Comment by Please_do_not_DM_me on 07/11/2023 at 02:52 UTC

3 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)

View submission: Casual Questions Thread

So the survey is here https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/06/us/elections/times-siena-battlegrounds-registered-voters.html[1][2] (You need an account to view it.)

1: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/06/us/elections/times-siena-battlegrounds-registered-voters.html

2: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/06/us/elections/times-siena-battlegrounds-registered-voters.html

I'm not actually seeing anything too strange here. One of the long term trends we've had in the US is for less educated persons to get poorer. This necessarily means poor people, i.e., minorities, get poorer. White men without college degrees in particular have lost more of their real wages since the mid 80s (edit: than other blocks). See, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf[3][4] Specifically page 13,

3: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf

4: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf

Men’s wages at the 10th percentile fell by 7.7% ($14.09 to $13.00) from 1979 to 2019. Within the group of low-wage male earners, however, White men experienced the largest percentage decline from 1979 to 2019, a drop of 2.0% ($14.68 to $14.38), and a 1.8% decline for Hispanic men ($11.45 to $11.25); Black men’s wages increased by 3% ($11.10 to $11.43)*

At the same time you see small increases for the wage of women, and minorities (presumably because their wages were so much lower to begin with.)

Now this report is using pre-pandemic data. So we'd need more information. I'll look at Michigan (That's where I live and I like to shit on this place so this will be fun for me.) For example real median household income has declined by about 5% since 2020. See, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSMIA672N[5]. Now since that's a median, persons below the median, so minorities disproportionately, have lost more than 5% real income.

5: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSMIA672N

Again, since I live here, I'm familiar with the prevailing minimum wage and I can do a semi-educated guesstimate of how much it's fallen. (Unfortunately as far as I know they don't collect data on this kind of thing so I have to guess.) Using, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL[6] I get about an 25% increase in costs due to inflation (from Aug. 2017 to Sep. 2023.) At the same time the prevailing minimum wage (again from Aug. 2017 to Sep. 2023) went from about $11 an hour to about $13 an hour. So around an 18% increase. So you'd maybe see almost double the percentage decline in real income for a large number of minorities.

6: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

So what's the theory? The people who are responding negatively are actually being negatively effected by the our current economy. They're loosing real income and there's not enough movement, or rhetoric or whatever, from the administration to account for that.

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There's nothing here!