Another example. Health insurance for a family is $600/month, about 10% of wages if you make $100K/year. For employers it is the largest cost. For GM, $1,000 of every car is for health insurance for their workers. So the health insurance premium should be 10% of CPI, but is it less than 0.1%.
I’m not sure how 600 bucks a month is 10% of 100K a year, especially as healthcare premiums are pre-tax. If the percentages are using pre-tax salaries then this is more like 5%.
Having said that, not everyone is a family, and not everyone pays that much in health insurance. My wife and I both work, earn close to 200K a year, and we pay about $800 a YEAR on health insurance. We have pretty good coverage through our jobs, but it’s not the best coverage out there. So I’m paying about 0.5% in insurance.
So, some will pay $600, and some pay less, and some pay nothing (government, or whatever).
Still, I agree that the CPI figures are insane and need adjusting. Especially the “core” index, which seems to me to be the inflation figure with all that pesky stuff take out. You know, the stuff that goes up in price.. Yuk.
In addition, my understanding regarding GM is that the $1000 figure you quote is for workers AND retired workers, who I believe outnumber current workers by 2 to 1. If that’s true (and I believe it’s close, if not entirely accurate) then that would put the cost at about $300 for their current workers, which is what your basically implying in your quote. GM’s problem is not so much their healthcare for their current workers (now that they’ve got rid of a bunch), it’s the costs they have to pay for the retired ones that they made promises to all those years ago. Other car companies do not have *nearly* the burden that GM has in this area.
