Responsible journalism requires hard thinking

Yearly growth of three percent in wages is significant if you are a parsimonious boss – an Ebenezer Scrooge of a fellow – hording your gold. Any worker with any pride – human beings with backbones – scoff at this year’s average three percent annual increase.

Yet, the big news a full week ago was of the “significant increase” in hourly wages, actually 2.9 percent. That’s below three percent.

At $15 per hour, a three percent raise is forty-five cents, or $18 a week, before taxes. Delete two dollars of payroll taxes and the net is $16 more weekly. That’s $68 a month, $832 annually. That’s a pizza a week, one nice dinner for one person a month or two plane tickets for the year. That is not wage gains funding anyone’s kid going to college.

Wall Street traders and economists calling those wage gains significant have hearts of coal and no soul at all.

Inflation is running below three percent a year. Three percent wage gains barely maintain living standards. Forget about getting ahead.

If the stock market rose three percent annually, Wall Street would wring its hands. If Dave Hedin’s sales improved three percent this year, he would be disappointed. For Pioneer Potatoes’ John Thulen, he would wonder what he did wrong if his 2018 profits were three percent above 2017’s.

Shame on any journalist or editor that allows an article under her name or in her paper that does not put significant in quotes or challenge the accepted account of significance.

Mainstream journalists, echoing government staff, bankers, traders and economists, are not doing their jobs. They are parroting the news, not reporting it. That is, they are merely repeating what the talking heads say. They are not evaluating either what they read or what the data means. They are not providing the necessary, cogent analysis making sense of the numbers and placing them in context.

Wage growth since 2009 has been flat. Wage growth since 1979 has been flat.

In 1979 the Dow Jones closed at 838.74. In 2009 the Dow Jones closed at 10,428.05. Last week the Dow Jones closed at 23,860.46. The traders on Wall Street have been raiding workers’ wages. They have been raiding our Main Street economies for the last 40 years, and more.

The math: the Dow is up 28.4 times from 1979. It is up 230 percent from 2009. That is, it has more than doubled in the last nine years. If you invested $1,000 in 1979, you would have $28,400 last week. These figures are not corrected for inflation, but the relative scale makes the point. If you made $10 an hour in 1979 and your wage went up 28.4 times, you would be making $284 an hour this year. Has anyone you know seen wage increases like that?

Why do our nation’s most powerful and well off get spooked so easily? Why aren’t they realistic?

Why don’t they pay attention to our real, everyday lived lives?

This paper will raise wages and payments 25 and 50 percent once it significantly increases income. Folks will be a lot less underpaid here, then.

If this paper’s revenues grew only three percent in 2018, I would be very worried. That’s a sign of going nowhere fast. That’s only inching ahead in the race to success. That is near stagnation, not robust growth.

And that is the cold, hard, carefully considered truth.