Report Card for Donald Trump

[David Horn]

(01-14-2017, 12:59 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-14-2017, 11:46 AM)David Horn Wrote: The first indication of discontinuity was the unlinking of productivity and median income gains.  That happened ~1973 and the new trend lines continued up to the present.

Agreed.  As I demonstrated in the 2016 election thread, the most likely cause of that discontinuity was uncapping of immigration so the owners could import as much labor as they needed without increasing wages.  Incidentally this is more than a decade too early to reflect any Chinese inflluence on the situation.

The 2000 discontinuity is specifically in manufacturing, and is in number of jobs in that sector, not just wages.  It's a different discontinuity.

I remember the trigger well: the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.  One day things were banal, the next, we had gas lines and rapidly escalating gas prices.  Employers got spooked, so hiring dried up, and forget about pay raises that matched price increases.  That practice stopped cold right then, and never returned.