And, importantly, tariffs are payed by the importing party. This means they affect the base price of the product and cannot be made progressive.

You could set up a deduction system... But that's retroactive (poor people still don't have that money for a whole year) and dramatically complicates their tax filing burden and financial record keeping requirements.

The rich can afford lawyers and accountants, so the IRS has been going after lower and lower income folk for their slip-ups more often. So yet more punishing the poor.

> 25% higher gas or food prices [due to tariffs]

Not a great example since energy and food are overwhelming domestically produced in the US. That doesnt mean there is no effect of tariffs in those categories, but it is much more muted than the headline numbers might suggest.

The middle of last century saw a labour shortage and much weaker monopsony labor makret ibfluence so that makes sense. The title of this article should be "in a surprise to noone, jobs that can be done by the widest percentage of the population are highly competitive and least responsive to wage pressure"

Yup. And then:

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

True, since they own all the beachfront property

Curiously in the Netherlands poverty has gone down. But that's because the government has a pretty solid Robin Hood system going on: take from the rich give to the poor.

The amount of wealth that is redistributed is frankly insane.

> The error people make all the time is assuming these groups are static and always have the same people in them over time.

Here is something I posted only a few days ago. It is Germany, but that point is certainly not much different from Anglo-Saxon countries.

It is a podcast, and in German too, but it is high quality and on one of the best stations in Germany (Deutschlandfunk's culture channel -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandfunk)

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eliten-seit-dem-kaiserr...

> Despite political upheavals over the past 150 years, Germany's elites have remained the same. Sociologist Michael Hartmann criticizes the fact that only four percent of the population shapes the country. He calls for a quota of working-class children for executive boards.

Yes individuals can rise and fall. For example, near the big turning points in German history the people in politics were renewed, after WWII people from the working class made it to the top posts. However, with increasing stability, over the last two decades even that group has become more and more of an insider club, and people from "lower classes" have a very low chance of rising to the tops. In the economy and when it comes to real wealth it is even worse. Connections and pre-existing wealth are a good predictor of where you will end up. You may have better luck with high-paying jobs, but they rarely lead to the top of the wealth pyramid and influence.

> The error people make all the time is assuming these groups are static and always have the same people in them over time.

I believe people actually involved in being active against top percentiles understand the difference between ongoing millions of annual income and one off inheritance. Have you got a some reason to think otherwise? I mean it was "occupy wall street", not "occupy people visiting retirement homes".

Income sure but wealth is what matters and the wealthiest make their money from capital gains, not income

Someone who inherits a couple million from a dead relative is not in the same league as Bezos who is rich enough to buy entire countries. Bezos is not coming down to the median any time soon. There are different leagues to this game.

Sorry but I don't understand your comment. Are you sure you are responding to the right message?

The OP specifically called out trickle-down economics. Which is a myth, a false belief that somehow not taxing rich companies and not redistributing a country's wealth through taxes and other means, companies will do the right thing eventually, and they will raise the wages instead by their own incentives.

Which they never do, and only raise wages as a very last resort. They do instead coordinated wage suppression, lobbying governments to take away labor rights from the labor force, outsource their operations, set up new offshore offices to escape paying taxes, etc

So what does your comment to do with that? I think your message doesn't address any of that

I suspect when people think of evil rich people, they are thinking if wealth, not annual income.

Why pick the top and bottom 0.1%? The top 3% and the bottom 40 are probably a less frothy cohort. What cited data would yoh find for those?

The tariff will cause, is causing in fact, increased prices. This will have a negative effect on their earnings.

The problem with comparing wages by cohort and average inflation is that inflation doesn't affect each cohort evenly. By and large, necessities continue to outpace top line inflation, and they have done so for decades. These include food, healthcare, housing, daycare, and education. Lower income people spend more of their income as a proportion on necessities, so they are impacted more than average by inflation. In order to tell if these lower income people have indeed received wage increases in line with inflation, we would need a model which uses a lower income basket of goods and services.

If I had to put on my tinfoil hat, I presume we don't do this because it would illustrate how badly the poorest are affected by inflation, and validate the frustrations they feel and which are clearly reflected in economic sentiment surveys.

I'm obviously not an expert, but assumed the same thing. I watched a fast food joint near me go from 9/hr to 21/hr in just a few years. Maybe that was just pandemic pricing, I don't know.

But getting >2x salary in such short order is outpacing pretty much everyone else, percentage wise.

If these reports say that things are better for low income people, why do people living that reality overwhelmingly disagree? Any statistics derived from inflation figures are doomed to be wrong when the inflation data was wrong to begin with.

I'm not in the US, but our inflation data was just as wrong as I've heard the US data was. Official numbers were 10% but literally everything went up at least 20%. Everyone I spoke to had their cost of living increase by significantly more than the official inflation figures.

And when "real wage growth" over 4 years is deemed to be just 13%, it's essentially guaranteed that real wage growth was in fact negative when you consider the disparity between real and official inflation figures. Statistics such as food insecurity rate, personal savings rate, and credit card delinquency rate would certainly support that.

I imagine how cost of living/inflation is calculated became a lot more complex in the past few years which skews the comparison. Especially because of cost of buying homes and cost of renting and greater disparity between rural and urban in the context of increasingly higher urban populations.

Also, predatory debt trapping, in part due to social media exposure and student loans, is way bigger thing now.

Activists love to use the Federal Minimum Wage, which has not increased in a long time (16 years), as their basis for that claim, ignoring how few workers are actually paid the Federal Minimum Wage. It's become a worthless metric for anything other than misleading arguments.

In addition to state and local governments setting their own minimums, the decline in young people and competition for workers in that sector from food delivery companies, has put wage pressure on fast food companies. Most wouldn't be able to open their doors if they tried to pay the Federal Minimum Wage. Had it been pegged to inflation, it would be $10.90/hour, which is less than what fast food workers are paid almost anywhere.

That's a study that underestimates growth in cost of living, i.e. gouging by rent seekers and businesses, and ignores changes in status, i.e. people leaving the job market or moving down to something worse. It's not surprising that the lowest income earners got a substantial boost in that period, since life is getting substantially more expensive. Importantly, I don't think their "real wage" inflation adjusted values are fair. People being told inflation was one amount when their actual CoL was vastly outpacing that was part of what fueled the anger that got Trump elected again, not that he has helped (or will help) anything since '23 where that analysis ends.

Anecdotally, many people I know would be in dire straits if they didn't own appreciating real property, because their cost of living adjustments at work aren't coming close to matching inflation. Others I know are actually in dire straits. Some are doing fine and getting the benefit of profitable work. Overall things have been awful economically post-COVID, and there are a lot of causal factors, from the policy decisions of the last decade, to the surprises of COVID, natural disasters and geopolitics, to the AI investment bubble and the changing zeitgeist. (Oh and let's not forget simple demographics, birth rate, etc...)

Good data! Looking at the objective figure on the chart is sobering tho - $4k in income!(I think it may go up after taxes given tax credits?)

Lots of contrarians or simply wealthy people think increasing supply of housing does not cause this.

They are not more likely to find themselves among the 40% of workers who's salaries are lagging inflation, they are more likely to be among the 60% who's salaries are outpacing inflation.

The FT is being disingenuous.

simply disabling JS seems to do it