{"id":183492,"date":"2013-02-13T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/02\/13\/no-i-did-not-watch-the-state-of-the-union\/"},"modified":"2013-02-13T19:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-14T00:00:00","slug":"no-i-did-not-watch-the-state-of-the-union","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/02\/13\/no-i-did-not-watch-the-state-of-the-union\/","title":{"rendered":"No, I Did Not Watch the State of the Union"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just don&#8217;t like listening to him, so I read the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/the-press-office\/2013\/02\/12\/president-barack-obamas-state-union-address-prepared-delivery\">official transcript<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Rather unsurprisingly, he wants to <strike>throw mama from the train<\/strike> put forward &#8220;entitlement reform&#8221;, and he is patting himself on the back about the successes Obamacare (time will tell, but I doubt it), and killing bin Laden.<\/p>\n<p>He also waxes eloquent over lowering the deficit, because austerity has worked <b>so<\/b> well where it has been tried.  (Not)<\/p>\n<p>He also proposed infrastructure repair, but that&#8217;s not going to go anywhere.<\/p>\n<p>I think that the most substantive proposal he made was to raise the minimum wage to $9.00\/hour in stages through 2015.<\/p>\n<p>As compared to his promise from the 2008 campaign, raising the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011, this barely keeps up with inflation.<\/p>\n<p>At least he is proposing an automatic inflation adjustment.<\/p>\n<p>The real problem is that the minimum wage has plummeted relative to median and mean wages over the past 40 years<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/k0uF482.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/stats.oecd.org\/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=MIN2AVE#\">Source of data<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Based on this chart, it would appear that the minimum wage needs to increase by about 20% immediately to hit the trend (mid to upper 40% range), but the reality is that boosting the minimum wage has a big effect on boosting the lower half of the wage scale, so it probably needs to go up by about 40% to return to trend in the longer term.<\/p>\n<p>Note also how the lines for median (50<sup>th<\/sup> percentile) and mean (average) have diverged.&nbsp; This is an artifact of the increasingly inequality in our society.<\/p>\n<p>I call this the &#8220;Bill Gates walked into the room, so we are now all millionaires&#8221; effect.&nbsp; It makes the mean and the median diverge.<\/p>\n<p>Setting the minimum wage to slowly, and automatically, converge to 45% of the minimum wage over the next half decade or so would serve to do a lot to reverse the income inequality .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just don&#8217;t like listening to him, so I read the official transcript. Rather unsurprisingly, he wants to throw mama from the train put forward &#8220;entitlement reform&#8221;, and he is patting himself on the back about the successes Obamacare (time will tell, but I doubt it), and killing bin Laden. He also waxes eloquent over &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1142,975,978,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-employment","category-politics","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183492"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}