If you will take a brief amble with me through some budget weeds, I assure you it will be in your interest.
Even people who pay some attention to such things don’t know that an important work-support for low-income families is scheduled to expire at the end of 2017. I’m talking about parts of the refundable portions of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) that were expanded in recent years. Without Congressional action, these improvements will go up in smoke at the end of 2017.
EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) — President Barack Obama acknowledged his pivotal role in the midterm political campaign Thursday, arguing that the November congressional elections are a referendum on his economic policies and blaming Republicans for blocking his efforts to boost wages and create more jobs. Continue reading Obama Defends Economic Progress On His Watch Ahead Of Midterms→
I don’t plan to publish this wage mash-up every quarter, but given the building and misguided pressure on the Fed to start raising rates to prevent allegedly incipient wage and price inflation, I thought I’d update the previous quarter’s result through the first half of this year.
We don’t yet have all the data I need to update my full-monty-wage-mash-up, but a few series to which I pay attention are now available for the first half of the year: median weekly earnings (MWE) of full-time workers and two flavors of average hourly earnings. What do they show?
Not much, in terms of wage pressures. MWE is a very noisy series–medians are a more volatile statistic then means–so in order to show underlying pace in nominal weekly earnings, I’ve smoothed the series (using an HP filter; both figures show year-over-year changes). Amidst the jumpiness, the deceleration is clear.
