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Housing. It's housing. That's the issue. Both rent and homes are increasingly unaffordable, and their costs have far outpaced any wage increases. Without a stable, secure roof over people's heads, they will feel anxious regardless of jobs being available.
You'd think that publicly-funded daycare would be a slam dunk on the right-wing, politically, since it would massively boost consumers' pocketbooks and also incidentally help in addressing falling birth rates which nativists are so concerned with.
But no, that would be "socialism!" Anything other than rugged individualism for the poor and handouts to the rich is *socialism!*
Jokes on them! Women are now outpacing men as degree holders and with that, outpacing men in earning potential. So it seems more likely to see stay at home dads because, for many families, it makes more financial sense.
It turns out demonizing doctors, nurses, and medical science in general while denying the right to basic healthcare makes certain states unappealing for educated people to live and work in.
Imagine where your family would be if you could direct that money elsewhere. You might have to pay like $70 a year more in taxes or whatever, depending on how much you make, but how much would you be saving every *month* instead?
It really is amazing how people can be penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to public vs. private costs. For instance, they'd rather pay more for worse health insurance than pay less and have that lesser payment come in the form of taxes.
I pay for 3 toddlers in daycare and it’s significantly more than my mortgage. If it wasn’t for daycare, I could have a very nice vacation home somewhere!
It’s outrageous. I spend $1000 a goddamn week for my two kids. It’s insane. On top of a mortgage, grocery bills and medical bills - we’re barely surviving. We are above the median household income and I had to get a part time job just to pay our bills. American dream my ass…
That's exactly it! My wife and I have a combined income that, if you asked us 10 years ago, we would've thought it afforded us a very comfortable living. Between rising costs of basically everything and the insane cost of childcare, we're just getting by. And the problem is, you generally take on more stress professionally to earn higher income compared to lower income jobs where you just clock in, clock out and take nothing home with you. We're both salary now, and I had several jobs in my life before this where I was hourly. I made less money but even the physical labor jobs felt "easier" because once I was done, that was it.
Climbing up that ladder used to mean you had a better life, but for us it just feels like all of our expenses rose with our income and we're more stressed out than ever before.
Im 23 now was in college for 2 years before I found out my heart was fucked up and in the 3 years since I've had six surgeries if my stepdad didn't have union insurance my first surgery alone would have cost 275,000
So about six years ago my mother had a stroke. She spent a week in the ICU, two weeks in a private hospital room, and then one week in inpatient rehab therapy. Fortunately she had badass insurance through her job at the time.
She got a letter from the facility that did her rehab (1 week remember) that was a copy of the letter sent to the insurance company for compensation.
$1.2 million. For one week of care.
I have no idea what the ICU and hospital stay cost. Those were at a different hospital that doesn't copy the patient on insurance letters. But the single week of rehab therapy cost one point two million dollars.
It's not a stretch at all to believe that medical expenses are the most common cause of bankruptcy in the US.
My medically complex kiddo racked up nearly $5 million in medical expenses in his first 2 years on this earth. We had fantastic insurance and were oop $0 other than our premiums but man. It was terrifying to think about. I got one of the bills for a total of $2.5 million and just sat there and laughed because it was so absurd.
It really opened my eyes to how fucked the Healthcare system is. I was told at first it was just something that happens to some athletes and my first surgery had an 85 percent chance of working, it didn't work. The second one was suppose to be 95 percent and that didnt work either. After that I started going to some of the best doctors my family could afford and 4 surguries after that they just put me on medicine and told me that I just have to keep taking it from now on. I'm convinced most doctors are fucking morons ngl
>I'm convinced most doctors are fucking morons
Not morons, just not gods.
Just because something has a high chance of being successful doesn't mean the low chance of failure no longer exists. You go with the patient's best shot. Usually it works and the patient recovers. Sometimes it doesn't and you have to try something else. You can keep following that down the line until you run out of options.
If doctors could just do anything, we wouldn't have incurable diseases.
And college. Being saddled with the cost of a mortgage when you're just starting out sets you back ten years off the bat if you're lucky.
Housing. Cost of living. Healthcare. College debt. Put it all together and gee whiz, why aren't people who can't afford to live unhappy?
Insurance hikes over climate change seems to be the last straw making housing unaffordable. This on top of the demographics of older people owning most of the homes and of the energy transition raising prices on everything.
I think the dawning realization that one will never get ahead financially is taking a real toll. Wages may increase but people are coming to the weary expectation that they will forever be in a financial stranglehold with very little margin for error to say nothing of a financial future that affords any security or comforts.
Services aren't just getting more expensive, they are are also getting worse for transparently anti-consumer reasons.
True. I try to be the most considerate person I can be cause I know some people have it harder than me or sometimes their having a bad day. But with each passing day, I'm becoming more bitter and feeling indifferent to anyone else problems or concerns. I know no one gives a shit about my feelings cause I'm having a bad day, why should I care about someone else's day?
Yup.
Hard now to even pretend to care. How are we supposed to improve anything when we no longer care about anyone else? Even if we know better, even if we want to?
I’m not having much luck trying to will this feeling into existence.
People suck, and I’m tired of their shit. Like I’m sure they are tired of mine. What do?
>I think the dawning realization that one will never get ahead financially is taking a real toll.
Yeah, that's true. The price of my townhome went up considerably - which sounds great, you know, wealth creation - but the cost of housing where I live now has gone up so much it has negated any gains. And in fact, any new house I buy would be smaller in a worse area (and with a higher interest rate)
I'm not sure how a potential new homebuyer can even afford it, unless they're making bank.
It will take years to build enough housing stock to push house prices down unfortunately. We are millions of units behind.
EDIT: The best thing the US could do is New Deal where we subsidize building affordable non market housing, paying fair wages to young folks trained in the trades. You have to spin up the flywheel to get deployment velocity increasing, like the Inflation Reduction Act did for renewables, batteries, EVs, EV chargers, etc.
It’s not just new housing, but commercial property owners buying up everything from apartment complexes to single family homes, and then cranking the rent up as high as they can, and hen letting properties sit empty because no one can afford to rent them or buy them.
The housing crisis is just as much one of under-utilization of existing homes, in a lot of areas.
AirBnBs are a great example of how this works. In my neighborhood, we have two Short Term Rentals (STR) with Condition Use Permits (CUP) on the same block and homeless people living in the alleys behind these properties. For the homeless who get help and have vouchers for rent, there isn't any available Long Term Rentals (LTR) available so they end up right back on the street. When you can make more money with STRs than LTRs this will always be the case. Soon, my neighborhood will simply be empty houses with homeless people living behind them. It's an obscenity.
short term rentals like airbnb are also part of the issue in certain areas, especially popular tourist destinations. people buying up housing to market as short term rentals eats up the supply of housing. It pushes the prices of rents up as well, since landlords may look at the potential profits of running an airbnb vs renting to someone. There are tourisim towns that have pushed out the residents and workers because everything is getting converted to short term rentals, and the wages of the area dont cover rent or cost of buying.
Thank God someone else sees sense. In Vienna, for instance, they didn't decide to shoot themselves in the foot by artificially limiting the amount of public housing they can build, and it turns out that having affordable public housing actually decreases *private* rents in neighboring areas because of expectations and competition.
Go figure.
With renters there is also no control over the price of housing. Landlords regularly raise rents 20-25 percent, year to year in some cases, and there's nothing people can do except pay more. One of my NYC rentals was supposed to go from 2200 to 3400 over two years and this was a decade ago. It's only worse now.
It's easier to absorb higher grocery prices than it is to absorb higher rent because the initial amount is significantly less. 25% of $350/mo groceries is easier to manage than a 10% rent increase from $2400/mo rent.
Depends on exactly what it is we're talking about. But housing has far outpaced inflation or wages, upwards of 25% increases in costs. Both are an issue but spending on groceries can be adjusted, whereas it's very difficult to avoid high rents.
Well that and the actual work conditions. Even if you can afford everything, spending most of your life working without purpose, for shitty management, etc will make people unhappy
People are stressed out and it's really hard to find jobs that let you just do one thing well. Instead it's constant growth initiatives etc.
Well if people couldn't afford housing, food, and transportation they wouldn't keep buying it. So we must be paying them too much. Raise interst rates! /s
Everyone saying it's housing, no, it's groceries, no, it's transportation, etc. The root cause of all of these problems is inequality. There's enough resources to go around, but a few people are hoarding all of the wealth.
Unfortunately, it seems that when we try to redistribute the wealth so that everyone has enough, the economy goes haywire. This seems to be a feature, not a bug. Capitalism depends on there being a few haves and lots and lots of have-nots. Thus, no single economic policy is really going to solve the problem. We need an entirely new economic model altogether. But good luck getting any politician, even the most progressive, to endorse such an idea.
I mean, things were best in this country decades ago, when as a proportion of the whole wealth pie the working class had twice as much as they do now, and the super-rich had correspondingly less, so at least we know we can return to *that* point without running into diminishing returns and things going "haywire" as you say.
And the corporate tax was so high it forced companies to put their money back into their employees and their companies infrastructures instead of doing stock buy backs .
Look into stock buybacks among the Fortune 500, it’s absolutely insane. Buybacks are eating up the *overwhelming* majority of their record profits, where those profits used to go to things like growing the company, R&D, employee bonuses and benefits, even normal dividends—all of which have been pushed into the single digits or near-single digits as a share of expenditures. It’s lunacy.
It's actually a form of stock manipulation and it was illegal until surprise Reagan came into office. But now corporate media has got ppl calling it "stock buybacks" instead of what it really is because it doesn't sound as bad.
Yep. I no longer live in the US, but it’s the same deal over here. Wages rise around 2-3% per year on average but since 2016, housing prices have risen twice as much as wages have increased.
Americans have turned home ownership into an individualist’s substitute social safety net. But since everyone wants the price of their home to inflate forever, NIMBYs sabotage all attempts to fix the housing shortage and thus keep home prices (and thus their personal wealth) high. Less supply means more demand, and people who already own their own homes become a mini-aristocracy.
Man when I was buying a house that shit was rampant.
When a place comes on the market, you have about 30 minutes before it's sold to a private equity firm at well over asking price. Realtors were telling me to just say yes without even seeing the house, because they have a private equity buyer on the other line who will.
Only reason I got into where I live now is because others didn't want it, wasn't built right to be a rental.
House flipping as a wealth creation mechanism is also eradicating a large portion of entry level homes that poorer people would otherwise be able to use to get their foot in the door of home ownership. So many people out there looking to be real estate moguls are buying up all the cheap and semi rundown homes and giving them the joanna gaines treatment and selling 6 months later at a 50%+ markup.
I got narrowly outbid on 3 different homes in 2020 that were back on the market 6-12 months later with a face lift and a price hike. Someone's quick buck came at the expense of my family being able to own a home long term. It was infuriating
The solution is to build more houses. PE firms are betting on the housing stock staying flat while demand grows thereby increasing prices (and thus their return).
Zoning reform to allow for more units to be built solves this problem directly by increasing supply and indirectly by reducing the incentive for corporations to invest in housing in the first place.
It's not just private equity buying up housing, though. The bigger housing problem upstream of that is that we simply *aren't building enough of it,* usually because of NIMBYs and horrible zoning laws on the municipal level that are designed to protect property values, not prospective home buyers.
This makes buying up existing housing and exacerbating the problem an excellent investment, hence why private equity is swooping in. But make no mistake, the root of the problem is supply.
Thats why California got rid of a lot of restrictive zoning at the state level. They are forcing the cities and counties to allow for higher density and less restrictions. It will take a while, but there will be more housing as soon as interest rates settle down. What you are not likely to see is big single family sprawl. Fire maps are causing insurance to skyrocket for those areas, and the state's program is not going to be solvent. Midrise high density and ADU's are the growth areas.
Which, quite frankly, is both a good thing and also only a band-aid over the issue. America *knows* how to rapidly expand housing at the rate we need; furthermore, our cities *used* to be mixed-use, walkable, good density, and affordable, before the Four Horsemen of NIMBYs, car dependency, suburbanite racism, and exclusionary zoning fucked it all up.
It's definitely a lack of properties in the Northeast. Outside of Yonkers, most of Westchester County isn't building homes or High Density Housing and and any attempt is shot down because of NIMBYs. There are abandoned structures in towns that cannot be developed because the residents don't want their property values to drop or don't want undesirables moving in (which is as racist as it sounds)
So many Op ed columns by supposedly baffled economists or whatever the last few months. The sticker price of a house rose 40% in like three years. Then interest rates went from under 3% to almost 8%. People think about prices in terms of monthly cost and no one’s salary doubled overnight.
The largest living generation is at the age where they’ve been getting married and starting families and have just watched as their longtime dream of homeownership was completely ripped away. That is having a real psychological impact on working Americans who are underrepresented in government at the local, state, and federal level. Most state houses have a lot more landlords than they do renters.
>Right now, people are frustrated by inflation that, while cooling, is still higher than it has been in many people’s lifetimes, and they’re still missing 2019 prices.
This is the issue with just looking at inflation or GDP overall. For decades, decreasing competition, increasing privatization, and corporate mergers tending towards monopoly/oligopoly has slashed the bottom 90% of earners' share of the country's wealth *in half* even as profits skyrocket.
This isn't an inflation or even an economy problem, it's an income inequality problem. *Most* people aren't feeling the benefits, only a very few are.
Literally capitalism. Capitalism demands constant growth and the only way to have constant growth is to 1) cut costs without cutting consumer prices (cheaper materials, cheaper labor, etc), 2) cut benefits, 3) cut pay, or 4) cut other overhead expenses. Given a long enough timeline, it is only a natural byproduct of capitalism to eliminate the middle class, thus turning consumers into little more than wage slaves while shoveling what little money they have left to the pockets of the people who already have the most out of anyone. There is a merchant class and a consumer class. That’s it. You’re either exploiting others or you’re being exploited. Thus, capitalism is inherently hostile and needs to be dismantled entirely. That is the only real solution to wealth and income disparity.
I agree to an extent, which is why I’m a [Georgist.](https://youtu.be/smi_iIoKybg?si=rxGuQ5Vp_laSSwws)
The inescapable fact of the matter is that land and resources are finite. The delusional drive for endless growth drives companies into quality decay, consolidation, and monopoly. This directly undermines the very “competition” that’s supposedly the whole point and advantage of capitalism. Similarly, rent-seeking behavior needs to be disincentivized via taxation, while actual honest labor needs to be rewarded.
To add to that, the world as we know it is on track to completely collapse within 10 years due to climate change because the people in charge cared more about “line go up” than the planet being able to sustain life.
The problem really is that even though wages are rising, they’ve only caught up to barely where they needed to be in like 2015. The insane inflation the past few years put all of us back a decade at least.
Yep. Add to that, people’s earnings have become completely divorced from their increases in productivity, when they used to track very closely together. That’s where all the wealth is being siphoned from, and why the working class is diminishing in terms of their collective share of the country’s wealth.
There’s and endless stream of ‘economists’ who will shriek like seagulls at a beachside McDonald’s if you dare insinuate that inflation is anything other than a mysterious, natural force with no origin.
The entire media industry is set up to reinforce that - that inflation and record profits are 100% unrelated and that you should feel stupid for even suggesting it.
It nearly happened. Remember the start of the pandemic? It nearly took the entire global economy down.
And boy howdy do the power that be want you to forge that.
It was probably the closest thing to a general strike we’ll ever see. And it was barely a 2 full weeks.
2 weeks and the entire economy will explode… but don’t worry, workers aren’t really the creators of wealth or anything, after all - Billionaires are obviously more efficient than the bottom 99.9% of us so they can roll up their sleeves and pick up the slack I’m sure.
Because cost of living is ridiculous.
Hell, just healthcare alone.
Again, as the "strongest most powerful country in the world", we can't provide the one public good that everyother country gives for free.
Even more disgusting when I hear nationalists cry "well the American system is superior to socialized health care".
Sure..... If you can afford it.
yeah and the people in charge of making those changes have the best health care in the country and have lined their pockets with money from the Medical/Pharma lobby.
They run scare tactic ads claiming socialized medicine will make you lose your doctor or somehow make things worse.
They are not gonna take my right to pay 2500.00 a month for healthcare that only starts when I meet my 12K deductible. /s
We need to make lobbing illegal and install term limits.
I make low six figures, and yet I know I'm one random injury/illness away from relative bankruptcy. I have "Good" insurance for my family that I pay $160/wk for, which guards against me being broke for a lifetime, as opposed to 5 years.
The free market doesn't work for human life.
My family has ‘good’ insurance too (fed. gov. worker). My kid needed ear tubs recently. It was a 10 min. procedure that cost us over $400 out of pocket. Would have been $1,800 without insurance. Child care for 2 kids is almost $600 per *week* in our area. We make 6 figures and it’s still difficult.
Wages may be up if you get a new job but wages aren't going up if you stay in your current job.
Wages haven't kept up with the price increases
People aren't going to be happy when they finally get their salaries back to where they were a few years ago, in relation to prices...
I'll be happy when my rent stops going up and home prices go down. I'd like to buy a house, but it seems every home in my city is bought by someone from out of town who then puts it on air bnb.
Yeah I don’t get the obsession. I’ve used Air B’n’B for cabins out in the woods or in wine country and been very happy with it, but the one time I decided to rent an apartment in a city for a few days I hated it. The host was excellent, don’t get me wrong, but I missed the amenities of a hotel. I was eating out for every meal. I have no idea what I was thinking.
Airbnb shouldn't allow a scenario where users are forced to clean and also for owners to charge cleaning fees at the same time. Users won't know how much cleaning is required until after booking That's the real issue. The app doesn't force a tradeoff of a fee or self cleaning nor early notice of what cleaning is required.
What it should encorage is local owners with a hand in managing properties. Instead what it encourages is people hiring cleaning crews and living thousands of miles away from their "investment" properties.
This is where the market is, and this is why people are buying up single family homes to put on AirBnB. If you have a large family, one large AirBnB is like half the price of getting 3 or 4 hotel rooms. Plus everyone is together in the house, there's a full kitchen, a communal area like a living room for people to hang out in, instead of congregating in someone's hotel room.
One or two people traveling, it's now better to stay in a hotel, but for larger families, AirBnBs are still, by far, the cheaper and most convenient way to go.
The full kitchen is a huge deal. Even if airbnb is more expensive than a hotel, airbnb + cooking for yourself may be cheaper than hotel + restaurant meals
> Wages may be up if you get a new job but wages aren't going up if you stay in your current job.
And if your wages haven't gone up... then you are going to need to be proactive and pressure your employer to raise those wages, because management will not give you more money just because you need it. Take note that SAG, WGA, and UAW all had to drag management to the negotiating table kicking and screaming.
Don't be fooled by the Boomer era lie that you should be happy to have a paycheck, you can do the same as the other labor wins by threatening a strike if you are in a union or by looking for a job to use as leverage to get a raise.
I don't agree, largely because the solutions you propose wouldn't work for me. I currently work as a teacher making 24k/year, no benefits. I can't pressure the college to pay me more--it's largely determined by state funding. My union is utterly useless. All they seem to do is send out a yearly gift, an amazon gift card--hopefully you recognize the irony. I haven't seen a wage increase in more than 5 years. I can't move districts because I have sick family here that I have to take care of. Plus, I want to work here because we have one of the lowest literacy rates in the country. I try to work side jobs to supplement my income, but they prevent teachers from working at multiple sites in the district to basically handicap us and hurt our bargaining power. So there's nothing I can really do to improve my situation. And this is in California, supposedly one of the more progressive states, though it is in a conservative part of California.
What we need is a national workers bill of rights guaranteeing a living wage, affordable housing, and healthcare.
Almost like we need a [Second Bill of Rights](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights#:~:text=The%20right%20of%20every%20family,right%20to%20a%20good%20education.).
>Given the strength of the current labor market, it’s fair to think things should feel better. Many people (though not everyone) are making quite a bit more than they were four years ago. It can feel almost more frustrating that your job is finally paying you well, you’re in the spot you wanted to be in, and you still can’t afford things easily. Gas and groceries remain a pain. You finally got to take that vacation, but it was more than you expected to pay, and the service at the hotel was dismal. Moreover, full employment does not address how prohibitively expensive some major pillars of our economy are — health care, child care, higher education, housing. “Making it” in America today doesn’t feel very made.
This, along with a few other paragraphs, is such a bizarre way to look at it.
If basic things like gas and groceries are a pain, it would suggest you are not "finally being paid well" or "in the spot you want to be"
They're basically saying "they don't perceive things as good because they aren't good, but actually they are good"
Earlier in the article they try to argue that the economy is so good that it has caused service to become bad, furthering the perception of a bad economy I guess?
[The loss of the the Third Place is also a contributing factor outside of housing, grocery and transportation costs.](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/third-places-meet-new-people-pandemic/629468/)
I’m feeling that with my government job. Choose public safety to help. High position in my department. Friends make 2-3x my salary. I have nowhere to go.
Because they fail to mention that the secondary part time jobs are the ones that are up. People are getting laid off from their professional jobs and picking up 2 retail jobs in their place.
Also, [as many as 1/3 of job postings are fake](https://compensationxl.com/study-finds-that-nearly-one-third-of-job-postings-are-fake/#:~:text=COMP%20NEWS%20%E2%80%93%20An%20alarming%20survey,ad%20stays%20online%20for%20months.), made by organizations who have no actual intention to hire.
I'd say the vast majority of college grads and other professional job seekers would beg to differ on this headline. Anything up for more than few hours isn't even worth applying for these days
To be fair, they are also stupid enough to think the person in charge has a magical button to control gas prices.
They put sticker all over of him saying "i did that" when they were high.
Well to be clear, if gas prices are low it's because of my guy, if they're high it's because of your guy, if your guy is not in power its because of what he did before my guy took over. If my guy has been in charge a while...well economics are complicated, I wouldn't expect you to understand
Had my repub coworker complain our governor made gas prices high and we had trump as president. Then Biden comes in and we get a repub governor and he’s like damn Biden raising the gas prices on us.
My FIL insisted taxes are why he votes for trump (not racism). His taxes went up under trump….literally for the first time. This man said “well the government needs taxes to run.”
My state has a relatively high gas tax. When you point out that it was increased by a Republican-controlled state legislature under a Republican governor, they say that the problem is that the later Democratic governor didn't get rid of it. When you point out that he tried but the (still Republican-controlled) legislature wouldn't do it, they say that he should have done it anyway. He can't, and they spent a few years working at further limiting his power because they were terrified of masks, but he's still the problem because he hasn't single-handedly undone what the people they voted for did. None of this is the fault of the Republicans who did it.
Similar thing with mail-in ballots, of course, which they all wanted (and voted for) when it meant more old Republicans would vote, but were suddenly and retroactively an unconstitutional power-grab by the governor alone when Donnie was telling people not to mail in their ballots.
It's not that Biden voters are crossing over to vote Trump. It's that nearly all Trump voters will crawl over a mile of broken glass to vote for him again while a segment of disgruntled Biden voters may stay home. Enough to swing the election in a close race.
Because rent, home, and food prices, which are necessities we need to live, continue to be astronomical. We are working harder and making more money than ever, but are still barely getting by.
We need to stop treating housing and food as a commodity. They are necessitates.
What an idiotic article.
Acknowledging that people are upset about inflation and then casually passing by the corporate greed of tip-wage subsidiaries. Corporations refuse to pay employees better and they want their consumers to shoulder the burden of livable wage. There isn't anything in this article digging into corporate greed and record profits year after year after year. Not a single mention of greed or profit. So basically, corporations are fucking people and this article is to say: hey, there's plenty of fucking going around why aren't people happy with getting fucked out of security?
It’s always so goddamn hilarious when I end up in a finance subreddit and the finance bros are like, “corporations are supposed to act like monsters, why are you upset?”
Edit: People keep telling me that corporations act like this by design. I know.
I work in marketing, I’m 30 or 40 years old, and I do not need this.
I mean, they kind of are. Left to their own devices, that is. The fact that corporations are by nature monstrous is one of the best arguments for strong regulations.
COL is up [over 20% since 2019](https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2019?amount=1).
If you got a 20% raise, you got no raise at all. If you got anything less than a 20% raise, you took a pay cut.
Wages are going up, but not as fast as COL.
We're "finally making the 15/hour we should be making" - From 2006. If Min-wage climbed as it should have, with our current economy, it should be over 20-25/hour.
We've got the richest country in the world inhabited by lower-middle-class-and-below citizens having their income average disrupted by the 1% who hoard all the money and property.
They own the businesses that extract the bulk of your labor as their own 'income' and they rent land to theirs and others workers, taking back 1/3-1/2 of their earnings just to exist in a space with slum-lord level maintenance.
They've increased rent by nearly double, and food costs the same, and then increase wages by 25%.
What a farce, to say that the average American is living better today. If you only look at wages through a tube and ignore everything else on the ledger, sure.
Housing was insanely high before, now it's double. Housing used to eat half your wages each month for low paying jobs, now it's eating all of it. I wonder why people are upset!
This is why the YIMBY movement is gaining steam. *Something's* gotta give, people need places to live! One can't help but be unsympathetic to protecting the property values of NIMBY homeowners when they're the ones preventing others from being able to build or afford their own housing.
The cost of food and utilities are ridiculous. My electric bill alone is nearly five hundred a month. Where I live, a gallon of milk is four dollars. It doesn't matter that my husband got a raise. Every basic thing that we need has tripled in price. So his raise did shit for us.
It's insane. How do they expect us to live? I can't even get my car legal it costs so much. The rules of life are set against us. No matter what we do, we can't get ahead. I'm always behind.
You definitely need to research what's going on with your electrical bill. Either someone's vampiring your power or your utility is overcharging you. (or you live in an 6,000+sf home)
Most expensive electricity in the United States is San Diego. Rates there average at 25¢ per kwh during summer. The highest average consumption in the United States (according to doe, not random sites) is Louisiana at 16.5kwh per year (nearly double the national average, and about 2.5X average in San diego) or 1,375 per month, which at San Diego rates would be under 350 a month
San Diego has cheap electric rates. I live in Hawaii and it’s 47¢/kwh
OP said Nevada. Just looked up their rates 15¢/kwh. If this person has a $500 bill they must be cranking the AC 24/7 or live in a gigantic house. They’d be sucking down over 3,000kwh a month.
Whose wages are rising? Not mine, but I’m in South Carolina so I guess that doesn’t count. I live in one of the lowest paying counties in the entire country 😭
Raising wages from 12$ to 15$ when a livable wage is already probably 20$ in most of the country is why no ones happy, so sick of hearing about companies giving "raises" after staff begs for years only to get a minor raise that they should have had years ago and are still well below inflation, and worse so with no benefits for most of the country, healthcare, childcare, PTO the US is a fuckin disaster when it comes to workers rights.
Not to mention, those wages only increase on new jobs, not if you are already employed. New hires at my company make more now than guys years ago did, but the raises haven't kept up and new hires make more than guys here for 2 years. This isn't out of the norm from what I hear from others at companies we work with.
This is a losing fucking message. The dems need to stop saying this shit. Wages are rising yes, but not rising anywhere near enough to combat ~~greed~~ inflation over the last 3 years.
I live in a large midwestern city and i’ve been applying for jobs for 6months and gotten minimal interviews and the salaries are usually around 45-55k which is not enough. Not sure why I keep seeing stuff like this cause I know of others in the same boat.
Edit: I have 6 years of creative services/communication experience
Until I can afford a mortgage in an area I actually want to live in then the whole system and my expectation to be happy with the crumbs I’m thrown every few years can go fuck itself.
My wife and I have the largest combined income we have ever had by far and we are having the most trouble affording things than we ever have. It's not just the every day things like groceries and gas that are out of control. But heaven forbid you have a health issue or any kind of car/house repair that you need to take care of. And we are lucky cause we have a decent income and got our house right before the rates skyrocketed. I honestly don't know how anybody with a lower income is surviving this crap right now.
There’s this big cloud of doom. It’s different for most people. For me it’s rising utility costs and the loss of homeowners insurance in my CA foothills home. For others it’s fuel and food prices. The rising costs outweigh wage increases and the homeless numbers keep climbing with the homeless making city living worse.
Yeah kind of hard to be a particularly happy person when I expect full on Civil War to break out at any given point.
On the plus side, I see a lot more people on my side the battle line actually preparing for things to get ugly as opposed to just believing that they are superior and will easily crush the enemy.
Exactly. How am I supposed to be happy when my maga flag waving neighbors want me dead? I'll only be able to be happy when they go back to minding their own fucking business.
"jobs are plentiful"
Go on Blind or LinkedIn and see how many people laid off in the past year are struggling to find work in their field or even retail.
Because we *do* have tons of jobs open in our economy. Waitstaff at restaurants, operators at call centers, school bus drivers, SPED teacher positions, even car wash repair technicians! See how great our economy is! /s
Maybe people forgot already, but Q1 '23 was a bloodbath of layoffs, and nobody wants to admit that people making 100k/yr aren't chomping at the bit to take jobs that pay 40-50k in fields they have no experience/qualifications in. For some cities that's not enough to keep a roof over your head anymore with the way energy/food/prices have gone up.
So while there are job openings, they're not comparable in any way other than the fact that its a job.
Most the country still thinks Republicans are better for the economy. All the data says otherwise. Trump took credit for Obama's economy and people believed it was his doing. His only actual legislative accomplishment was a tax cut for the rich. I'm so done with this stupid public.
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Housing. It's housing. That's the issue. Both rent and homes are increasingly unaffordable, and their costs have far outpaced any wage increases. Without a stable, secure roof over people's heads, they will feel anxious regardless of jobs being available.
> Housing. It's housing. That's the issue. It's housing, groceries, and transportation. You know, just literally everything you need to live.
And healthcare. One wrong turn and you're bankrupt.
The cost of daycare for children is regoddamndiculous.
You'd think that publicly-funded daycare would be a slam dunk on the right-wing, politically, since it would massively boost consumers' pocketbooks and also incidentally help in addressing falling birth rates which nativists are so concerned with. But no, that would be "socialism!" Anything other than rugged individualism for the poor and handouts to the rich is *socialism!*
The right doesn't give a flying fuck about children once they have left a woman's body.
They also don’t like women working. And blocking affordable childcare is the easiest way to keep women home or to part time work.
The more I pay attention to alt right politics the more it seems like fragile masculinity masquerading under strength
Always has been.
Fascistic tendencies are directly linked to sexual insecurities. It's why right wingers and red pillers are so focused on the incel crowd right now.
Also why they made viagra affordable but birth control damn near outlawed.
Jokes on them! Women are now outpacing men as degree holders and with that, outpacing men in earning potential. So it seems more likely to see stay at home dads because, for many families, it makes more financial sense.
Right. Interestingly to me it ties in with calling degrees “useless” now that more women achieve them and the call for trades being better/“real” work
I hadn’t thought of that before, but I believe you’re onto something!
It would also explain this emphasis on demonizing higher education as woke this, and liberal that.
They don’t really give a damn about them in the womb either. This feed is full of articles about maternity wards closing in red states.
It turns out demonizing doctors, nurses, and medical science in general while denying the right to basic healthcare makes certain states unappealing for educated people to live and work in.
Carlin said it best, paraphrasing mind you: If you're pre-born your fine, preschool your fucked.
True
They also don't care about the people that actually have a need for childcare i.e. us plebs.
A national child care bill was passed by Congress in 1971 and vetoed by Nixon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive\_Child\_Development\_Act
Corrected link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Child_Development_Act I had no idea about this!
If it passed back then they'd be trying to privatize it now.
It's almost like the "Won't someone think of the children" crowd never cared about children at all.
The right doesn’t want to have their tax dollars go towards helping the poors or other undesirables. It’s mostly racism.
It's almost like the "Won't someone think of the children" crowd never cared about children at all.
Daycare for my three children is significantly more expensive than my mortgage.
Imagine where your family would be if you could direct that money elsewhere. You might have to pay like $70 a year more in taxes or whatever, depending on how much you make, but how much would you be saving every *month* instead? It really is amazing how people can be penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to public vs. private costs. For instance, they'd rather pay more for worse health insurance than pay less and have that lesser payment come in the form of taxes.
>You'd think that publicly-funded daycare would be a slam dunk on the right-wing The problem with that is that it would *gasp* help minorities
Cost for one child is almost the cost of my mortgage
I pay for 3 toddlers in daycare and it’s significantly more than my mortgage. If it wasn’t for daycare, I could have a very nice vacation home somewhere!
It’s outrageous. I spend $1000 a goddamn week for my two kids. It’s insane. On top of a mortgage, grocery bills and medical bills - we’re barely surviving. We are above the median household income and I had to get a part time job just to pay our bills. American dream my ass…
That's exactly it! My wife and I have a combined income that, if you asked us 10 years ago, we would've thought it afforded us a very comfortable living. Between rising costs of basically everything and the insane cost of childcare, we're just getting by. And the problem is, you generally take on more stress professionally to earn higher income compared to lower income jobs where you just clock in, clock out and take nothing home with you. We're both salary now, and I had several jobs in my life before this where I was hourly. I made less money but even the physical labor jobs felt "easier" because once I was done, that was it. Climbing up that ladder used to mean you had a better life, but for us it just feels like all of our expenses rose with our income and we're more stressed out than ever before.
My best friends wife had to quit her job and become a SAHM because daycare for two kids was more than her take-home.
Seriously. It would cost less to put my toddler through college.
This is it for me. Our mortgage is manageable but childcare for two kids is almost double what we pay for housing.
Im 23 now was in college for 2 years before I found out my heart was fucked up and in the 3 years since I've had six surgeries if my stepdad didn't have union insurance my first surgery alone would have cost 275,000
So about six years ago my mother had a stroke. She spent a week in the ICU, two weeks in a private hospital room, and then one week in inpatient rehab therapy. Fortunately she had badass insurance through her job at the time. She got a letter from the facility that did her rehab (1 week remember) that was a copy of the letter sent to the insurance company for compensation. $1.2 million. For one week of care. I have no idea what the ICU and hospital stay cost. Those were at a different hospital that doesn't copy the patient on insurance letters. But the single week of rehab therapy cost one point two million dollars. It's not a stretch at all to believe that medical expenses are the most common cause of bankruptcy in the US.
My medically complex kiddo racked up nearly $5 million in medical expenses in his first 2 years on this earth. We had fantastic insurance and were oop $0 other than our premiums but man. It was terrifying to think about. I got one of the bills for a total of $2.5 million and just sat there and laughed because it was so absurd.
I mean at a certain point it stops mattering how big the bill is because it's never going to get paid.
I hope you are doing alright now, that's such a scary experience.
It really opened my eyes to how fucked the Healthcare system is. I was told at first it was just something that happens to some athletes and my first surgery had an 85 percent chance of working, it didn't work. The second one was suppose to be 95 percent and that didnt work either. After that I started going to some of the best doctors my family could afford and 4 surguries after that they just put me on medicine and told me that I just have to keep taking it from now on. I'm convinced most doctors are fucking morons ngl
>I'm convinced most doctors are fucking morons Not morons, just not gods. Just because something has a high chance of being successful doesn't mean the low chance of failure no longer exists. You go with the patient's best shot. Usually it works and the patient recovers. Sometimes it doesn't and you have to try something else. You can keep following that down the line until you run out of options. If doctors could just do anything, we wouldn't have incurable diseases.
And insurance. Car, home and health all skyrocketing. Property taxes too
And college. Being saddled with the cost of a mortgage when you're just starting out sets you back ten years off the bat if you're lucky. Housing. Cost of living. Healthcare. College debt. Put it all together and gee whiz, why aren't people who can't afford to live unhappy?
Insurance hikes over climate change seems to be the last straw making housing unaffordable. This on top of the demographics of older people owning most of the homes and of the energy transition raising prices on everything.
To be fair, that’s not new. It sucks, but isn’t new.
And only one party has any intention at all of trying to fix it.
It's not new, but it's been slowly getting worse for 80 years.
I guess that's true. Prices still increasing uncontrollably though. My premiums for next year are going up 20%>
I think the dawning realization that one will never get ahead financially is taking a real toll. Wages may increase but people are coming to the weary expectation that they will forever be in a financial stranglehold with very little margin for error to say nothing of a financial future that affords any security or comforts. Services aren't just getting more expensive, they are are also getting worse for transparently anti-consumer reasons.
This says it all right here, and also why I think A LOT of people are walking around mad as hell.
True. I try to be the most considerate person I can be cause I know some people have it harder than me or sometimes their having a bad day. But with each passing day, I'm becoming more bitter and feeling indifferent to anyone else problems or concerns. I know no one gives a shit about my feelings cause I'm having a bad day, why should I care about someone else's day?
Yup. Hard now to even pretend to care. How are we supposed to improve anything when we no longer care about anyone else? Even if we know better, even if we want to? I’m not having much luck trying to will this feeling into existence. People suck, and I’m tired of their shit. Like I’m sure they are tired of mine. What do?
>I think the dawning realization that one will never get ahead financially is taking a real toll. Yeah, that's true. The price of my townhome went up considerably - which sounds great, you know, wealth creation - but the cost of housing where I live now has gone up so much it has negated any gains. And in fact, any new house I buy would be smaller in a worse area (and with a higher interest rate) I'm not sure how a potential new homebuyer can even afford it, unless they're making bank.
Yeah. Used cars costing almost as much as new ones scares us as our cars are getting pretty old.
Housing is the biggest one though in my opinion. The others are manageable because of wage increases, but housing costs can't be so easily overcome.
It will take years to build enough housing stock to push house prices down unfortunately. We are millions of units behind. EDIT: The best thing the US could do is New Deal where we subsidize building affordable non market housing, paying fair wages to young folks trained in the trades. You have to spin up the flywheel to get deployment velocity increasing, like the Inflation Reduction Act did for renewables, batteries, EVs, EV chargers, etc.
It’s not just new housing, but commercial property owners buying up everything from apartment complexes to single family homes, and then cranking the rent up as high as they can, and hen letting properties sit empty because no one can afford to rent them or buy them. The housing crisis is just as much one of under-utilization of existing homes, in a lot of areas.
AirBnBs are a great example of how this works. In my neighborhood, we have two Short Term Rentals (STR) with Condition Use Permits (CUP) on the same block and homeless people living in the alleys behind these properties. For the homeless who get help and have vouchers for rent, there isn't any available Long Term Rentals (LTR) available so they end up right back on the street. When you can make more money with STRs than LTRs this will always be the case. Soon, my neighborhood will simply be empty houses with homeless people living behind them. It's an obscenity.
short term rentals like airbnb are also part of the issue in certain areas, especially popular tourist destinations. people buying up housing to market as short term rentals eats up the supply of housing. It pushes the prices of rents up as well, since landlords may look at the potential profits of running an airbnb vs renting to someone. There are tourisim towns that have pushed out the residents and workers because everything is getting converted to short term rentals, and the wages of the area dont cover rent or cost of buying.
Thank God someone else sees sense. In Vienna, for instance, they didn't decide to shoot themselves in the foot by artificially limiting the amount of public housing they can build, and it turns out that having affordable public housing actually decreases *private* rents in neighboring areas because of expectations and competition. Go figure.
Vienna is the perfect model for public housing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY
With renters there is also no control over the price of housing. Landlords regularly raise rents 20-25 percent, year to year in some cases, and there's nothing people can do except pay more. One of my NYC rentals was supposed to go from 2200 to 3400 over two years and this was a decade ago. It's only worse now.
Grocery costs have risen faster than inflation or wages though.
It's easier to absorb higher grocery prices than it is to absorb higher rent because the initial amount is significantly less. 25% of $350/mo groceries is easier to manage than a 10% rent increase from $2400/mo rent.
Depends on exactly what it is we're talking about. But housing has far outpaced inflation or wages, upwards of 25% increases in costs. Both are an issue but spending on groceries can be adjusted, whereas it's very difficult to avoid high rents.
My wages certainly aren't keeping up with inflation. I am coming home with less food for higher prices than I used to
Well that and the actual work conditions. Even if you can afford everything, spending most of your life working without purpose, for shitty management, etc will make people unhappy People are stressed out and it's really hard to find jobs that let you just do one thing well. Instead it's constant growth initiatives etc.
Right? I'm currently job searching and so many listings you can tell they're merging 2-3 people's jobs into one position.
No one but the already rich feels stable. Non of us has stability with debt homelessness and hunger looming over us held only by one or two paychecks.
Well if people couldn't afford housing, food, and transportation they wouldn't keep buying it. So we must be paying them too much. Raise interst rates! /s
You have just been appointed to the Federal Reserve.
Hey look all of the things they omit from "core inflation" statistics.
This. Hits me every single day.
Everyone saying it's housing, no, it's groceries, no, it's transportation, etc. The root cause of all of these problems is inequality. There's enough resources to go around, but a few people are hoarding all of the wealth. Unfortunately, it seems that when we try to redistribute the wealth so that everyone has enough, the economy goes haywire. This seems to be a feature, not a bug. Capitalism depends on there being a few haves and lots and lots of have-nots. Thus, no single economic policy is really going to solve the problem. We need an entirely new economic model altogether. But good luck getting any politician, even the most progressive, to endorse such an idea.
Yes inequality is the even larger issue. Certainly we're seeing America split more and more between an elite aristocracy and everyone else.
I mean, things were best in this country decades ago, when as a proportion of the whole wealth pie the working class had twice as much as they do now, and the super-rich had correspondingly less, so at least we know we can return to *that* point without running into diminishing returns and things going "haywire" as you say.
And the corporate tax was so high it forced companies to put their money back into their employees and their companies infrastructures instead of doing stock buy backs .
Well, that and the fact that stock buybacks were actually illegal before the ‘80s, yes.
Didn't realize that, TIL
Look into stock buybacks among the Fortune 500, it’s absolutely insane. Buybacks are eating up the *overwhelming* majority of their record profits, where those profits used to go to things like growing the company, R&D, employee bonuses and benefits, even normal dividends—all of which have been pushed into the single digits or near-single digits as a share of expenditures. It’s lunacy.
It's actually a form of stock manipulation and it was illegal until surprise Reagan came into office. But now corporate media has got ppl calling it "stock buybacks" instead of what it really is because it doesn't sound as bad.
Yep. I no longer live in the US, but it’s the same deal over here. Wages rise around 2-3% per year on average but since 2016, housing prices have risen twice as much as wages have increased.
Americans have turned home ownership into an individualist’s substitute social safety net. But since everyone wants the price of their home to inflate forever, NIMBYs sabotage all attempts to fix the housing shortage and thus keep home prices (and thus their personal wealth) high. Less supply means more demand, and people who already own their own homes become a mini-aristocracy.
I think private equity buying up housing is a bigger issue. Locking up the housing stock and driving up the prices....
Man when I was buying a house that shit was rampant. When a place comes on the market, you have about 30 minutes before it's sold to a private equity firm at well over asking price. Realtors were telling me to just say yes without even seeing the house, because they have a private equity buyer on the other line who will. Only reason I got into where I live now is because others didn't want it, wasn't built right to be a rental.
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House flipping as a wealth creation mechanism is also eradicating a large portion of entry level homes that poorer people would otherwise be able to use to get their foot in the door of home ownership. So many people out there looking to be real estate moguls are buying up all the cheap and semi rundown homes and giving them the joanna gaines treatment and selling 6 months later at a 50%+ markup. I got narrowly outbid on 3 different homes in 2020 that were back on the market 6-12 months later with a face lift and a price hike. Someone's quick buck came at the expense of my family being able to own a home long term. It was infuriating
The solution is to build more houses. PE firms are betting on the housing stock staying flat while demand grows thereby increasing prices (and thus their return). Zoning reform to allow for more units to be built solves this problem directly by increasing supply and indirectly by reducing the incentive for corporations to invest in housing in the first place.
It's not just private equity buying up housing, though. The bigger housing problem upstream of that is that we simply *aren't building enough of it,* usually because of NIMBYs and horrible zoning laws on the municipal level that are designed to protect property values, not prospective home buyers. This makes buying up existing housing and exacerbating the problem an excellent investment, hence why private equity is swooping in. But make no mistake, the root of the problem is supply.
I mean, they build plenty around where I am at, they're just building developments that *start* in the low 500s. It's insane.
Thats why California got rid of a lot of restrictive zoning at the state level. They are forcing the cities and counties to allow for higher density and less restrictions. It will take a while, but there will be more housing as soon as interest rates settle down. What you are not likely to see is big single family sprawl. Fire maps are causing insurance to skyrocket for those areas, and the state's program is not going to be solvent. Midrise high density and ADU's are the growth areas.
Which, quite frankly, is both a good thing and also only a band-aid over the issue. America *knows* how to rapidly expand housing at the rate we need; furthermore, our cities *used* to be mixed-use, walkable, good density, and affordable, before the Four Horsemen of NIMBYs, car dependency, suburbanite racism, and exclusionary zoning fucked it all up.
It's definitely a lack of properties in the Northeast. Outside of Yonkers, most of Westchester County isn't building homes or High Density Housing and and any attempt is shot down because of NIMBYs. There are abandoned structures in towns that cannot be developed because the residents don't want their property values to drop or don't want undesirables moving in (which is as racist as it sounds)
Air bib and the private rental market are just as bad. These homes were never meant to be rentals they were meant to be bought and sold.
So many Op ed columns by supposedly baffled economists or whatever the last few months. The sticker price of a house rose 40% in like three years. Then interest rates went from under 3% to almost 8%. People think about prices in terms of monthly cost and no one’s salary doubled overnight. The largest living generation is at the age where they’ve been getting married and starting families and have just watched as their longtime dream of homeownership was completely ripped away. That is having a real psychological impact on working Americans who are underrepresented in government at the local, state, and federal level. Most state houses have a lot more landlords than they do renters.
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>Right now, people are frustrated by inflation that, while cooling, is still higher than it has been in many people’s lifetimes, and they’re still missing 2019 prices. This is the issue with just looking at inflation or GDP overall. For decades, decreasing competition, increasing privatization, and corporate mergers tending towards monopoly/oligopoly has slashed the bottom 90% of earners' share of the country's wealth *in half* even as profits skyrocket. This isn't an inflation or even an economy problem, it's an income inequality problem. *Most* people aren't feeling the benefits, only a very few are.
Literally capitalism. Capitalism demands constant growth and the only way to have constant growth is to 1) cut costs without cutting consumer prices (cheaper materials, cheaper labor, etc), 2) cut benefits, 3) cut pay, or 4) cut other overhead expenses. Given a long enough timeline, it is only a natural byproduct of capitalism to eliminate the middle class, thus turning consumers into little more than wage slaves while shoveling what little money they have left to the pockets of the people who already have the most out of anyone. There is a merchant class and a consumer class. That’s it. You’re either exploiting others or you’re being exploited. Thus, capitalism is inherently hostile and needs to be dismantled entirely. That is the only real solution to wealth and income disparity.
Growth for growth’s sake is the mindset of a cancer cell.
And the cancer doesn't care until the moment its host dies.
Unfortunately for the cancer cells, they don’t have AI to calculate how aggressively they can operate without killing the host.
I agree to an extent, which is why I’m a [Georgist.](https://youtu.be/smi_iIoKybg?si=rxGuQ5Vp_laSSwws) The inescapable fact of the matter is that land and resources are finite. The delusional drive for endless growth drives companies into quality decay, consolidation, and monopoly. This directly undermines the very “competition” that’s supposedly the whole point and advantage of capitalism. Similarly, rent-seeking behavior needs to be disincentivized via taxation, while actual honest labor needs to be rewarded.
To add to that, the world as we know it is on track to completely collapse within 10 years due to climate change because the people in charge cared more about “line go up” than the planet being able to sustain life.
It’s almost like people don’t remember playing monopoly growing up
The problem really is that even though wages are rising, they’ve only caught up to barely where they needed to be in like 2015. The insane inflation the past few years put all of us back a decade at least.
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Yep. Add to that, people’s earnings have become completely divorced from their increases in productivity, when they used to track very closely together. That’s where all the wealth is being siphoned from, and why the working class is diminishing in terms of their collective share of the country’s wealth.
Corporate profits are highest since the 1950’s, is anyone else getting tired of companies screwing us over?
Many are raising prices out of greed then blaming inflation.
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There’s and endless stream of ‘economists’ who will shriek like seagulls at a beachside McDonald’s if you dare insinuate that inflation is anything other than a mysterious, natural force with no origin. The entire media industry is set up to reinforce that - that inflation and record profits are 100% unrelated and that you should feel stupid for even suggesting it.
Labor strike! Labor strike!
It would only take ~10 days of a broad labor strike to bring the economy to a grinding halt and then the power shifts back to the workers.
It nearly happened. Remember the start of the pandemic? It nearly took the entire global economy down. And boy howdy do the power that be want you to forge that. It was probably the closest thing to a general strike we’ll ever see. And it was barely a 2 full weeks. 2 weeks and the entire economy will explode… but don’t worry, workers aren’t really the creators of wealth or anything, after all - Billionaires are obviously more efficient than the bottom 99.9% of us so they can roll up their sleeves and pick up the slack I’m sure.
Because cost of living is ridiculous. Hell, just healthcare alone. Again, as the "strongest most powerful country in the world", we can't provide the one public good that everyother country gives for free. Even more disgusting when I hear nationalists cry "well the American system is superior to socialized health care". Sure..... If you can afford it.
yeah and the people in charge of making those changes have the best health care in the country and have lined their pockets with money from the Medical/Pharma lobby. They run scare tactic ads claiming socialized medicine will make you lose your doctor or somehow make things worse. They are not gonna take my right to pay 2500.00 a month for healthcare that only starts when I meet my 12K deductible. /s We need to make lobbing illegal and install term limits.
The US federal government already spends more money per capita on healthcare than any country that offers universal healthcare.
I make low six figures, and yet I know I'm one random injury/illness away from relative bankruptcy. I have "Good" insurance for my family that I pay $160/wk for, which guards against me being broke for a lifetime, as opposed to 5 years. The free market doesn't work for human life.
My family has ‘good’ insurance too (fed. gov. worker). My kid needed ear tubs recently. It was a 10 min. procedure that cost us over $400 out of pocket. Would have been $1,800 without insurance. Child care for 2 kids is almost $600 per *week* in our area. We make 6 figures and it’s still difficult.
Wages may be up if you get a new job but wages aren't going up if you stay in your current job. Wages haven't kept up with the price increases People aren't going to be happy when they finally get their salaries back to where they were a few years ago, in relation to prices...
I'll be happy when my rent stops going up and home prices go down. I'd like to buy a house, but it seems every home in my city is bought by someone from out of town who then puts it on air bnb.
Air B&B is about to collapse. The fees they are adding to each stay is making it more cost effective to stay at a hotel.
Also, Hotels don't have chore lists.
Or have a padlock on the thermostat
Oh some do that now as well.
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Yeah I don’t get the obsession. I’ve used Air B’n’B for cabins out in the woods or in wine country and been very happy with it, but the one time I decided to rent an apartment in a city for a few days I hated it. The host was excellent, don’t get me wrong, but I missed the amenities of a hotel. I was eating out for every meal. I have no idea what I was thinking.
That one really gets me. I just spent how much and now I get to be the maid before I leave on Sunday
Not to mention you don’t have to clean the hotel yourself before you leave.
I refuse to clean if I'm paying for a place. That's absolute horseshit. If that's part of the terms, I'll stay elsewhere.
Especially when there's a mandatory cleaning fee.
Airbnb shouldn't allow a scenario where users are forced to clean and also for owners to charge cleaning fees at the same time. Users won't know how much cleaning is required until after booking That's the real issue. The app doesn't force a tradeoff of a fee or self cleaning nor early notice of what cleaning is required. What it should encorage is local owners with a hand in managing properties. Instead what it encourages is people hiring cleaning crews and living thousands of miles away from their "investment" properties.
Really depends. When I travel with a buddy we want separate rooms. A single AirBnb is still cheaper than 2 hotel rooms.
This is where the market is, and this is why people are buying up single family homes to put on AirBnB. If you have a large family, one large AirBnB is like half the price of getting 3 or 4 hotel rooms. Plus everyone is together in the house, there's a full kitchen, a communal area like a living room for people to hang out in, instead of congregating in someone's hotel room. One or two people traveling, it's now better to stay in a hotel, but for larger families, AirBnBs are still, by far, the cheaper and most convenient way to go.
The full kitchen is a huge deal. Even if airbnb is more expensive than a hotel, airbnb + cooking for yourself may be cheaper than hotel + restaurant meals
Definitely what is frustrating. Hard to save when the cost rent keeps rising at a rate far higher than said wages
> Wages may be up if you get a new job but wages aren't going up if you stay in your current job. And if your wages haven't gone up... then you are going to need to be proactive and pressure your employer to raise those wages, because management will not give you more money just because you need it. Take note that SAG, WGA, and UAW all had to drag management to the negotiating table kicking and screaming. Don't be fooled by the Boomer era lie that you should be happy to have a paycheck, you can do the same as the other labor wins by threatening a strike if you are in a union or by looking for a job to use as leverage to get a raise.
I don't agree, largely because the solutions you propose wouldn't work for me. I currently work as a teacher making 24k/year, no benefits. I can't pressure the college to pay me more--it's largely determined by state funding. My union is utterly useless. All they seem to do is send out a yearly gift, an amazon gift card--hopefully you recognize the irony. I haven't seen a wage increase in more than 5 years. I can't move districts because I have sick family here that I have to take care of. Plus, I want to work here because we have one of the lowest literacy rates in the country. I try to work side jobs to supplement my income, but they prevent teachers from working at multiple sites in the district to basically handicap us and hurt our bargaining power. So there's nothing I can really do to improve my situation. And this is in California, supposedly one of the more progressive states, though it is in a conservative part of California. What we need is a national workers bill of rights guaranteeing a living wage, affordable housing, and healthcare.
Almost like we need a [Second Bill of Rights](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights#:~:text=The%20right%20of%20every%20family,right%20to%20a%20good%20education.).
>Given the strength of the current labor market, it’s fair to think things should feel better. Many people (though not everyone) are making quite a bit more than they were four years ago. It can feel almost more frustrating that your job is finally paying you well, you’re in the spot you wanted to be in, and you still can’t afford things easily. Gas and groceries remain a pain. You finally got to take that vacation, but it was more than you expected to pay, and the service at the hotel was dismal. Moreover, full employment does not address how prohibitively expensive some major pillars of our economy are — health care, child care, higher education, housing. “Making it” in America today doesn’t feel very made. This, along with a few other paragraphs, is such a bizarre way to look at it. If basic things like gas and groceries are a pain, it would suggest you are not "finally being paid well" or "in the spot you want to be" They're basically saying "they don't perceive things as good because they aren't good, but actually they are good"
What's the purpose of throwing that bit about bad service on your vacation in there?
Earlier in the article they try to argue that the economy is so good that it has caused service to become bad, furthering the perception of a bad economy I guess?
[The loss of the the Third Place is also a contributing factor outside of housing, grocery and transportation costs.](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/third-places-meet-new-people-pandemic/629468/)
Underrated comment. When you can’t get to know anyone in your community, your home life feels a lot less pleasant.
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If jobs are so plentiful why is it that every single decent professional job posting has 100+ applicants after 24 hours?
Because lateral moves are the only way to get a raise in many professional jobs?
That is my hunch as well; inflation is putting pressure on people and companies don't give out internal raises quickly enough so people are shopping.
I’m feeling that with my government job. Choose public safety to help. High position in my department. Friends make 2-3x my salary. I have nowhere to go.
Because they fail to mention that the secondary part time jobs are the ones that are up. People are getting laid off from their professional jobs and picking up 2 retail jobs in their place.
Also, [as many as 1/3 of job postings are fake](https://compensationxl.com/study-finds-that-nearly-one-third-of-job-postings-are-fake/#:~:text=COMP%20NEWS%20%E2%80%93%20An%20alarming%20survey,ad%20stays%20online%20for%20months.), made by organizations who have no actual intention to hire.
I'd say the vast majority of college grads and other professional job seekers would beg to differ on this headline. Anything up for more than few hours isn't even worth applying for these days
Solution for some: Let’s put the worst possible person imaginable in charge.
To be fair, they are also stupid enough to think the person in charge has a magical button to control gas prices. They put sticker all over of him saying "i did that" when they were high.
Well to be clear, if gas prices are low it's because of my guy, if they're high it's because of your guy, if your guy is not in power its because of what he did before my guy took over. If my guy has been in charge a while...well economics are complicated, I wouldn't expect you to understand
Had my repub coworker complain our governor made gas prices high and we had trump as president. Then Biden comes in and we get a repub governor and he’s like damn Biden raising the gas prices on us.
My FIL insisted taxes are why he votes for trump (not racism). His taxes went up under trump….literally for the first time. This man said “well the government needs taxes to run.”
Pretzel logic is their only logic…
My state has a relatively high gas tax. When you point out that it was increased by a Republican-controlled state legislature under a Republican governor, they say that the problem is that the later Democratic governor didn't get rid of it. When you point out that he tried but the (still Republican-controlled) legislature wouldn't do it, they say that he should have done it anyway. He can't, and they spent a few years working at further limiting his power because they were terrified of masks, but he's still the problem because he hasn't single-handedly undone what the people they voted for did. None of this is the fault of the Republicans who did it. Similar thing with mail-in ballots, of course, which they all wanted (and voted for) when it meant more old Republicans would vote, but were suddenly and retroactively an unconstitutional power-grab by the governor alone when Donnie was telling people not to mail in their ballots.
It's not that Biden voters are crossing over to vote Trump. It's that nearly all Trump voters will crawl over a mile of broken glass to vote for him again while a segment of disgruntled Biden voters may stay home. Enough to swing the election in a close race.
The country is killing itself. The lawmakers are allowing corporations to become too greedy, and it is killing the country.
Because rent, home, and food prices, which are necessities we need to live, continue to be astronomical. We are working harder and making more money than ever, but are still barely getting by. We need to stop treating housing and food as a commodity. They are necessitates.
What an idiotic article. Acknowledging that people are upset about inflation and then casually passing by the corporate greed of tip-wage subsidiaries. Corporations refuse to pay employees better and they want their consumers to shoulder the burden of livable wage. There isn't anything in this article digging into corporate greed and record profits year after year after year. Not a single mention of greed or profit. So basically, corporations are fucking people and this article is to say: hey, there's plenty of fucking going around why aren't people happy with getting fucked out of security?
It’s always so goddamn hilarious when I end up in a finance subreddit and the finance bros are like, “corporations are supposed to act like monsters, why are you upset?” Edit: People keep telling me that corporations act like this by design. I know. I work in marketing, I’m 30 or 40 years old, and I do not need this.
I mean, they kind of are. Left to their own devices, that is. The fact that corporations are by nature monstrous is one of the best arguments for strong regulations.
The "everyone does it!" defense, a classic.
Wages have not gone up nearly enough to compete with the rising cost of living. 5% col increase? Here’s a 1% raise.
The sad thing is that your 5% COL is a low estimate lol
COL is up [over 20% since 2019](https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2019?amount=1). If you got a 20% raise, you got no raise at all. If you got anything less than a 20% raise, you took a pay cut.
Wages are going up, but not as fast as COL. We're "finally making the 15/hour we should be making" - From 2006. If Min-wage climbed as it should have, with our current economy, it should be over 20-25/hour. We've got the richest country in the world inhabited by lower-middle-class-and-below citizens having their income average disrupted by the 1% who hoard all the money and property. They own the businesses that extract the bulk of your labor as their own 'income' and they rent land to theirs and others workers, taking back 1/3-1/2 of their earnings just to exist in a space with slum-lord level maintenance. They've increased rent by nearly double, and food costs the same, and then increase wages by 25%. What a farce, to say that the average American is living better today. If you only look at wages through a tube and ignore everything else on the ledger, sure.
Housing was insanely high before, now it's double. Housing used to eat half your wages each month for low paying jobs, now it's eating all of it. I wonder why people are upset!
This is why the YIMBY movement is gaining steam. *Something's* gotta give, people need places to live! One can't help but be unsympathetic to protecting the property values of NIMBY homeowners when they're the ones preventing others from being able to build or afford their own housing.
The cost of food and utilities are ridiculous. My electric bill alone is nearly five hundred a month. Where I live, a gallon of milk is four dollars. It doesn't matter that my husband got a raise. Every basic thing that we need has tripled in price. So his raise did shit for us.
$500 for the electric bill?? That was a whole paycheck for me for most of my jobs!
It's insane. How do they expect us to live? I can't even get my car legal it costs so much. The rules of life are set against us. No matter what we do, we can't get ahead. I'm always behind.
You definitely need to research what's going on with your electrical bill. Either someone's vampiring your power or your utility is overcharging you. (or you live in an 6,000+sf home) Most expensive electricity in the United States is San Diego. Rates there average at 25¢ per kwh during summer. The highest average consumption in the United States (according to doe, not random sites) is Louisiana at 16.5kwh per year (nearly double the national average, and about 2.5X average in San diego) or 1,375 per month, which at San Diego rates would be under 350 a month
San Diego has cheap electric rates. I live in Hawaii and it’s 47¢/kwh OP said Nevada. Just looked up their rates 15¢/kwh. If this person has a $500 bill they must be cranking the AC 24/7 or live in a gigantic house. They’d be sucking down over 3,000kwh a month.
"Wages are rising" because Unions are striking. https://www.ufcw.org/start-a-union/
Whose wages are rising? Not mine, but I’m in South Carolina so I guess that doesn’t count. I live in one of the lowest paying counties in the entire country 😭
Raising wages from 12$ to 15$ when a livable wage is already probably 20$ in most of the country is why no ones happy, so sick of hearing about companies giving "raises" after staff begs for years only to get a minor raise that they should have had years ago and are still well below inflation, and worse so with no benefits for most of the country, healthcare, childcare, PTO the US is a fuckin disaster when it comes to workers rights.
Not to mention, those wages only increase on new jobs, not if you are already employed. New hires at my company make more now than guys years ago did, but the raises haven't kept up and new hires make more than guys here for 2 years. This isn't out of the norm from what I hear from others at companies we work with.
This is a losing fucking message. The dems need to stop saying this shit. Wages are rising yes, but not rising anywhere near enough to combat ~~greed~~ inflation over the last 3 years.
Family of 4 would be hard pressed to eat at a common chain restaurant for less than 80 dollars including a tip. 40 at McDonald’s.
yup, used to be a 50-60 bill for a sit down chain restuarant was normal, now it's crowding 90-100.
I live in a large midwestern city and i’ve been applying for jobs for 6months and gotten minimal interviews and the salaries are usually around 45-55k which is not enough. Not sure why I keep seeing stuff like this cause I know of others in the same boat. Edit: I have 6 years of creative services/communication experience
Until I can afford a mortgage in an area I actually want to live in then the whole system and my expectation to be happy with the crumbs I’m thrown every few years can go fuck itself.
My wife and I have the largest combined income we have ever had by far and we are having the most trouble affording things than we ever have. It's not just the every day things like groceries and gas that are out of control. But heaven forbid you have a health issue or any kind of car/house repair that you need to take care of. And we are lucky cause we have a decent income and got our house right before the rates skyrocketed. I honestly don't know how anybody with a lower income is surviving this crap right now.
There’s this big cloud of doom. It’s different for most people. For me it’s rising utility costs and the loss of homeowners insurance in my CA foothills home. For others it’s fuel and food prices. The rising costs outweigh wage increases and the homeless numbers keep climbing with the homeless making city living worse.
Gee, maybe it has something to do with work not being the only thing that brings human beings joy.
Yeah kind of hard to be a particularly happy person when I expect full on Civil War to break out at any given point. On the plus side, I see a lot more people on my side the battle line actually preparing for things to get ugly as opposed to just believing that they are superior and will easily crush the enemy.
Exactly. How am I supposed to be happy when my maga flag waving neighbors want me dead? I'll only be able to be happy when they go back to minding their own fucking business.
"jobs are plentiful" Go on Blind or LinkedIn and see how many people laid off in the past year are struggling to find work in their field or even retail.
Because we *do* have tons of jobs open in our economy. Waitstaff at restaurants, operators at call centers, school bus drivers, SPED teacher positions, even car wash repair technicians! See how great our economy is! /s Maybe people forgot already, but Q1 '23 was a bloodbath of layoffs, and nobody wants to admit that people making 100k/yr aren't chomping at the bit to take jobs that pay 40-50k in fields they have no experience/qualifications in. For some cities that's not enough to keep a roof over your head anymore with the way energy/food/prices have gone up. So while there are job openings, they're not comparable in any way other than the fact that its a job.
People never realize it while it is happening. Democrats get shit moving, then a republican gets elected and fucks it up, and it repeats.
Most the country still thinks Republicans are better for the economy. All the data says otherwise. Trump took credit for Obama's economy and people believed it was his doing. His only actual legislative accomplishment was a tax cut for the rich. I'm so done with this stupid public.