‘We got it back to the same as it ever was. Why are you upset?’. smh
The jobs market is robust
Which is why every big corp is doing layoffs right now, with hire freezes, wage increase freezes, and shoddy layoff schemes designed to avoid having to pay unemployment.
Even ignoring all the insane foreign policy and fake as hell local policy that will never see the light of day much like the Obama administration, exactly what metric are these fools using to evaluate the economy?
Because if it’s the Federal Reserve, then of course those banking moguls are having a hell of a time.
There’s always layoffs going on to some extent, overall the labor market has been great though. Unemployment has been consistently low, something like 14 million new jobs have been added over the past few years. The tight labor market has been pushing up the median wage, which is exactly what you want to see. We’re basically at full employment and people are finally starting to see real wage growth that beats inflation. The layoffs recently get disproportionate media coverage because of who they impact (and for political reasons) rather their overall economic significance.
“Jobs” might be the worst metric to look at overall. How many of those jobs are part-time? How many of those jobs include health insurance? How many of those jobs pay a living wage? How many people have to have two or more of those jobs out of necessity?
Hell, how many of those “jobs” are listings that companies never intend to fill? I’ve seen countless listings for high qualification jobs offering poverty wages with no benefits.
The way they calculate the unemployment number makes that metric even worse. If everyone looking for a job gave up the unemployment rate would fall to 0, because it only counts people who are looking for work.
You can never be critical enough on the party that supposed to represent the people doesn’t do a fucking thing to help. Fascism vs. indignation. What a fucking country we live in.
We need a new New Deal.
It’s not working for the middle class. It’s working for another class.
Because most Americans can’t afford to loose a week of pay?
Because it’s a zero-sum game and most Americans are losing so rich fucks can have their “good economy”.
Biden is so fucking out of touch it’s embarrassing.
On the contrary, the fastest growth in real income right now is among those in the lowest quintile. Which means income inequality is actually decreasing for the first time in decades.
That just shows that the economy is not “booming” as they say in the capitalist media - the needle may be moving in the right direction, but we need to acknowledge that the current position of that needle is deep in the gutter, with a lot of improvement still needed before the voting public feels like the economy is actually working for them. Claiming that the economy is doing well, when the people are not doing well economically except for a handful of ultrawealthy, causes feelings of resentment and alienation in people who are currently working hard and still unable to afford basic necessities, ie the majority of Americans. It makes the journalists and the politicians they appear to be hyping seem out of touch and unaware of the problems the voters are dealing with, and therefore it does not inspire hope that those problems are being worked on.
Showing that the needle is moving in the right direction is an important component of effective messaging, but so is demonstrating a clear eyed view of the problem. Articles that talk about how ‘strong’ the economy is fail on the latter.
Maybe in a few decades people will feel better about it.
Well said! Very well said.
“Fastest growing in real income” sounds really fancy.
But it’s a bit misleading. I assume you’re looking at percentage gains. For someone working 40 hrs/week 42 weeks a year, a dollar raise (which is huge for that “lowest quintile”), would equate to a bit more than 2,000 per year.
At federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, that dollar gain represents an increase of 13%. At 15 an hour, its a 6% gain. At 200k/year? Barely a percent. For Walmart CEO, for example, who’s salary is 24.1 million is barely even worth mentioning at .08%.
Said another way, Walmart has 2.2 million “associates” which iirc, is everyone whose not a manager. Let’s say 3 million people who aren’t corporate because I don’t care to go get the accurate stats and frankly want to keep the math easy.
So if they gave them all a 1 dollar raise, that would cost Walmart 3 million dollars. Last year, Walmarts annual gross profit was 147.568 billion, with a 2.65% increase over ‘22. An increase of 3.8 billion dollars.
You know the difference between a million and a billion? About a billion. That hypothetical dollar increase would have been a rounding error on their financial statements.
So if they gave them all a 1 dollar raise, that would cost Walmart 3 million dollars.
I think your numbers are off. It would cost $3m to give 3m workers a bump of exactly one dollar on exactly one paycheck. That’s not a 13% increase. It’s not even a 0.01% increase.
If you actually wanted to increase the wage of 3m full time workers from $7.25 to $8.25, it would cost $6 billion.
Walmarts annual gross profit was 147.568 billion
This isn’t really relevant. Gross profit is Walmart sales minus what it paid manufacturers for its products. So if it buys a TV for $200 and sells it for $300, that’s $100 in gross profit.
Gross profit is used to pay employees, rent, utilities, advertisers, etc. The amount left over after paying the bills is the operating income. Then they pay taxes on that, and the actual earnings (aka net income) are left over.
Nearly all of Walmart’s gross profit was used to pay employees, etc. Their operating income was $23 billion in 2023, which is a decrease of 20% from the previous year. Of note, this coincides with pay increases for Walmart’s hourly workers, from $17.50 to $18/hr.
After paying taxes, they were left with $12 billion.
Nearly all of Walmart’s gross profit was used to pay employees, etc
That’s a mountain sized “etc” covering mainly shareholder dividends and artificial profit minimizing for tax avoidance purposes.
The publicly reported profit margins are always AFTER those things and as such as informative about reality as having literally no information.
No, operating income does not take dividend payments into account.
The fact is that employee payroll/salaries is one of Walmart’s biggest expenses by far, and gross profit does not include it. So you cannot use gross profit to argue that Walmart could afford to give its workers a raise.
It’s the equivalent of looking only at someone’s salary and then saying they should put more away for retirement. You are ignoring their expenses.
Polling suggests this is not the case. In December there was a poll of swing states that showed the people were split 50/50 on whether what they saw in their own lives, their local or city economy, was heading in the right direction but when asked about the national economy, something they have to rely upon the media for rather than their own experience, only 1 in 4 thought things were heading in the right direction. People are constantly fed negative economic propaganda but don’t see it in their own communities so they assume it’s happening everywhere else.
Polling is opinion, and they all have varied (and usually terrible) reasons for their opinions. But some telling statistics?
nearly half of Americans have little to no savings , while 89% of Americans save, the average savings is ~1000, and 60% don’t have a retirement account
60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
About 50% of people under 65 have trouble affording healthcare- with insurance
All while corporations are netting record profits despite all this.
Oh no, more negative propaganda! Better hide it before it shows up in the polls! 🙄
I get my credit score up through tricks of the trade, get whatever procedure I need on credit, and then don’t pay at all, because I can’t afford basic medical even though I work, for above minimum wage no less. They want too much for essential medical treatments, so now I have to do this to survive, I just hope that between every 2 years when my credit tricks work again, that I don’t get mysteriously ill with no way to pay. I tried everything. I work 40 hours and live in a very basic tract home built in the 90s with roommates, I sell things on the side, my old man does repairs/handyman services, we don’t shop, or go on dates, or get to enjoy life really at all outside the home, hell, I’ve even tried selling porn; but apparently I’m not hot enough to pull that off either. And to top off this absolutely lack of sundae; I work enough to not qualify for any assistance despite all the above details keeping me stuck renting/working a shit job until something breaks or I get sick or somebody dies. I know some of y’all are gonna hate me for this, but I didn’t create this broken economy where $10-$30 a month for insurance is an unaffordable expense on top of copays and deductibles and all the BS to make sure you never use the service they’ve made you purchase… When is enough gonna be enough? Then our leaders have the balls to ask why we’re upset? Give me a damn break.
You should be one of Biden’s economic advisors.
Does anyone under the age of 50 respond to polling calls/emails? Polls are shit for actual representation nowadays and are mainly used as a way to influence rather than gauge.
Yeah, but have you met anyone from Wisconsin?
Went to a wedding in Milwaukee last summer, it wasn’t terrible. I wouldn’t want to be there in the winter, I’m content to stay in California. I was on the college side, but it seemed like a slightly larger Redding/Chico area. A lot more brick, closer to a major city, and with more local national level sports teams. The locals seemed nice enough, I enjoyed the first generation immigrants running their cafes.
That does seem to be what his rhetoric is pointing at:
“But for all we’ve done to bring prices down, there are still too many corporations in America ripping people off. Price gouging, junk feeds, greedflation, shrinkflation,” Biden added.
“bring prices down”? Does Biden think we’re in a deflationary period or is he intentionally misleading people?
The latter or both.
It’s not allowed to discuss “bring wages up.” Only impossibilities of putting the genie back in the bottle such as this. That way Biden can continue to deliver on his most important promise to donors - nothing will fundamentally change.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That disconnect looms large over Biden’s political prospects, with White House advisers and campaign officials acknowledging that how Americans feel about the economy could be decisive in determining whether the president can win a second term in November.
But one senior adviser to the president told CNN the one thing they have not offered Biden is a prediction for when the American public’s psychology about the economy will have meaningfully improved.
There is also a delicate balancing act for the president to execute: Touting economic progress while being publicly sympathetic to the reality that many Americans still feel burdened by high prices, including on rent, housing and food.
To that end, Biden has started testing out lines that point the finger at some corporations that he says are taking advantage of the fact that prices were at record highs for so long.
And as Biden addressed culinary union workers at a hotel cafeteria in Las Vegas on Monday morning, he pointed to a classic American candy bar to gripe about shrinkflation.
A recent New York Times op-ed by the chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management that used the price of Snickers bars to examine why so many Americans are still unhappy – despite falling inflation – had caught the president’s eye.
The original article contains 858 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Mandate WFH for companies that have proven they can do it especially for those of us who would rather die than be in a room full of people.
My spending on groceries has almost doubled. I went from being ok to barely making it. It’s great.
Fun times. /s
Let’s see this fucker live on minimum wage and try to afford an apartment.
Real wages have been growing in the past year, especially for those in the lowest quintile. In fact, there are almost no adults making the federal minimum wage any more.
Half joking response- but wouldn’t the survivorship bias mean those who were surviving only on minimum wage alone didn’t survive for very long?
I think you’re on to something, but in reality people will quit a job that doesn’t provide enough to live on. In other words, the job is the one that doesn’t survive, not the worker.
So you might expect a rise in unemployment, but in fact we are seeing low unemployment. This suggests that employers respond to vacant minimum wage jobs by increasing the wage. And in fact there are plenty of well-known employers (e.g. Wal-Mart) where nobody works for minimum wage any more.
people will quit a job that doesn’t provide enough to live on
Or they’ll get a second job. Or a third job. Or start doing gig work.
Especially if the job provides them with health insurance.
Either way, they aren’t working any minimum wage jobs.
Okay but they’re still living off ramen and putting off medical treatment and hoping their car doesn’t blow up
The solution to all those problems involves increasing real wages. Which is what has happened for the last year, especially for the lowest quintile.
I’m also not sure how relevant my experience is to this whole thing since my work experience is 100% contract work in a specialized field instead of salaried or employer scheduled. From my perspective everything is becoming gig work, but that might not be the case. I think it’s hard to budget for groceries getting more expensive if one year I make 85k and the year after, I make 25k. Employers just don’t seem to have as much money to spend on advertising as they used to, so finding work is hard unless you take less than what you’re used to taking.
All my peers seem to be having issues with finances nowadays unless their parents are helping them out or have a partner making quite a bit as well. Combine that with businesses forcing the end of work from home means we have to move back to expensive cities. It’s looking pretty bleak even from my pretty privileged vantage point.
One thing to keep in mind is that you may not be in the bottom quintile. And if you’re not, then you may have a very different view of the economy.
Income inequality is decreasing right now, but many people don’t understand that this necessarily involves some zero-sum adjustments. You cannot reduce inequality if everyone grows at the same rate, something must be transferred from the upper X% to the lower X%. And if you’re in the upper X%, then the economy might feel worse to you than it really is.
I’d be interested to see a source on if income inequality is decreasing because I haven’t seen any articles about that tbh. In fact, since 2020 when I last looked at graphs on it, it’s seemed like the gap is just getting wider and wider every year.
And if I was told things would get harder for me and other people in my bracket to make it easier for people making less than me, I’d be fine with it, but I’m not seeing an indication that that is what’s happening. But to be honest, so long as I’m seeing record profits for corporations and billionaires continuing to breathe, I’ll continue to think income inequality is continuing to get worse regardless of a study that states the contrary.
Reduction in income inequality started under Biden, after 2020
But there’s some pretty good news that doesn’t readily appear in the steady stream of government data released each week. After decades in which the gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew by leaps and bounds, the strange rebound from the pandemic has led to something different: a slow reduction in inequality across the economy. Incomes of people in the bottom half of income distribution grew by 4.5% in the last calendar year, much faster than the 1.2% average income growth of all Americans
Dude. Rents are skyrocketing, grocery prices are insane, everything is wildly more expensive and wage growth isn’t keeping up for a lot of people. This kinda “well look at the data” thing that the Democrats constantly do is not helpful. They always fail to account for some part of reality and it shows just how disconnected these rich fucks are from the common person.
They have no clue what it’s like to walk a day in a normal person’s shoes.
No doubt many people are suffering. But wages for the lowest quintile have been outpacing inflation for the past year. Which means that overall, most of those in the lowest quintile are better off now than they were a year ago. Of course, doing better is not the same as doing well.
They were still in a horrible situation a year ago, so they’re better off but still bad.
Meanwhile the CoL has only gotten worse year on year, every year.
This isn’t new. The cost of living always goes up. It’s supposed to. Because when it goes down, you are in a recession and probably about to lose your job.
This is as detached from actual people’s lives as the DNC’s messaging
most of those in the lowest quintile are better off now than they were a year ago
Yes, and on average each human has roughly 0.98 testicles.
The goal of public policy is to benefit the public as a whole. So the average will always be a more useful metric than the experience of an individual, or even a hundred individuals.
By that logic, Medicare for All would only cover less than one testicle
Except testicle coverage is a policy, not a valid metric. A valid metric is the outcome of a policy, like average deaths from testicular cancer.
I mean, dude currently lives in public housing, what more do you want? (I kid)
Ohhhh I’d love to see any president spend a month in some of the run down slum lord apartments I’ve been in.
Leaders should have suffered more to understand the plight of their constituents. Though I suspect a lotta those rich old men simply don’t have the constitution to survive a normal life.
The economy measured by the performance of the stock market doesn’t represent the majority of Americans.
The economy isn’t measured based on the stock market. The closest factor might be GDP, but that isn’t the only number that is used anyways.
By basically all metrics, the US economy is moving in the right direction. Its just in a really big pit on some of them.
Well, over the last four years I’ve only received a 3-4% annual raise. This means that, because of inflation, I’ve seen an effective pay cut of ~10%. Meanwhile the CEO of the company I work for just bought his third condo/apartment (or whatever) overlooking Manhattan’s Central Park while full on doubling his take-home in 2022. That’d be a huge reason as to why I feel like shit Uncle Joe. Not like Trump and the Republicans would make things any better or do anything about it… they’re more on the billionaire take than the Democrats only plus the GOP apparently is just openly talking about wanting to overthrow the government. I’ll hold my nose once again to vote for a Democrat, but they’ve seriously got to pull their heads out of their asses.
When they said “wants to know” what they really mean is “want them to shut the fuck up about it so we can continue to fuck them harder next time!”
Greedflation, but he has already commented on being concerned about it.
Because rent is $2000/month and most places require proof that you make 3 times that amount.
I’ve never met any motherfucker that makes $6k a month, Joe. Most of us are living paycheck to paycheck.
It’s getting increasingly more difficult to give a shit about the social contract when people like Elon Musk have all the fucking money and the rest of us would starve if we got sick.
Fuck.
But the
the rich people’s yacht moneyeconomy is doing well!I often read from random people who live in some tiny ass apartments in places like NYC or San Francisco or wherever and spend like 3000 dollars a month in rent. Hell i know a guy in Toronto who tells me about his shitty ass apartment with no heat that just raised rent 400 dollars or some shit and ge already paid 1400 to 1600. How do people live like that? Genuine question, i spend 1600 a month but for a whole house and garden. Which is nothing in comparison, but i wouldn’t mind spending less just to have more.
I managed to get a house for a reasonable price and interest rate. Neither of those are the case anymore. So unless you can save up $100,000 for the 20% down payment on a $500,000 house, you’ve got to rent. And then you can’t save because rent is so high, so you’re stuck renting forever.
A 500k house is hardly even possible anymore here. I worked for a guy who build quite the bice house in a pretty damn expensive neighborhood. He told me he’s able to afford it because the neighbouring piece of land is also his and he’s gonna sell that. He pointed at a piece of land about the size of a soccer field. I said that’s nice, that’s a good chunk of the house i assume. Ge told me that the land is worth over 1 million dollars. No house nothing, just a piece of flat grass.
Houses in my neighborhood are still going for around $350,000 for a 45 year old 1500 sq foot, 3 bed, 1.5 bath. I was trying to adjust for an average but I forgot that $350,000 will buy you a dumpster with HOA fees in a lot of places.
I work in an adjacent industry to construction and I can tell you that even the $300k houses are so cheaply made that you would refuse to live in one of you saw them being built.
I’ve seen stucco being sprayed on exterior “walls” made of Styrofoam (polystyrene), and broken studs toenailed together before the drywall gets hung. That’s not even mentioning the number of times I’ve seen human shit on the floor of the garage.
The number of times these building companies have been sued for breaking building laws would make your head spin. A company in Florida got sued by an entire subdivision because they poured the foundation on the water table and the first rainstorm flooded every house.
It’s criminal how much these companies fleece from the American public.
These were built in 1979-81, so hopefully they’re not as slapped together as new houses. But I’ve seen houses built since 2000 where every window is cracked because the wind bent the frames so much.
The next house I live in will be built with my strict supervision.
How is the economy doing well when the majority of people are broke?
Politicians: Record economy!
Businesses: Welp, time for layoffs! We were always at war with Eurasia.
Citizens: Do I vote for the status quo, ear plugged, blindfolded, ancient politician… or do I vote for a literal dictator, dumb as bricks, ancient “politician.” Hmmm… Options options.
Think of it this way:
You are on a sinking cruise ship with the rest of the country and are headed to one of two islands. Sadly, these are the only islands available, and you’re going to land on one no matter what. Both of them are toxic wastelands, but one island is attempting to clean up (though, slowly and poorly) while the other island is fully leaning into the toxicity because the people controlling the island are safe in their bunkers. Everyone on the ship has an oar good for one stroke.Do you give up and throw your oar in the water leaving everyone else to decide your fate? Do you use your oar to paddle toward the island you want and call it good enough? Do you try to get more people to paddle your direction?
We’re all along for the ride regardless of how we feel about it and the options for destinations, at least we can try to influence the direction we’re going.
Look at it this way unless America has a massive come to Jesus moment culturally we will have an authoritarian in office in the next 8 years.
That authoritarian can be an out of shape dementia ridden thug likely to die in office OR we can get whatever ghoul the republicans conjure up to replace him…
I’m not one for accelerationism, but I’m becoming more convinced we need a controlled burn. If America can’t defeat the fascist bullshit trump promises, then we will fall to any other half competent wannabe dictator…
I think it’d be wise to either take over the boat or jump ship at that point.
Because prices are still jacked up from inflation? Seems like they go up but never come back down?
Gee, ya think?
It was never a realistic expectation for prices to go back to what they were before COVID, but somehow that is what people expected.
You never want to see prices come down across the board because that causes deflation. Deflation can very easily spiral into a feedback loop of higher interest rates and higher unemployment.
Well, we were told the problem was supply chain issues, then that resolved and was supplanted by inflation.
The financial issues feel unrelenting at this point.
The supply chain issues directly led to inflation. That scarcity leads to a rise in prices is economics 101.
The article makes a misleading statement about inflation right off the bat. That it’s at a three year low and that’s a sign of good things.
But inflation doesn’t work like that. This just means prices are increasing at a slower rate. Not that prices have gone down.
Also inflation is not a measure of the cost of living. CPI is ostensibly a measure of cost of living but it’s not particularly good at that either
CPI is fine when it isn’t manipulated to hell like the government does to make things seem better than they actually are.
Any of these sorts of metrics have at least some issues. There are always issues with weighting different variables and excluded data due to the complexity of what’s being measured.
