and prevented even more businesses out of existence. All the rules and laws introduced to promote 'this thing for all' and 'that thing for all', the so called 'rights' (entitlements at the expense of the rights of others and at the expense of the entire economy) to have housing, food, health insurance and care, this and that....
Anyway, the eventual bond and currency collapse will lead to the real government crisis and probably to real civil unrest. It's going to get much worse before it gets any better at all in terms of real healing of the economy.
The fact that the college grads can't get well paying jobs - that's just a consequence of destruction of individual freedoms by the ever growing idea that it is government that should be in control of business, money, of everything. This idea will have to die in order for the economy to live again.
You can't handle the truth.
The housing bubble has moved to an education bubble.
He said 8 years before that the dotcom bubble had moved to a real-estate bubble. ...
To his credit, he's actually paying people to leave college and start companies.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Could it be that economic prosperity is not caused by college graduates... could it be the other way around perhaps?
Could it be that instead of attacking fundamental problems in national economics, politicians instead decided to hand out even more money that wasn't there... ?
"We must be doing better, cause we all got papers now saying how smart we are"
I wonder where all that tuition money goes these days. Expensive football teams? VPs of diversity? High salaries for administrators? Large number of administrators? Low teacher productivity from small class sizes? High salaries for 'tenured' professors whom don't teach much? Expensive new buildings? Is full price tuition a way of screwing rich people, and poor get generous financial *aid*?
Salaries suck, because the US is still in a recession. With real unemployment well over 20%, comparable to economic powerhouses like Greece, Croatia and Botswana, it's no surprise that salaries are declining. Add in inflation, and they are declining even faster.
There is one overriding reason for the continuing recession: debt. Federal debt in the US is out of control - plus up to $200 trillion of unfunded obligations that everyone is carefully ignoring. If we also ignore those invisible (but inevitable) obligations, the US is still one of the top 20 most indebted nations.
Keynesian economics have been thoroughly debunked. Actually, there was never any evidence that they might be correct. But politicians love them, because they provide an excuse to buy votes by spending other people's money. All of this debt has been built up with promises that never would be fulfilled. But the politicians making those promises are now mostly millionaires, so that's ok.
What cannot go on forever will stop. Debt cannot be infinitely piled on, and countries like the US are reaching the limits of their ability to sell more debt. When this stops, the stopping is likely to be abrupt and unpleasant.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I've noticed over the past 4-5 years (at least in the U.S., where I'm from) that average raises for technology professionals has gone down from the heydays of the 90's and early 2000's and I have a theory as to why. It may be 100% incorrect but it's a theory nonetheless. When I first started in tech in the 90's, it was nothing to see annual raises of 8-10% for "meets expectations" folks and well above that for employees with higher ratings. Over the past 4-5 years, however the average raise pool across the tech departments I've been involved in have been around 2%-2.5% for the "meets expectations" folks and maybe 3.5% for the "exceeds" superheroes. At the same time, the increases in health insurance premiums have continued to increase but at a slower rate than they did in the 2000's and early 2010's. My theory is that companies are trying to absorb more of their employee's health insurance costs but at the expense of salary increases and likely at the expense of new employee's salaries as well. So, as total compensation is shifting faster and faster towards healthcare costs, they are shifting away from base salaries. Most companies (at least the one's I've been involved with) pay a portion of each employee's healthcare premiums so as these costs go up, so does the effective cost of their employees. This is kind of a shitty situation for both employer and employee as employers have less to spend on "salaries" (as the remainder is going towards insurance premiums) and employees are left with less and less in take-home pay. Just a theory and not supported by data at all.. but something that's crossed my mind a lot lately.
Today/yesterday is a really good time to hear this when basically all the kids are finding out which college they are going to. High schooler interns who work for me are waiting to find out if they got into Stanford today. They are psyched up they got into the Ivies, but then I'm like Stanford is 100x better cause it's in the Bay Area and you can continue to do work for me. You basically don't have to worry about a job then.
I think most of the stagnation is due to the fact that most college graduates are having to take lower-paying jobs. In the past, large companies were happy to take in new college graduates for entry-level jobs. Big companies paid relatively big salaries, and the recipient of that entry level job could either use it to rise in that company, or put it on their resume and move on to another.
These days, there's just not a lot of entry level work that pays well. Big companies are outsourcing and offshoring the stuff that new grads used to do, and the jobs that remain onshore are with service providers. Those providers squeeze every single penny out of every outsourcing deal they make, and one of the ways they do that is to pay workers less and give them crappy benefits. For those who aren't lucky enough to get one of these jobs, yes, Starbucks awaits. The early 90s had a similar problem -- large companies had just killed huge swaths of their employees because computers were starting to automate processes that would require tons of manual work. College grads who would have gotten some faceless cubicle job a generation prior and used it as a stepping stone to prosperity all of a sudden didn't have that option. I'm pretty sure that's where the word McJob came from -- educated people forced to take low-paying, low-skill work because there wasn't a demand for educated people.
I'm foolishly hoping that one day MBA schools will start teaching students that it's better overall to have everything done in-house with employees you control. Accounting rules and tax laws would have to change to incentivize hiring large staffs, but I definitely think everyone, including executives on down to the lowest level employee, were happier when everyone who made the investment in education had the chance to earn a good wage.
You're arguing that people have had consistently less since 1890?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Like every single industry since 1987 - all the revenue generated from efficiency is going strait to the top; this includes years since the recession:
Adjusted average income for the 1 percent without capital gains rose from $871,100 to $968,000 since the recession.
Yet everyone else fights for table scraps... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0...
.
" A biology major at the start of their career earned $31,000 on an annual average in 2015, down $4,000 from five years earlier."
Well, we told girls they need to get into science. So, a lot of English majors heeded the call.
Meanwhile, define "college degree"? Now we have what used to be called "vocational schools" being renamed as "colleges." And, then they get the ok to confer a BS, which of course is just plain BS. Then, there are the online "colleges" that hand out degrees like airline cigarette samplers.
These statistics mean nothing, without also measuring competence and/or productivity.
Less freedom, yes. Every new law, every new tax, every new subsidy, every new department, every new war, all of this takes away individual freedom and is another step towards destroying the economy.
I wrote exactly what I am arguing in that comment, I am not arguing what is not written there. My point is that without all of the things that I mentioned in that comment the USA economy today would have been stellar, something that we cannot really imagine because of all the damage that was done that prevented that economy from happening.
You can't handle the truth.
College ends up costing so much that you basically spend the entire rest of your life paying off the debt? Your wages are garnished for your entire life? ...that's assuming you actually find a job. ----There you go, I knew you folks were waiting for the punchline
As I've watched American prosperity and society change over the last 30-40 years, I've come to believe the following are the cause of the economic stagnation/depression that just gets worse each decade:
- Americans went gung ho into promoting cultural and ethnic diversity wiping away the uniformity of the 50's/60's replacing it with gigantic mess where no one talks to each other any more because they have nothing in common. Many recent research studies suggest that culturally/ethnically diverse societies find it much more difficult to unify or agree on common values or solutions to national problems. Is diversity good? Yes.... Was it in the long run good for America, maybe not.
- Education became politicized and focused on test scores and indoctrinating rather than teaching thinking and self sufficiency, partly this is a result of the widespread adoption of public schools and the removal of educational choice for families...local communities used to determine educational standards and parents used to have the primary responsibility for teaching their kids, not lowest common denominator schools that politicians manipulate the educational standards to ensure future generations will be one gigantic monolothic low paid workforce that can't provide for itself and yet will continue to vote for the polticians ruining the education of their kids.
- Lawyers -- there is a reason everyone hates them, but 40-50 years ago there were much fewer of them....legal crap everywhere began to spread in the 80's and now nearly anyone in power has a law degree, a degree which trains them to think not as engineers/doers but in terms of win/lose where one's only responsibility is to take care of oneself and his/her client.
- population growth -- yes, there are many states in the country that are underpopulated...but the areas where everyone wants to live are vastly overcrowded and the resources/environment are suffering greatly....it's not healthy for the mind or body...constant stress and overworking. Back when things were much more rural and there was a smaller population, people naturally cooperated with each other more.
- Public Debt -- whatever you think about the threat of future fiscal collapse, every $ removed from the economy for debt or interest payments is one less $ that goes into the broader economy to stimulate business or invest in infrastructure. We're on collapsing spiral here on way or another.
So, short of everyone suddenly deciding to handle all these big issues much differently than we have the last 40 years, I don't have much hope of any significant improvement. Technology and productivity increases help...but we've been relying on them for too long and if the pace of technological improvement slows down - our economy will get much worse.
And yet executive compensation has skyrocketed.
Well, when we keep importing labor, yeah, wages will remain stagnant.
However, if you do truly believe the Obama administration's inflation numbers, then wages haven't fallen in real dollars. If you try to buy groceries or pay rent or avoid getting fined for not paying off the insurance companies, well, then, sucks to be you.
Dan
"Recession" has a clear technical definition.
Based on easily manipulable data
.
You statists are so cute when you're at your most utterly naive and gullible!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
College grads skills, education level, competence, and intestinal fortitude have fallen through the floor since the recession. Most college grads are about where high school students were ten years ago in regard to the above. I suppose it's only fair they are receiving high school level wages. More useless whining. You want more, make yourself into someone that warrants more.
What pay employers will offer is a direct function of supply and demand.
All the big companies are complaining about a shortage of STEM workers, but the reality has to be that its just not the case, otherwise there would be more competition for thos workers which would directly translate into higher wages offered.
Clearly the complaints are a baseless dog-and-pony show, probably just to keep the H1Bs flowing, which is also presumably where most of the supply is coming from that is actually surpessing the demand (and therefore wages) for local talent.
What's scary about Apple isn't that they over charge, it's that they've shown that a company can be the most profitable company in history (even outpacing some of the Robber Barrons adjusted for inflation) while selling relatively little product. Apple shows that the rich can abandon not just the poor but the working class and still do just fine.
As for those Communists... well they weren't. At no point in the history of the USSR were the spoils of economic output distributed "From each according to his ability to each according to his need". Stalin et al weren't communists, they were Fascists who borrowed Marx's book for rhetoric. And no, this isn't a 'No True Scottsman' argument. People can lie about their motives and facts will show they're lying. Yelling 'No True Scottsman' doesn't change that.
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It is not a matter of diversity itself as much as having common threads shared by all which bind the society together enough to properly function. That has been lost and community does not exist anymore. I do not even know what it is because I had no exposure to it - only what I was told about and some tried to create and / or save.
We went TOO far fighting against the evils of conformity and uniformity of the 50s-60s but the fight was necessary. It just went too far.
While local communities and parents HAD more input into education in the past, there was a lot of uniformity in other ways.
Uniform public education is a safe way to create common threads --- even the private schools were more uniform in the past (despite marketing to justify the added expense.) Every child; ethics used to be taught; civics used to be taught to everybody; the constitution actually studied instead of a little history around it and memorize the preamble. Everybody should read 1984 too. Certain books at certain grades for EVERBODY even private schools. Other counties doing better do this. Hell, some force kids to read books over the summer-- classical books. We used to ALLOW children to fail now we screw up the whole system because of them... parents are getting too much input ; the WRONG kind of input. Parents who neglect their kids in the important ways are right there to demand and blame the schools and force changes that make everything worse. In the past parents were involved differently with education but had to accept their brat was failing and take some responsibility... maybe actually punish the kid. Parenting of kids is the BIGGEST influence and that isn't done much today in between both parents working. "Success" also means different things today as well. If we as a society valued community if we could figure out what that even is.... we would consider success as including a common experience in education. So everybody had the basics.... but even that is a problem today where basic facts and reality can't even be shared in common.
- ZONING - we don't have diversity in our communities. A small town had drunks, poor, rich, etc. they would interact to some degree -- sure racial boundaries were stronger but you still had communities within those boundaries. Now we don't even have a community within the groups we identify with.
-LAWYERS - it should be as shameful as a prostitute and as likely to be elected to office.
REALITY: WE CAN NOT GROW FOREVER. Human intelligence has severe limitations we dare not admit. Resources are limited. You can not birth your way to success. Necessary jobs are extremely limited; that is why we created consumerism and promote fashion and those too are limited (at best growth until resource limits are reached, some are logically capped, such as popular art.) A.I. will eventually remove ALL necessary jobs, but far before that point it will remove most jobs. A.I. will also remove the need for cheap labor; so the idea of a large peasant class is out dated; they will need to be culled significantly. (I don't think nice solutions to this will prevail when sociopaths are so well rewarded in our societies.)
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We need chapter 11 and 7 for student loans
We know it's your fault, and was the stated goal of your globalist anti-American agenda.
I'm trying to figure out by what metric the economy has been going downhill since 1890.
You lost me there, and I'm trying to understand.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
By the metric of USA being a major creditor nation in 1890 and today it is the biggest debtor in history of histories.
By the metric of USA running trade surpluses in 1890 for the last 25 years or so USA has been running about 500 BILLION USD / year in trade deficits, so USA is *not paying for its consumption*, it's been subsidised by the productive world.
By the metric of being on real money in 1890 and today USD is nothing but a ghost.
By the metric of new business formation, by the metric of *not having to pay income, payroll, property taxes* to the government, by the metric of government not being anywhere close to what it is today in terms of power and size, by the metric of all the wars, which seem to be the most profitable business in today's America - murdering people around the world.
By the metric of people not coming to USA for individual freedom anymore at all.
You can't handle the truth.
"- Public Debt -- whatever you think about the threat of future fiscal collapse, every $ removed from the economy for debt or interest payments is one less $ that goes into the broader economy to stimulate business or invest in infrastructure. We're on collapsing spiral here on way or another."
If the government issues $100 if debt at 1% interest rate and someone buys it then there is $100 more in existence than before, which very likely matched by $100 the government spent in the first place. The government has to then service this at $1 per year. But the economy is up $100, or 100 years of such payments, so the economy is up on the deal on this broad measure. However, many types of government spending have a good ROI (science, infrastructure) or are spent immediately and hold up velocity of money (e.g. Social Security), so the issue is more about whether the amount of debt means that the servicing cost means that enough is taken from those areas that velocity of money or other stimulus effect is lost, as the institutions that tend to hold the debt don't use the $1 per year in ways that generate as high velocity of money, although it is still greater than zero. There's a balancing point for the amount, servicing cost, and rate of generation of public debt.
The problem is that we're all living a LOT longer because those clever doctors have cured the things that used to kill us off. Therefore pension benefits have to fall, pensionable age rise, or both. Add in the collapse of negotiating power of labour as globalisation and automation destroys jobs, and you will inevitably get what's happening today.
The snowflake effect!
http://www.independent.co.uk/l...
You can have unfettered immigration an think pay scale will go up.there is always someone that will due your job for less.you cant have loopside trade deal and think wages will go up. if they pay a guy in china a dollar a hour and US workers want 10.00 and you arent extra 9 dollars for the product wages dont go up.I Miss the days when you we ashamed to buy something not made in the USA, Than there the work ethics of alot of today youth.if i wanted a good paycheck i knew my boss want my best.I didnt run around all day complaining that he wanted me to due my job and i didnt think he should take less pay to give me more .i strive to have what they had but didn't hate them because they lived in the better zip code or could drive a better car than me it was either luck of the gene pool or they better educated or they decided to study while i choose to spend time hacking and phone freaking i was first in many miles to have 3300 baud modem tells you how old iam). It is called life.
I feel sorry for my grand kids because i know there going to have to make the choices every generation before them blew off because it was taboo. number one issue everyone needs to start talking about is population control. we need one child for every two poeple for at least two generations than one per person.almost every problem like this can be trace back to one issue there are 2 many poeple. to many for environment,too many for job market and on and on.
stop blaming the rich or government take some personal responsibility
A rising tide lifts all yachts. That's pretty much where all productivity increases, automation, and outsourcing have brought our society.