Abstract
This paper estimates the net social wage—the difference between labor benefits and labor taxation—from 1959 to 2012 in the United States using two different methodologies. During this period the average NSW1/GDP and NSW2/GDP ratio are 1.3 and −3.8 percent, respectively. This paper finds a deviation in the net social wage data starting in 2002, suggesting greater redistribution to US workers in the early twenty-first century than in the twentieth century. This paper argues that the increase in the US net social wage in the early twenty-first century is being caused by a combination of cyclical, structural, and secular factors. US redistributive policy should be understood as stabilizing and subsidizing the social reproduction of labor.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
