Jared Bernstein Growth Quotations

It's a mistake to think that any increase in wages is inflationary and there is substantial room for non-inflationary wage growth, particularly at the bottom end of the scale.

When income growth is concentrated at the top of the income scale, the people at the bottom have a much harder time lifting themselves out of poverty and giving their children a decent start in life.

When unemployment is that low, wages are growing broadly, and family incomes are rising. Wage-based demand growth keeps the economy growing at potential.

Many of our overall indicators are percolating along just fine, but the growth continues to elude many working families, especially those in the middle and low end,

Given the growth of the population and labor force and improvements in productivity, we need to be adding somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 jobs per month to nudge unemployment down.

Unless working families can give up food and gas, this combination of slow wage growth and faster inflation continues to pinch.

This report shows a race between factors boosting net worth such as home ownership and factors pushing the other way such as weak wage growth. Unless we start to see better income growth from jobs and wages, it is hard to see major gains in net worth for the typical family.

Folks are coming back into the labor market, but they're not finding jobs there. The tepid pace of job growth was too low to keep unemployment from rising. We're looking at a fairly weak recovery, at least initially.

I've been pretty happy to see the pace of job growth in professional services.

A fundamental principle of our economic system is that the benefits of economic growth will flow to those responsible for their creation. When how fast your income grows depends on your position in the income scale, this principle is violated. In that sense, today's unprecedented gap between the growth of the typical family's income and productivity is our most pressing economic problem.

The weakness in the labor market is clearly reducing the growth of earnings, meaning consumers, most of who depend on their paychecks, are likely to remain insecure about where the economy is headed. This in turn has the potential to constrain consumption growth, limiting the boost that the economy will get from the recent tax cut, and delaying the arrival of a truly self-sustaining recovery.

Home appreciation was offset by lousy wage growth and debt accumulation.