More 'Stagnant Wages' Myth-Busting, Courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics

April 18th, 2007 11:45 AM

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Real Earnings News Release yesterday:

Average weekly earnings rose by 4.4 percent, seasonally adjusted, from March 2006 to March 2007. After deflation by the CPI-W, average weekly earnings increased by 1.6 percent.

And here's one for Paul "the rich are getting it all" Krugman of the New York Times -- Note who is being surveyed when these numbers are determined:

Earnings series from the monthly establishment series are estimated arithmetic averages (means) of the hourly and weekly earnings of all production or nonsupervisory jobs in the private nonfarm sector of the economy.

It's Joe and Josephine Sixpack whose earnings have "really" increased in the past year.

Even more confirmation came from BLS today:

USUAL WEEKLY EARNINGS OF WAGE AND SALARY WORKERS: FIRST QUARTER 2007

Median weekly earnings of the nation’s 105.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $693 in the first quarter of 2007, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.7 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.4 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.

These BLS releases won't stop the Formerly Mainstream Media from claiming that wages are stagnant. They will just make those claims even less true than they have been for some time now.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.