Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

Climate change does not mean just rising sea levels, but more extreme weather as well, which can include more flooding: warmer air holds more moisture, so when it eventually gets released it can be in downpours. See recent flooding in Texas.

Poor people tend to live in the highest risk areas because the safer areas are desired most and so the people with money bid up prices there.

When you hear headlines like "Trailer Park Destroyed by Tornado", and people ask "Who would live in 'Tornado Alley'?", the answer is "Poor people.".

Yes. But that cost can be absorbed across the board. The manufacturer can lower their margins. The importer / distributor / wholesaler can do the same. The B2B / B2C seller can do the same.

It doesn’t all necessarily get directly passed to the buyer.

Another question that few are asking is: what has the off shoring of so much manufacturing cost the USA? Looking at the resident of the WH, it appears to be quite a bit.

This is not correct. The cost of tariffs are shared by the distributor and customer. The proportion is determined by the elasticity of demand. By this I mean that for goods and services which people rely on, like gas, they will pay almost all of the cost of the tariff because they need the gas to survive. For luxury goods and services, like Louboutin shoes, most of the cost of tariffs is paid by the distributor. This is because customers are willing to substitute for other options, or simply not buy that item. They don't need it.

The downstream effects are quite complex to calculate. For this reason, neoliberals prefer to avoid any tariffs at all. For example, the U.S. is a net gas exporter, meaning that total net local consumption can be satisfied without imports. In a perfect market, there would be no change to the cost of gas. However gas is a commodity, and there is the risk that cartels abuse their market positions to exploit the fact that locals must buy gas from them if they wish to avoid the tariff. For other goods like imported food, locals can substitute. They don't have to buy imported avocados. There are plenty of other affordable and nutritious foods available locally. However, the loss of avocados is, by some metric, a loss of quality of life. This isn't generally captured in economic data. Further still, some of these additional costs are offset by the fact that local businesses become more profitable thanks to said tariffs, and this ends up in the pockets of consumers. Because so much menial labour is currently offshored, the primary benefactor of tariffs is expected to be the poor and working classes.

You also have little nuggets like https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dio...

The Cultural Revolution marches on. Carbon Dioxide is woke.

  > The amount of wealth that is redistributed is frankly insane.

There is no plan to make the pie larger. The problem is the same as everywhere: a public brainwashed by neo-liberal nonsense voting against their own interests. Private gains and public losses.

Thus if you lower taxes, economics growth increases (overall tax receipts go up, not down).

One of the critiques of meritocracy:

> […] It’s wild that everyone is using “merit” and “meritocracy” as though it somehow avoids elitism, when in reality it’s a sneaky way to cement biases without the appearance of bias. Of course people should be judged on their skills and not their wealth. But, how’d they acquire those skills, and why would anyone assume the money didn’t help? Of course it’s a self-reinforcing system. […]

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44571491

From the Wikipedia § Criticisms page:

> In his 2019 book The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits poses that meritocracy is responsible for the exacerbation of social stratification, to the detriment of much of the general population. He introduces the idea of "snowball inequality", a perpetually widening gap between elite workers and members of the middle class. While the elite obtain exclusive positions thanks to their wealth of demonstrated merit, they occupy jobs and oust middle class workers from the core of economic events. The elites use their high earnings to secure the best education for their own children, so that they may enter the world of work with a competitive advantage over those who did not have the same opportunities. Thus, the cycle continues with each generation.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Books

> In his book The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?, the American political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that the meritocratic ideal has become a moral and political problem for contemporary Western societies. He contends that the meritocratic belief that personal success is solely based on individual merit and effort has led to a neglection of the common good, the erosion of solidarity, and the rise of inequality. Sandel's criticism concerns the widespread notion that those who achieve success deserve it because of their intelligence, talent and effort. Instead, he argues that this belief is flawed since it ignores the role of luck and external circumstances, such as social and external factors, which are beyond an individual's control.[91]

* Ibid

Because a hard life feels harder when prices rise. If you're at the bottom of the wage statistics, even a large increase in salary (eg. 20%) will still leave you struggling day to day, before inflation in your costs.

> Official numbers were 10% but literally everything went up at least 20%

Inflation numbers consider a wide variety of things. It's probably at least partially the reality that the necessities are rising faster than discretionary purchases. As an example, iPhones are "cheaper" today accounting for inflation since Apple hasn't raised prices much, especially on the high end. Obviously the poorest X% of people aren't buying new iPhones, so they don't get those savings.

Anecdotally, my grocery bill for packaged goods has risen dramatically, while my produce costs are flat. I'm a vegetarian so IDK about meat costs. My utilities have risen, my housing costs have risen, and my subscription prices have risen. Meanwhile, most of my other non-travel spending (eg. home goods like towels, electronics, etc) is pretty flat for years.

facts and experiences are two very different things. Despite wages going up, poor people can still experience hardship and the feeling of always missing out / having less. it's a matter of contrast, not numbers. And that contrast, that's formed by lived experiences, not some report numbers or percentages thrown around here n there.

Policies should aim to elevate lived experiences of people, not change some numbers here and there to make the facts more confortable morally -_-.

All the math that underpins the usual idiots screeching about "muh compounding gains/interest" applies to the divergence between real inflation and official inflation as well. You can hide a lot of divergence between the real value of the currency and the official value by "simply" having the official number be low by a couple percent over time.

I'll give an example. In 2019, a 1bd apartment near me cost $800 per month. The McDonalds paid $7.50 per hour. Today the same 1bd costs $2000 per month, and the McDonalds pays $15 per hour.

So both can be true. Wages have gone up 100% for the low income worker, which is good news. But it's not enough to offset the cost of living increases, so they are actually worse off than they were before their wages went up.

So it seems to me that any effects along those lines strong enough to exactly negate the apparent real wage growth in recent years must have either 1) been basically constant, so effective wages in this group actually declined 3.1% every year on average for forty years, making 2019 10th-percentile workers reduced to 28.4% of their forbears' wages, or 2) the inflation numbers were about representative for the 10th percentile worker from 1979-2019 and then suddenly and abruptly weren't, or 3) some combination of the two.

(or of course 4), the effect is real, nonzero, but not big enough to wipe out 3.1% apparent wage growth)

869k workers. The size of a country larger than Luxembourg.

Not a family. Especially not families with - for other reasons- only one breadwinner.

The problems of poverty (to the extent the US even experiences it) are broader than demanding someone make uneconomic decisions with their investors capital.

Look, I get where that is coming from. But no one deserves anything, even clean air. Instead, you pay for things with other things (e.g. clean air in exhchange for slightly more expensive cars).

A (shitty) job is better than no job. Minimum wage should be lowered. You gotta help people with something else. For instance by allowing to build higher density housing.