Comment by smallmancontrov
4 hours ago
Oh good! I was worried that trickle down economics was self-serving nonsense pushed by think tank economists on behalf of their benefactors. Since it is economic fact rather than self-serving fiction, when I review its track record I will find that it caused an upward inflection in real wages, right? Right?
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Oops!
As long as capital doesn't get involved in some kind of highly financialized spiral getting further and further divorced from the real economy, we should be good.
That could never happen here. We have a history of strongly regulating capital and banks. Why look at all the executives we jailed for the 2008 financial crisis!
Total labor compensation has in fact grown. Unfortunately, much of the non-wage compensation involves services like healthcare that has become a lot more expensive over time due to burdensome overregulation and an overall lack of price transparency.
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>Since it is economic fact rather than self-serving fiction [...]
You deride the weak justification for trickle down economics, then proceed to link wtfhappenedin1971.com, a site that tries to argue for the reintroduction of the gold standard through a gish-gallop of random charts?
The gap between productivity and wages is striking, isn't it?
I'm not perfectly aligned with gold bug politics. Their faith in the Kindleberger world is misplaced and their tax aversion can make them useful to my opponents, but at the same time they tend to take the Cantillon Pump and Balance of Payments mechanisms seriously while my traditional allies do not.
No, I don't mind borrowing their charts. Why? Do you have a better go-to link for The Wedge?
>The gap between productivity and wages is striking, isn't it?
It's not. The (in)famous epi.org is flawed for all sorts of reasons, from excluding noproduction/supervisory workers (the highest compensated ones!), to excluding non-wage compensation (eg. benefits), to different deflators for compensation vs productivity. If you adjust for all of that, the chart is unremarkable.
https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/gr...
That incidentally, is the exact problem with the site. It presents a barrage of charts, without regard to relevance or rigor, and tries to persuade through sheer volume alone. Yet, if you scrutinize any of them, it quickly falls apart. That's probably why the site doesn't even bother justifying the charts, or even state the thesis, for that matter.
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