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Poorest workers are hit hardest by pretty much anything related to money.
Including tariffs. (Blanket) tariffs are almost like a special tax on poor people.
Explanation: to a well off person, 25% higher gas or food prices is just an annoyance. Nothing in their day to day life will change because of that. To a poor person it's brutal.
In the middle of last century you saw the opposite where the lower you went on the income distribution the faster your income was increasing, relativy speaking.
Or related to capital, politics, etc.
And climate change…
Thank you for saying this.
That's the myth of Trickle-down economics in action.
The same thing happens in other countries too BTW. Prime example is Japan, where prime minister Abe promoted this nice lie for many long years
It's a myth that people support something called trinkle-down economics.
But it’s not.
The error people make all the time is assuming these groups are static and always have the same people in them over time.
They don’t.
A great example were the people in the 0.1% percentile of income. Evil rich people!
Turns out people who end up in that group, only do so for a single year in their entire life.
Things like selling a company or getting a large windfall propels them into the 0.1%, then after that they fall back towards the median.
Same with the lowest income group. People move in and out that group each year.
The tax cuts for the rich will also probably mean that a lot of this money is going to buy real state as an investment rising the house prices.
The immigration crackdown and the tariffs will also mean effective reduced supply of foreign labor, and since their labor is what poor people sell, it will cause upward pressure on their earnings.
What slowing wage growth? For the poorest the wages have essentially not increased for a long time right? It hasn’t even kept up with inflation. The recent bill actually makes it much worse.
As far as I can tell, over the last few years at least, that's mostly not true: wages outpaced inflation, and it outpaced inflation more for lower-income workers than higher.
> In stark contrast to prior decades, low-wage workers experienced dramatically fast real wage growth between 2019 and 2023
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
("real wages" are wages adjusted for inflation)
> For the poorest the wages have essentially not increased for a long time right?
No. Nominal wages grew from ‘21 to ‘23, hitting all-time highs in ‘24 [1].
> It hasn’t even kept up with inflation
It did [2].
Maybe dramatically increasing the supply of something lowers its price.
That hasn't been true for a decade but nobody updated their mental models
Great example in how humans do this thing called “hallucination” where they just make up facts. I wouldn’t trust them to write code.
"people earning roughly less than $806 a week — slowed to an annual rate of 3.7 per cent in June, down from a peak of 7.5 per cent in late 2022"
With inflation dropping from 9.1% in June 2022 to 2.7% in June 2025, real wages for these low earners are now growing for the first time in years. The Financial Times failure to mention this context makes me question their motives.
"The wage growth trend means the lowest paid are now more likely to find themselves among the 40 per cent of US workers whose salaries are not keeping pace with inflation…"
They do talk about inflation in the article.
It doesn't change the "Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth" premise of the article, I don't see any hidden motive needed to explain this.
This is probably cold comfort to a population looking at housing prices rising at 3.7% in 2025 per realtor.com.
It’s how journalism works today.
Do actual research to make sure you understand a topic? Nah!
Come up with a conclusion, then go looking for evidence to support it, cherry picking if needed? Absolutely.
Gotta get those clicks
> now growing for the first time in years
This is a lie. Low earners had strong real term wage growth under the previous administration.
> real wages for these low earners are now growing for the first time in years
This is total crap [1][2].
Wage 'growth' after 2+ years of real wage decline (vs stagnation) is the coldest comfort to folks categorized as 'low earner'. Anyone ignoring that make me question their motives
Works if/when archive.today is blocked
No Javascript required
x=https://www.ft.com/content/cfb77a53-fef8-4382-b102-c217e0aa4b25
echo url=$x|curl -K/dev/stdin -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Java) outbrain" > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmWhy does this work for the FT site?
And the higher prices caused by tariffs which amount to a tax on imported goods. The things everyone buys are more expensive due to the president’s antics.
And doing business is more expensive so businesses can’t afford to spend it on hiring and wage growth.
This article ignores the delta between wage growth and inflation.
Yes, wage growth was higher in 2022. But inflation was raging then. Today’s environment is actually better for low wage earners ( but far from ideal ).
Isn’t this fundamental down to landlords being able to extract all excess pay from the lowest paid workers? Minimum wage increases, simply get passed on to the landlord on higher rents.
The prevailing HN wisdom from, IDK 2010 or before, to 2020something was that inflation was good for the poors because their debt went away (laughable when considering interest rates on a lot of that debt but still).
Where are those people now? Why are they not all over these comments posting links rebutting the article?
Or if they no longer exist what made them change their minds?
How do you measure prevailing wisdom? Is there some sort of data we can look at?
> The president wants his own people there so that, when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable
He wants people there to be his version of Minitrue, providing the numbers he wants to see, not the real ones:
Reporting unworkers doubleplusun-good, rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.
Alternatively, he wants someone at the top who will create an organization that does not have to repeatedly restate massively incorrect numbers.
Welcome to modern slavery. You wanted rights and strive for legal orgnization to improve your working conditions and pay? So we'll replace you with people that have no rights, have ruthless gangs supply and control them, and maybe, we will get you some handouts if you do not upset the new applecart.
the min wage is long overdue, its should be somewhere near $25/hr
this is how you 'tax' billionaires
That's a good way of turning the poorest US workers into the poorest US unemployed. If you raise the minimum wage above the actual value of an employee, then they're just going to get fired. Even if they still provide more value than their being paid, it makes automating away their job more competitive.
California tried this with a $20/hr minimum wage in fast food restaurants: the next time you go into a McDonalds, count the number of empty cash registers and number of shiny new ordering kiosks: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
I got my first job as a grocer in 2010 which paid a minimum wage of $7.25/hr. That was 15 years ago and the minimum wage is still $7.25/hr.
According to the WSJ, the California minimum wage increase for fast food workers reduced the number of those jobs by 20,000.
Why?
Pretty sure the data of the past few years has shown we don’t really need a minimum wage apart from ensuring people aren’t absolutely taken advantage of. Nobody is paying just minimum wage anymore, apart from servers and the like that make most of their income from tips. The local McDonalds pays at least 50% more, for instance.
> Pay for the top 25 per cent of workers is up by 4.7 per cent in the year to June
Wait what? Anyone here getting 4.7% pay rises?
There is just no advantage to being poor in America.