The Trump tax cuts and bonuses. And Russia.

As I will be mostly blogging about pending elections in Minnesota for a while, I’m reverting to an occasional one of these round-up posts for other matters.

Newly released Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data allow us to examine nonproduction bonuses in the first two quarters of 2018 to assess the trends in bonuses in absolute dollars and as a share of compensation. The bottom line is that there has been very little increase in private sector compensation or W-2 wages since the end of 2017. The $0.03 per hour (inflation-adjusted) bump in bonuses between the fourth quarter of 2018 and the second quarter of 2018 is very small and not necessarily attributable to the tax cuts rather than employer efforts to recruit workers in a continued low unemployment environment. - Economic Policy Institute 

Regarding the following, I was a “Russia skeptic” until enough evidence came along to change my views. That’s how rational, scientific thinking (anathema to contemporary conservatives) works, and rational, scientific thinking is, for example, the reason we’re not all still living in thatched mud huts, until the next epidemic of plague comes along and we’re not living at all.

I still don’t consider Russian interference the #1 reason that Traitor Trump is in the White House. To my mind, that perverse “honor” goes to the grotesque, appalling dereliction collectively displayed by corporate “news” media.

Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would challenge her arguments. Yet she expressed confidence that unbiased readers would accept her conclusion that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—it is “likely that it did.” 

...Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.” - The New Yorker