My own experience in the third world was that even if people started to make more money, the cost of living and housing increased often faster than the wages.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If you look internationally over the last 50 years there have been improvements in the third world, but in the last 20 years the reverse has happened, with debt crises and increased poverty.
If there are healthy - and growing - numbers of people working and paying taxes, we are better able to pay the costs of people living longer.
You pay more in wages, get more in in tax, you get people living a higher standard, you get more money. It's a kind of circle.
The increase in inequality in income is a longtime trend, but the pressure on middle- and low-income workers is going up rapidly. Especially if they live in an area where there are high housing and gas prices, like California.
Rent and the cost of essentials like food and child care are rising so fast that wages are not keeping up.
In real terms, there is a greater disparity of earnings between the very rich and the very poor.
In our high-tech, high-skilled economy where low-skilled work is being scaled back, phased out, exported, or severely under-compensated, all the right behavior in the world won't create better jobs with more pay.
A study of the history of wages back through the years indicates clearly that when the cost-of-living rises appreciably wages have shortly been adjusted upward also.
The poor pay more, and that's one of the reasons people get trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder.
If the economy grows, housing gets better, quicker.