So wages for ordinary workers are finally going up...and the Fed thinks this is a bad thing:
Last week, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, warned that the central bank might have to raise interest rates again. “One factor that we are watching carefully is labor costs,” he said.Note to Mr. Bernanke: labor is a 'cost' only to employers. Workers record it on the other side of the ledger.
Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein deal neatly with the point that, as Ezra puts it, "the Federal Reserve literally takes wage growth for the median American as a warning sign of a sick economy."
Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias notes that we are still expected to believe that income inequality is the result ot 'skill-based technologic change'--not the fact that, as he puts it, "the most powerful economic policy institution in America has spent the past 25-30 years consistently viewing its mission as trying to prevent typical wage earners from seeing increases in pay."
It's at moments like these that we see the skull beneath the skin. These three posts (and others I haven't read, I'm sure) are immensely important--and immensely depressing. The game is rigged; we can make it fairer at the margins, but the game is the game.
[That's all, folks]
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