With stagnant hourly wages, the only way for working families to get ahead is by working more hours, ... certainly not the path to improving living standards that we'd expect in an economy posting strong productivity gains.
The bottom line is that it's better to run a workforce on security than insecurity.
The black unemployment rate has to be twice that of the white rate in the US. If the national unemployment rate were 6.8 percent, everyone would be freaking out. We ought to not take too much solace in the 6.8 percent, but ask ourselves what can we do to bring that down to white rates, which are below 4 percent now. Some of that has to do with education, but that's just part of the story. You find that those unemployment differentials persist across every education level. I think it means pushing back on discrimination and helping people who can't find work get into the job market.
Where you see immigration competition play out most clearly is among high school dropouts. I'd say there's clearly immigrant competition among the least-skilled workers, but natives are a shrinking share while immigrants are a growing share.
The government should be actively enforcing the high road.
We are in the midst of a protracted wage slump, ... a troubling trend that is largely going unnoticed by policymakers.
It's a mistake to think that any increase in wages is inflationary and there is substantial room for non-inflationary wage growth, particularly at the bottom end of the scale.
Barack Obama is talking about cutting taxes. On net, he is a tax cutter. But the difference between Obama and John McCain is that Obama is raising some taxes on families, for example, with incomes over $250,000. Now, that amounts to about 2 percent, the richest 2 percent of American households. And even with those tax changes, even with all of the tax changes Obama's talking about, taxes will be lower under Obama than they were under the Clinton years.
What you don't hear from these GOP candidates is that they really can't go after this president on domestic production of oil and gas. He's actually done quite a lot. In fact, I would suspect they're environmentalists who are worried that we're doing too much drilling and fracking, in fact. I know that for a fact.
Did folks know that the tax to fund the program [Social Security] only hits salaries up to $110,000? That means that if you make a million bucks, about 90% of your salary is tax free when it comes to the payroll tax that funds Soc Sec. That ain't right.
The full employment situation reinforces itself.
