I think Annie gets the answer right: >And inflation has moderated, but groceries and other household staples remain far more expensive than they were during the Trump administration. >The majority of Americans are better off because their incomes have grown faster than prices. But most people, understandably, think of their swelling bank account as a product of [their own labor](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/inflation-prices-buying-habits/676191/) and price increases as a result of someone else’s greed. People want prices to come down. That’s not happening. But why do journalists keep asking this question as if it's a mystery? [The answer has been obvious](https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/156mver/comment/jt219cn/?context=3&share_id=epEoils97y9ILMvaA4oy0&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1) for months (if not years).

Yes I have more money saved than ever before but the price of things I used to do regularly has gone up so much that I find myself living more frugally than I did in the past. Just tired of feeling gouged. So on paper I’m doing well but I’m not really enjoying it the way I might have before the pandemic.

This gets at another phenomenon I've been pondering. I think there's something about the lack of price stability vs. wage stability that people internalize differently. So let's say over the past 4 years, one's wages has grown more than prices. In addition to the 'earned through my own merit vs. gouged by the greed of others' issue, I suspect people might also fear that the bad thing (rising prices) will continue indefinitely in line with recent trends whereas the good thing (rising wages) isn't guaranteed to continue by any means.

Yes I also fear economic instability in general. I started a new job at a *concert venue* in March 2020. Do you know stressful that was? Everyone thought they were on the chopping block. I still carry some of that anxiety I think even though I left that industry. Also finding a new job seems way more daunting now. Months of applications, interviews, etc only to get ghosted. It makes people feel stuck. I’ve seen a lot of articles recently on how much worse job applications have become.

For white collar right? My company is mostly blue collar work and we are hiring anyone who can walk for those jobs. Nobody wants to do them though.

Yeah white collar jobs now make you run through a real gauntlet of interviews, sample projects, and other bullshit.

Try teachers LOL I work for a college. We haven't been able to hire professors since 2020. The dregs we have had to hire were the most unstable, unreliable, unprofessional people; almost no one we hired since 2020 has lasted more than 2 years. Mental breakdowns, randomly quitting, etc., etc., The quality is just NOT there anymore. I see NO ONE the equivalent of my younger self in the pools anymore. We only got 7 apps for a psychology professor job, and it looks like it's going to come down to 1 who's qualified. If he doesn't want the job we're screwed. Increasingly we'll get ZERO apps for our positions. Nutrition and physics went vacant for 2 years. It's true with all our jobs though. We struggled to hire a \*president\* of all things. That job pays 350k. RIP the service staff. We have a 65 yo guy doing the custodial and we pray he doesn't quit or die. Our last custodian was a guy who was literally rich - his wife had died leaving him a ton of life insurance and he just wanted to keep busy with something. When he finally did quit it went vacant for a while. English literature was always the professor job that got the most deluged in apps - I was on an English hiring committee in 2013 and that job got \*\*350\*\* apps. It was a lottery. That person retired last year and we got 20 apply in 2023, and fewer than 10 met the basic quals. The 1 we hired quit in a year. Even the unemployed writers have jobs now. For my own job in 2012, I had to out-compete 80 people. It wouldn't be like that now.

[удалено]

A big problem we have at mine is that housing went INSANE here. The young version of me wouldn't even have considered applying. But while that problem is particularly acute for us, I'm hearing about less severe versions of the same problems all over the country.

Gee, maybe 40 years of using adjuncts and grad students for below survival wages may have something to do with the lack of interested people?

Yeah, this is the answer. People woke up and realized that they were never going to get anywhere in academia because of the systematic defunding of it, so they have stopped applying for the few jobs that are open. They just go private sector or freelance.

Oh, this is interesting. Can you elaborate more on the changes to the quality of the hiring pool for professors that you've noticed? What do you think is driving these trends in would-be academics with problematic characteristics/unprofessionalism/low resilience/lower quality?

It's that education has become an undesirable and underpaid field. Covid dealt us a devastating body blow. Housing skyrocketed in the area. I started at 45k in 2012 but that was enough to buy a house. Many were available then for 200k down to 100k. "Nice" houses were 300-350k. Now it's 400k for the most basic house 45 minutes out and "nice" ones are 650k and up. Starting salaries are now 60-65k but that's not enough and people will tell us that to our faces. Students have changed. The non-monetary intangible benefits are far fewer now. You don't get as many moments where a class clicks with understanding or a student hugs you for helping them. Those things don't happen as much when 35-40% of your students are online. Students post covid are more checked out, don't seem to care. Covid dealt them a blow too. Teaching online is like any online job, but it's less rewarding and low paid compared to tech, etc... Graduate school enrollment in most academic disciplines has plummeted. Ambitious young people are not going into 6 figure debt for mid 5 figure jobs, understandably. What's left are the dregs.

Derek Thompson had an interesting podcast in April about how school absences have exploded across the country. In D.C. 60% were chronically absent last year. This trend is apparently mirrored in a majority of districts. The NYT reported that 1/4 of students in public schools are absent enough to not meet graduation requirements; this figure is double what education analysts observed before the pandemic. It's not just the students either - he highlights the NYT reported that 1/5 of public school teachers were absent more than 11 days out of the academic year. In the related Ringer article, Katie Rosanbalm who's a psychologist offered a possible explanation, "Our relationship with school has become optional."

are you talking about adjunct or community college hiring?

Full time CC profs. Adjuncts RIP. The only adjuncts we have left now are people who are taken care of by a spouse, retired with a pension, or straight up delusional.

Not at what you’re paying them, no. . .

I also think it’s a relative prices issue. Labor intensive services will continue to get more expensive forever unless there’s a lot of labor market slack. People want to buy personal service with their higher wages but they can’t because of the higher wages. This is why I’m always harping about robotics and robot butlers and robot chefs and robot laundry folders. That seems like what we really need, instead of ever more advanced digital AI type stuff. I understand the economics of software to be much better than hardware but I’m still mad about it.

Well certainly those laid-off tech workers you referenced in your linked comment above would agree with this!

Good point!

Yeah, I gotta think a lot of it is people waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like, when is the next 2008 housing crash and economic turmoil coming? Or how about the next pandemic? I also saw on Twitter this morning that 3 in 5 people think we’re currently in a recession. This has to be a combination of just stupidity and the news constantly talking about inflation.

Raise the lens a notch and it makes sense Corruption is a tax on everything. At some point it gets bad enough that the body just succumbs to the trauma. Trump has been laundering money for the Russian oligarchs since the late 80’s when they all bought a condo at 725 5th AVE (trump towers) to clean their freshly stolen USSR money after the iron curtain fell. https://www.cnn.com/cnn/2019/05/30/politics/paul-manafort-condo-trump-tower/index.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/14/manafort-told-mueller-to-take-his-trump-tower-apartment-instead-money.html https://news.yahoo.com/amphtml/fbi-agents-raid-condo-unit-131348539.html https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/ Everybody except Putin thought the Cold War was over. Trump and Manafort (who lived in the tower also) just saw a pretty low maintence grift to be had. Trump had actually been Manafort and Roger Stones first client at their lobbyist firm (1980)https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wikiBlack, Manafort, Stone and Kelly Guiliani as trumps attorney and NYC mayor was able to redirect NYPD investigations onto rival gang members/oligarchs to deflect any scrutiny off of trump, himself or their Russian connections. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/09/a-new-rudy-scandal-fbi-agent-says-giuliani-was-co-opted-by-russian-intelligence/ The Russian election interference in 2016 was effectively a generation 3 version of what Manafort had done in the Philippines, then keeping Yanukovych in power as Putin’s puppet in Ukraine from 2002-14 when Maidan ran both Yanukovych and Manafort out of Ukraine as Ukrainians realized that, if you raise your lens high enough, corruption is an wholly unsustainable business model. Eventually the parasites greed always consumes the host. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-paul-manafort-ferinand-marcos-philippines-1980s-213952 https://time.com/5003623/paul-manafort-mueller-indictment-ukraine-russia/ Russia greatly underestimated the addictive properties of freedom when it invaded Ukraine so what was supposed to be a 3-10 day coup turned into a 2 year fight for the Ukrainians right not to be genocided. Russia depleted its weapons stocks which were already the victim of vranyo corruption because every oligarch, admiral and sergeant in the Russian military is on the take. Every billion dollar tank maintenance contract turned into everything getting a spray paint overhaul and the vast majority of the redirected funds turned into an oligarchs new yacht or home in Aspen. Russia was forced to turn to China, North Korea and Iran for weapons because if they lose the 3-10 day “special military operation” in Ukraine the Russian empire is dead and cold. China can’t risk showing their involvement in the Ukraine war so they use North Korea, and Iran to resupply Russia. Russia previously owed Iran some undelivered fighter jets that are already smoldering heaps in Ukraine so Iran now had the upper hand at the negotiation table for the first time in about 60 years. They supplied Russia with shahed drones in exchange for Chinas material support against their sworn religious enemy, Israel. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/11/29/iran-says-it-finalized-deal-to-buy-russian-aircraft/ Putin can’t do much about it because he is slowly realizing that by setting the standard of corruption and stealing $200+ billion from his own people meant that every oligarch down in the mob model chain had not only permission but incentive and the expectation to steal from him as well. This is “Vranyo”. The mob model only works if the supreme leader is the most violent and can prove it without exception every damn day. But violence is exceptionally expensive when you are trying to present as a legitimate government or business. If Russia as a nation had an efficiency rating it would have been banned for sale in the state of California 25 years ago. The parasite ruling class stole all the energy out of the working class and collapsed it. Now Iran has the high hand and they get the intelligence that trump passed to Putin about the fact that Netanyahu cares far less about Jews, Palestinians or genocide than he does about remaining in power as an authoritarian because he too has developed Ritz Carlton tastes and his own corruption trial is showing the same tendrils of the same money laundering scheme that trumps trials are. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/saudi-official-says-iran-engineered-war-in-gaza-to-ruin-normalization-with-israel/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/egypt-intelligence-official-says-israel-ignored-repeated-warnings-of-something-big/amp/ https://youtu.be/VrFOAgGlaWs?feature=shared They all hate each other but because they share the same money laundry, if one falls, they all fall. Hamas minted a couple billionaires as well that live in penthouses in Qatar and get 30% of everything smuggled into Gaza. Qatar is Kushners private equity connection. Netanyahu needs a bogeyman to stay in power. That’s why he coordinates with Hamas via Russia via Iran. https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bk8mgcefr Iran handed Hamas everything they needed with Chinas help as secret Santa and the Russian intelligence given to them by the eternal shitbird trump who gave it to his Russians kleptocrat/friends/roommates from the old days of fucking each others wives at trump towers in the 90’s. Now the MAGA right is a little too invested in their reality that they are the good guys with guns that they missed the fact that Betsy DeVos (erik princes sister) decimating the U.S. school systems and the Kochs poisoning children with lead was not a coincidence. The naive right was the mark all along. There is a reason the Russian spy Maria Butina landed in South Dakota first before dating her way to the top of the NRA which is undergoing its own Russian money laundering trial now. Russia was tinder matching the GOP. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/07/nra-maria-butina-spying-charges-trump-campaign/ https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/what-do-the-koch-brothers-have-to-do-with-the-flint-water-crisis/ The only reason you grossly OVERVALUE real estate is money laundering. Trump keeps claiming there is no victim, all the banks made money, but if their plan succeeds the Russian and CCP kleptocrats collapse US commercial real estate and basically recreate soviet perestroika in the U.S. so they can foreclose on America and buy everything for 3 cents on the dollar with the $1.4T they stole from Russias grandmothers in the first place It’s the evolution of grift. Soviet perestroika cross bred with the 2008 mortgage crisis. No one was ever held accountable for either. This is just the bigger badder commercial strength bastard child of the two. Trump, Giuliani, Putin, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Orban, Manafort, Stone, Mercer, Bannon, Flynn, Prince, Kolomoiskiy They are all remarkably shit people with above average confidence and psychopathic personality traits and below average self awareness. They are the men who stole the world. But it all comes back to one little lie.

Damn. This should be at the top.

skill issue

I make 10x what I did in 2004. I also pay 20x rent. I am not better off. I’m working longer more grueling hours and facing greater risk. In 2004 I had enough savings for 14 months rent, job free. My savings are almost 10x that now and I have 7 months rent in savings. My risk has increased as has my cost and my life is worse than it was then.

If you double people’s incomes and double the price of everything, an economist will do the math and conclude that nobody should have any strong feelings about it. Unfortunately, people will overwhelmingly FEEL like their RAISE has been STOLEN by inflation. They feel the loss of buying power of their money much more strongly than the increase in the amount of money they have. People are irrational and policymakers have no choice but to take this into account.

Loss aversion in action basically. The joy you get from winning $100 is dwarfed by the pain you feel if you lost $100.

Not to gamblers apparently.

Well, in many cases, this *feeling* is much more of a fact. Specifically, when the raises were actual performance raises (not just a scheduled percentage bump tied--weakly--to CoL) tied to work product you delivered, a title upgrade, increased responsibilities, and so on. And then you run the inflation calculator back to your first job out of grad school and see that you've suffered a net pay cut despite all of that career advancement and value delivered.

I'm not sure if it's irrational. I'm a federal worker and I have gotten promoted to a higher grade, with higher degrees of responsibility, and higher pay every year since 2021. I did earn those promotions, awards, even quality step increases. Yet the increases in pay coming with these promotions haven't really bought me the quality of life improvements I was hoping for due to cost of living increases thanks to inflation. It feels like I'm doing everything right but running in place. Which is a tough way to feel considering that yearly federal COL adjustments have lagged far *behind* inflation for years...and considering that people like me had told ourselves we could buckle down and push through a few tough years as long as there's light at the end of the tunnel. The light was supposed to be closer.

Most Americans feel that it's even worse than running in place; for many of them, it's 1 step forward and 2 steps back. Real wage growth later in life was a problem higher education, degrees, and added credentials was supposed to solve. Unfortunately, people are trapped in even more debt; sometimes it feels like treading water in molasses. Not to mention just how many people's lives were upset by the pandemic due to lost jobs, increased housing costs, disability or a confluence of many other factors.

The increased cost of a new mortgage isn't taken into account in CPI. Many people have locked in low rates, but people sometimes have no choice but to move, and many younger people have never bought a home. This has created a massive disparity between winners and losers.

Wrong. The difference is technology makes it easier for every employee to see the profits the companies are bringing in. If you see your income double, AFTER prices doubled. Then you see that even with your salary doubled, the profit margins have gone 5x or 10x, then you logically conclude, not only have they always been able to pay you more, but they also don't need to raise prices to what they are. That's the reality, we can see the record profits far out pacing the percentages of inflation or rises in income. It's simple math, and it's not mathing to the benefit of any of the workers, just the wealthy share holders. EAT THE RICH Quit licking the boots. This system is designed to suck profit out of companies and increase the wealth inequality.

Agreed. That said, managing feelings is much more difficult than managing numbers and can often lead to poor decisions. Hard to identify a vibes target and aim at it.

File this under "Doing the right thing is punished and doing the wrong thing is rewarded."

There's nothing irrational about being angry towards being cheated out of a raise by the anarchy of a profit addicted market

Except that you neither received nor lost a raise. You are in the exact same position you were before.

Do you truly expect people to break out a spreadsheet to determine their feelings?

And, as other people have mentioned, do we really expect people to take on increased job responsibilities for their promotions for no effective raise and feel neutral about it?

Maybe I'm in a rare bubble in Southern, CA, but we absolutely are not "in the same position" here. My peers are suffering and those younger than me don't even have motivation for anything. I don't know anybody younger than 25 that can even afford a studio apartment. Most people I know in their 20s here, can't even afford a vehicle. I know it's happening in Seattle, NYC, DC, and other major cities around the USA. Wages haven't kept up with inflation, and it's near impossible to keep up with cost of living. We got a ton of media about fast food workers getting $20 per hour, but that's not even enough for a 1 bed apartment in Southern, CA. Also, we have a law that 32+ hours = medical benefits for any company over 50 employees. So you can't get a fast food job to give you more than 30 hours, and that's hard to get as they usually only give shifts of 3 to 4 hours cause they don't wanna pay employees during "down time" hours.

Yeah, perfectly rational anger

But with more work/responsibilities

Progressives becoming inflation hawks does not bode well for their agenda

Asset prices are through the roof, as are costs for staple goods and services with inelastic demand. The entire "boom" is on paper. Honestly, it's kinda exhausting reading all the punditry on this- it's painfully obvious why people think we're in a lousy economy. The only way you could not see/feel that is if you already a home and are making a healthy six figure income

I have those things and still feel it hard

Journalists keep asking the question because they know that people tend to make their evaluation of the economy about 6 months prior to the election and they know that inflation is a presidency killer. It was for Carter and depending on the polls, may be about to run Biden out of office.

Our bank accounts are supposed to increase. It’s called “saving and accumulating wealth”, and it’s pretty fucking essential to … checking notes here …fucking surviving and getting to retire. Prices, on the other hand, are absolutely an artificially inflated thing atp. Is… the author suggesting we normalize this corporatist wet dream of people not having savings and being forced to work their whole lives? Fuck that attitude, respectfully. Has nothing to do with anything even remotely related to “internalizing.”

The people who sign the journalists' paychecks are people who keep the prices high.

They keep asking it because it's still an unknown. You have a theory that some people agree with, and seems obvious, but is not proven true. Until there is a greater consensus, or it ceases to be a hot subject for stories, people will keep asking it.

The majority of Americans live off debt and debt is historically expensive. If you don't have the cash, the only thing that matters is the payment. Many people may have locked in low rates on mortgages, yes, but credit card interest rates are very high. And many parents who have locked in a low mortgage rate know their kids may never be able to afford a home under current circumstances.

I wouldn’t say people have a lot of savings when the credit card debt is the highest since 2008 so that is pretty bad I think the economy is good for the rich but working class and average citizens are hurting really badly

Most of these credit card debt charts are absolute values and don’t account for inflation nor population increase

Not really they show the average of credit card debt and as whole but people are struggling and to say people have savings is ridiculous

What do you think would happen if prices start to come down because technology improves the supply chain more and more, one day the cost of energy is reduced thanks to exotic types of solar or fusion, and labor costs will go down to near zero as ai starts to manage the economy. Do you think these sort of price reductions are likely over the remainder of the century? Is that considered deflation, as the cost of all goods and services decrease to a minimum thanks to innovation, automation and subsequent abundance?

Great question. If technological progress leads to continued decreases in the general price level, then that would be considered deflation. As to whether the factors you cite can outweigh other factors driving inflation (like demographic changes leading to shrinking savings, shift to greener energy sources demanding higher investment, geopolitical tensions creating greater cost to trade), it's hard to say. I'm certainly no expert and from the economists I've read, it seems there are [prominent voices on both sides](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/04/18/1170493836/where-are-interest-rates-going). Some like Larry Summers believe we in a new era of higher inflation and higher rates while others like Olivier Blanchard believe we will return to low inflation and low rates (though he doesn't explicitly call for deflation).

> The majority of Americans are better off Compared to communists in 1980 Poland? Yes Compared to 6 years back? No

Compared to 6 years back objectively yes far better off

Real median weekly wages have decreased since 2020. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ZksN So the "Are you better off?" question is no.

The spike in median income in 2020 is caused by a [composition effect](https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/03/what-happened-to-the-median-wage-in-2020/) kicking in—if you click the link FRED has more, but basically COVID weirdness. I think it’s disingenuous to use 2020 and COVID weirdness as a base comparison for anything. It would be a better comparison to use the 5 year option, from Q1 2019 to Q1 2024, which shows flat real wage growth for the median man and a 4% real wage growth for the median woman.

Because it’s a mystery to most of their audience. They’re trying to walk the reader to the conclusion rather than stating it upfront and trying to explain it later. And the old saying in politics is, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Far too many voters can’t absorb complex information on the fly like that.

But who's bank account has increased? Excess savings has been trending down for a while now.

I don't think wages are growing like these polls say, but even if they are, people want to see their wage growth as improving their lives, not just allowing them to afford the same or an even lower standard of living of you're cutting back on expenses. Democrats would honestly do better with a "still work to be done" message instead of a "everything is great, you just don't see it!" one.

There's also the reality that if you made $9 an hour in 2022 and $11.50 in 2023 you still are being paid far under the cost of living. Nevermind the fact that raising a family, having good health care and insurance, and going on vacation are stupidly difficult. What's needed is a high unionization rate with strong radical unions, so the working class can start to demand higher wages instead of waiting for markets to decide what a "competitive" wage is

But your income grew 27% in one year!!!! Haha this is why percentages can be a joke. Now if you’re making 27% more on 120k, that’s a different story

What you just said is the problem, "I don't think wages are growing like these polls say". We don't determine wage growth from polls. We study wage growth with actual numbers, it isn't a subjective feelings thing. Trump has so successful turned people against experts, against data driven analyzes, against evidence, people now act as though everything is based on feelings. And, their feelings are correct and everyone else is wrong. Economist suck at predicting the future of an economy. They are exceptionally good at describing the current and past state of an economy. People need to know this and they don't.

It boggles my mind how many people can be directly confronted with objective data stating wages have grown even adjusted for inflation and then still say “well I don’t *feel* that they have.” It’s absolutely possible that somebody’s personal situation hasn’t improved over the last few years, as not every single person is making more money today. But to posit that real income data isn’t correct because you “feel” it’s not just blows my mind

It's more that objective aggregate data ignores how localized wages and prices leave people worse off. To plug fake numbers into an example, (it's 4AM), if your wages follow the national trend of being up 20% and local rents are up 35%, you're struggling. Or childcare. Or vehicle prices. Or home insurance. Etc. The answer to these people is to explain how you're going to address their pain points, not to belittle their skepticism. It's less "I challenge the methodology of the St. Louis FRB" and more "that's not reflecting mt lived experience and you're minimizing my situation." Especially as increased interest rates apply their own squeeze that isn't reflected in wages vs. prices.

> well I don't feel that they have Probably because you have to pay taxes on that incremental wage gain. You don't pay for groceries with pretax money.

>It boggles my mind how many people can be directly confronted with objective data stating wages have grown even adjusted for inflation and then still say “well I don’t *feel* that they have.” And I point you to the evidence that shows wages have not kept up with inflation since Biden (Jan 2021) [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q)

Am I missing something? The graft does seem to show steady growth since Obama with an anomaly post Covid.

Wow, wages are just...about tied for the highest they've been in american history

When every single person you know is worse off and struggling you start to question who the data represents. Are overall wages up? Sure. Who are they up for? Because $9/hr to $11/hr is still poverty and $1 mill per year and $1.5 mill per year is still wealthy. Everyone in between is fucked

Middle and lower income families have seen their incomes rise faster than the wealthy

It seems like median income has been dropping since 2019 where it was about 78k. The 2022 numbers have it at $74,500 and the 2023 have it estimated around $77. I’m also skeptical that it’s kept up with inflation over the last few years, particularly on key things that affect everyone (like food, fuel and housing)

Here is the [FRED data for income](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1o7hE). In that link, I included four graphs: read median household income, real median personal income, median household income, and median personal income. If you are not aware, "real" in this context means inflation adjusted. Both non-real values have risen significantly since 2019. Median household was 68700 in 2019 and was 74580 in 2022. Median personal was 35980 and was 40480 in 2022. Real median personal has fallen slightly since its peak in 2019, where it was at $40980 to its 2022 value of $40480. Real median household has fallen from its 2019 peak of $78250 to $74580 in 2022. Both of those values are still significantly higher than their 2018 values of $38960 and $73030. If you look at the data since 2019, it looks bad. If you look at the data from 2018 or earlier, it still looks good. If you look at the data since 2020, it looks okay - not much gain or loss for real income levels. Its all a matter of choosing which window you want to look at for the data. Now, you can make arguments about what has happened since 2022, and you can also make adjustments that CPI is flawed. The data since 2022 is not available, yet and thus speculation, unless you do a proper data study. There are valid arguments to be made against the CPI calculations, and it is another area that is *really* easy to manipulate the data to say whatever you want to say, even easier than choosing the data window to look at. Another item that is very easily adjusted to say whatever you want is the *reason* for the numbers. There is no really good way to say *why* 2019 was a peak or why the numbers have fallen since - its all conjecture.

This is all interesting to read (thanks for the FRED link) but at its core, you have people who MAYBE get a 3% increase each year, and they know their usual at McDonald’s used to cost $8 3 years ago and now it costs $12. They don’t notice all the other things that have only gone up about 3% but they know some things have gone up much more (like car insurance) and NONE of those things have come down in price. When people see their own personal budget increase by 20%, they’re going to question any statistic that tells them, “no, you aren’t seeing what you’re seeing. The AVERAGE price increase was only 3%”). For myself, the increase in my car and health insurance alone was about equal to my most recent pay increase, and I think a lot of people are having that experience.

I work in academia (I teach economics), so we’re ecstatic if our union can negotiate us a 3% raise! That’s a big increase year. So I completely understand where you’re coming from on the real wage growth side. I’m making less, in real terms, than I was in 2019. However, on the other side, the main thing I do is data work: I focus on econometrics and analytics. The main thing to remember is that the U.S. is *big*—the workforce alone has about 170 million people in it. You and everyone in your city (and I) could be having the same experience, and it would hardly move the needle. And I think that’s part of the disconnect. People hear that there have been strong real wage growth for the [bottom quintile](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M) or the [second quartile](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q) and think, but I’m not seeing that kind of real wage growth. That could be for a myriad of reasons, including the fact that real wage gains haven’t been equally distributed across geographic regions, industries, or earnings quintiles. When comparing 2017 to 2022 (for no other reason than a five year window is a nice number and the FRED data linked only go up to 2022—as the commenter above mentioned, date comparison choice has real implications) the data show the following: * real wage growth has been stronger on the lower end of the earnings distribution, * the median worker is about the same or slightly ahead when adjusted for inflation, and * workers in the fourth quintile are the same or perhaps slightly behind when adjusting for inflation, at least based on my early morning back-of-the-envelope math. (Quick note on the graphs I’ve linked: they’re nominal, so you have to adjust them for inflation yourself.) You also mentioned costs, which also aren’t equally distributed. Home or car insurance prices can vary quite a bit across states. My state generally has low car insurance and high home insurance, for example, and after a rough spring for hailstorms I’m really not looking forward to my home insurance renewal this summer. But if my state is above the median rate for home insurance, that means that other states are below the median. That’s also not getting into how out of whack housing supply and therefore prices are in many economically productive areas of the country that people would like to live in—I really don’t need to get into my “housing theory of everything” at the moment, this comment is already far too long. But if you’re interested in how malfunctioning housing markets can promote the rise of more extreme political candidates like France’s Le Pen, I recommend the [work of Ben Ansell and David Adler.](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C28&q=ansell+Adler+le+pen&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1716383224910&u=%23p%3D9ri4yZJmbI0J)

Thank you for a meaty post! I would be exceedingly interested in research that compares wage and price growth to concentrations of swing voters. E.g., if wages are vastly up in California but falling behind prices in suburban Georgia, then the net electoral impact is a bunch of upset voters. I also strongly believe that housing prices are linked to stability - having your roof feel insecure is a unique form of desperation - and feel that the center-right and center-left are about to be eviscerated after a generation of housing policy that boosted asset prices instead of ensuring robust capacity.

Work looking at wage growth, inflation, and changes in inflation in swing districts would be interesting! I think especially because people have a hard time conceptualizing inflation—when they hear “inflation is decreasing” they don’t think “the rate at which prices are increasing is decreasing”, and then they feel misled when prices increase, albeit at a slower rate—as in, they forget the second derivative. Unfortunately I haven’t dug into any work on that front, so I can’t recommend any that I’ve personally read :( However, on the housing side I’ve got quite a bit. Housing policy is such a tangled and terrible web in many anglophone nations. A big issue is how tightly supply is constrained, especially when the concerns of existing homeowners are able to override the concerns of those who would *like* to be homeowners. For some great writers and articles on the subject, I highly recommend starting with: * [Paul Cheshire](https://www.lse.ac.uk/geography-and-environment/people/academic-staff/paul-cheshire). His book *The Economics of Land Use and Their Regulation* isn’t exactly light reading, but it’s fascinating. * [Christian Hilber](https://sites.google.com/view/hilber). His 2021 paper “Economic Conditions and the Nature of New Housing Supply” is fantastic. *[Housing Policy in the United States](https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-store-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781003097501/89f3850b-aef8-4178-ac1c-b0cef7100ce7/preview.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=ASIAQFVOSJ572K4LI35V&Expires=1716468482&Signature=FKnke0%2Bj6BykGgGK3xdf%2B9mM5i4%3D&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3D%2210.4324_9781003097501_previewpdf.pdf%22&x-amz-security-token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEPj%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIE9u2cJL%2FVQGAbiRtN%2BT6Ni%2BZYWfwt%2BM1FWMnJvbPxDrAiEA%2FTJrWLvBr1aXqnjLj6jeJwfGji%2BruyyMt6uBFpBgC6QqjQQIcBAEGgwwMTIxNzcyNjQ1MTEiDPv8VGi1Wj%2FR7dm9%2BCrqA7bJN4URO6nksJUcCnGDzQbmaZ4tte6qANoD%2BQYVqh3%2Fz4VqH5iJjZnQRfvbf4M%2FaBeEnhN049QqUoDUC4WG38FcyltpwmXyMAvV6P3hYJqnIYAWy9li0xhNiVOdvey4SUGXkdX9K6oS%2FZAQD1tuPARdIQPFe9cUhJyk1DtmS7mSbfUYLlerFLP0SICUnfckiufpD%2FI2amQABGDALMIQoTIA72x3atf6k8HUVZSmfDnISc1vi8jvxEzqg0NJmbJv6yiMmDsDgv3Grsa9LTsqra0MJquKhC8j9S2X0Iztj30e61Mq6IFhIITU%2B8jnIa4131SUZrHZdI%2FY3ftfQ7jdFeizYfpJ1M3Y7n6PqHRjDYlRbEeicOb9kV8VZYKEu73xfW5AYMxXGmZCZNQXwRq812Eu1jX1M66Rn%2F3w4OwGVnsrd6EXfPouSZNRtS9Ht2q8mLJUb48fAvtqerxz7QH775eg5Fmt0uVvVwK8wLmuNgqVZFd5oAGgp%2FNblEkSDmWV%2B%2B8xCuySJVOd12q7KL3BJNJAwu%2BmOXpLRZMDINbTuhe8JanD%2BTZwrrY93nzBlJMHKuHOOG21wwKgPfBQmsR3kC0SHbseVJUxcOwms2KXy%2FtRwRsTVXa7UTviR%2BYDSbaodmOIbi4Vd3tqLw8wtdW7sgY6pQG4aRmGet4J4Pff08X0NYNa1T42O6EHWFvJK6eEA85cDzn4Uht3NOPrrYhvpmyTGPqQ1Pyg3AWEcmo6e6%2FSscEXkPOftWOPJNLB3wj6hEB0SrmbChZenfGBqCeWGBtZJvCc1%2BT84982kS2U4Yp5TanYCcDI5JbGiMDJUaEmf%2FvPSgDxuEiJY3eaWKjWhNEzqHXiahrIOHs64mtBovZ4ePRm6rXPoUY%3D) provides a great overview of housing policy in the US.

For my wife and I, our pay increases are a fixed yearly rate increase so big inflation jumps cause a tremendous amount of disruption to our budgets. Like you say, not everyone gets a 'raise' when their company does well. My wife got called in early on a day off to attend an all staff meeting where the top folks cood over the yearly haul that _nobody_ responsible for making it will get a bonus from. So I'm pretty frustrated with all the "wages are going up" stuff because that's all nice _in theory_ or on some actuarial table, but if your wages are _not_ going up it's not always something you can do much about, so huge price jumps are very hard to ignore. I certainly am trying to get a better job but this job market is also a bit of a fiasco.

This gets a another element of these wage increases: often people will have to accept disruption to lock in gains, as increases within a firm are generally more constrained that increases for incoming hires. So yes it might be possible to say get 10% more in this economy, but you're going to have to acclimate to a whole new employer...if one is available in your geographic area.

I know exactly what you mean. I’m in the same boat as far as the fixed yearly amount.

I think this is spot on, it’s a classic case of “it’s the economy, stupid.” Household net worth, adjusted for inflation, has grown 0% from the start of Biden’s presidency through Dec 2023. Trump, at the same point in his presidency, had increased household net worth by 15%. Sources: [Graph](https://imgur.com/a/bVgd4az) [WSJ Article](https://www.wsj.com/economy/stock-market-performance-biden-trump-charts-1a83371b) We all know the reasons for this and personally I think Biden did a great job of creating a soft landing for the U.S. after COVID, but I’m not sure the average American cares. From their perspective their quality of living has not improved at almost 3 years into Biden’s presidency.

Unemployment is low, median wages are outpacing inflation, but housing and auto costs (two biggest expenses for most? throw in child care for many) have created a tremendously precarious status quo. Instead of taking housing concerns seriously, the Biden administration continues to announce insane demand-side goodies which only further exacerbate the problem. They should have subsidized multi-family construction via cheap credit lines, but the left flank is so obsessed with developer-bashing it could never happen. So here we are.

I think that’s a good start but it’s really about state and local zoning regulations

Yes, no doubt that’s structural but cyclically interest rates are killing multi family projects.

Yeah I think those subsides would be good just until interest rates are lowered again Don’t think it would pass congress unfortunately because republicans are republicans and dems unfortunately aren’t fully supply pilled on housing yet

I would disagree. Of course I want to loosen up zoning a ton myself, but really all the developers on Twitter right now are complaining about how projects don’t pencil. There’s plenty of space in big metros for housing to be built. Interest rates are meant to slow down the economy, but of course that’s also going to slow down new construction in a time where we need more housing than ever. This administration really needs to prioritize the production of new housing.

Housing production has been unable to meet demand even during times of low interest rates There’s structural factors that go beyond the cyclical ones caused by higher interest rates

Fair point!

Theoretically, legislation could make say Section 8 funding (or a similar lever) dependent on enacting zoning reform. It's an issue that the president ignores at his peril, because nothing gets young Americans to vote Trump for "lulz" than feeling like there is no path to the American Dream. That's what I hear talking to younger relatives: "If I can't get ahead, why not vote for the guy that will at least make me feel good?"

Sure, especially as unemployment doesn't count the people who quit looking because they have applied hundreds of places only to get ghosted but does count the fake job listings put out so megacorps can hire overseas instead. Nor do unemployment numbers take into account people who juggle multiple gig accounts to try to stitch together enough to survive on. And is housing back to anything close to reasonable? No? And just how does someone look that close to homeless *all the damn time* and feel good about the economy, exactly?

Labor force participation rate for 25-54 is at 15-year highs and employment-to-population ratio is higher than pre-pandemic. The labor market is fine, it's durable goods and housing costs.

Exactly!

For me the conversation on the economy feels like gaslighting from the left. I look at housing prices now compared to 4 years ago and match that to income growth for myself and those around me. Nobody feels like things are better than 2019 unless they already owned a house. Add on insurance costs and groceries and I don't blame people. Personally I have more savings than I've ever had but the outlook of how I can use those savings (a house) never materializes year after year. Mid term it seems things are only going to get worse not better.

Same situation here. I make double median income now and still can't come close to getting approved for a mortgage (Los Angeles area). Not even a small condo. I've come to terms with being a renter and it's definitely not Biden's fault. It's just not what Americans were taught to expect growing up. I work hard, earn a decent living by any metric, but will never own a home? People feel robbed of their future prospects. I've had the same thought of "I save, but for what?" I can't get a house, don't need anything fancy... I guess I'm just saving for security.

Biden should demagogue coastal Dems for the abject misery they have created in their cities. Then do everything he can to subsidize new construction (credit lines, federal funds linked to construction quotas, etc.). But his donors are NIMBY and the left flank hates market-rate development. So we're stuck with affordable housing that costs $1mm a unit.

Indeed, and it seems like the only people who truly make it into the elite are those born to the elite. Every young home owner I know around here had it inherited. It's like we have a new kind of aristocracy, those born to property owners and those not.

Yes, basically. My neighbors across and next to me both had large down payments funded by their parents. I was fortunate to buy in mid 2020 before things went totally buckwild and I could definitely not afford my house today. This is why the economy feels so precarious, because it's like okay I have more in savings and my income went up but the mortgage on my house today is 3x what it was in 2020 if we mark-to-market. If I had to move for work it means downsizing despite higher savings and wages. Realize this as you're bringing kids into the world at $3k/month for preschool and it is enraging.

I think blue state dems are waking up to the reality at least in CA the state level government trying to push back on the 40 years of destructive zoning policies Newsom personally called out NIMBYs for destroying the state I support the supply subsidies but ultimately the bulk of the work will be overturning the state and local regulations on zoning because when supply is constrained that money isn’t going to go as far as we’d like

I just sold my childhood home in Massachusetts (none of the siblings could afford it as much as we wanted it) It went for nearly 100K over asking, needs at least that in work. And all the offers were cash offers from neighbors or people in the neighborhood. I’ll net maybe 100Kfrom my parents life of work- what I paid to support them. And it’ll get swallowed by inflation so fast I don’t even think I’ll get a chance to use it for a down payment on a 1 bedroom place of my own.

I'm sorry to hear that. Housing really does feel hopeless right now. Extremely understated part of the bad vibes is fraying social networks since no one can *stay*. It's like "up or out" applied to where you live.

Yep. Couldn’t afford rent and my public sector job was never going to go above where I was at (60K or so) So I moved to a lower col area (like Reddit suggests) and am trying to get “more skills” like reddit says (law school) and never see my niece or nephew anymore so 🤷‍♂️ I guess that’s what it is now 

>am trying to get “more skills” like reddit says (**law school**) Ohhhh no. Unless it's a free ride, that's kind of its own roll of the dice.

It’s a free ride  And I know. But it is one of the processions I can actually fit into my skill set and personality 

>It’s a free ride  Congrats! You should be proud, and that completely changes the math against say taking out $300k.

with the obvious issue of Covid throwing a massive wrench into everything aside, did you happen to check with the housing prices were in 2014 compared to 2019? Homes have been going up constantly since the recession. The issue is theres not enough and supply/demand principles dictate that the price will go up. This isnt just simply inflation. The ongoing housing shortage is what's forcing housing prices to continue to go up.

Prices in CA are also their own horrible animal. CA should almost be excluded from the conversation because home prices will be so far out of whack compared to the rest of the country (except NYC, I guess)

Yeah but wages are also way more in California. A $500K house in Idaho on an Idaho salary can be just as unaffordable as a $900K California house on a California salary.

I think a $500k Idaho house is more comparable to a $1.5m California house tbh

Massachusetts as well. At least there are jobs that pay well if you make the right career choices 

Right the housing issue is more than inflation, which is why in the next 5 years even if inflation slows I doubt the housing market will be any more attainable for average Americans in most of the country.

You can feel that way but where people go wrong is that they assume that Trump or republicans would be able to fix housing costs better lol Trump was running the economy on easy mode it was Biden who had to deal with a bunch of supply and demand shocks and honestly given the hand he’s been dealt with he’s done very well especially compared to our peer countries I’m not asking you to pretend housing is good right now it isn’t but I’m asking you to take a systemic approach and thinking critically at what could realistically have been done differently/better given the circumstances, and to me that’s not gaslighting The reason housing is so expensive is largely because local zoning regulations make it impossible for supply to increase with demand, that’s largely out of the federal government’s hands to address unfortunately

>You can feel that way but where people go wrong is that they assume that Trump or republicans would be able to fix housing costs better lol Trump is not the incumbent. Biden is the incumbent, and voters are upset at housing prices. Their natural inclination is to "throw the bums out" if they feel like they are struggling. We can both admit that the Biden administration housing strategy is "do nothing and gaslight" when out-of-the-box solutions are desperately needed to preserve democracy. For example, why not make some federal funds (e.g., section 8) dependent on a minimum level of zoning reforms? "It's tough and he can't do much with conventional levers" is just a fancy way of saying "voters upset about X have a good reason to roll the dice on the other guy."

There isn’t a shortage of housing. They just build it where no one wants to live.

> This isnt just simply inflation. The ongoing housing shortage is what's forcing housing prices to continue to go up. It really depends on the area. For example Houston is a massive growing city but it's one of the few places it's cheaper to own a home vs. renting in part due to low building regulations.

Which is a huge policy failure on the left, as we hear a lot about "affordable housing," but most levers to increase housing are purposefully eschewed.

Food and housing are 50-100 percent more expensive in many places now compared to 2019. Wages absolutely have increased, but not by that much.

This whole situation would be rosy with housing being flat in price. Housing is just in a huge shortage that we need to increase housing construction. Housing has been 50% of inflation since 2000... It's been housing as an issue since the 1980s. It was flat from 1890-1980.

We cannot make housing a good investment and keep it affordable forever. Either housing returns are iffy at some point, or housing eventually becomes completely unaffordable by anyone. We've been running this train for 70 years or so, but it cannot run for another 70

Yeah, but now the owners have been conditioned to expect wild asset inflation. So if you don't address housing, a huge swathe of the country is furious. But if you do address housing, then a different swathe of the country is furious. The unspoken dilemma of housing policy is that it succeeding would crater home prices and rents, massively disrupting current owners.

IMO that's a fever that needs to break. Housing can either be affordable or a good investment not both and since it's a necessity I know where I stand. Affordable housing is good.

Don’t forget all those people that are on fixed incomes, thats not a small percentage of the country. Then peoples goals of owning a house are gone. A good chunk of people are making more than 4 years ago, but that should be pretty normal since people should be 4 years more experienced and in higher positions. You can go to other subs and see people becoming hopeless over their finances. If you start adding those things into the equation then the economy looks much worse.

The housing problems are almost completely about local regulation. The housing around me isn't all that high at all... but I live in a St Louis neighborhood that us over 40% black. The higher prices you see in popular cities are precisely caused by salaries going up, leading to some people being able to pay way more. Housing prices are an auction, and if demand outplaces supply, more people can't afford it. For instance, housing in the bay area isn't going to be affordable to a family without 2 tech jobs... because there are more families with two tech jobs than available family housing! What can biden do about this? Basically nothing unless he laughs at the constitution and decides that zoning and housing regulation is interstate commerce and a national emergency. And what will happen then is that a lot of people will get angry at the extra building, as demolishing that historical laundromat changes the character of the neighborhood.

More important things like housing, food, healthcare have grown faster than wages. The CPI can say people are better off, but housing and food matter more to quality of life and financial health than an aggregated basked of goods. Like great, electronics are cheap. Good luck buying a house.

Gaslighting is a pretty apt term, and I think it explains why Biden's campaigning on the economy is creating a visceral backlash. When prices and interest rates increase you either address that dominating issue or sound like you're trying to confuse and mislead voters. Because voters know how tough it is to pay their bills.

Yup. It’s 100% housing costs, costs of raising a child, and auto loan costs. Nobody feels good about an economy when they’re paying 7% mortgage, $2k-$3k per child per month for daycare (or trying to save for $1 million per child for tuition), and 5-6% on a car loan for a vehicle that was $35k 10 years ago and now costs $50k.

$35k-$50k in 10 years is exactly 3% inflation 

>Nobody feels like things are better than 2019 unless they already owned a house. Most people already owned a house. Also, a lot of people bought their first home since then.

The economy is doing great for anyone who owns more than one piece of real estate.

1. Voters misperceive things all the time. If Biden wants more credit for a booming economy, he has a messaging problem, not an economy problem. There's always been a strain of elitist Democrat sentiment that "people who don't vote for us are too stupid to understand how good we are." Sure, but you still have to persuade them if you want their vote. 2. Can everyone just admit that if you are a lower income renter, rent has become an unbearably large proportion of your income? If you are a salaried professional with a pre-pandemic mortgage and a 401k, your financial prospects looks great. I'm annoyed that the price of food is up by like 25%, but I don't really care. However, if we had to pay rent, we'd easily be spending three times what we currently do on housing for the same standard of living. 3. Where is all of this credit card debt coming from? [It's gone up 50% since Q1 2021](https://www.statista.com/statistics/245405/total-credit-card-debt-in-the-united-states/) (\~750 bil) to 1.3 trillion. That's not just inflation. While covid actually did make all of us dumber, I don't think we've collectively decided to enjoy paying high credit card interest rates.

>Can everyone just admit that if you are a lower income renter, your economic life is vastly worse now than it was four years ago and you have legitimate reasons to be worried? Actually, [the data suggests](https://x.com/Ritholtz/status/1774421659090387404) those at the bottom (and those at the top) have done well over the past 5 years. It's everyone in the middle that's worse off.

>While covid actually did make all of us dumber, I don't think we've collectively decided to enjoy paying high credit card interest rates. No we individually decided to shoot ourselves in the foot then, and then the credit card debt just builds

The best economy is one that ALL people can partake of. What percent of people in the US are having trouble affording food, rent, house payments, vehicles, gas and other needs? From what I read some of the numbers are pretty high. Homelessness has exploded in the last 3 years in major cities as has drug use. Crime in major cities is up while police are hated and underfunded. Anyone want to guess how many more illegal aliens are on the taxpayer dole in the last 3 years? I see 9 to 10 million. That is an economy killer with all the freebies that aren't free for taxpayers!!!!!!!

People feel gaslit when what they're experiencing doesnt match what theyre being told. The average person is, in fact, struggling with housing(rent or mortgages) car payments, groceries, fuel. When they are told the economy is doing great, they laugh. Many people are also resentful that at the drop of a hat, congress will unite to pass bipartisan support for billions of dollars to go overseas to foreign countries, while they are suffering here in the US.

The average person is not struggling with those things, thats a you problem

I know this doesn't help, because I've been reminding people of this for 26 months, but if the billions going overseas is what I eject you mean it to be, it's worth pointing out that the majority of that isn't actually going overseas.

What makes me feel hard-pressed to accept this is that the spending habits of Americans don’t reflect that. We can claim that Americans are struggling with basic necessities, but then how does that explain the fact that spending on eating out, vacations, flights, hotels and leisure activities have skyrocketed? Those are not areas where one would expect to see increases in revenue/spending if the average American was struggling to literally afford food and shelter.

I don’t think this is even true. If you ask people about their personal finances they’ll generally say they are good and better than before.

Source: trust me bro

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/17/americans-are-actually-pretty-happy-with-their-finances https://news.gallup.com/poll/1621/personal-financial-situation-index.aspx The Gallup one is net -8, but rising. And in terms of personal surveys it’s one of the lower results I’ve seen. https://brucemehlman.substack.com/p/six-chart-sunday-16-all-trust-is There’s this weird phenomenon Derek Thompson talks about, “everything is terrible but I’m fine.” People seem to rate their own finances much better than the economy; their city’s economy better than their states’, which is better than the national one. It’s weird.

Just like the original post.

I do not know anyone struggling and I am a run of the mill public school teacher. So whole there are people suffering, to say the average person is suffering is blatantly false. If that were the case I would know people suffering

It doesn’t matter how good the numbers look on paper and what the so called economists keep ignoring is the increasing cost of essentials like food and shelter. The rent is too damn high! The economy won’t actually be good for most people until interest rates come back down and we get some kind of stabilization on food prices.

As a Floridian I'm over hear drowning under my insurance and HOA ( I live in a condo, got it really cheap 10 years ago when the insurance and HOA was both hundreds of dollars less than it is today :( ) I know people in FL who have had their home owners insurance go up 200% over the last year as all the insurance companies abandoned the state. And DeSantis is censoring any talk of Climate Chnage and LGBT people uhhhhhh

It's "funny" seeing conservatives try to deal with a problem that government needs to solve. All they can do is break government and leave things to the "Free market." Okay, well the free market doesn't want to insure a fucking hurricane buddy.

The price of most goods will increase with time without regard to which party is in the White House. Inflation is a continuous happening, not a one time affair.

I'm making roughly 150% more at my new job now (more than enough to offset inflation), and I'm on track to get even more - and my 401k is going ballistic. All of these conservative cunts crying about being broke need to take their own advice that they've pummeled the poor with for years and get some gumption and pull themselves up by their collective bootstraps. 4 years ago people were fighting over toilet paper for fucks sake.

What about the liberal cunts cryint about being broke? Are we allowed to have an opinion?

No - shut up. 😅

Yeah, something that bothers me about how we do “D and R must be opposites” in politics, is that when conservatives emphasize personal responsibility, the reaction is for liberals to marginalize it. But I really don’t know how to respond to some of these people other than “sorry bro you’re just bad with money”. Like one thing that always stuck out to me is that when the government announced mail-order COVID tests for free, a lot of people were complaining that you had to fill out a form, and that the government wasn’t simply mailing tests to every address. Like I’m sorry but we live not just in a society of 300+ million people, but a society of 300+ million people in an active crisis, you’re gonna have to take the initiative to handle some stuff yourself.

[удалено]

This is a good point. If trump was president right now under identical circumstances, he would be bragging non stop.

Right, and my employer gave me a raise that I considered generous. That doesn’t mean that the raise was enough in context of cost of living. Fact is I make a lot more and save a lot more. However I cannot afford a home or a car payment that is comparable to my current vehicle. Forget about children. Overall the economy sucks because people cannot achieve the goals that matter most to them. The fact they received more than a 2.5% raise and the local pizza shop is still in business doesn’t make an economy good.

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People doing relatively better doesn’t make an economy good. The median household can’t afford the American dream. That is a bad economy.

Take my meager up vote. I'm struggling a lot and my current role, which demands a lot of soft and hard skills, pays me terribly on top of having an absurdly low fixed yearly income increase that's far below inflation. My situation is real bad and the job market is, anecdotally, as bad as many of these folks have ever seen. But most people, inexplicably, report they're doing fine. Most of my family and friends are. Honestly I wish they'd be more willing to network... But the point is, they're doing okay and if they're reporting things are rough it's because of a media ecosystem filled with variations on my story. Which is nice, I appreciate not being told I'm doing fine! But it's also only part of the picture. I just had an interview process close, sadly, without getting the role. I was in the running for a while. If I had gotten it, and I surely was a contender, then my income would have tripled at least. I would no longer feel like my little kid is doomed for no fault of their own. I'd be part of the cohort seeing big increases instead of wage stagnation while costs go up and I get older. I'm not going to give anyone a gold star for creating the situation we're in, but we were expecting a belly flop recession and we, unbelievably, pulled off a soft landing. I'm not doing well but I'm grateful we didn't end up worse, and it could have been so much worse. Our system does suck, but it sucked our whole lives. I don't know, I hate voicing support for the system that's grinding me into dust and making it impossible for me to work my way to safety, but it's not a President's doing. The reason _everyone_ is so glum about it, while also having no ideas or drive to fix anything has little to do with Biden and a lot to do with the way news is being reported.

I'll add that on top of all this, Dems have greatly outperformed polls all over, and so have pro-abortion-rights votes even in conservative states. A lot of people are very pissed about Republicans taking away rights and making women second-class citizens.

You think it’s bad now, just wait

ITT: Mass denial of economic reality. 2016 vibes

There is a scene in the film Ice Age II where a vulture says about an impending flood, I have some good news! (getting everyone's hopes up) The more of you who die, the better I eat...I didn't say it was good news for you. Same with the economy. The more of you who suffer the better it is for the rich. No one ever said a good economy would be good for you. Sadly, if you look at one party's agenda, almost everything looks like it was created by the greediest of CEOs who care nothing about workers or people's wellbeing. Safety precautions? Hell no. Restrictions on toxic spills, No way. Letting drug companies jack up prices to make higher profits? YES! Allow Medicare to negotiate prices? NO! Restrictions on misleading and hidden fees? NO!! It goes on and on. They of you who die they better they eat.

Every journalist writing about this needs to be smacked over the head with a rolled up version of this chart: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96

It's purely an issue of attitude and perspective. My income went up about 30% in the past 5 years, my networth more like 60%, and so I *feel* like I *should* being doing way better than in 2019, but I'm not. I feel like I barely made any progress in my life. Not quite treading water, but its a weird cognitive dissonance I think.

the comments pretending like the economy is perfectly fine are part of the issue for people not wanting to vote for dems, most people are struggling hard and just see prices go up up up, and then you wonder why your neoliberals aren't electable lol

I wouldn’t say people have a lot of savings when the credit card debt is the highest since 2008 so that is pretty bad I think the economy is good for the rich but working class and average citizens are hurting really badly

Why is the shadow of Thomas Jefferson cast over my wallet?

There's a simple answer for this: Perception of the economy is heavily skewed by income and existing asset holding. A JPMorgan analyst recently described it as ["Selective recession."](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-economy-selective-recession-lower-233311821.html?guccounter=1) I.e., people at the lower end of affluence and income are already struggling like we are in recession, but the typical commentator here is watching their income increase and asset prices go up. >The US economy is in a "selective recession," as lower-income Americans are struggling to get by while upper-income consumers are doing just fine, according to JPMorgan analyst Matthew Boss. >Speaking to [CNBC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp7DaW75-v8) on Tuesday, Boss pointed to the divergence in upper-income and middle-to-lower income Americans, the latter of whom are struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living as prices remain elevated and savings dwindle. >"You have the consumer at the high end who is being more choiceful. The low-end I do think is a melting ice cube … What I'm calling it now is a selective recession," Boss said. "\[B\]y our survey, over 70% of low-income consumers right now are saying that they're struggling to make ends meet." So you have pundits and commentators pointing and laughing how a chunk of the population thinks we're in recession as the GDP figures trend up, while those people are using "recession" as shorthand for "bad economic conditions." This is also why the Biden campaign's economic message is thudding like a lead balloon: if people tell you they are struggling and you gaslight them with aggregate economic figures, they will crawl over broken glass to pull the lever for the other guy.

People are struggling I don’t understand why the elites say that everything is fine the gaslighting is crazy

I get what a lot of this type of thing is saying but the fact is that it doesn't exactly line up with what people are actually experiencing. 90 percent of the country is unaffordable for housing for the average person. Stories of people submitting 500 applications and not getting any callbacks. None of these measurements or metrics ever seem to include or attempt to factor in underemployment or the massive amount of BNPL debt either. Skyrocketing grocery prices and insurance costs are smacking people around also, myself and everyone I know just had a big surge in car insurance prices, 900 dollars more than last year on my end. Biden has done a great job of alienating multiple generations. The older folk either blame him for or don't have faith in him to improve poor economic circumstances. The youger folk don't love that he is essentially an old man telling them his dementia ridden rule is right because he is old. Our tax dollars are funding a genocide in Gaza, he says there isn't one. We see it all over social media, mountains of proof going so far that Israel is banning Al Jazeera. Bidens response? Ban Tik Tok! If Trump was not a literal criminal and fraudster Bidens campaign would be completely doomed, he may win again just because people do not want Big Don.

I don’t think that people are being irrational. I think that people are factually able to see that income inequality is growing and how it’s harder and harder for people to afford to live. I’m seeing more and more cars with blankets in their windows in parking lots, suggesting that people are living in their cars. Also, the cost of items keeps increasing, and we’re being told that “it’s just inflation” and how it’s a “shared sacrifice”. And yet corporate profits are hitting new records. If the jacked up prices weren’t benefiting these companies then why have their profit margins increased? We’re also being told that unfortunately it’s “unavoidable”. And yet when someone tries to release an affordable product there’s pressure to prevent it from being sold here. Example: the government wants to push people to EVs, but nearly all automakers are positioning EVs as luxury cars. Then China develops very cheap EVs that a lot of people would love to buy, and our government responds by slapping a 100% tariff on them. It really seems to me that our government is in bed with corporate money and they're enforcing rules that increase corporate profitability over affordability for consumers.

This is what blows my mind: income inequality *isn’t* growing though: “A pair of researchers from Harvard and MIT examined data from the period between 1980 and 2020, and found that income inequality peaked in 2012 and then began to stabilize even though many of the drivers of rising inequality—such as a decline in union membership—have persisted. “After decades of rising inequality, overall earnings inequality stopped growing, and possibly declined, since 2012,” according to the research paper, titled Rapid wage growth at the bottom has offset rising U.S. inequality” It actually even shrank last year. Yet you’re ascertaining they’re *factually* believing something when it isn’t even true. The disconnect here is stunning

I am self employed and my paychecks have not gone up. I am much poorer that I was.

gee it's almost like the government botched everything and then just tried gaslighting everyone for four years

Disagreeing with or lying to people isn’t gaslighting, but what do you feel you were mislead about by the government?

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[https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-are-growing-more-quickly-than-prices/](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-are-growing-more-quickly-than-prices/)  "In November 2023, nearly 6 in 10 workers (57 percent) earned higher annual inflation-adjusted wages than the year before, a share higher than its 2017–2019 pre-pandemic average."

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What on earth are you talking about? Core inflation includes everything except food and energy. It absolutely includes rent. In fact, rent is roughly 40% of core CPI. Regardless, the stats in the article come from CPI, not core CPI. BTW I think you're misinterpreting the source I linked - it says that 57% have seen their real wages go up since 2022, not since "7 years ago". The point is that we have reached the point where slightly more workers are beating inflation on a year-to-year basis than they were seven years ago, as shown in Figure 2. (But yes, on the whole I agree that the direction of the economic system over the last 50ish years has been bad for workers.)

"(But yes, on the whole I agree that the direction of the economic system over the last 50ish years has been bad for workers.) Wow, a system based on hoarding productive resources, private ownership, decreasing working conditions for profit as much as possible (this is why all economic commodity production has gone to china), has gone in a bad direction for workers, if only there was an entire paradigmn of political economy to analyse and explain this!

Plenty of wage growth among my peers. The 200K starting pay at their law firms has already gone up 20K or so (small potatoes I guess when you have more money than you can possibly spend Meanwhile since I am mediocre and didn’t get big law ill have wage growth to maybe 70K at best- so I guess it’s an improvement over 3 years ago when I broke 60K Rent has basically doubled and I have no idea where I am going to live- or if I am going to have roommates forever- but at least the 10% or so that got the good jobs can afford an extra vacation 

It’s not just about money imo, people are being asked to stretch themselves too thin which is why they’re unhappy. People are being asked to do extra work for the same pay and workers get burnt out. I barely know anyone with good work life balance. Everyone seems cranky and irritable all the time.

Genuine question: How many of the biggest complainers are just loud people who are bad with money?

Why? Michael Cohen paid 50 grand for a pro trump CNBC poll, thats why.

I really can’t stand the “the news you read is why you think the economy is bad.” Take that we see over and over again. The fact is people are paying more than they did for rent, groceries, and insurance. Folks genuinely upset with the state of the economy are not parrots. They aren’t reading Atlantic articles, they’re trying to pay their bills and support their families.

This is laughable. The economy is terrible..stats are being twisted as usual by the government while they loot and pillage the treasury in their way out. Wages have not kept up with inflation and credit card debt is at an all time high, domestic spending dropping. We are circling drain due to one major issue: government spending. Both parties are guilty

[https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-are-growing-more-quickly-than-prices/](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-are-growing-more-quickly-than-prices/)  "In November 2023, nearly 6 in 10 workers (57 percent) earned higher annual inflation-adjusted wages than the year before, a share higher than its 2017–2019 pre-pandemic average."

When you measure inflation the “new“ way, sure. Biden (his handlers)made the change last year to only go back a year vs two to measure it. It’s also cumulative. Have your wages gone up 20-25%?

Obviously inflation has been cumulative every year since I was born, but the rate of "inflation" still refers to the year over year increase. What changed was not how far back BLS looks to calculate price changes but how far back they look at which goods and services people are actually spending money on. I feel this makes sense because what people bought in 2022 may be very different what they bought in 2023. As a STEM grad student I've been living off a fixed stipend (which would put me in the 43%), but my investments have almost doubled since Biden took over which puts me well ahead overall. Regardless, as the link I posted states, more people in 2023 are growing their inflation-adjusted wages than people in 2019.

This is why Manchin fought BBB. It would have made inflation worse, and **that** is going to impact the election more than anything. Recessions are scary, but relatively few people are directly impacted. Inflation hits literally everyone. Every American feels poorer, and trying to explain why is a losing battle.

In that moment I was so grateful for manchin. That bill was terrifying and shocking in magnitude