Despite negative perceptions on the state of the economy, inflation is now much lower than its June 2022 peak of 9.1 percent.
I can never get past economic articles that miss the fundamental issue with “but inflation rates are lower!” card.
Like, the price never went down, it just started increasing faster for a while, and is now slowing down. But it’s still increasing.
Like imagine if you went from 0-60 in 2 seconds in an Uber, so you say “slow down”. So the driver takes 2 more seconds to go from 60-100.
The rate of acceleration slowed down, but the past acceleration doesn’t just magically disappear.
And wages aren’t keeping up, either. A friend just told me they got a 1% “raise” this year. After inflation, that’s a pay cut.
Yeah but did you hear fast food workers make $15 bucks an hour now in at least one state? Plus people surely haven’t gone through all of their COVID stimulus savings yet.
My favorite excuse for not paying fast food workers more is, “that’s not supposed to be someone’s permanent job, that’s supposed to be a teenager’s job.”
Great, but we don’t live in your supposed to world and it is a permanent job for a lot of people now.
Also, the idea that you shouldn’t pay a teenager a decent hourly wage either is pretty offensive, but that’s a whole other issue.
High inflation: I’m losing money faster.
Low inflation: I’m losing money slower.
That’s how it should be read.
Despite negative perceptions on the state of the economy, people are losing money a lot slower than its June 2022 peak of losing a shit ton of money per quarter.
Rather than losing money, it’s technically more correct to say that we’re earning less.
The real trick is converting to purchasing power of individuals and showing the trend overtime.
Like the average/median purchasing power of an American year by year. Not just purchasing power of a dollar, but of the average salary.
Edit:
Are down votes because I didn’t mention savings?
Like 50% have less than $500, over a third have less than $100
This functionally isn’t a problem for most so I ignored it considering the focus is on poverty and not how I flation effects the wealthiest.
I think it’s a perception thing? Maybe people feel like they are earning more money than ever before but things cost more so they feel like they are losing money rather than earning less? I don’t know the answer but yea…. Prices are going up and they are still going up, and even if inflation is under control it feels like prices are going up faster than they were before….
Eating at a fast food restaurant I remember my first job I could get a burger for way less than one hour of work at my lowest wage I worked for I could get a whole combo meal at the fast food place next to one of my first jobs for about one hour of work…. Wages have gone up a bit but it’s not keeping pace so if i look at what my same job would pay per hour now it’s still not going to get me a meal for one hour of work, maybe only the burger.
I think you were being downvoted because while you may be technically correct, that means little to the daily life of your average person.
The last time I saw data on wages (pre COVID, so sometime between 2015 and 2019), when adjusted for inflation, wages for the average worker had actually dropped about 5% since then. Add to that that prices have increased faster than inflation across the board, even before COVID, and people are losing money simply keeping afloat. The price of a taco at Taco Bell is now twice what it cost in the 90s when adjusted for inflation. College tuition is up something like 1,500% since the 70s (thanks, Reagan). Something like 60% of houses are considered unaffordable to the average American today, compared to 30% roughly 20 years ago.
All this means that purchasing power has dropped, but “purchasing power” and “earnings” means absolutely nothing to people. The number in their bank account dropping instead of going up matters. The fact that people can’t get a mortgage for a house even though the rent they currently pay is more expensive matters. The fact that people have to take on debt to afford essentials is what matters. To the average person, any of that is a clear sign that they’re losing money.
They’re not missing it at all. In normal circumstances, we’ve always got some low amount of inflation. If prices fell, we’d have an entirely different and much worse set of issues.
If prices fell, we’d have an entirely different and much worse set of issues.
No, it would be a lot worse for the wealthy
Deflation causes people to save money and accumulate wealth.
The wealthy say this is bad because we won’t buy products, but now we don’t buy products because we have no money. Which is worse than not buying products because we’re saving money for a thing like a house or planning to have kids.
Except for the wealthiest who want all the money and can’t get what people are saving. They want everyone broke and all the money they don’t have already, being in circulation so they can take it.
Like, come on bro, it’s not complicated but there is generations of capitalism propaganda repeating that inflation is a good thing, it’s just not true for 99.99% of us. If it still doesn’t make sense, feel free to ask for clarification.
We have history that we can learn from where we’ve had deflation and could observe the effects. The wealthy are the ones not buying products in deflationary environments, or otherwise big ticket purchases for the rest of us. Those big purchases involve a lot of money changing hands, but above and beyond that, there’s also a lack of capital investment, because the investor has no incentive to do anything except to put their money under their mattress, once again not circulating it. If there’s constant low inflation, the investor is guaranteed to lose money keeping it under their mattress but has a good chance at making more money by investing it into companies who use it to hire people and produce things that people want to spend money on.
Do you think that every article written about inflation just happens to forget that prices are still rising? Or do you think there’s a reason there are basically no economists anywhere arguing that deflation is what we should have instead?
…no longer afford?..man, the last proper vacation i took was in nineteen-ninety-mother-f*cking-eight…
When America was still America…
Country is broken post 2008 and we haven’t even arrived to the final destination we are going.
Hope y’all got lube, we are gonna need it. It is getting harder by the day taking all this D
Makes me laugh at the liberals spewing American exceptionalism bullshit in the other comment chain.
Strong union support? Plenty of vacation? 40 hour work weeks???
Genuinely, what fucking insane liberal bubble are those people living in to say this and act like Democrats are the “other side” rooting for the people and putting these in place.
How can you say with a straight face the Dems have strong support for unions. Maybe the fucking police union, sure.
How can you say we should be happy with the 40 hour work week. I work 55 per week and this is common for STEM degrees. In America, salaried workers don’t even get overtime and often make less than the fucking forklift operator outside.
How can you say, unironically, Dems have given us plenty of vacation days. Even the most liberal strongholds use less vacation than developed countries. Y’all know it’s normal for Europeans to fuck off for an entire month every year?
How fucking dare you liberals spit in my face and tell me bold lies and then demand my vote.
The reason the hypocrisy of liberals is so fucking unbelievable is the realization that liberals don’t actually have beliefs or values. They are truly blue MAGA, that’s all it is. They don’t give a shit about making society better or helping the working class.
And I’m so fucking tired of it. Burn it all down at this point if my choice is between continued hell or the literal apocalypse.
TL;DR: Only 56% of Americans plan on taking a summer vacation this year.
For comparison:
So it’s higher than almost any time after normalising from a record height but somehow they needed to create a negative headline?
And one side is working decidedly to take away this and every summer vacation of your life - while the other side backs union labor which is the reason you and I even have weekends, a workday capped at 8 hours and vacation time period.
Wake up and smell, old donny dipshit and his ghoulish handlers!
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fgu4ppsviyqad1.jpeg
Here’s a slightly better version that’s just things spelled out in the actual project2025.
Or worse, I can afford it but still can’t go because my wife can’t get the time off from work.
She had to get a doctors note to get 2 extra days off around the 4th to recover from surgery(!)
Surgery aside, I would have loved to have packed up this week and spent it someplace fun. My wife would have only had Thursday off. She got Wed, Thur, Fri only because her doctor told her employer to get fucked.
It’s not like I can go “Sorry honey! Headed to Vegas! See you in a week!” Well… not if I wanted to STAY married.
That’s just an appalling situation for workers in the US. I work in the public sector and get 37 days off a year in vacation time. Admittedly, I work in the public sector and have a generous vacation deal, but it’s absolutely insane that workers in the US have a worse deal than many third world nations. My 37 days are working days, meaning I get almost 8 whole weeks of vacation time, on top of all the other regular bank holidays everyone else gets. The people there often seem to cherish your second amendment, but fuck, what tyranny are you guys waiting for. How about using them weapons for something else than suicides and accidental shootings?
all the other regular bank holidays everyone else gets.
…“everyone else” gets six, if they’re fortunate to land a salaried position: new year’s day, memorial day, independence day, labor day, thanksgiving day, and christmas day; all those other unobserved holidays are a thing for the public sector and finance only…
Alright. I was thinking about bank holidays here in Sweden. They’re generally off days for all workers here. You can choose to work, it’s not like everything is closed. But that’s a voluntary thing that your employer can’t force you to do, and which is handsomely compensated on account of it being a bank holiday. So people in the hospitality sector for example generally seem to like these shifts and there’s no shortage of volunteers to cover them. This is yet another area where the US system is raping US workers it seems.
I really don’t get how you guys don’t properly unionize - especially with how many companies collaborate with European ones where everyone gets a minimum of 4 weeks of holiday guaranteed by law.
