90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, February 27, 2021

Warming Up To Racism...

Is There Anything More Destructive Than The Current Pace Of Leftist Indoctrination?

Report: Americans Made Big Wage Gains Under Trump

Average wages rose sharply in 2019 in then-President Donald Trump’s go-go economy and also rose again in 2020 as China’s coronavirus pushed many lower-income people out of jobs, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

The spikes reveal the Trump gains at the 2019 end of the EPI chart, released February 24 in the group’s annual “The State of Working America 2020 wages report.”

Source: Economic Policy Institute

“Men at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution saw their wages rise in 2019: a 2.6% increase at the 50th percentile and a striking 5.7% increase at the 10th percentile, along with a 4.2% increase at the 20th percentile,” according to the organization’s 2019 yearly report, The State of Working America 2019.”

Wages rose rapidly during the 2020 coronavirus crash, in large part because many lower-wage workers lost their jobs and were pushed out of the annual wage calculations. The new report says:

Wages grew [in coronarivus year 2020] largely because more than 80% of the 9.6 million net jobs lost in 2020 were jobs held by wage earners in the bottom 25% of the wage distribution. The exit of 7.9 million low-wage workers from the workforce, coupled with the addition of 1.5 million jobs in the top half of the wage distribution, skewed average wages upward. [Emphasis added]

Pro-migration progressives control the EPI, so the reports typically ignore the wage-cutting impact of labor inflation caused by the arrival of millions of legal and illegal blue-collar and white-collar migrants.

But the group also provides much useful information about slow wage growth since 1990 when President George H.W. Bush and Sen. Ted Kennedy collaborated to double legal immigration and dramatically expand white-collar visa workers.

The inflated supply of workers, consumers, and renters helped employers pocket the huge gains from routine productivity increases. That economic transfer spiked the stock market for investors and also pushed many states toward Democrat dominance.

Source: Economic Policy Institute

The EPI’s data echoes other reports.

“Families near the bottom of the income and wealth distributions generally continued to experience substantial gains in median and mean net worth between 2016 and 2019,” says a September 2020 report by the Federal Reserve banking system. The report, titled “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2016 to 2019: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” said:

During the three years between the beginning of the 2016 and 2019 surveys, real gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.5 percent, and the civilian unemployment rate fell from 5.0 percent to 3.8 percent.
…
Families at the top of the income and wealth distributions experienced very little, if any, growth in median and mean net worth between 2016 and 2019 after experiencing large gains between 2013 and 2016 [during the Obama administration].

The report notes that...

Romney And Schumer Advisers Among Dozens Of Congressional Staffers Participating In Chinese Communist Party Exchange Program.

The U.S.-China Transpacific foundation – a Chinese Communist Party-funded group – has sponsored several trips to China for U.S. Congressional staff including Mitt Romney’s top National Security Policy Advisor and Chuck Schumer’s Senior Advisor, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.

Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings reveal a 2015 letter wherein China’s Ambassador to the U.S. requests approval from the Obama administration for the U.S.-China Transpacific Foundation (UCTPF) to sponsor trips to China for congressional staff.

The letter to then-Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel noted the Chinese Communist Party would “fund all activities of this program”:

“The Government of the People’s Republic of China, as represented by the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the U.S., is the sponsor of this program. It will fund all activities of this program and no private funds will be used. However, no funding will be provided for expenses incurred by or for any member of the family or household of the federal employees participating in the program. The National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs will be the host organizations in China.”

Stengel ultimately approved the request, noting he was “pleased” to do so.

UCTPF FARA FILING.

Shortly after, a host of American lobbying firms began to ink lucrative contracts with the foundation to implement the proposed trips. As a Capitol Counsel filing notes, it was retained to “assist with Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act (MECEA) approved travel to China.”

“The program is intended to provide the Members of Congress and/or the congressional staff the opportunity to enhance their understanding on the cultural, economic, political and social developments of the People’s Republic of China, thus helping strengthen U.S.-China relations,” FARA filings added.

In contrast, the Trump administration terminated MECEA programs including the UCTPF exchange, dubbing them “propaganda tools.”
Guilty.

At least seven exchange programs occurred in the short period between October 2017 and October 2019.

In April 2019 “at the invitation of US-China Transpacific Foundation, Megan Reiss, National Security Policy Advisor of the United States Senator Mitt Romney, led a delegation of twelve congressional staff on a visit to China,” per the UCTPF.

And in April 2018, “Ryan McConaghy, Assistant Democratic Secretary of the United States Senate, previously Staff Director at the Democratic Policy and Communications Center run by Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, led a delegation of eleven congressional staff on a visit to China.”

The former Schumer aide’s trip included a visit to the “hometown of the first leader of People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong” where UCTPF professes the “delegation gained an in-depth understanding of his revolutionary efforts.”

“Later, they headed for Orange Island Park as beautifully described in the poem penned by Mao himself,” an event summary adds.

In October 2019, “William Kelsey Van Horne, legislative counsel of Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, led a delegation of twelve congressional staff on a visit to China from October 6th to October 14th, 2019.”

“On the afternoon of October 10th, the delegation went for a long-anticipated visit to Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd, where they had an in-depth discussion on the future development of 5G technology, intellectual property protection, network security, and the development of private enterprises in China. This Huawei trip gave delegates a deeper understanding of Huawei’s development strategy and...