TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.
TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.
In the late 70s around 23% of US corporate revenues went to pay salaries. By 2012 that had fallen to 7% - in other words, just before neoliberalism really took off almost 1/4 of the money workers spent buying goods from US companies was almost directly back in workers’ pockets, whilst by 2012 less that 1/14 of what workers spent buying goods from US companies ended back in workers’ pockets.
All that excess money that doesn’t get recycled back to workers anymore has got to be pooling somewhere.
Wow, now that’s a hell of a statistic! Got a nice reference for it so I can read more?
I read it ages ago when I was still frequenting a certain finance discussion forum (whose name totally evades me now, and I did just try looking up such forums but failed to find it) back in the post 2008 Crash years, hence why the end date in that statistic is 2012.
This is the best I found on the subject. Note that the numbers are quite different from the statistic I quoted since they’re not the same thing (it’s about labour share of income in the whole Economy, rather than the corporate labour to revenue ratio) but you can see the very same trend I mentioned in this report and what’s used there is almost certainly a better statistic to get an overall view of what’s going on.
I used to frequent a few finance forums too; maybe I can help. Was it a personal finance/FIRE forum (e.g. bogleheads.org, forum.mrmoneymustache.com, etc.), or some other kind?
Nah, it started as a forum made by an ex-edge fund guy which in the beginning had quite a lot of people over there with a background in Investment Banking like me, but it kept getting more and more american goldbugs and preppers and was eventually swamped by simpleton Libertarian politics.