While Congress Dithers, Minimum Wage Drops 8 Cents in Two Months

March 22nd, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Economy | Legislation | Politics - (0 Comments)

The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 (H.R. 1010 in the House and S. 460 in the Senate) is a bill that would increase the minimum wage from its current $7.25/hour to $10.10/hour over the next two years. After that point, the minimum wage would automatically increase to keep pace with inflation — the tendency of currency to be worth less as time passes. Tracked by the Consumer Price Index, inflation means that what a $1 dollar bought in January 1977 would take $4 to buy now. Sure, the minimum wage was “just” $2.30 back in January 1977, but what $2.30 could buy in January 1997 would take more than $9 to buy today. Because the minimum wage is $7.25, economists say that the minimum wage has declined in “real value” between 1977 and today.

1977 didn’t even mark the high point for the U.S. minimum wage in real value; the minimum wage reached its peak in 1968, when workers were guaranteed a wage that would buy what $10.67 would buy today. The following graph summarizes Consumer Price Index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to show how the real value of the minimum wage has fallen since then.

U.S. Minimum Wage in Nominal and Real Dollars, through February 2013

Despite support by 162 members of the House and Senate, leadership of the 113th Congress has allowed these bills to languish in committee. Meanwhile, the real value of the minimum wage continues to fall. In January and February of 2013, the real value of the minimum wage dropped 8 cents an hour from its 2012 average. That may not sound like much to you if you have a high-paying job, but for someone on minimum wage that’s a drop of more than 1% in pay over just two months. Over a 40-hour work week, that drop means a minimum wage worker lost the ability to buy one inexpensive breakfast. By April, another meal will be out of reach. When will Congress act?

P.S. Before someone says that American business can’t afford to pay its workers, consider this: while America’s minimum-wage workers lost their breakfast, corporate profits soared. The latest available report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis reveals that in the 3rd quarter of 2012, corporate profits rose by 7.5%, a gain of $45.7 billion.

, , , , , , , , ,

Minimum Wage vs. CEO Pay Puts State of the Union in Context

February 15th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Barack Obama | Economy | Politics | Republicans - (1 Comments)

In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called for a restoration in the minimum wage and a change to make it keep pace with inflation:

"We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day's work with honest wages. But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That's wrong. That's why, since the last time this Congress raised the minimum wage, 19 states have chosen to bump theirs even higher.

Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour. We should be able to get that done.

This single step would raise the incomes of millions of working families. It could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank; rent or eviction; scraping by or finally getting ahead. For businesses across the country, it would mean customers with more money in their pockets. And a whole lot of folks out there would probably need less help from government. In fact, working folks shouldn't have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up while CEO pay has never been higher. So here’s an idea that Governor Romney and I actually agreed on last year -- let's tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, so that it finally becomes a wage you can live on."

Should the minimum wage for workers be at least what it was in 1980, or should cuts to the minimum wage be allowed to continue? That’s the real question, and I don’t use the word “real” lightly. The problem with tracking the minimum wage at its “nominal” dollar value is that a dollar in 2012 didn’t buy as much as a dollar did in 1980. As a matter of fact, according to the Consumer Price Index a dollar in 2012 only buys what 36 cents would have bought in 1980. In the chart of minimum wage trends in the United States you see below, “real” wages adjust for this change by measuring wages according to what they’d be worth in 2012 dollars. As you can see, around 1980 the inflation-adjusted minimum wage was about $9, but has fallen since then.

Real and Nominal Minimum Wage Trend in the United States, 1956 to 2012

Some people in Congress, mostly Republicans, are arguing that our nation’s big corporations just can’t afford to pay full-time working people what they were paid in 1980.

Problem #1 with the Republican story: corporate profits hit a record high in 2012.

Problem #2 with the Republican story: corporations have found enough room to pay their executives. Here’s a graph of real and nominal CEO pay over the same period (data: EPI)

Real and Nominal Corporate CEO Pay, EPI Data, to 2011

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jill Stein is the Presidential Candidate with the Fewest Fake Followers on Twitter

August 27th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Barack Obama | Election 2012 | Ethics | Greens | Media | Mitt Romney | Politics | Tech - (2 Comments)

I’m intrigued by Austin Considine’s recent article for the New York Times, in which he employs StatusPeople’s Fake Follower Check tool to discover that:

71 percent of Lady Gaga’s nearly 29 million followers are “fake” or “inactive.” So are 70 percent of President Obama’s nearly 19 million followers….

The tool examines Twitter relationships, said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. “Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers,” he said. “We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake.”

The Fake Follower Check categorizes any Twitter user’s followers into three categories:

1. First are “fakes”; these are accounts that have few if any followers or posts but that follow a gigantic number of accounts. Google “Get More Follows” and you’ll find a service that charges a Twitter user $127 to gain 10,000 followers. Unfortunately, these followers aren’t real people with real interests. They’re computer-generated, computer-generated, utterly fake “bot” accounts that will pump up your statistics but leave you with odd and often tell-tale patterns, such as an American Medicare reform effort having a strong core of support from self-professed 13-17 year olds living in Jakarta, Indonesia. A few of these fake “bot” accounts might follow a politician without the politician’s active involvement, but if a high percentage of followers of a politician are “fake,” then some involvement by the politician or a staffer is likely.

2. Second are “inactives”; these are accounts that don’t have many recent status updates, but they might be entirely legitimate. People let their Twitter accounts lapse all the time.

3. Third are the “good”; these are accounts that generate regular status updates, that follow some but not a ridiculous amount of other accounts, and that have some followers of their own.

Why stop with Barack Obama? Why not use the Fake Follower Check tool to look at the Twitter accounts of all the presidential candidates? That’s just what I did, and here’s what I found, in order of “goodness”.

#1: Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein: 2% Fake, 22% Inactive, 76% Good.
#2: Independent presidential candidate Rocky Anderson: 4% Fake, 27% Inactive, 69% Good.
#3: Constitution Party presidential candidate Virgil Goode: 5% Fake, 27% Inactive, 68% Good.
#4: Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul: 10% Fake, 36% Inactive, 54% Good.
#5: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney: 16% Fake, 38% Inactive, 46% Good.
#6: Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson: 29% Fake, 28% Inactive, 43% Good.
#7: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama: 28% Fake, 39% Inactive, 33% Good.

In short, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has the least fake, most real set of Twitter followers out of all the presidential candidates for this year. Barack Obama’s and Gary Johnson’s Twitter followers appear to be most the most fake out of the set.

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Birds of No Feather

September 27th, 2011 | Posted by Jim Cook in Uncategorized - (5 Comments)

A real duck and a fake wading bird, side by side, looking off into the distance together

, , , , , ,

James Delingpole Talks Out of Both Sides of His Mouth on Global Warming

February 20th, 2011 | Posted by Jim Cook in Environment | Media | Reviews | Science - (2 Comments)

Travel in time with me:

On March 29 2011, the 88th day of the year, James Delingpole sends out this e-mail blast to promote his book, 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy:

#88: Global Warming Fun

Pick a cold day in April to remind all the liberals you know how miserable the weather still is. Ask: “Do you think there’s a single person left out there who’s still stupid enough to believe in global warming?” If the liberal tries to explain to you the difference between “weather” and “climate,” laugh darkly and cynically and go, “Yeah, right. When it’s hot, the eco-nuts will tell you it’s proof of dangerous climate change. But when it’s cold, they tell you it’s just ‘weather.’ How dumb do those tree-huggers think we are?”

If spreading illogical and anti-factual talking points is what it takes to Drive a Liberal Crazy, then James Delingpole succeeds in his mission. It’s a simple definitional truth: there is a difference between weather and climate. “Weather” is the atmospheric condition right now where you are. “Climate” is a long-term tendency in atmospheric conditions. “Climate change” is a long-term change in atmospheric conditions over time. A “global climate change” like “global warming” is a long-term change over time in atmospheric conditions across the planet. Delingpole implicitly acknowledges exposure to these terms by using them, but despite that encourages his readers to laugh at these distinctions and use mockery to try and make the distinctions go away. That’s a small-minded way to live life. Why would Delingpole want to encourage that?

James Delingpole does worse than that in his short paragraph: he actively tricks his readers into believing something that’s just not true. What is “a cold day in April”? In the trivial sense of weather, it’s a day that’s not as hot as it will get later on in July. But nobody disputes (or at least nobody should dispute) that summer months tend to be warmer than spring months, which in turn tend to be warmer than winter months. Global warming is indeed not about weather, which is what’s happening today where you are. It’s a pattern of climate change across time, around the world. When you’re talking about global climate change, a cold April is an April that is colder across the planet than normal. The NASA global temperature data record shows that there has only been one April in the past 30 years that was colder across the planet than normal: April of 1982 (that’s the 1951 to 1980 average; if you measured against the full 1880-2010 average for all Aprils in NASA’s temperature dataset, none of the Aprils in the past 30 years would be colder than average). Since 1982, every April has been warmer globally speaking, and the extent to which Aprils have been warmer has increased over time. April of 2010 was actually the globally warmest April yet. When speaking in terms of the climate, there has not been a “cold April” for nearly 3 decades, which makes Delingpole’s suggestion about a remark to make during a “cold April” ludicrous.

The final sticking point of James Delingpole’s talking point is that he doesn’t actually believe what he’s telling his readers. On January 7 2011 Delingpole refused to accept a bet in which he’d pay me $100 if BOTH the year 2010 was one of the top ten warmest on record AND the winter of 2010-11 was one of the top 20 warmest winters on record; I’d pay him $100 if EITHER the year 2010 wasn’t one of the top ten warmest on record OR the winter of 2010-11 was cooler than the 1880-2011 average. If Delingpole was being sincere when he wrote “Do you think there’s a single person left out there who’s still stupid enough to believe in global warming?” then this would be a pretty good bet.

Here’s how Delingpole responded, explaining why he wouldn’t take the bet:

The world is emerging from the Little Ice Age which ended C1850. Therefore it is understandable if temperatures are on average warmer now than they were over a century ago. Global warming is – or rather has been – happening. We just don’t think it’s mainly or indeed significantly man-made.

“Global warming is – or rather has been – happening.”

James Delingpole encourages his readers to call anyone who believes in global warming “stupid,” but actually believes in the existence of global warming himself. How exasperating. Why, if I took Delingpole seriously, it’d be enough to drive me crazy.

, , , , , , , , ,

U.S. Minimum Wage Has Fallen 30 Cents since last July

July 16th, 2008 | Posted by Jim Cook in Economy | Legislation | Politics - (0 Comments)

The U.S. minimum wage fell 30 cents between July of 2007 and June of 2008. Oh, I know that’s not true in a nominal sense: in literal dollars, the minimum wage was $5.85/hour in July 2007 and is $5.85/hour now. But thanks to inflation, literal dollars don’t always mean practically the same thing. The Consumer Price Index tracks changes in what a dollar will actually buy, and according to the CPI, a dollar bought about 4.8% less in June of 2008 than it did in July of 2007. That means that if you earned $1,000 a month last July, and you didn’t get a either a raise or a pay cut, it should have felt like you were earning $952 dollars last month. You can also look backward: for those who earned the minimum wage of $5.85/hour last month, it’s like they were earning $6.15/hour in July of 2007 and got a pay cut of $0.30/hour in the meantime.

Increases in the minimum wage are scheduled for this month up to a nominal $6.55/hour, and for July of 2009 up to a nominal $7.25/hour. These sound like large increases. But their value will erode: by July of next year, just before the minimum wage jumps up again, the value of the minimum wage will have eroded to $6.23 in the value of today’s dollars at that same rate of inflation. At that rate, by 2014 the minimum wage will have sunk back below today’s minimum wage level again — which is, by the way, just 57% the size of the inflation-adjusted minimum wage in 1968. The last period between congressional laws to hike the minimum wage was ten years long. If it’s that long again, minimum wage workers can expect to see a period of time in which they earn less for their labor than they do today.

, , , , , , , ,