It was once the standard that firms that performed well would give all their employees an annual raise, in part to acknowledge workers' contribution to the business's fortunes, in part to ensure that wages kept pace with inflation (otherwise workers would be suffering a real-terms pay-cut every year).

The percentage of millennials planning to "always rent" is up about 25% from last year, to 12.3%, based on Apartment List's annual survey; the factors behind this are primarily high house prices and high levels of indebtedness, driven primarily by student debt.

There isn't single county in the nation where a minimum-wage worker can afford to rent a two-bedroom home; and although LA has the worst homelessness crisis in the country, New York state is catching up, with homelessness growing by 46% since the financial crisis — the fastest rate in the nation.

Every Monday, some poor "brand ambassador" at Chase has to post a "Monday motivation" tweet aimed at convincing people that one of America's largest, most rapacious banks is actually a cuddly, responsible business whose $12 billion bailout from Uncle Sam was perfectly justifiable and sure to be put to excellent use.

US federal law sets the national minimum wage at $7.25/hour, a number that hasn't budged for a decade and is in part responsible for the nation's wage stagnation, which has seen working peoples' earnings falling in real terms, while productivity grew, the stock market surged, and the richest grew much, much richer.

Politicians love introducing tax-cuts, because they're reliable vote-getters, even if they're structured to blow up later by giving massive breaks to the super-rich and more modest breaks to middle-class voters, resulting in mounting deficits and eventual service cuts.

Even before the election of Donald Trump, America's pearl-clutching class has been invoking James Madison and his fear of "impetuous majorities" and his desire for "majority rule based on reason rather than passion," worried that the "adults" in the political halls were losing their grip and being forced into "extremism" by mob rule.

Wage stagnation in the USA has many causes: both the destruction of trade unions and the erosion of labor protections in the law (these two things are connected) are obvious culprits, and do much to explain how real wages could be falling even as unemployment has gone down.

In the US, states and cities have their own minimum wages, keyed to the local cost of living — but every one of these minimum wages is insufficient to provide that most basic of needs: a roof over your head.

Jordan is broke, thanks to falling tax revenues due to tax avoidance and low taxes on the super-rich, and the country is seeking to bridge the gap in its finances by borrowing from the International Monetary Fund, which backed a bill that imposed crushing cuts on public services to ensure that money could be found to pay back Jordan's creditors.

Bernie Sanders has a plan to solve America's wage stagnation and its long-neglected infrastructure: tax the super-rich and massively profitable corporations, then use the money to fix the multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure overhand left behind by decades of neglect, and hire Americans at $15/hour, plus full healthcare, to do the work.

California regulates payday loans (good thing, since Trump's about to kill the federal rules preventing payday loansharking), but not "installment loans" of $2,500 to $5,000 and that means that out-of-state lenders are able to target desperate Californians; they're getting seven-year loans of $5,000 that cost $42,000 to repay. — Read the rest

Nudging — the idea that a well-designed "choice architecture" can help people make free choices that are better than the ones they would make without the nudge — has a few well-publicized success stories: the cafeteria where frontloading veggies and other healthful options gets kids to choose carrots over pizza; and the employer-side deduction for retirement savings that gets employees to put aside a little more to retire on (this insight rates a Nobel-adjacent prize*! — Read the rest

Dr Ben Maruthappu, a senior public health researcher from University College London is the lead author on a forthcoming peer-reviewed paper in the BMJ Open which attempts to quantify additional deaths attributable to the UK Conservative Party's austerity measures under the 2010-2015 coalition government and the Tory governments since; Maruthappu and his co-authors attribute 120,000 deaths to austerity, and call them "economic murder."

The Resolution Foundation's Living Standards 2017 is an eye-opening look at the current state of the British experiment in allowing wealth inequality to expand without any check, to use a combination of austerity, the elimination of protection for tenants, reckless lending, offshore money-laundering and public subsidies for speculators to turn the human necessity of shelter into the nation's leading asset-class.

Dave sez, "Last year, Employment and Social Development Canada put together a report suggesting that the Canadian middle class has seen wage stagnation and is experiencing record levels of debt; Finance Canada felt that this 'appears to conflict with the general message in Budget 2014 and previous internal briefings' so they made a new report — that says the opposite, while looking at the same data." — Read the rest