A Whopper From the President
"Wages have risen faster in real terms during this business cycle than in any since the 1970s," according to the president. That doesn't sound credible to anyone aware of the tepid pace of wage growth. As I'll show, he is not even close.
We date expansions as beginning in the first quarter after an NBER recession and ending in the last quarter before the next recession. We then calculate real wages as the ratio of total wages and salaries (BEA) to total hours worked (BLS), deflated by the headline inflation index (FRED). Figure 1 shows the overall gains in real wage per hour during the expansions under the four two-term presidents since the 1970s. We see that real wages grew 11% during the Clinton expansion, whereas they have only grown at 4.2% in the Obama expansion. Indeed, Obama's performance is even slightly worse than Bush's 4.5%.
Figure 1.
But the president did not say wages have grown the most in his expansion; he said they have grown the fastest. Since the expansions are of different lengths---ranging from 24 quarters under Bush to 40 quarters under Clinton---perhaps the president has a point about the pace of gains in real wages?
Not even close. Figure 2 shows the annualized growth rate of wages per hour in the four expansions. We see that although the gap is narrower by this metric, the Clinton expansion still yielded significantly larger real wage gains than the Obama expansion (1.05% vs. 0.59%). And instead of being statistically tied, Bush pulls away from Obama. His expansion saw an annual increase of 0.73% in real wages per hour. Meanwhile, Reagan lags behind at 0.41%.
Figure 2.
The White House itself publishes annual estimates of real wages that are included in the Economic Report of the President. Unlike the BEA's numbers which are for all employees, these are for blue-collar workers only ("production and nonsupervisory workers"). And because the numbers are annual, we have to make a choice of which years to include. We date our expansions from the first year after the end of an NBER recession and the last year before the next NBER recession. For example, the Clinton expansion is taken to be 1991-2000 since the first recession ended in the last quarter of 1990 and the next one began in the first quarter of 2001. We then calculate the annualized gain in real wages per hour for blue collar workers from the data provided by the White House. Figure 3 displays the results.
Figure 3.
We see that according to the president's own numbers, blue-collar workers did nearly twice as well under Clinton than under Obama, even as the working class did twice as well under Obama than under Bush. During the Clinton expansion, blue collar wages per hour grew at the pace of 0.73% per annum, versus 0.4% per annum during the Obama expansion. Meanwhile, blue-collar workers got shafted under Ronald Reagan. Their real wages per hour fell by 2.8% between '83 and '89.
The bad news is that this has been the worst expansion for the middle class since Reagan. The good news is that the Clintons will be back in the White House soon.
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Correction: An earlier version of Figure 2 displayed quarterly growth rates instead of annualized growth rates for real wages per hour in the four expansions.
Appendix. Quarterly growth in real wages since the 1970s.