The economy is working perfectly fine for the people that own it.
Real wages are up for three straight years; they were unmoved or negative for nearly four decades before that. Your feelings about the economy don’t matter when the data all goes in the other direction
Your feelings about the economy don’t matter when the data all goes in the other direction
Except its not “all the data”. Its “the data we’ve always used to measure this up to now”.
The disconnect is that classic measurements of national economic health used to reflect the earning and spending power of average Americans. So using the same basket of measures and things that can affect those was a valid approach. In recent years those measurements don’t reflect average Americans anymore. Inflation has eaten away at the value of savings impacting older Americans. High interest rates are now acting as a double whammy for young Americans that need borrow for higher education as well as first time home buyers, but the costs of both have risen sharply in the last 20 years. So while the high cost has been a problem, the now high interest rates are a force multiplier stepping on the necks of young Americans.
I don’t disagree that Biden’s actions have improved classic measurements. Those are still valid and useful for where they apply. I disagree that those measurements still reflect the experience of regular Americans. Thats a problem that extra economic measures should be included when looking at the experience of regular Americans.
This. Buying power of the average American has decreased drastically. If you worked for the last five years and your pay has changed you’ve technically made less money every year as the power of the dollar has diminished. If you’re on a fixed income it feels even worse.
Your feelings about the economy don’t matter when the data all goes in the other direction
Except its not “all the data”. Its “the data we’ve always used to measure this up to now”.
I hear you saying an apples-to-apples comparison to show a point is … somehow bad.
Sometimes I just don’t know what people want.
I hear you saying an apples-to-apples comparison to show a point is … somehow bad.
You’re gonna have to grow out of just thinking there are only two outcomes: “good” and “bad”. The world is more complicated than that. The classic indicators don’t reflect the modern average American experience anymore. They were chosen in a different time under different circumstances. They were chosen when a college education cost a couple of thousand dollars a year, a average blue color worker could buy a brand new car every two years, and a small house was easily affordable for a single income earner with the other staying at home raising kids. Clearly you can see how this is now out-of-date with modern American life.
They’re fine as a useful apples-to-apples comparison to national economic health, but today fail to show what average Americans experience.
Sometimes I just don’t know what people want.
Introduce some nuance into your worldview and that may help you understand.
They seem to be pretty thorough
There are plenty of problems with CPI, one of which is the very issue of “feelings”. Owners equivalent rent is absolutely irrelevant to actual rent costs. It’s just how much a homeowner says they would charge if they were to rent out their place. These are not the people renting out units…they’re just someone who happened to have enough money to buy a house. WTF do they know.
Peasants, We have increased your daily crumb rations by 1.2%. Be grateful for that.
However, we are reducing the size of crumbs by 7%
Are they? I got a 3% ‘raise’ again this year and that doesn’t seem like it’s keeping up with inflation. And yes yes get a different job, blah blah.
Two things:
- Judging by the increase in prices reported by many as well as shrinkflation, Official Inflation Figures in the US might be very understated, which would make that “real” part of real wage rise be complete total bollocks, since a wage adjusted to a smaller inflation index value than reality is not in fact “real”. Considering that understating Official Inflation not only helps in political propaganda like the “real wages” one but also mathematically feeds to a higher GDP Growth figure (in simple terms: the unaccounted for inflation appear as “growth”) which is also heavilly featured in political propaganda, it’s pretty naive to think that there isn’t political pressure to “adjust” that figure down, especially in an election year.
- Independently of that, it’s perfectly possible for the average real wage (which is what’s reported) to be going up whilst the median real wage (which is more representative of most people’s experience and is not what’s reported) to be stagnant or even falling: all it takes is for the top earners to be getting significant raises to pull the average up enough that it disguises everybody else not getting such raises.
PS: To add to my second point, here’s an interesting chart. Even though it’s an overall unweighted nominal (so, not real) value and it’s a 3 month moving average (so the effects are shown delayed) you can see a spike and subsequent fall towards the trend in 2023. Now look at this inflation chart and you can see that the median salary growth is delayed from inflation and never actually managed to be as high as the actual inflation. This actually brings up a 3rd point I hadn’t considered:
- The salary growth is delayed from inflation, so what we saw in 2023 (and which is now slowing down as per the first chart) is salaries trying to catch up with the high inflation of 2021/22 (and failing) but the inflation by then was already much lower. Obviously if one completelly ignores the last 5 years (which is a common technique in political propaganda) and just calculates “real” wage growth from present day wages and present day inflation, the result will be positive, simply because salaries are still trying to catch up to the inflation of 2-3 years before. However if one adds up the median real wage growth of the last 4 years, the picture is significantly worse.
Your example is N=1
But inflation is also around 3% so why would you expect a bigger raise?
Are you seriously asking why someone would expect a bigger raise than just keeping up with inflation?
I’m asking why one person’s employment history matters when we can analyze 100 million
No you didn’t ask that, you asked why they would expect a bigger raise when inflation is around 3%. The answer is because they obviously think their job isn’t that terrible.
This is all about the disconnect between feelings and actual data. The question is how to get them back in sync. Some of that is time, but people will feel negatively as long as their media keeps telling them they are worse off.
For me it’s time. I know that be all objective measures I’m better off. It’s not just the overall stats but I got decent raises two years in a row. I still get hit with how bad inflation is. But a big part is that I stopped buying stuff for a couple of years. I cut back to really only make necessary purchases. Now that I have a little more available resources, and can make a few discretionary purchases, I’m hit by the last 4-5 years of inflation since I even looked. My comparison point is pre-COVID
Your statements about it matter as much as his opinion without sources. Not disagreeing or agreeing, just seeing two opinions and no facts.
But I think you can understand why three years of improvement after four decades of stagnation might not dramatically move peoples’ perception of the economy. Plus, are real wages up for everyone? Is it average real wages? Median? There’s a big difference. It’s entirely possible some people are experiencing much more real wage growth than others.
Edit: apparently a lot of you are confused. You seem to think that if wages are up for some, they must be up for all. That’s not how it works. Not everyone got a raise over the last three years. Some people did, others didn’t. Some people saw their income increase dramatically, some saw their income stay about the same, and some saw their income go down. And that’s true whether the incomes in question are measured in “real” (inflation adjusted) terms or are nominal figures.
Bro, go look up “real wages” before you bring some dumbass questions in here.
Ok, I looked it up. Here’s what I found from investopedia:
Real income is how much money an individual or entity makes after accounting for inflation and is sometimes called real wage when referring to an individual’s income. Individuals often closely track their nominal vs. real income to have the best understanding of their purchasing power.
Now that I have an exact definition, explain how anything I wrote was a “dumbass question.” Frankly, I don’t think I’m the dumbass here…
“Is it average real wages? Median?”
That’s the crux of their question, not what real wages means.
If it’s defined by an individual then how is it calculated across the entire working class for you to say it’s increasing. Median, average? Are we all sharing in that growth or only the top?
Serious question: are they up higher than inflation if you adjust for the last three years?
Yes, that’s what real wages mean, adjusted for inflation
Wage growth now is outpacing inflation, meaning we’re going in the right direction. But if you compare over a few years, many people have fallen behind and have a lot of catching up to do.
Lol
Look, peasants, wages have gone up by slightly less than 1% for reasons having nothing to do with the government, be grateful!
They went down in the 1970s and 1980s, and stagnated in 2000s, the last decade of growth hasn’t been seen since the 1990s
My wage has not budged in four fucking years and no wages in Oklahoma have gone up if anything they going down.
My company will not give raises and I get paid more than any other person in my field and it isn’t enough.
They literally offering jobs here at 12 an hour you be lucky to see 15 with bunch bullshit stipulations.
I’m sorry that some states are shitholes, with shitty people trying to make them shittier. I live in one too.
Low taxes, but low benefits to its citizens, so people don’t really want to live there. Poor healthcare, poor education, fewer opportunities for the arts and the things that make life worth livin’. It’s a cycle of poverty and despair, and it’s awful.
When I get money, I’m moving out. But I may never have enough money.
Cool, you’re an outlier. Get out of here with anecdotes and come back with real data.
Come Oklahoma asshole better yet look up jobs here and see what they pay. It isn’t shit. Not outliner go look at fucking jobs and what they pay. All the data you need is right there.
NO ONE IS PAYING A FUCKING LIVING WAGE. Homeless is going up everything is but fucking pay. So full of shit. Show your data and not from propaganda machine that is mainstream media.
Tell me about it. It seems like no one looks at job postings to see what companies are actually hiring at.
If they do it’s selective to their profession, or across highly educated professions. Then they can argue “well, git gud scrub.” Completely ignoring how a gigantic portion of the population is stuck working those shit paying jobs.
Wage data doesn’t come from the mainstream media you dope
I definitely agree with you about the data, but people’s feelings do matter, that’s why we’re currently experiencing a vibecession.
Why would people’s feelings matter when the economy is actually good? The vibecession is literally a Conservative psyop
The entire stock market is based off investor’s feelings so why shouldn’t that also apply to the rest of the economy when market performance is a primary data point when measuring how the economy is doing?
Why isn’t the stock market down
People’s feelings affect how they act. Those actions, collectively, can have an impact on the economy (recession spending can cause a recession), politics (especially with elections in 6 months), and society in general. As they say, “perception creates reality.”
Why aren’t people saving up for a recession? They are spending at a very healthy level
Consumer and credit card debt would like a word.
People making bad decisions is being the scope of this discussion.
Yeah, fixed doesn’t mean everything is better; it means things are on trajectory/no longer getting worse
People don’t understand the damage Trump did and how long it will take to undo it. It’s much longer than Biden’s second term
I know, right? Buying food is such a bad decision.
Interesting link, you should start a discussion about it.
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He has no incentive to do better. It’s him or Trump and he knows most democrats have bought into fear politics. He has the vote no matter what. I’m personally voting for neither. And please save your time trying to convince me otherwise.
Honestly though, Venusaur is really the worst pokémon, and this move has the smallest pp in the series.
After 40 years of a happy life you find out your whole life has been some sort of twisted Truman show. After 20 years of being on the show you’ve forgotten all about the big red button you push every night before you go to sleep. It has become a habit. The big red button sits next to a green button that says “Venusaur is the best Pokemon”. Each night you must choose one and the big red button gases you and makes you forget the last 30 minutes right before you go to sleep.
On the first day of the 41st year you get a knock on the door. It’s a woman in her 30’s wearing a tight fitting Venusaur t-shirt. She tells you it was her little brother’s and you finally find out after 40 years of a happy life that each time you press the red button you cause the brutal death of a child.
You are devastated, run upstairs and press the green button. Venusaur appears and you disappear from a Solar Beam. The most powerful attack in the history of the franchise.
Fissure
Haha fair but you hurt yourself and poor accuracy
Big Emo energy
emo-type pokemon. every attack hurts themselves. Magikarp the OG emo type.
I wish you’d saved your time announcing it.
TBF even if you don’t agree that the economy is getting better under Biden, that still doesn’t say anything about his fiscal policy. His policies might not have a tangible effect for a decade. He’s not a king, he doesn’t decide who sells what and for how much.
Capitalism is strangling us. Any candidate who doesn’t admit that is unacceptable.
That’s literally their goal. Wealthy elites and corporations want to bury the middle and lower classes.
The working class
What’s your solution?
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You’re allowed to say it, we will just downvote another brain dead violent revolution argument. History is full of proof on how well that tends to work out for your average citizen.
Lmao, they deleted their comment, so in the end THEY were the one who decided they werent allowed to say whatever they said
History is full of proof on how well that tends to work out for your average citizen.
Didn’t see what the deleted comment said so I’m not going to defend or attack it. But isn’t that exactly how the US came about?
And look where that got us. /s
Jokes aside, the US Independence Movement was an organized restructuring of government into democracy that could have gone by peacefully if the then British Monarchy didn’t try to control them by means of force. The USA didn’t invade the UK and tear down parliament.
No, but stop paying your taxes in America and see where you end up.
No one is stopping you here.
Lol okay, I guess Lemmy is too mainstream for you.
My ideal solution really doesnt matter. When you are being strangled, to extend the analogy, you dont really care who gets the guy off you.
If capitalism wants to protect itself, it better stop the strangling.
So you want competent legislation to make strangling illegal via a series of complex regulatory standards and campaign finance reform?
I don’t think that would hurt. I certainly would go further.
The point is that on the path we are currently heading, people will take any alternate system better or not. So if capitalism wants to in its own self-interest, stick around, then it’s going to have to throw the little guy some bones.
When people are desperate enough, they’ll look for any savior.
Okay but what is further?
Like I said, it is wholly irrelevant. Read better please.
the economy is not great but he has changed the trajectory. it took obama two terms to normalize after bush jr and unfortunately it was not so great that trump did not make it way worse. ironically mostly by not continuing gradual interest rate increases which forced the severe ones now.
Public demand and competition drove prices down. Since Covid reset prices, and stockholders demand growth, companies will continue to price gouge until customers say it’s enough.
This is just what capitalism looks like.
The problem is where things are getting the most expensive, that being food and housing, the markets are captured. You can’t just say no to having food and housing.
This is where regulation is supposed to step in.
Corporate ownership of housing is a major problem that no legislator seems to be handling. The Feds should start building and selling houses to individuals themselves. I believe that is one way to lower housing costs and increasing private ownership.
Food tracks the general inflation closely, it hasn’t actually gone up faster than the inflation in any meaningful way
Food tracks the general inflation closely
That’s a fine bit of bit circular logic there. The price of food is used in the BLS’s basket of goods for calculating the Consumer Price Index (CPI). So yes, the goods used to track inflation do, in fact, track with inflation.
That said, the US economy (at a macro level) is doing rather well considering that we weathered a global pandemic, we have a war on in Europe involving one of the world’s major oil and gas suppliers and inflation has been stubbornly high. Yet somehow, wages are up and unemployment is at historic lows. Seriously, if the administration could actually do something about the housing situation and prices rising, this election would look a lot more like 2008 than 2016. But unfortunately, people vote based on how they feel, not on an analysis of macro-economics. So long as people fell like the gains they have made are being squeezed back out of them via rising prices, the incumbent president is in trouble. When you get down to it, it’s still the economy, stupid.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
It’s not like we don’t have inflation excluding food
All items excluding food and energy: 3.8%
Food: 2.2%
most of the increases were actually before this last year. im not sure that is the best time frame. at least for me the big effects where seen in a year or two of inflation but its tapped down now comparatively.
Yeah, when Russia was blocking the Black Sea and Ukrainian farmers couldn’t get the grain out. Can only blame Biden for not shipping enough weapons to Ukraine
Public demand and competition drove prices down.
Prices have never gone down.
Costs for the corporations may have, but that has never (and will never) been passed on to customers.
It’s not hard to find examples of products where prices have gone down. Prices for literally all electronic goods have been decreasing for a long time, for example.
Price for performance in electronics has gone down: the end device has only gone up.
I’m not sure how you’ve decided to arbitrarily normalize “performance” but normal people are experiencing price drops in many categories. Here’s a bunch of other stuff that has dropped in price. Lots of things have been commoditized and benefited from economies of scale, leading to lower prices over time.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-7/
The way that we measure the economy is disconnected from the quality of life of most residents.
The economy is “good” when the rich are getting richer.
So the system isn’t broken and needs fixed, it’s working as designed and needs destroyed. Got it.
Rent is outrageous and getting worse every year. The dream of owning a home is dead for my generation (xennials) and newer. Utilities and other basic costs of living have skyrocketed and continue to get worse. The environment is starting to fall apart and insurance companies are starting to drop people, refuse coverage, and skyrocket rates when it IS available. Fascists continue to dismantle any and all social safety nets while pushing tax burdens onto lower income households, cutting their own tax responsibilities, and also creating inventive ways to loot public coffers.
Cancelling a little bit of student debt (without ever solving the core problem, btw) isn’t “turning around” - it’s barely a wiggle on the steering wheel. We’re all screwed and nobody is doing anything about it.
360º turn, got it!
Absolute shit to shit is some sort of change.
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Confusedtravolta.gif
Neoliberalized Democrats wouldn’t say better. This why people doesn’t trust and believe in them anymore. They became neolib like every others and they are chasing the myth of the middle voter.
One result is abstention. The second is people voting for the far right.
“Don’t vote”
lol. No.
LOL, keep trying Vlad.
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Biden has done much better than I would have guessed, especially considering how fucked everything was when he took office. He’s not a star candidate and I have plenty of criticism, but Biden has done infinitely better than the last 5 Republican presidents.
That said, even if I thought Biden was amazing, he’s basically a walking ghoul at this point. The president (and supreme court justices) should be sharp, at the peak of their game, not in their last dwindling years. I’ll still vote Biden, because the alternative is one of the dumbest and biggest pieces of shit in American history. Maybe some day we’ll have better choices.
You took the words out of my mouth
Have you considered that the economy is a lagging indicator meaning it can take years for any policy good or bad to take effect?
Obama inherited bad fiscal policy. Trump inherited the economy that Obama put into place with his policies guiding America through the recession. That’s why the economy under Trump was “good” Covid, major war, supply shortages, inflation got us here. Biden has spent the last 4 years turning this around but it is an uphill climb.
You’re right… we should elect the pussy-grabbing, whiney-ass, treason-weasel who will further shitcan everyone just to stick to Biden.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, nobody said anything about Donald Trump.
It is absolutely possible that Biden can start to do better. For some reason a lot of people on the internet want him to not even have to try to do better. I just don’t understand why our expectations are lower because the other guy sucks. He can and should have high expectations, meet them, and be better than the other candidate.
Because you have to be smart enough to pick and time your fights. Biden has done some of the best work we’ve seen in a long time.
I think you know this, though.
Dude, I’ve been voting since Obama 1. Every election is a crisis, every election is “just trust me bro, this one is too important, you can pick your principles out of the dirt next election, please, bro, I mean it”. I’ve become convinced that this is a situation where tomorrow never comes. The republicans leapfrog is into fascism, and then the democrats keep us right where the Republicans left us, saying ‘oh, man, if only we had four more years, or a few more legislators. Oh well, here’s a new bipartisan domestic surveillance bill.’
I’ve never voted for a Republican and I don’t intend to start, but I’m sick of being clowned on with this fucking line. I know I’m being played, and you can’t make me like it.
Every presidential election is important, and it never makes sense to make a “protest vote”. That’s just not how voting works.
I’m sure somebody has cried wolf at every election, but McCain and Romney never aimed to become dictators. Republicans currently have a published plan to institute fascism. It’s pretty obvious that these elections actually are exceptional.
Every Presidential election is too late. The elections to sway things start at the party and local level and continue on up. Most people aren’t involved in those and so they’re left with the choices at the end that were long since selected by others.
I don’t know what crowds you’ve been running in, but Obama and McCain had pretty similar platforms. Like, that was the big criticism of that election until McCain picked Palin as his running mate and crazy entered the limelight.
The Obama vs Romney election was rather uneventful.
Hillary vs Trump was a clown show, but not many were doomsaying. I think most just expected Trump to stuff his pockets and hoped not much would change. But he went rabid and we have been in crisis mode ever since.
Obama and McCain felt very different in the moment. Obama was promising healthcare reform with a national public insurance option, McCain wanted to let health insurance companies sell Arizona policies in California and voce-versa. McCain casually joked about bombing Iran, while we were already balls deep in two wars; Obama was planning on ending the Iraq war (though Tbf, I can’t recall if that was an Obama I or Obama II promise). Obama Romney was, OTOH, much more of an election of their character than their policies- as far as I recall, there was very, very little difference on the policy front, which is why that election was down to shit like Romney having binders full of women. To be fair, I eagerly voted for Obama in both of those, and it’s only in hindsight (and towards the end of Obama II) that I realized that Obama was really, really super moderate. But still, both of those elections definitely had the “oh fuck, oh God, the republicans want to start World War Three as a gift to Lockheed Martin, this is too important!” mood, IIRC. That got turned up to 11 in HRC/DJT, and I’m frankly a little surprised that you don’t remember this kind of rhetoric from that election, as it was even part of the DNC strategy of highlighting Donald Trump. The whole point of focusing on Trump was “look at this fucking guy, he’s unelectable, he’ll burn the whole country down, so you’d better hold your nose and vote for Hillary OR ELSE”. FWIW, I did hold my nose and vote for Hillary because it was “too important”.
I’ve been voting for quite a bit longer than you have and I’m sick of it, too. I personally feel Obama was an absolutely horrible president. Biden isn’t doing all of the good shit, but he’s probably done the most good shit I’ve seen since Clinton. Of course, things are so messed up, that one almost has to try or they just accidentally do good shit at this point.
I would love to see ranked choice voting implemented so that we could finally have a chance to maybe vote for someone we want instead of against the fascist.
We have two options in the upcoming election. This isn’t about expectations being lower, it’s about unifying against Donald Trump, the worst president in modern history. If you can’t see that, you’re probably trolling. If you’re not trolling, you’re probably not well educated on current politics.
Im saying we can walk and chew gum at the same time. In fact, it is utterly irresponsible to not do better as a party given that that stakes are so high this election. Youd think we’d want every edge we can get.
The problem is that most people can’t. In their minds you must be willing to idolize the Democratic party else you’re a Trump supporter.
I criticize the Democratic Party specifically because they are the only ones that can get us out of this mess, which makes it all the more troubling that they don’t seem competent enough to. It’s increasingly difficult to not feel hopeless.
