Inflation inflicting pain, as wages fail to keep pace with price hikes

[alp227]

Source: The Washington Post

Inflation is back, with higher prices for food and fuel hammering American consumers, and this time it really hurts.

It’s not just that prices are rising — it’s that wages aren’t.

Previous bouts of inflation have usually meant a wage-price spiral, as pay and prices chase each other ever upward. But now paychecks are falling further and further behind. In the past three months, consumer prices have been rising at a 5.7 percent annual rate while average weekly wages have barely budged, increasing at an annual rate of only 1.3 percent.

And the particular prices that are rising are for products that people encounter most frequently in their daily lives and have the least flexibility to avoid. For the most part, it’s not computers and cars that are getting more expensive, it’s gasoline, which is up 19 percent in the past year, ground beef, up 10 percent, and butter, up 23 percent.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/inflation_inflicting_pain_as_wages_fail_to_keep_pace_with_price_hikes/2011/03/09/AF6K2seC_story.html

[tridim]

1. Corporations must beat their record profits from last year

What event has to happen before wages rise? Raising minimum wage isn't going to do it.

[Purveyor]

2. I have serious concerns about any economic recovery with energy prices this high.

That said, better now than April 5th, 2012...

Perhaps it will work itself out by then but it is spooky as hell out there with the economy, the middle east, Japan, etc...

[rocktivity]

3. Candidate for this year's "You Call This NEWS?" award

What else would you expect, with so much money out of circulation?

:headbang:
rocktivity

[dencol]

4. With money out of circulation...

there are deflationary pressures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation

What we're seeing seems to be market manipulation and supply issues caused by world events. With the value of homes expected to fall even more, some economists (like HS Dent) think we're headed for deflation, which is even worse.

[Thor_MN]

5. Back? They must be living in that special place where you can ignore food and fuel prices...

Out here in the real world, inflation has been eating away at the middle class since Saint Ronnie first started screwing us.

[Sherman A1]

6. Did I not once hear of inflation being described as a tax

upon consumers? Perhaps it needs to be framed that way again?

I know everything has or is going up (except my take home pay) like crazy. I wonder what the true rate of inflation really is(not the BS handed us by DC)?

[Lorien]

7. My pay and that of most of my friends has dropped substantially since the mid 1990's

most of us used to have six figure incomes (entertainment industry). Now most barely get by on 35k a year or less. Film production is down 30% and nobody wants workers over 40. I work two jobs, neither with benefits, and I don't know how much longer I can take it. It's 4am here and I'm about to turn in. I'll be up again in just a few hours to work another 16 hour day, 6-7 days a week, no vacation in 11 years...and here I'm one of the lucky ones who HAS a job! But that's just it, isn't it? They work us into exhaustion and no one ever complains because "you're lucky to even have a job."

[Vinee]

11. It's a tax on anyone who holds, uses, saves US dollars.

There's a $1.6 trillion budget deficit looming in our future and we're all squabbling about a few billion dollars in cuts. Where do you suppose that 1.6 trillion will come from? Here's the answer to your question regarding the true rate of inflation btw:

[No Elephants]

8. K & R

[ellenrr]

9. hate to tell the WP- but for those of us who are NOT

middle-class, the bite has been going on for many years

[No Elephants]

10. By "those of us who are NOT middle-class," do you mean the poor or the rich?

Or, would you rather not say?

[ellenrr]

14. I mean the working-class and those trying to enter the working-class and the working-poor and the

poor and the very poor and the very very poor
Fuck the Rich.

[FreeStateDemocrat]

12. The mark of a successful Democratic adminisration is how well Wall Street is doing. BO's a success.

Fuck the rest of the country as BO reaches out to the wealthy for re- elect contributions for part of his payoff.

How is the White House veggie garden doing, I think it's so cute when rich people dress up, call in the media and play poor?

[RedCloud]

13. Price hikers shot in Libya, here they are worshipped.