Energy Higher, Earnings Lower
Charles Hugh Smith-Energy Higher, Earnings Lower
Until oil no longer matters, our real earnings and our economy remain hostages to the cost of oil.
As we all know, what matters isn’t our nominal earnings, it’s what our earnings can buy that counts. If it takes an hour of labor to buy four gallons of gasoline, it doesn’t really matter if we’re paid $1.60 an hour and gasoline costs 40 cents a gallon or we’re paid $16 an hour and gasoline costs $4 per gallon. Ditto $16,000 an hour and $4,000 per gallon.
What matters is if our hourly wage once bought eight gallons of gasoline and now it buys only four gallons. This is called purchasing power, and rather naturally the Status Quo has worked mightily to cloak the reality that our purchasing power of the bottom 95% of wage earners has been declining for decades. More recently, 2011, real median household income was 8.1 percent lower than in 2007.
So even as nominal earnings rise, earnings lose purchasing power.