September 9th, 2023

A few years ago, the EPI published a graph showing that most of the benefits from higher prices were going to firm’s profits, rather than to wages.

This, of course, is concerning, as many folks’ wages were not keeping up with rising prices, placings economic burdens on household budgets. However, this no longer describes the situation, today in 2023. Notice the graph ends a year and a half ago in 2021. I downloaded the data from Table 1.15 of BEA’s NIPA tables. Below is an updated figure looking at the past 12 months. As we can see, corporate profits are no longer a concern.

Here is the link to the TikTok video discussing it.

Below is a link excel sheet which includes the calculations I made for the graph.

nipa.1.15-profit-and-labor-share-inflationDownload