From card carrying population ponzitier and fake Lefty, Rob Burgess:
As described previously, flat-lining wages are feeding into very poor retail sales figures, and both need to rebound if Australia is to genuinely complete the transition from the mining investment boom era to a more balanced period of growth.
At face value, the national accounts might seem to offer hope that this is happening. ‘Compensation of employees’ is up 3 per cent, so you might expect people to get out and spend that above-inflation rise in income.
And you’d be wrong. With some very basic number-crunching, the dire state of household budgets becomes apparent.
Economist Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work, pointed out two really nasty numbers when I spoke with him on Wednesday.
The first, which simply confirms Tuesday’s retail figures, is the latest monthly figure for the growth in household consumption.
At just 0.1 per cent, it’s the lowest monthly figure since the depths of the financial crisis in December 2008 – as the chart below illustrates.
The second problem for the consumption side of the economy is that the aggregate ‘compensation of workers’ figure of 3.0 per cent doesn’t take account of the way the workforce has grown in the past year.
The number of workers is actually up 2.6 per cent, due to population growth and more unemployed workers swapping welfare payments for a wage.
Putting those two figures together, average compensation of employees only increased 0.4 per cent over the years – a lot less than the current inflation rate of 1.8 per cent.
So while those workers taking new jobs will see a big improvement in their household budgets, the rest of the workforce is going backwards in inflation-adjusted terms.
So why do you support it then Rob? To wit:
- he defends Chinese bribes in Parliament;
- he defends education imports over house prices;
- he attacks as racists any and all who try to change it.
Burgess is an openly Left commentator whining (rightly) about declining wages while continuously and vehemently defending the mass immigration that is one of the primary driver of said falls.
Nice not to have to get your hands dirty, eh mate?
