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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFact-checking the fact-checkers on Martin O'Malley and wages
Last edited Tue Jun 9, 2015, 08:16 AM - Edit history (1)
Kristin Sosanie ?@ksosanieGood read: On Substance, Martin OMalley Was Right About American Wages http://www.epi.org/blog/on-substance-martin-omalley-was-right-about-american-wages/
____The Washington Post fact checker says that The percentile data from EPI do not reflect individual Americans wages, and instead shows the distribution of wages. Thats flat wrong. Our data absolutely reflect individuals wages. What she means is that its not a panel datasetit doesnt follow the same individuals over time. Instead it is a repeated cross-section of American workers. This means that if OMalley had said the bottom 70 percent of American workers make less than 12 years ago it would have been perfectly accurate. By saying instead that 70 percent of us saw wage declines, OMalley opens the issue of individual workers getting older and potentially making more money as they get promotions and gain experience throughout their career.
Looking at individual workers wages over time to rebut a story about economy-wide wage stagnation artificially raises the bar. After all, people do tend to see their wages rise as they accumulate skills and experience, earning more in their thirties than in their twenties, more in their forties than in their thirties, and so on. This is called the age-earnings profile. Wage stagnation for the large majority of Americans (lets focus on workers lacking a four-year college degree, for example) has manifested itself in lower (or stagnant) wages for new workers as they enter the labor marketearning less in their twenties than an earlier cohort and seeing smaller wage growth (or flatter age-earnings profiles) as they age...
Further, OMalleys analysis of wages by percentile is much more relevant to the question hes speaking about: rising inequality. We could have wages rising over any specific workers lifetimes with overall wages not rising at all in the economy, as was just explained. But so long as wages for the bottom 70 percent of American workers fail to rise, this leads to a divergence between typical workers pay and productivity growth, which in turn leads to a sharp rise in economic inequality. And this is exactly what has happened to the U.S. economy in recent decades...
All-in-all, the judgement of the fact checkers on the overall truth of OMalleys claims are awfully nitpicky. OMalley is claiming that policies embraced by many in the GOP are bad for wage growth, and he cites a correct statistic that wages for the bottom 70 percent of American workers have been stagnant or worse for a dozen years. Thats also important for demonstrating that wage stagnation occurred in the last recovery (2001-2007) as well as in the current recovery, and is not simply a Great Recession phenomenon .
Did OMalley wordsmith it perfectly from our perspective? No, but EPI isnt running a campaign. We would note the broad-based wage stagnation of the past 12 years but also note the longer-term stagnation (other than the exception of the late 1990s and the spillover into 2000-02). But theres nothing misleading about OMalleys claimsit has indeed been a terrible 12-year period for wage growth for the vast majority of American workers, and this poor wage growth is a clear root cause of rising inequality.
read more: http://www.epi.org/blog/on-substance-martin-omalley-was-right-about-american-wages/
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Fact-checking the fact-checkers on Martin O'Malley and wages (Original Post)
bigtree
Jun 2015
OP
elleng
(131,197 posts)1. Thanks for fact checking the fact checkers, bigtree!
Some fact checkers have their own agenda. They are not always telling the truth.
Thanks for the post.
Koinos
(2,792 posts)3. Great post as usual, bigtree!
NCTraveler
(30,481 posts)5. Informative read and fact check.
No one should be taking issue based on concept alone.