Maybe people's attitudes need to change. When people were poor 100 years ago, they didn't wait around for government handouts. They worked hard, and got out of where they were to go to places with more opportunity. That's how poverty-alleviation actually works.
If you go back a little further than 100 years (in the U.S. anyway). They were also relatively likely to get together a bunch of folks with guns and weapons and murder men, women, and children and take their land to make their own.
I'm not sure the hutzpa of 100 and 200 years ago is exactly what we should aspire to.
It is actually incredibly, mindbogglingly, difficult for someone who can't even get a job where they live -now- to relocate to someplace completely unknown with zero resources and no job even lined up.
In the old days if you were willing to do something lower end there was always /some/ job you could get. That isn't the case today, and the jobs that used to pay enough for someone to get by don't. (I blame rampant inflation in cost and deflation in wages over time)
Inflation adjusted wages are near all time highs for all quintiles [1].
[1] http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-...
Nope, that's inflation adjusted household income.
Wages (what one gets paid per unit of work) are significantly down from the peak in the 1970s.
http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/commentaries/Avera...
Since 2014, real wages have increased (see BLS data) and are still increasing. And even the 2014 rate of $19/hr is higher than all but a few years in that entire chart.
And wages is not the same as total remuneration, which has also increased, due to many non-wage benefits companies have added since 1978. See the time series "Total cost to employ" in BLS data to see that.
Finally, demographics also change - the workforce is getting younger (as people are earlier in careers) ad boomers retire, lowering average wage while individuals are still better off. You can dig this out of census and BLS data also.
So, how is this "rampant inflation in cost and deflation in wages over time". It's nearly flat for a long time, and significantly better than the decades before that.
You called it rampant inflation as well as deflation in wages. To go from $22 to $19 over almost 30 years (completely ignoring the other relevant factors) is not a very big inflation or deflation effect whatsoever. Do the math.
1973 for the broad, cross-industry peak. (1978 was the peak for wages restricted to manufacturing.)
> which was a small blurb.
Both the broader and manufacturing measures were above their present levels at least a decade (nearly two for the manufacturing measure you fixated on) around their peak.
> And even the 2014 rate of $19/hr is higher than all but a few years in that entire chart.
Its lower than 1971-1989.
> Since 2014, real wages have increased (see BLS data) and are still increasing.
And then we can talk about the distribution of the recent gains... [0]
[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...
Ah, moving the goalposts. And irrelevant. The gains shown in the BLS [1] are median gains.
I just redid the data that you posted up through today (Time series CPIAUCSL [2] and AHETPI [3] from FRED like the author did). We're less than $1/hr off the all time high and trending upwards. We're higher today than 90% of all months back through 1964, and within 5% of the all time high. This doesn't seem like "rampant inflation in cost and deflation in wages over time", since the required rate to lose 5% over nearly 40 years is less than 0.13% compounded annually. That's miniscule. And it ignores all other factors that actually account for a lot of the change (like people getting more returns in the form of benefits and better regulations, which often lowers wages).
Today I learned 0.13% is "rampant inflation".
A large difference between then and now is we let minorities and women earn significantly more money than that high, while white men are earning less. Overall every income quintile is doing better. There is more competition for wages, which generally drives it lower, but the data us consistent with stable wages despite increased benefits and increased supply of labor.
There is nothing supporting your claim of "rampant inflation in cost and deflation in wages over time".
I rest my case. We're done.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm
[2] https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CPIAUCSL/downlo...
Certainly I can't be the only one to look at that map and wonder how much of the cause for increase in the free-school-lunches is first and second generation immigrants from Mexico.
A new generation is being created that thinks that food is something that miraculously appears courtesy of the government.
The same parents who get food stamps to feed their children, are starving their own children to the point where schools are now tasked with feeding these kids (in addition to the food stamps).
So where are you suggesting that they go?