You don't need to guess - you could read the post you quoted, where I directly and specifically refer to the problem with your use of the Social Security Wage Index - it's a mean yearly wage, and you need a median hourly wage to make your argument. Which is why I corrected you. You needed to use median hourly wages, to make your point that wages are increasing more than Billy says. Using mean yearly wage totals is a mistake, if you are trying to argue that people's "average" hourly wage increase is thus and so (you argued .27, iirc), because it fails to account for hours (or even jobs) worked and because it is vulnerable to wage increases limited to a small subset of higher wage earners. Your number and Billy's are not necessarily in conflict - they could both be true, depending on the situation concealed by your mistaken use of mean yearly total wages. The standard explanation is that older workers who lost jobs in the crash have been forced into early retirement or (often) disability because they cannot find replacement jobs. That isn't the same as "choosing not to work".
Oh, that presupposes you know what my point is, and it is very apparent you do not know what my argument is Ice. For your edification Ice, I will once again engage in some remedial education. My point was this statement by BillyT is wrong, “Certainly Republicans will emphase what is wrong with the economy. For example that average wage increase is only $0.03/ per hour, that fraction working part time is increasing and labor force participation rate is at all time low and still falling”. If you had done your homework and had the requisite intellectual horsepower, you would know that. Additionally, now that I have taught you what the Wage Index is and how it is derived, you are changing your story a bit…funny how that works. Your previous objection held that the Wage Index was just a Social Security artifact and of no use whatsoever other than to the Social Security Administration and the BLS hourly wage should be used. Now you are back to arguing mean versus median, because you now appear to understand the fatuous nature of your previous position. If you read BillyT’s statement very carefully, you will notice BillyT specifically uses the word “average”. You will note BillyT specifically references an average metric. Since my point was to debunk the veracity of BillyT’s metric, why would I “need” to use a different metric and disprove a different metric? This gets to the core of your deep cognitive inability to compare apples to apples. Well if you are going to correct me, then you need to be correct and clearly you are not. If BillyT used an incorrect median statistic, then I would use a correct median statistic to demonstrate the error. And as for the rest of that paragraph, it doesn’t make sense. Again it is very apparent; you do not know what you are writing about or what this discussion was about. If you are going to correct something, you should have a very good sense of both and you clearly do not. By the way, given your obsession for the median statistic, apparently it is something new for you. While the median statistic is a valuable measure, it isn’t magic. You still need to use the appropriate mathematical tool for a given problem. You don't think we know the average hours worked? You cannot divide average annual income by average hours worked? It really isn't that difficult. LOL, oh and mistake would that be exactly? What mistake is concealed in the Wage Index? This gets back to your deep cognitive inability to recognize similar and dissimilar concepts and inability to understand mathematical concepts. As I said before, if BillyT used an incorrect median then the correct refutation would be a median. But that wasn’t the case. Any rational person with sufficient cognitive ability would understand you don’t disprove one metric by disproving another. It shouldn’t be that difficult to understand, but for some reason it is proving very difficult for you Ice. Since BillyT referenced an average and the disputed metric is an average, the correct metric to refute is an average. That shouldn't be difficult, but it maybe beyond your cognitive ability. You are conflating two very different metrics here. Work Force Participation isn’t even remotely related to wage growth which has been the topic of discussion. Further, you have completely missed the “standard explanation”. The so called “standard explanation” is the demographic shift occurring as a result of Baby Boomers entering retirement age and retiring from the work force. Baby Boomer retirement is causing the work force participation rate to shrink. The degree to which the work force participation rate has been affected by discouraged workers isn’t as well known. But there is no indication it is significant. If workers are opting out of the work force they obviously have sufficient means to support themselves as social support programs require beneficiaries to work or receive job retraining as a condition for public support. And as I stated, work force participation isn’t in any way relevant to the discussion on alleged error. The work force participation metric hasn't been disputed. It's very straight forwards. Further, a decreasing labor participation rate has nothing to do with worker prosperity at this point. However, it could eventually become an issue as the nation approaches full employment and the nation needs an expanding pool of workers. Further, the number of part-time and marginally attached workers are falling as well. That is well documented in the BLS employment data.
Senate Republicans Scrambling for Excuses "It is a useful thing when a political party reveals itself as utterly unsuited for national leadership." ―Fred Kaplan The #GOP47 find themselves scrambling for excuses. Some of them are actually funny: Republican aides were taken aback by what they thought was a lighthearted attempt to signal to Iran and the public that Congress should have a role in the ongoing nuclear discussions. Two GOP aides separately described their letter as a “cheeky” reminder of the congressional branch’s prerogatives. “The administration has no sense of humor when it comes to how weakly they have been handling these negotiations,” said a top GOP Senate aide. Added a Republican national security aide, “The Senate should have a role. It would make any agreement have some sort of consistency and perpetuity beyond the president. And it would also be buy-in for the American people. Right now it’s just an agreement between the President of the United States and whoever the final signatory to the agreement is.” (Mak) Let us start with the latter, there, the unnamed national security aide: (1) The Senate does have a role. (2) The pretense that a president cannot negotiate in good faith on behalf of the United States of America is an extraordinary assertion. (3) "A buy-in for the American people" is a stupid, deceptive, desperate attempt at populism. Yet this is the explanation justifying the excuse that forty-seven Senate Republicans essentially decided to prank the P5+1 negotiations? Part of the problem here is that Sen. Cotton (R-AR), the guy who came up with this idea, is a backbencher with a penchant for saying and doing stupid things. As Senate Republicans reel under the backlash against the stunt, one only wonders why, even by the excuse of simply pranking the negotiations, it didn't occur to more of them that it might not be the best of ideas to play along. That is, we might wonder if anybody actually thought ahead. But look at their messaging; they're trying to pretend a new, extraordinary assertion of how foreign policy works is somehow the constitutional and traditional process; it's pretty bad when the Iranians have to school Senate Republicans on constitutional issues, though I admit some are overplaying the fact that Jack Goldsmith also says the #GOP47 are wrong on those points; after all, Goldsmith might be a Republican on paper, but Republicans really don't like listening to him. Even in losing, though, Republicans are determined to hold the messaging line. And this time what they're doing is so observably dangerous that they are trying to blame the White House for their own actions. Needless to say, the fiasco continues .... ____________________ Notes: Kaplan, Fred. "Amateur Hour". Slate. 10 March 2015. Slate.com. 11 March 2015. http://slate.me/1Brbd0c Mak, Tim. "Republicans Admit: That Iran Letter Was a Dumb Idea". The Daily Beast. 11 March 2015. TheDailyBeast.com. 11 March 2015. http://thebea.st/1C5BykU
No, it wasn't. I never said anything like that. The mistake that you think your number necessarily contradicts Billy's. You claimed that your average showed Billy's average was wrong. But your average was derived differently than Billy's average, and they could both be correct as averages, due to the problems with using means as one's statistic in such circumstances. So you failed to show that Billy was wrong. To show that Billy was wrong, you would have to contradict the presented meaning of his average - that average wage increases were meagre. You wanted to show they were larger than that. For that you would need a statistic accurately measuring what is meant by the English term "average wage increase" in a discussion like this - it means the ordinary hourly wage increase enjoyed by the ordinary "middle of the pack" wage earner, the kind of hourly wage increase most people enjoyed. For that, you need the median hourly wage increase. Your yearly mean wage earnings do not work, because they conceal the critical matter of total hours worked and are vulnerable to deflection by outliers in the data. For all you know, your entire "average wage increase" is an artifact of all those part-timers you say have disappeared working full time hours now - that would bump the yearly mean wage total significantly. Maybe nobody at all got a single hourly wage increase in the whole country, by your numbers - they don't distinguish that situation. Especially because so much of it is early retirement and otherwise unwanted disability, in the job shortage after the crash. You describe that as "choosing not to work", and refer to it as a good thing, a desirable option. It is not. It is a hardship, caused by a still damaged economy.
LOL, oh yeah…maybe we need to add dementia to your list of afflictions. You don’t remember writing this: No they can’t both be correct. I showed BillyT’s numbers were not consistent with fact. Contrary to your belief, numbers are not magical they don’t change based on who is making the calculation. They are one of the few things which remain constant in this universe. BillyT has not disclosed how his number was derived or who provided it. But it is definitely not consistent with known fact or it has been grossly misrepresented. And that has nothing to do with your visions of median. I get it; you are infatuated with the median statistic. Someone apparently just taught you about the median statistic. But it isn’t relevant to the discussion BillyT and I were having; BillyT introduced the average statistic and the discussion was about the average. If you want a discussion on medians, start another thread. This just demonstrates once again you know virtually nothing of the subjects upon which you opine. Huh? You really don’t understand math. Nor is it relevant to the discussion BillyT and I were engaged in. Our conversation was about the veracity of his mystery numbers. He has not identified his source. Although he did later say that they were quarterly numbers versus annualized numbers which is a little tricky because there is no seasonal adjustment and it is a small measure and doesn’t reflect changes over a significant course of time. So one of difference between BillyT’s number and mine is time. Mine is annual and his is represented to be quarterly. I suspect BillyT’s source may have used the BLS hourly survey as you did. I haven’t checked, because it’s BillyT’s job to reveal his sources. And if his source did use the BLS data, it would be wrong for the same reasons you were wrong in using the BLS data. As I previously pointed out to you the BLS hourly survey doesn’t include all wage earners. It doesn’t include military personnel. It doesn’t include most professionals, business owners, managers, doctors, etc. So it is missing a significant portion of wage earners. That is a potential cause for the variance. In any case the variance has nothing to do with your median infatuation. I don’t think you understand the concept. It is a good thing that people have enough wealth that they can choose to not work. That is what the work force participation number is all about. It shows people are opting out of the work force and mostly due to demographic changes in the work force. Baby Boomers are retiring. As I have repeatedly said in this thread, unemployment numbers have fallen dramatically from double digits to mid-single digits. Every month between 200k and 300k new jobs are being created. The number of marginally attached workers, the under employed workers, have fallen by half. Those are all good things. If people want work they remain part of the work force and are included in the labor force participation rate. Actually, I said there are two reasons for the shrinking labor force. First, the baby boomers are retiring from the labor force. The second is people are choosing not to work because they do not want to work. And if they fall into this category, they could be going back to school. They could be taking time out from working. Either way, they have some other source of income, because if they choose not to work or to not go to school, they are not entitled to public welfare benefits. Wither people retire, go back to school, or just drop out of the work force for personal reasons, it is a choice. No one is forcing people to retire, go to school or drop out of the work force. If people seek public aid during their period of unemployment, they must seek employment and if they do they will be accounted for as unemployed and counted as part of the work force. And as we all should know, unemployment has fallen dramatically since The Great Recession of 2007-2009. That means more and more people are becoming employed. All the jobs lost during that period have been recovered. PS: Do you really think people there has been some change which has caused people to become more disabled than in the past? If so, I would like to see some evidence of that assertion.
If he did, he used medians - so your claim that you were using means to compare with Billy's means is bullshit as well as a poor excuse for making that mistake. When calculating changes in wages paid by the hour, one often leaves out "wages" (you are now including salaries and ownership profit taking ?!) not paid by the hour. That's called making sense. Which is something that using a yearly total mean of all wages to calculate changes in hourly wages does not do. Many are retiring early, without enough wealth, without full benefits even, because they are forced to. They are old, they are unemployed, and there are no adequate jobs for them. That is a hardship, not a good thing. They don't pay very well, most of them. That's why the median hourly wage is stagnant, and has been for years. Walmart - the single largest employer in many areas, the other frequent major employer in the US being one of the big temp agencies - recently raised its floor rate to 9@hr, and it made headlines. That will of course boost your mean yearly total wage statistic - great news for the economy! Nope. But there have been some significant changes in various laws, as well as the economy, that act to coerce people into claiming disability benefits rather than remaining in the work force. If you look here, say, http://www.ssa.gov/disability/data/ssa-sa-fywl.htm you discover that the number of Americans under age 64 receiving Social Security benefits rose by about 1.6 million, or about 20%, between 2007 and 2012, and this number is almost completely accounted for by the increase in "workers" receiving benefits - not children, or widows - and about 40% of that number is accounted for by the increase in "SSI" recipients, which counts those on disability. The other 60% would be those early retirees, starting their SS benefit career at 2/3 what they could get by waiting another 3 years and making all the necessary adjustments in their lives accordingly.
Mystery Of America's Missing Wage Growth Has Been Solved: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Here's my question: How many Government Schooled (and qualified) functional illiterates are going to get one of these sweet plumb supervisory roles? My guess is: Not many. Here's something else that's interesting: U.S. Millennials Come Up Short in Global Skills Study February 17, 2015 Another big tick for American Government schools - the most recent graduates are not only functionally illiterate (or just barely squeaking by as "literate"), but they're graduating with pretty much ZERO skills required to get a job doing anything other than Labor Cog - in the global market place. Which makes sense on a number of levels. A) Government Schools were designed from the bottom up to create compliant labor-cogs with as little thinking skills other than to raise hand to ask permission when needing to pee (See: MCQ Test). Which comes in handy in prison or on a factory floor. B) Most Government Unioned School "Teachers" are working under a Babyboomer legacy or are themselves from the Baby-generation. (See: 13th month bonus on top of 4 months holiday, great medical, great job security [except where in competition with a Charter School], great retirement benefits, and much higher pay than most of the parents who's children they brainwash) C) In the Progressive Central Banker ran "New" Economy, Millennials are expected to rent from a Baby-gen, you know "for the Good of Society". No need to have a family of their own when they can instead work as labor cog in HYPER-regulated un-free-regulatory-captured-markets and fulfill their role as mindless consumer Tax Chattel .... or, if they're really really super lucky, get a job as functionally illiterate Cannon Fodder dying for the State in one of the Government's $$600 BILLION A YEAR phoney Terrorizing Wars. Government Central Planning: Destroying your society, so you don't have to. Enjoy the New Economy - it isn't going anywhere, any time too soon. Now, when can we start the 'Redistribution' for the "Good of Society"? 20 years? 10? 30? Then we'll sit through another decade or so of Progressive Socialism and Warmongering before some States finally do the right thing and peacefully, and Democratically, vote in favor of succession. And then, finally, we'll get that "Change You Can Believe In". Until then, enjoy the Great Recovery - We deserve it.
As has been repeatedly proven, BillyT did use an average. Do I need to explain to you the difference between average and median? Have you forgotten what you have been arguing? Contrary to your assertions, it is appropriate to compare likes with likes. It isn’t appropriate or correct to compare apples to oranges or means to medians. That is really the unpleasant fact that you seem to have great difficulty wrapping your head around. BillyT and I were discussing his average number for which he has not provided a source. Don’t look now Ice, you have been caught making shit up yet again. This is the second time I have provided BillyT’s post to you. So either you are being dishonest or that dementia thing is getting worse. No, that’s called you not knowing what you are talking about. Wages include are more than just hourly wages. That is why salary data is included in the Wage Index. If you knew what you have been talking about this shouldn’t be the revelation it apparently is to you. As evidenced by BillyT’s quote, BillyT didn’t limit his assertion to just hourly workers. Face it Ice, you don’t know crap and you are just making stuff up. Oh, then where are they getting the money they need to live on? As I pointed out, they can choose to work or not work. Slavery was outlawed some time ago Ice. They have two choices, work, or not work. If they chose the latter, they need to fund their life style. They have two funding choices. Fund their lifestyle through savings or family, or public largess either public assistance or disability. There is a range of disability ranging from mildly to completely disable. Few people are completely disabled. And there is nothing to indicate the percentage of disabled people have grown, if that were true it would be a condemnation of all the labor protection laws that Democrats have put in place over the years. Getting a significant pay raise doesn’t sound stagnant to me…just saying. Oh and where is the evidence for that claim? I don’t know what you think those references say, but they don’t say what you need them to say. As I said before there is a range of disabilities ranging from a few percent to 100 percent. The number of totally disabled people is small as a percentage of the population and remains small as a percent of the population. You have no evidence to support your assertion that people are being forced into public assistance and that is a reason for the decline in work force participation as you assert. I pay attention to business news and politics and that is the first time I have ever heard anyone make that assertion. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. So where is your proof?
Tied for Last Across the board, young Americans fared poorly compared to those in the other countries studied. They tied for last, with Italy and Spain, in math skills. In problem-solving, they again performed at the bottom of the pack, with Ireland, Poland, and the Slovak Republic. U.S. millennials also had lower literacy scores than peers in 15 out of 22 countries, tied with a few, and outperformed only peers in Italy and Spain. Younger members of the cohort, who presumably grew up under the last decade of high-stakes accountability initiatives, were no more competitive globally than older millennials. Government Schooling - where 'success' is measured as a 1 in 5 functionally illiterate graduation rate. But, hey, that's all just part of the so-called 'conservative myth' (whatever the f*ck that's supposed to mean) that Government just doesn't work... even when it so clearly doesn't. The derogatory idiom "Good enough for Government work" was coined for a reason.
Then he didn't use my BLS source, and you were wrong to suggest he did. You are wrong to try to excuse your error by claiming it matches Billy's, whether it does or not; either way, it makes no difference to my argument, which is that you cannot reliably contradict Billy's number with a yearly total mean wage. That is true regardless of where Billy got his number. Then trying to claim they have gone up by a certain amount "per hour" makes no sense. If you want to talk about wages per year, you can make an argument for including salaries and profits and pirate gold you found in your yard and whatever. If you want to talk about wages per hour, including salaries and profits and such will make your number meaningless. They aren't paid by the hour. Hourly wage increases are increases in hourly wages. The language is English, the words are simple and clear. Salaries, profit taking from business operations, bonuses and partnership earnings, profit sharing, probably even overtime premiums in this context, are not hourly wages. Hourly wages are monies paid to people for an hour of work effort put in. Do you want to talk about per hour increases in hourly wages, like you said your .27 measured, or not? The entire economy has not had a significant pay raise since Reagan. You were talking about the economy, under the current government, right? The median hourly wage, the fundamental measure of prosperity for America as a whole, is stagnant. Has been for years. I made no such assertion. I posted links to the SSA stats (and extracted a couple of key numbers, to save you the trouble) supporting my observation about the early retirements you find such a wonderful feature of post-crash US economic life. They have risen more than 20% since the crash, and almost half of the increase is on disability. If you have a quarrel with that direct evidence, let's see it. Government schools seems to work in dozens of places - they're kicking US butt, for sure. Any idea why the US system - under the most capitalistic, market-dominated, rightwing government in the Western industrialized world, with private and non-government schools all over the country and no Federal or national curriculum, teacher standards, etc - is so much worse at educating children than all those socialized, government-paid, government-run school systems are?
Are you really that disconnected Ice? What don’t you get about: So how can I suggest BillyT’s source? I didn’t say where BillyT derived his number, because BillyT hasn’t’ disclosed the source of his number as I have said on a number of occasions. And you introduced the BLS data long before my speculation on what may have inspired BillyT’s number. And in that speculation, I said I had not checked it to confirm it. It could very well be, given BillyT’s reticence to disclose the source of his metric, the source could well be and likely is specious and the number is a complete fabrication. On the good side it appears you are now abandoning your crap about how I should have used the median. Here is the bottom line, if you want to prove an average is wrong, you don’t do it by using medians as you have up till now consistently claimed. It’s just that simple, but it appears to be a very difficult concept for you. As I previously told you BillyT didn’t initially disclose his number was a quarterly number. And as I previously pointed out, these numbers are generally presented as annual numbers because there are seasonal variations in quarterly numbers and because the actual wage numbers are only published annually, not monthly or quarterly. Additionally, you can use a quarterly number to create an annualized number. It happens all the time, with the inflation number being a case in point. And where did I ever say my number matches BillyT’s number? If it did, BillyT and I would be in agreement and clearly we are not. This is obviously difficult for you. You seem to be under the impression salaried workers don’t work hours too. I have news for you, they do. The average hours worked is derived from surveys, which include hourly as well as salaried workers. I was a salaried worker for almost my entire adult life. I wasn’t paid hourly, but I still reported my hours. And I had an hourly rate even though I was a salaried employee. My salaried workers also had an hourly rate. The CEO had and hourly rate. Just because you are salaried, it doesn’t mean you don’t have an hourly pay rate. I know that blows your mind. But your inability to comprehend doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense. And the fact is if the issue is wages, which it was, then you need to include all wages which is what the Wage Index does. By the way, pirate gold and profits are not wages. Aside from being wrong, this isn’t relevant to the topic at hand. So you didn’t say this? You clearly said people were being forced and you went on to say they were coerced. Yeah, and as I said before the SSA numbers didn’t do anything for your case, the fact is Baby Boomers are retiring and leaving the work force. That is why the work force is shrinking…not because people are being forced into retirement. Your referenced showed disability was very low in the population at large. It was higher for older people and that has always been the case. Contrary to your assertion nothing has changed on the disability front which would account for the changes we see in the labor force. Providing a link to the SSA database does nothing to support your assertions. Pull out the specifics you think support your assertion and I will gladly blow them out of the water for you.
I said everything in the quoted text. I did not say what you claimed I said in your latest misrepresentation. In general, giving your falling accuracy percentage, I haven't said anything you claim except actual quotes. It is indeed a very simple mistake, and your stubborn insistence on making it has become a bit bizarre. You cannot prove Billy's number wrong by using a yearly total mean wage to get a different wrongheaded "average" you like better for whatever confused reason - not even if you cleaned your idiocy up by removing the salaries and profits and so forth. Your yearly total mean wage does not allow you to determine an "average hourly wage increase" in any relevant sense. It cannot be done. The attempt is a mistake. You have to use either the median hourly wage as paid to people who got paid by the hour, or the median hourly wage increase as received by those so paid, if you want to talk about "average hourly wage increase". Nothing else works. They don't get paid by the hour. By definition. So averaging their total yearly take in to determine an average hourly wage for people who do get paid by the hour is stupid. According to you they are, as posted above and linked: the money taken home from their businesses by the owners counts as wages - that's yearly profits from a car dealership being added into an average hourly wage calculation, presumably along with the sales commissions, by you. The returns to silent partners in a medical clinic, you are adding in. The salary compensation, including profit sharing by formula, accruing to lawyers in firms you are including. Given that, I don't see why pirate gold obtained by mowing a lawn wouldn't count. Once you start adding salaries and profits and other stuff that is not hourly wages into an hourly wage calculation, there doesn't seem to be much reason to exclude anything. How about the yearly take from playing online poker? Post 26, last two paragraphs. My guess is you can't get my assertion straight in the first place, let alone deal with the implications of the specifics as presented - but hey: surprise me. One misleading circumstance: a lot of low level supervisory jobs have been eliminated - so the average wages are rising without much actual change in the jobs or their compensation.
Government works for THEM - not for us. In Japan, which topped the list in terms of Problem Solving Skills, they spend nearly HALF as much per GDP as we do and, get this, they have a thriving Private educational system as well - not to mention they don't pay their teachers a 13th bonus for graduating functional illiterates. They're also monocultureal - this adds up to a huge amount of savings. Japan also had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, BEFORE they adopted the Prussian Government Schooling model. Japanese language is also different. They actually think differently. Words like "I" are often never spoken in Japan (as an example). Japanese mothers traditionally stay at home with their children and *gasp* raise them. Read to them. Most Japanese children at age 8, can read better than 25% of all American adults! In Japan, the idea of putting a child into a Day Supervision Clinic/Center at age 6 weeks would be tantamount to child abuse. In the USSA you can get Government issued credits for doing just that - you know, for the "Good of Society". We are not them. They are not us. What works for a monocultureal society with 1000s of years of cultures that was already topping the list in terms of literacy and numeracy long before Government schooling does NOT work for a multiculture composed of functionally illiterate imbeciles who's Government School system is designed to train children to raise their hand when they need to pee and sing their allegiant to the State so that one day, they can graduate as a functional illiterate and fulfil their role as Cannon Fodder. "I pledge my allegiance and life to a silly peace of cloth on a pole....." The State is the new God. The POTUS replaces the Pope. The Bishops don Senators costumes as quickly as any other. The Christian becomes the Citizen. And there we go. Don't worry, nothing you do or say or think is going to change the fact that each and every year 20% of Government Schooled children will graduate functionally illiterate. Nothing. It doesn't matter who you vote for. Every year Government Schooling will pump out useless labor-cogs into a hyper-regulated market where they have zero skills to apply with any amount of usefulness. Those that do, will use the State to regulate and capture whatever markets they find and through rent-seeking make a living. And life in the USSA will simply continue to get less prosperous. Just as mothers had to enter the workforce to maintain the "American" Dream, soon their children will be working alongside them to make rent to the SlumLord. And it will all seem quite normal, the USSA will be no different than any other 3rd world shit-hole. Isn't Central Planning wonderful? Too bad they can't figure out how much I value my coffee cup, but, maybe some day they will? Until them, the Police State will have to do. Enjoy the Great Recovery.
i guess your one of those fuctionally illiterates considering you don't know what the term centrally planned economy means? so than if your one of those ignorant plebs why should we listen to drivel you spout? seriously give up your childish ideology and enter the real world. do you know how foolish you look ranting about problems caused by your ideology?
I quoted your words verbatim as you just admitted, so how were your words misrepresented? The fact is they were not. This is yet another case of you writing something stupid and later pretending you didn’t write those words. That is very disingenuous, but it is the norm with you Ice. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt Ice. Just because you don’t understand math, it doesn’t mean the rest of the world shares your inability. As has been repeated over and over again, this discussion isn’t about a median statistic. It is about an average. When the discussion is about averages, you talk averages. What you are advocating is mixing averages and medians. That’s stupid. No one with any knowledge of statistics would do what you are advocating. For the umpteenth time, this isn’t about medians. If BillyT had initiated the discussion about a median statistic, then we would be talking about medians. But that isn’t what happened. You just can’t get that through your head. Salaried workers don’t get paid by the hour, but that doesn’t mean their hours are not tracked because they are. So how many hours they worked is knowable and can be used to develop an hourly rate. It gets back to that math thingy and knowledge of business that you are not very good at. Business owners pay themselves a wage. Yeah, owners may be entitled to a share of the profits of the company. But profits are not treated as wage income by the IRS and are not reported as wage income. So again, your allegation is just flat out wrong. Your whole paragraph is a testimony of your ignorance of finance and business operations. Except as you have been repeatedly told, profits and “other stuff” are not wages. It’s pretty clear you don’t know what you are writing about and it’s pretty clear you are a liar when on those few occasions when you realize you are looking pretty stupid. “Stupid is as stupid does”
By you inaccurately paraphrasing them and falsely attributing claims to them, and using the paraphrases and false claims rather than the quotes as a basis for your responses, as if your garbage were my posting. I was the first to point that out, specifically. And as I noted, that initial mistake has led you into error and confusion. And you have so far refused to correct that initial mistake, and put the discussion on a sensible and informative footing. Some are, some aren't. It doesn't affect their earnings, because they aren't paid by the hour. That's theoretically possible for each individual salaried worker, and if done for each and every such worker various statistics could be generated. Nobody is doing that here - certainly not you, you are using total yearly means. And of course that number would be useless for calculating whether or not they had received a raise in their hourly wages, because it would vary by total hours worked from week to week and month to month and year to year regardless of whether their salary had been raised or lowered or kept the same. Why yes, by you. Alternating with being told by you that the money business owners keep for themselves from the generated surplus, the money paid in profit sharing and bonuses, shares of income from partnerships paid to doctors and lawyers and such on quarterly or other intervals, salaries paid by the seek or month or year regardless of basis, and so forth, are all "hourly wages". The way a business owner pays themself an hourly wage is by hiring themself as an employee and punching a time clock. All those hourly wages show up in the BLS stats I used - as with any other employee. The extra business owner compensation - the stuff you are insisting on corrupting your calculation with - is taken weekly or quarterly or at tax year end as a salary or bonus or other compensation from what would otherwise be profits. That compensation does not reflect hours worked, and cannot be used to calculate an hourly wage in the first place, let alone a change in hourly wages - hours worked can vary from 0 to thousands, without affecting it. Once you have expanded your notion of hourly wages to include essentially every source of employee or ownership income, it's not easy to relate them to hours worked- which is why you can't make sense on the topic. Taking a yearly total mean completes the mushmaking. The result is that your calculated changes in the "average hourly wage" are meaningless - no one can tell from your numbers whether people paid by the hour in the US are getting paid more, less, or the same as last year, on average.
Oh hogwash. You weren’t paraphrased. You were quoted verbatim. Well more accurately you were the only one to “point out” and in doing so revealed your inability to understand simple mathematical concepts (e.g. the difference between means and medians and the importance of not mixing our confusing them). Except, there was no mistake, the mistake would have been mixing medians and means as you advocated. Are you really that dense Ice – apparently so. You don’t seem to be able to understand the difference between medians and means. The discussion was about a specious average statistic introduced by BillyT. It wasn’t about medians. Your fascination with the median statistic doesn’t change the fact the discussion was about an average statistic. Apparently you have recently become familiar with the median statistic but apparently don’t have the cognitive ability to understand when it is appropriate and when it isn’t. As has been repeatedly explained to you, if BillyT had introduced a median as a point for discussion, then the appropriate statistic would be median. But he didn’t. You have been all over the place on this, basically you have repeatedly lied. You go back and forth. You have said BillyT didn’t cite an average statistic when clearly he did. I have quoted BillyT in which he specifically uses the word “average” in direct reference to item in question. The only one, who has made a mistake Ice, is you and you have tried to cover your blatant mistakes with lies. Say what? As usual you aren’t making sense Ice. This gets back to your ignorance Ice and your habit of sticking your head in the sand in order to ignore evidence and simple mathematics. As has been repeatedly pointed out to you, wages are known and hours are known. Wages are known through tax filings. Hours worked are known through the Census Bureau Survey where individual workers and employers are surveyed. Further, wither and individual did or didn’t receive a pay wage isn’t relevant. What matters is the total wages received by the worker. Bonuses are wages. Even though bonuses are not based on an hourly wage, they are still wages. You don’t seem to understand accounting either. At the companies I worked for and owned, hourly workers received bonuses and those bonuses are counted as wages. Now your inability and unwillingness to understand doesn’t change reality. Not surprisingly, you are not making any sense yet again. You are very confused. Business profits are not wages. All one need do to understand various incomes is to look at a Form 1040. Your inability to understand the difference makes me think you have never seen Form 1040. You have probably only used the IRS Form 1040EZ. Business income isn’t the same thing as wage income. As a business owner, I can tell you without equivocation, you don’t have a fucking clue! J Business owners if they pay themselves at all and are active in the business, they are salaried employees – not hourly workers. Where is your evidence to back up your assertion? It’s probably with all the other material you have been unable to produce. As has been repeatedly pointed out to you the BLS hourly wage data you cited is a subset of total wages. Perhaps you should go back and carefully read that discussion again. I explained the holes in your BLS data. Do I really need to repeat them once again for your edification? The topic was all wages. Your BLS number cited a subset of all wages. It really isn’t that complicated but it appears very difficult for you to understand. Apparently among the many other things, you are unable to discern between a wages and business profits or between exempt (i.e. salaried employees) versus nonexempt employees (hourly workers) and that is very evident in your paragraph. You are getting lost in the detail. You cannot see the forest for the trees. It really isn’t that complicated. In order to calculate the metric I referenced you need to things, total wages (provided by the IRS) and the hours worked (provided by the Census Bureau). What Joe Schmo earned in Podunk, Iowa isn’t relevant. Wither Joe got a raise or not isn’t relevant. We are talking about macroeconomics here – another one of those concepts that appears to be lost on you. Per my previous posts, there are problems associated with using quarterly number because of seasonality factors (e.g. timing of bonuses). That’s why BillyT’s use of quarterly unadjusted data was wrong. I used annual data – no seasonal adjustment needed. Yes it is easy. But you are getting off track again. This discussion was about a specific metric BillyT referenced from a secret unnamed source which claimed to be an average for all wages. The discussion wasn’t about the BLS number. It wasn’t about medians. It wasn’t about your ignorance and cognitive deficits. You introduced all those things into the conversation. Just because you cannot relate wages to hours worked, others can. If you had some understanding of business, of economics, of accounting, you wouldn’t be making these stupid comments. You began this discussion by arguing I was wrong in disputing BillyT's average hourly wage metric by using an average wage metric based on real and very public data. You claimed I should have used a median. I endlessly told you that was inappropriate given the discussion was about averages. It is apparently one of the many simple concepts that stretches your cognitive abilities to the breaking point. Then you introduced the BLS hourly data, which is a subset of wage earners, when BillyT and I were discussing all wage earners. Face it Ice, you have just dug a deeper hole for yourself.
When you claim I posted something, and the words are different than the ones I used, that's called a paraphrase. When the meaning is also different, the claim is wrong. All your paraphrases in this thread are wrong. Indeed. It is the subset called "hourly wages". That happens to be the subset you made claims about - you claimed they had risen an average of $.27. Your metric is a mean, vulnerable to outliers and small group increases. Also, you don't have data on the individual's hours worked for many kinds of "wages" such as you are lumping in with hourly wages. You often don't have reliable data on the hours worked per household. So your metric does not tell us anything reliable about most people's hourly wages. Your use of annual total means to make claims about "average" hourly wages was an error. You need to use medians, and you need to use hourly wages.
You were quoted verbatim. That isn’t paraphrasing Ice. My pointing out your many errors of fact and reason isn’t paraphrasing either Ice. Your accusation paraphrasing isn’t a justification of your errors in fact and reason. Well if I had paraphrased you might have a point. Pointing out our many errors of fact and reason isn’t paraphrasing Ice. You were quoted verbatim and you have denied many times what you have clearly written only to subsequently rewrite those errors of fact and reason again and again. If I incorrectly paraphrased you, then you should be able to prove it and you can’t, because I haven’t. Your accusation of incorrect paraphrasing is just a distraction. As you have been repeatedly informed, that isn’t the issue here. BillyT and I were discussing the veracity of a metric he posted. It was an average. Our discussion was about the veracity of that metric. You intervened and accused me of being in error because I responded to BillyT’s metric proving it to be wrong with another average using the most accurate data sets. As has been told you umpteen times, IF BillyT and I were discussing the veracity of a median, then a recalculation of that metric using a median would have been appropriate. But that wasn’t the case. If I had recalculated the BillyT’s metric using a median as you advocate, I would indeed have erred, because a median would have been an entirely different statistic. I cannot prove or disprove the veracity of BillyT’s metric by using a completely different statistic. You don’t seem to be able to understand it is not appropriate to compare apples to oranges. You have this fetish for fallacious comparisons which transcends this thread. This wasn’t a discussion of which statistic was appropriate or better. This discussion was a about the veracity of a particular statistic BillyT introduced into the thread. You don’t seem to have the cognitive ability to understand that very simple fact. It is telling that you accuse me of error for using an average to show the error in BillyT’s average statistic, the statistic that began this discussion. But you have said nothing about BillyT being in error because he first used the average statistic. You are pursuing a personal vendetta because I have called out your nonsense in this and other threads. Huh? I guess you haven’t been paying attention, either that or you are significantly cognitively impaired.
Ransom Governance When Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republicans were less interested in her own record than using the session to complain about sitting AG Eric Holder. It was strange in its own right, but what happened next is even stranger. Since then, Republicans have offered all sorts of excuses for not advancing Lynch's nomination. Perhaps the most coherent excuse, even if it does not make sense, came from Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who explained that he wants an attorney general who opposes the White House. Other than that, it seems most of the standoff has to do with Republicans planning to run for office; Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) are expected presidential contenders, and Sen. Dave "Diaperman" Vitter (R-LA) hopes to succeed Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R). And as a result, Republicans are leaving an Attorney General they despise, Eric Holder, in office. Last week we heard from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the senior Republican from Kentucky, that Lynch would get her vote this week. That isn't going to happen. Steve Benen↱ explains the latest Republican excuse: Yesterday, the GOP strategy became clearer. McConnell seems to have kept things vague because he intended to break his word. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says there’ll be no vote to confirm Loretta Lynch as attorney general until Republicans and Democrats resolve a dispute over a human trafficking bill. “If they want to have time to turn to the attorney general,” then “we have to finish the human trafficking bill,” McConnell said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The Majority Leader added that he “had hoped” to allow the Senate to vote on Lynch, whose nomination has, by most measures, already waited longer than any other A.G. nomination in American history, but Lynch “will be put off again” unless Democrats agree to pass the human-trafficking bill that stalled last week. McConnell went on to say, “We have to finish the human trafficking bill. The Loretta Lynch nomination comes next.” Just so we’re clear, there’s no procedural concern or rule that must be followed. McConnell could bring Lynch’s 128-day wait to an end this morning, and by all appearances, she’d have the votes necessary to be confirmed. † † † And what of the human-trafficking bill? That was a bipartisan proposal, set to clear the chamber 100 to 0, but Republicans quietly added an anti-abortion provision and neglected to mention it to the Democratic co-sponsors. Dems, feeling betrayed and opposing the add-on, have decided to withdraw their support for the bill until the GOP majority takes the provision out. Republicans, of course, refuse to do that – and now McConnell is connecting all of this to Lynch’s nomination, effectively telling Democrats that the A.G. nominee will remain in limbo indefinitely unless they accept the bill, as is. Or put another way, the Senate is descending into a chaotic circus, in part because Republicans betrayed Democrats (sneaking anti-abortion language into a bipartisan bill), and in part because Republicans betrayed Democrats again (promising to bring Lynch up for a vote and then going back on their word). Republican governance is apparently a matter of political extortion: Give us what we want or we will refuse to fulfill our basic obligations. Remember how conservatives like to remind that "government doesn't work"? Again we find evidence that this is true according to Republican principles of governance; they refuse to perform their basic duties unless we all give them treats. Imagine showing up at work and saying, "Sorry, boss, I know you hired me and are paying me, and all, but I'm not going to do my job today unless you help me force my wife to have a baby." Yeah. Apparently this sort of thing is what Republicans vote for. Angry that their thesis about government dysfunction isn't necessarily true, they are out to prove the point, and plenty of voters in places like Iowa, Colorado, Kansas, and Louisiana to cheer them on. ____________________ Notes: Benen, Steve. "McConnell subjects Lynch to ransom-based governing". msnbc. 16 March 2015. msnbc.com. 16 March 2015. http://on.msnbc.com/1GLsGjI
