You’re old, straight, white and rich, motherfucker – YOU’RE going to be “ok.” Everyone else is fucked.
It doesn’t matter how well “the economy” recovered from Covid, when you see stuff like this:
https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/
Trump isn’t going to fix that, but Biden already didn’t, and FPTP means you get your pick of those two options.
Do you have figures that include 2024? That data seems to stop at 2021. Not saying you’re wrong but the picture being painted is just Biden’s first year as president during the height of the pandemic.
Comparing things like rates of inflation and the consumer price index, we see the numbers drop dramatically within the past two years, which seems to have been improving cost of living somewhat (or, ruining less quickly, at least) for the average American, though there is still a lot more to be done.
It’s not really about that short of a timeframe. Here’s another example:
https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
Compare 1963 to 2022:
We’re living in a new Gilded Age, people know they’re getting fucked, and saying “Oh, but look at this number going up” doesn’t work anymore.
I think there are two separate but related metrics at play here. Addressing income inequality would certainly go a long way towards improving quality of life for the working class, but Americans don’t care about someone having too much money as much as they care about having too little themselves.
Despite large movements like Occupy Wall Street bringing the topic of income inequality to the forefront of news for a while, the fact that it petered out and has ceased to be an issue means that enough members of the working class were still contented enough by their bread and circuses, so nothing came of it.
These voters don’t care if their CEO gets a $10 million bonus at the end of the year as long as they can still afford groceries and housing, but they do start to care a lot when they don’t. Only, blame is being directed at the government (inflated cost of living) rather than their rich bosses (wage stagnation).
