Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Inflation or Deflation?

Maybe it's both:

Indeed, Tuesday's WSJ had an article that detailed

"Increasing numbers of Americans are encountering similar choices as employers ask them to buy their own benefits, including disability and life-insurance policies, medical and dental coverage, and even benefits not normally found in the workplace like homeowner insurance and identity-theft coverage. Few businesses are actually replacing employer-paid benefits with these so-called voluntary benefits -- "voluntary" because you pay for them yourself. But some experts predict that eventually, American workers will have to buy many of the benefits they now get free at work, much the way most of the burden of funding retirement savings has shifted from employers to employees in recent years."

Paying for something that was previously part of your compensation package? Pick your poison: Either that's wage and income deflation, or price inflation.

1 comment:

Teri said...

The problem isn't so much paying for your benefits. It's that they expect you to pay for them with exactly the same pay as you had before. It is a defacto wage cut.