According to Politico, corporate executives are up in arms about inflation and worried that President Biden just doesn't get it:
Craig Doescher, a Michigan-based consultant who works in a chief financial officer-type capacity for multiple businesses, said inflation is disrupting nearly every sector and that there’s little confidence that anyone in Washington has a short-term plan to deal with it.
"It didn't take long to completely break down the economy in 2020 but it's going to take a long time to put it all back together," Doescher said. "I've got clients who haven't given significant raises to unskilled workers in decades and now they are raising wages by 50 percent and still having trouble finding people. There is a lot to ride out here."
Where does this crap come from? I have in my hands a fresh, crisp ten-dollar bill that I will give to anyone who can point to an actual firm that is raising wages by 50% and still can't find workers. I'm serious. I realize that boring charts and BLS numbers are no longer of any use to journalists, but here's another crack at average pay over the past year:
You can see a couple of things here. First, overall inflation speeds up between September and October. That's the 6.2% headline number we've all seen. Second, the cost of labor slows down. Since January, labor costs have gone up far less than the overall inflation rate.
There has been an increase in the price of goods, and of course supply chain disruptions have made lots of things hard to get. That's a genuine problem, and it's one the White House ought to be focused on.
But labor costs? Give me a break. There are a dozen ways I can present this data, and they all tell the same story: wages haven't gone up substantially in 2021. There are a few narrow categories with high wage increases, but even those are nowhere near 50%:
The leisure industry (which includes restaurants) is the obvious outlier here, with every other industry at about 4% or less—lower than the overall rate of inflation.
Bottom line: There isn't any big surge in the cost of hiring new employees. There just isn't. Stop saying there is.
Lagging data
Sounds like an excellent question for an investigative pundit to put to Craig Doescher directly.
I see from the link that Ben White wrote this Politico story. Any way you could get him on the record with a response to this post?
Compared to zero, to which employers are accustomed, wages have increased “meaningfully.”
Kevin's a mess on this. Lagging government stats are the problem. When unemployment falls to 3% next year, he will freak out.
What the bell can a Prez do about inflation anyway? A lot garbage from that article
I could pretty easily see certain businesses raising service sector wages fifty percent. No problem. If a company's starting wage in 2020 was $9/hour for a teacher aide in a childcare, for example, or cashier at a convenience store, then raising these wages to $13.50/hour in 2021 is not an outrageous leap and has absolutely happened. Not in every child care or convenience store. But in some. The teacher's in those same preschools or the supervisors at the convenience store may not have seen this same leap. But a good anecdote about out of control wage growth doesn't have to accurately depict every job in the entire sector, just one job category in one business.
"... There isn't any big surge in the cost of hiring new employees. .."
This is nonsense. Like saying prices aren't rising because if you adjust for inflation they aren't.
What's happening though is prices are rising faster than wages. Which means employers get to keep the difference. Of course they still complain about rising wage labor costs because why shouldn't they? Complaining works every time after all.
It's a stupid complaint anyway. "Labor costs" is just another way of saying "wages of people who work for a living."
When they go up, that's money going into the pockets of working and middle class people instead of executives and board members. Obviously the executives and board members are going to whine about that, but I see no reason we should listen.
My response to that is: you have clients who have kept their employees at the same nominal wage for decades? Fuck you and your clients. You're all evil.
+1
He sounds like one of those guys who bitch about the minimum wage and then bitch when nobody wants to work for them. Because obviously it's laziness and not shitty pay that keeps workers away.
@pjcamp1905
Right there with ya, PJ.
Yes.
More MAGA managers should follow the lead of my first boss at the custard shack. Still remember actually feeling bad for him when I happened on the death notice in the Saturday edition of the local paper, in July 2001, after having nothing but scorn for him in the four years after I had quit my job at his & his brother's passed down custard drive-in. Then, about four years later, I was talking with a colleague at the movie theater, & found out how my boss met his end. Still shocked after all these years.
Had exactly that reaction reading exactly that passage, thanks for expressing it. And I think I can guess what this guy was advising these clients over those same decades.
Compared to 1% or 2% per year increases prior to the pandemic, these are huge.
Video I've never seen of the Beirut explosion,
https://old.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/qryblf/feeling_safe_at_this_distance_think_again/
The propaganda machine kicks into high gear. Democrats don’t have a clue how to do this, which is good, I suppose. This country’s descent into chaos is truly remarkable. And quite deserved.
"For at least the past 30 years, the Democratic Party has exclusively played defense, trying to win presidential elections and carve out legislative majorities and then govern from above, hoping against hope that the combination of gradual demographic change and incremental policy adjustments could change the political culture and turn back the rising right-wing tide. We're normal and reasonably competent and mostly well-intentioned, Democrats announced, to the delight of the vanishingly small proportion of the public who view politics in rational and unemotional terms. To say that it hasn't worked would be, quite literally, the understatement of the century."
I think this is right, it hasn't worked. Impatient progressives who think there has got to be a better way to run this country are right too. There is one, but Americans just aren't interested. So even though I supported Elizabeth Warren for president and think of the rest of the democratic party as war mongering degenerates, I know that this isn't the time for the progressive agenda. It is truly sad that among all this debate about infrastructure etc, there is no debate about increasing the defense budget. It is truly sad that Biden's one good foreign policy move - leaving Afghanistan - is seen as a bad one by so many democrats (Mr. Drum being a notable exception).
So every little thing that goes wrong on the economy will be turned into a headline like this from the NY Times: "The White House Says Its Plans Will Slow Inflation. The Big Question Is: When?" The answer is... probably never. If you really care about an overheating economy causing inflation, just stop buying junk. Drink less milk or whatever. Make that video game console last a bit longer. Skip those understaffed restaurants with bad food and long drive thru lines. Pretend for just one moment that the republicans making obscene cartoons about murdering democrats are a real threat and focus on defending yourself.
Or not... it really doesn't matter.
https://www.salon.com/2021/11/11/democrats-and-the-dark-road-ahead-theres-hope--if-we-look-past-2022-and-maybe-2024-too/
When Democrats lose in 2022 and 2024 it will be ugly. And quite well deserved.
"Will it mean the end of democracy forever and the inauguration of a Thousand-Year Reich ruled for all time by a gaggle of white supremacist douchebags? No, of course not. Will it suck? Yes. Will it suck worst of all for people who don't have all the unexamined privileges of someone like me? Yes. But to pretend that the deeply offensive and moronic (and evil) prospect of a Trump 2.0 regime will mean the end of history and the end of politics and "a boot stamping on a human face forever" is insulting and untrue. Why do we think we're special? In almost every European nation, not to mention the nations of the developing world, there are living people who have survived periods of fascistic or autocratic rule and come out the other side. Millions of people live under such regimes right now. It might just be our time to get schooled by history."
I don't get the "deserved" thing. The American south did not "deserve" Jim Crow , which was prototype fascism before fascism.
I'm referring to the US as it exists today. Whatever republican fascism has in store, it is the result of actions and policies of the political class, the media, and the voting public. Dysfunction has brought us to this point in history where so many are prepared to throw the country into chaos for fun, profit... entertainment. A society which chooses dysfunction and corruption deserves the result. In my opinion.
Lol, nope. Fascism was from the left hegelian movement. Morons like up you are so stupid, you don't even get it. Maybe a nostril rip would serve well??? Pain can force education.
Jim Crow was a propertarian thing.
You'd be pure comedy gold, if you weren't so obnoxious. No one here - or on any comment board - displays more confusion and misapprehension while boasting of your imagined understanding and knowledge than you. An internet clown.
"It all makes sense" indeed.
Stop the progtard stuff nobody wants. It was the progressive who asked for Nazism in Germany. You literally were scared of the plutocracy and you asked for the dark half of the left hegelian's to save you by 1932. The Nazis then went into small rural towns killing and raping until they gave in. Is that want now proggies. Those peckers bother you more than you like the negro. If it means killing everyone, that will be ok.
I am seeing it now. My goodness. It all makes sense.
Blame Biden for ruining Christmas!
Trigger a recession before the mid-terms!
The Fed has been slowing its stimulus activities. This current spike will drop down a bit. But the real way to deal with inflation will be dealing with monopolies and what are effectively cartels. That part will take longer.
Ruined Christmas?
Even with the Biden supply chain blowup, when I went to the instore Starbucks at Target yesterday, I got my latte in a Christmas cup.
& lord knows, if anyone would want Biden to sink to lend a political opening, it's Howard Schultz!
The chain is already mending....
Those cups are EVIL....Christmas is ruined!!!
😉
"I've got clients who haven't given significant raises to unskilled workers in decades"
.... well there's your problem, right there
******************OT COVID NEWS************
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/11/10/1054224204/how-sars-cov-2-in-american-deer-could-alter-the-course-of-the-global-pandemic
{snip}
In September of last year, computer models suggested SARS-CoV-2 could easily bind to and enter the deer's cells. A recent survey of white-tailed deer in the Northeast and Midwest found that 40% of them had antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.
New coronavirus, likely from dogs, infects people in Malaysia and Haiti
GOATS AND SODA
New coronavirus, likely from dogs, infects people in Malaysia and Haiti
Now veterinarians at Pennsylvania State University have found active SARS-CoV-2 infections in at least 30% of deer tested across Iowa during 2020. Their study, published online last week, suggests that white-tailed deer could become what's known as a reservoir for SARS-CoV-2. That is, the animals could carry the virus indefinitely and spread it back to humans periodically.
If that's the case, it would essentially dash any hopes of eliminating or eradicating the virus in the U.S. — and therefore from the world — says veterinary virologist Suresh Kuchipudi at Penn State, who co-led the study.
{snip}
{snip}
lthough the virus doesn't seem to make the animals sick, Saif says, the new data from Iowa are "very concerning."
"Now the question is: Can the virus spill back from deer to humans? Or can deer transmit the virus effectively to grazing livestock? We don't know the answers to those questions yet, but if they are true, they're obviously concerning," she says.
**************Another concern, Saif says, is that SARS-CoV-2 could evolve inside the deer and create new strains of the virus.************* Researchers have already documented such a scenario with minks on farms in the Netherlands and Poland, she points out.
In those studies, farmworkers passed the virus on to captive animals. As the virus spread through the minks, it mutated and created new variants. These new versions of the virus then spilled back to the humans, the researchers reported.
At the end of day, tracking the emergence of new variants may become much more complicated, says Kuchipudi.
{snip}
I wondered how the deer were getting the virus from humans but given that they have found COVID in wastewater ...............
What is a concern is that the more this thing circulates the higher the chances become that a new variant that evades the post infection immunity and the vaccine induced immunity.
The numbers they are finding are very high in deer
Da Yoopers Variant of the Rona. The 3rd week of deer camp involves a ventilator.
Oh, who am I kidding? This would be the 2nd Yooper Variant of SARS-CoV-2 since I would think vaccine uptake in Stupak Country is likely unfathomably low.
From the Pioneer Press via Yahoo news, an Iowa study has found that up to 80% of deer in the state have been infected by COVID-19. So far it's unclear whether the virus seriously affects the deer, since most of the tests were on deer killed by hunters or vehicles. No clear cases of transmission from deer to humans yet.
Oh Deer!
Really the only response needed.
Kiners (I love that name BTW)
I also love the response to my post. But keeping up with the animal theme here's even more news:
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-11-12/cdc-shifts-pandemic-goals-away-from-reaching-herd-immunity
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, there has been one collective goal for bringing it to an end: achieving herd immunity. That’s when so many people are immune to a virus that it runs out of potential hosts to infect, causing an outbreak to sputter out.
Many Americans embraced the novel farmyard phrase, and with it, the projection that once 70% to 80% or 85% of the population was vaccinated against COVID-19, the virus would go away and the pandemic would be over.
Now the herd is restless. And experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have set aside herd immunity as a national goal.
The prospects for meeting a clear herd-immunity target are “very complicated,” said Dr. Jefferson Jones, a medical officer on the CDC’s COVID-19 Epidemiology Task Force.
Thinking that we’ll be able to achieve some kind of threshold where there’ll be no more transmission of infections may not be possible,” Jones acknowledged last week to members of a panel that advises the CDC on vaccines.
Vaccines have been quite effective at preventing cases of COVID-19 that lead to severe illness and death, but none has proved reliable at blocking transmission of the virus, Jones noted. Recent evidence has also made clear that the immunity provided by vaccines can wane in a matter of months.
The result is that even if vaccination were universal, the coronavirus would probably continue to spread.
“We would discourage” thinking in terms of “a strict goal,” he said.
To Dr. Oliver Brooks, a member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, it was a sobering new message, with potentially worrisome effects.
With just 58.5% of all Americans fully vaccinated, “we do need to increase” the uptake of COVID-19 shots, said Brooks, chief medical officer of Watts Healthcare in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, he said, Jones’ unexpected admission “almost makes you less motivated to get more people vaccinated.”
Brooks said he worries that as the CDC backs off a specific target for herd immunity, it will take the air out of efforts to run up vaccination levels.
And if public health officials stop talking about the “herd,” people may lose sight of the fact that vaccination is not just an act of personal protection but a way to protect the community.
A public tack away from the promise of herd immunity may also further undermine the CDC’s credibility when it comes to fighting the coronavirus.
On issues ranging from the use of masks to how the virus spreads, the agency has made some dramatic about-faces over the course of the pandemic. Those reversals were prompted by new scientific discoveries about how the novel virus behaves, but they’ve also provided ample fuel for COVID-19 skeptics, especially those in conservative media.
“It’s a science-communications problem,” said Dr. John Brooks, chief medical officer for the CDC’s COVID-19 response.
“We said, based on our experience with other diseases, that when you get up to 70% to 80%, you often get herd immunity,” he said.
But the SARS-CoV-2 virus didn’t get the memo.
“It has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, and it’s repeatedly challenged us,” he said. “It’s impossible to predict what herd immunity will be in a new pathogen until you reach herd immunity.”
The CDC’s new approach will reflect this uncertainty. Instead of specifying a vaccination target that promises an end to the pandemic, public health officials hope to redefine success in terms of new infections and deaths — and they’ll surmise that herd immunity has been achieved when both remain low for a sustained period.
“We want clean, easy answers, and sometimes they exist,” John Brooks said. “But on this one, we’re still learning.”
Herd immunity was never as simple as many Americans made it out to be, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on the challenges of communicating science to increasingly skeptical — and often conspiracy-minded — citizens.
It’s an idea that emerged about a century ago from the field of livestock medicine. Epidemiologists now calculate it with a standard equation. But like many tools that model a complex process with math, it makes some simplifying assumptions.
For instance, it assumes an unrealistic uniformity in the behavior of individuals and groups, and in the virus’ ability to spread from person to person.
So it doesn’t reflect the diversity of population density, living arrangements, transportation patterns and social interactions that makes Los Angeles County, for instance, so different from Boise County, Idaho. Nor does it account for the fact that Boise County, where less than 35% of adults are fully vaccinated, gets no protection from L.A. County’s 73% vaccination rate among adults.
“Humans are not a herd,” Jamieson said.
Public health leaders would have been better served by framing their vaccination campaigns around the need for “community immunity,” she said. That would have gotten people to think in more local terms — the ones that really matter when it comes to a person’s risk of infection, she added.
Changes in the coronavirus itself have also made herd immunity a moving target.
The calculation that produced a herd immunity estimate of 70% to 85% rests heavily on the innate transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2. But with the emergence of new viral strains like the Alpha and Delta variants, the virus’ ability to jump from person to person has escalated dramatically in the last year.
In addition, herd-immunity calculations presume that when people gain immunity, they remain immune for a known period of time. But it’s become clear that neither vaccination nor natural infection confers lasting protection. Booster shots or a “breakthrough” case might, but for how long is still unknown.
That’s just the way science works, said Raj Bhopal, a retired public health professor at the University of Edinburgh who has written about the maddening complexity of herd immunity.
For any agency engaged in public messaging, “it’s very hard to convey uncertainty and remain authoritative,” Bhopal said. “It’s a pity we can’t take the public along with us on that road of uncertainty
**************************************************************
I wonder how long it will be before we armchair QBs begin to realize that we are dealing with something very different here..
For big-money interests, which includes the big "liberal" media, almost any economic development means that the growth of wages must be restricted.
If Biden were King and he really wanted to bring prices down, he would decree wage increases for the areas which are holding things up because of lack of workers, such as trucking. This is how to draw workers back and increase production, alleviating the shortage of goods and services. The economy is still about four million workers short of the early 2020 level:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=IPgs
(This chart shows the actual number of workers missing. Kevin gets smaller numbers by using derivative measures, that is measures which bring in additional factors, but he doesn't really know what controls those other factors.)
Wow! Apropos of nothing, your formerly tiny "social" icons have expanded to gigantic size. Was that deliberate?
Followup shortly thereafter:
Thanks! the icons are now down to "small" (versus miniscule before). A big improvement.
Skept-
you said:
"This chart shows the actual number of workers missing"
Are they missing? If a person goes from being employed in IT to being an independent IT Professional "contractor" he still performs the service but is NOT considered an employee - correct?
So a independent contractor doesn't actually count in non farm payrolls.
The PPP also played into this.
Add to that the sheer number of retirees and we do have labor shortages.
But Trucking is the issue. There's just not enough of them. FedEx offered me $19/hr if I used my personal vehicle to deliver packages over the holidays. I said Oh hell no...........
$16/hr if you use their trucks.
The difference? Their truck maintenance, their gas, their computer to help with delivery efficiency, and their motor vehicle insurance. THOSE factors alone far out weigh the $3/hr premium for using my vehicle.
The BLS surveys evidently only cover payrolls while many truckers are independent "contractors". But according to a previous post by Kevin and other stories, truckers in the port industry are actually subject to special hardships because of the jammed-up conditions at the port, thus they would be even more likely than wage workers to stay out because they are not earning enough to break even. Actually the stories I have read say that truckers at the ports may have to wait absurd times in long lines to get their containers, so the holdup may not be lack of truckers, rather slow movements of containers in the ports themselves.
Here's Kevin's post about jammed-up ports: https://jabberwocking.com/there-is-no-shortage-of-truck-drivers/
Not to give away my naivety here, but isn't it possible for the feds to step in and alleviate the hang-up by, for instance, allocating a pot of money for extra pay to truckers working the ports, or even getting the national guard involved in pushing the containers out into the commerce stream? Is this sort of thing not an option?
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