Recently the U.S. Social Security Administration released the wage statistics—sometimes referred to as net compensation—of the nation’s workforce as a whole for the year 2019. This includes primarily wages and tips.
This presents a picture of what workers are earning before taxes.
According to the survey, one-third of the U.S. workforce (54.6 million wage earners) earn less than $20,000 per year. Including these workers, 45% of the U.S. workforce (75.8 million wage-earners) earn less than $30,000 per year.
What this confirms is that an enormous number of American workers are low wage workers. The average U.S. rent is $1,463 per month, which comes out to $17,556 per year. Even if two people earning $20,000 each are living together, the rent still constitutes nearly half their wage earnings. And this doesn’t take into account the cost of federal taxes, food, clothing, etc.
A fundamental reality that must be addressed, and which is barely talked about in this election year, is how the U.S. should get out of this low-wage economy, by changing the labor force so that 55% of workers are productive workers or scientists and engineers. This raises both the income and simultaneously the productive contribution that each worker makes to the scientific advancement of the physical economy. End the low wage economy. This is uniquely advanced in “The LaRouche Plan to Reopen the U.S. Economy: The World Needs 1.5 Billion New, Productive Jobs.”
