From Fred: Employed full-time: usually median actual weekly income: wages and salaries Workers: 16 years old and above (LES1252881600Q), Drawn according to the familiar hourly average hourly wage, total number of private enterprises, former non-production and supervised workers, and reduced by CPI:
figure 1: Average weekly median actual income per week: wages and salaries Workers: 16 years and older, full-time (blue, logarithmic scale on the left), and average hourly income per hour for the entire private industry (logarithmic scale on the right in red), Both in 1982-84 US dollars, using CPI to shrink. The decline date defined by NBER is shaded in gray. The light green line represents the Obama administration. Source: BLS calculated by FRED, NBER and the author.
This picture is in response to John Hcomment of:
Where exactly does the BLS report the median income in current U.S. dollars? SSA does this in a clear, straightforward format, albeit with a significant delay.
If BLS doesn’t, why not? Doesn’t the average American have the right to know how many workers take home per hour, week, and year on average? Don’t people have the right to know from BLS that ordinary workers barely make ends meet and can hardly afford houses? This may help politicians focus.
Merely reporting an average income that is 50% higher than the median will only confuse the performance of the labor force.
It took me 15 seconds (literally) to find and download the series. Importing EViews and then converting average hourly revenue to quarterly frequency and plotting takes longer than the time needed to find.
If you want to assert that the elites are trying to obfuscate and hide the data, then at least try to find a variable that is not actually reported and is difficult to create.
