Despite economic growth, 70% of Americans believe the economy is getting worse
According to a new Gallup poll released this week, most Americans are feeling negative about where things are heading with the economy and inflation.
Well yeah. Who gives a fuck about a 2% increase in the GDP? Prices are high and wages are low.
Housing (homes and apartments) is either in yet another bubble, or I guess just going to permanently remain absurdly high, slowly filtering more and more people into homelessness and death.
EDIT: (derp i fucked it up, EDIT 2)
Average rent vs median wage, cpi adjusted, and indexed to 1982 = 100.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1raP7
(Basic take away: the average real rent is about 4.2x or 420% what it was in 1982 whereas the median real wage has only risen by about 1.2x or 20%)
Edit 3: I would do median rent vs median wage, but FRED does not appear to track median rent.
Personal debt levels are astoundingly bad EDIT: If you do not own a house. The average US renter credit score is 638, and most places won't even consider you if it is below 620.
https://www.investopedia.com/do-you-need-credit-to-rent-apartment-8600564
... a study from Rent Cafe found that the average credit score of renters in the U.S. was 638 in 2020 (the most recent data available),...
The medical system remains ruinously expensive and corrupt.
The proportion of those who are not counted as unemployed, but who are not working, climbs higher and higher. is lowering, but still has not recovered to Pre-Covid levels, much less abated is general downward trend since the 90s. (Labor Force Participation Rate).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1raRG
College costs climb further and further, offering less and less likelihood of an actual decent paying job.
Wealth inequality is the worst in the known economic history of the world.
It's going well for anyone making capital gains. It sucks for anyone else earning a fucking wage.
I'm sure there is a different metric that could be reported then, like adjusted buying power.
Yeah, corporations are doing great, the "economy" is a good indication of that, but it means fuck all for us.
Gilded age 2.0
because it doesnt matter how great the economy is, because only the rich and businesses benefit from it.
Meanwhile us peasant folk are still struggling to buy overpriced essentials and afford the worst, most unsuitable, barely qualifying roofs over our heads.
Mmm I love sawdust in my food! /s
Woah there, slow down money bags. Around this economic level we pad our food with high fructose corn syrup, pink slime and sand for flavor.
It's almost like the word has a different meaning on Wall Street than it does for the average person!
“Economic growth” = rich people’s yacht money
We think the economy is worse because it is for us. Food prices have doubled or more than doubled in the last ten years and our income is stagnant so we make the same but everything costs more. We don't see any growth or stability in the quality of our lives.
Inflation is nothing compared to price gouging and price fixing by businesses that no one tries to curtail. This is approved of by the powers that be.
But let one opportunistic asshole corner the market on hand sanitizer in one region of the US at the beginning of a pandemic and he has to give it all away because nearly everyone thinks he is a monster.
Inflation is nothing compared to price gouging and price fixing by businesses that no one tries to curtail.
Lina Khan is on the case and making waves.
She's the single most hated person in the C-Suite across the USA.
Not to mention energy costs, transportation costs, basically all necessary costs have gone up. In the meantime, the cost of electronics and frivolous items have gone down. It almost seems like a goddamn ploy so they can continue to write snide articles about, “oh, you all complain about being poor? Why are you still buying TVs and iPhones?”
Electronics often have subscriptions, ads, and data theft baked in. So the sticker price is less, but companies are still making more money off us.
I think what people are feeling is what has been often described as enshitification. The definition of that term as given by its creator doesn't match the context in which I see it increasingly used. However, I think that the phenomenon that people often use it to describe is what is killing consumer confidence.
If the economy is actually serving consumers, then those at the top are making less profits. This is unacceptable. They have to keep making money. They have to keep increasing how much money they make. They have to keep increasing the rate at which they increase the money they make. If they're not, then they are stagnating according to investors. This is incompatible with the survival of normal people. Growth cannot be infinite.
So the companies consolidate and find corners to cut and we absolutely feel it even if it doesn't show in the numbers. They find new and creative ways to create "shrinkflation". They don't have to literally shrink the product - that's too obvious. They can instead alter the formula, find cheaper low quality components, squeeze their workers harder or outsource labor, stand behind their products just a little less by updating wording to sound the same but technically promise less, add a little friction to their warranty process, hedge against inevitable future failure with no class action clauses or forced arbitration in their terms...
It feels like every company is doing something like that these days... and if they aren't, they are being abused or bought by a company that is.
How can confidence then not be down?
I'll stick with price gouging.
How old are you? Genuinely curious.
I can remember the last moon landing.
It doesn't matter that the economy is growing if it isn't lifting up your life as well. Hundreds of millions of people still live in US states where it's legal to pay $7 an hour. (2/3 of them) All of us are dealing with rampant inflation and crippling costs for utilities, housing, and food.
The government's position on this is that the Biden Administration has created 16,000,000 jobs, and while that may be true, I'd wager my savings that most of those are second and third jobs, because it's become impossible to live with just one in the United States of America.
I'd wager my savings
Well if you're like most sub 35yr olds, that's not a big wager at all.
That's a really depressing statistic. I wish we could get everyone under 40 to vote differently, but I don't think we can.
I'm always really disturbed when I see how much value and assets and savings I am supposed to have...
Like depressed too but really fucking disturbed that neither I nor basically anyone I know except once rich kid who his parents paid for everything while he got a $200,000 a year coding job have any legitimate savings or plans to be able to grow it.
And it's not like I haven't been working for the last 2 decades since I was 14.
I’d wager my savings that most of those are second and third jobs, because it’s become impossible to live with just one in the United States of America.
I've wondered this as well - and wondered if Biden ever really grokked what's happening. Hopefully others do and they follow through once they win (if they do).
Biden ever really grokked what's happening
I don't think anyone at the federal does. If they do, they simply don't care, judging by their actions.
We're about to hit 20 years of the minimum wage being $7 at the federal level, across three administrations, two of which were Democratic with control of Congress. I expect more of the same no matter who we elect in the fall.
No, no, the economy goes very well to the bourgeois elite that controls the state.The workers who are getting worse and worse.
Maybe if the average citizen would benefit from economic growth.
Because the measures that economists use to measure the economy are not relevant to regular people. GDP tells you nothing about living standards.
Only getting better for the ultra wealthy. That's what the system is for and it's working better than it ever has.
If you think about. When capitalism is less capitalist is when regular people benefit. (Regulation, healthcare, free education)
Socialist American policies were the best.
I'd say even for the wealthy, their living standards aren't getting better. At their level of wealth, getting more either means number in accounts goes up if they are passive with it or power over others goes up if they are active with it.
But yeah, capitalism is for those with capital; it's right in the name.
"Economic growth" = stock market up
Stock market is just the scoreboard for theft of economic value, it is useless as a measure of economic health except maybe inversely (if stock market is up that means more wealth is being extracted and funneled upward)
That "economic growth" is for the benefit of capital owners at the expense of everyone and everything else. I'm so done with capitalism.
My salary increased but now my rent ate it all. And worse, house costs multipled.
I had/have such a hard time convincing people that this isn't traditional inflation as much as it's corporate price gouging. This is being done to us, not a result of Biden's economic policies
Yep. Just reading the title, the "economy" is up, and people are worse for it.
The fact is, despite record breaking profit, nearly none of that "growth" is being provided to the people creating the value for companies to sell, and is instead being handed upwards to people with more money than brains, who have "invested" in the business.
The lines on the stock market graphs go up, and the people working for that company who create all the things that are generating the profit, are robbed, and their would-be wages are handed to the shareholders.
Is anyone shocked by this? Is anyone surprised by this?
Did anyone not know this already?
What a stupid article.
I work with people that really struggle to grasp this concept. I work rotations and every hitch I find myself spending the first few days explaining that what they call "the economy" I would call the CPI, whereas what capitalists refer to is corporate profits - and never the twain shall meet. But this is yet another complexity that the right benefits from obscuring, and complexity requires thoughtful consideration for understanding. I realize I'm asking a lot from a bunch of blue collar rubes.
Part of it is that when people say the "economy" is up, they're usually only referring to valuations of public companies which is only part of the picture. The price-to-earnings ratio is so wack right now that many companies are trading at 18x their earnings per share, so while profits may be up, the companies are still wildly overvalued compared to their expected output.
Real wage growth has lagged significantly compared to the historical trend. If the labor market continues to take a beating, consumer spending will tank and bring equities down with it.
Stock market gains or shareholder gains mean absolutely shit to the average american.
If I can't afford housing and bread, shit isn't good. Let's change how we report on the economy.
We've known the ownership class was treated differently after the bank bailouts in 2008 which ran entirely contrary to capitalist theory as it was taught: if your company fails, then your company fails, and its detritus will feed growth elsewhere.
But it turns out some companies are special and are too big to fail because when they go, dozens of other propped up companies collapse with them.
I can't help but wonder if we let that catastrophe happen, would it serve as a reminder why capitalism needs to be strictly regulated? Because we undid all the regulations erected thanks to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007, and private equity is still demolishing huge chunks of the economy while investors get rich on bankruptcy shenanigans. This is the same kind of aristocratic bullshit as 1789.
We had a peaceful protest. OWS. Then one night, NYC turned off all the cameras and unpeacefully swept it away. We were told they didn't have specific demands. But they did, and their grievance was legit regardless.
So now, society is stratified. The ownership class has segregated itself from the working class and they won't consider grievances from the third estate. We saw during the Obama administration a _recovering economy _is not felt by the working class. We see now they're glad to install a one-party autocracy to keep it that way.
To be fair this was always the endgame. Our industrialst betters were sore over the New Deal. And later, school integration and interracial marriage.
I think their plan is to literally arm robotic dogs with guns and try to to rule us at gunpoint, kinda like Hebron. See XKCD 1968.
There's the "economy" and then there's the real economy. The one that affects the 1% and the one that affects the 99%.
The 1% love the current "economy".
The 99% hate the current economy.
The economy as reported is a measure of rich people sentiment, not a measure of how we’re doing.
Wow.
It's almost like pathologically fetishized "growth" (perpetually fetishized by the rich and their trained sycophants in the media, that is) is completely disconnected from the socio-economic condition of the majority of people on this planet.
It always has been.
Economic growth doesn't necessarily translate to an economy that serves the needs of a wider majority, often it means just the opposite.
I see prices going down, here and there. It's good but it's also bullshit. They raised the prices to make record profits and when people can no longer afford anything, they drop them. "See how nice we are, we lowered our prices for you", when in reality they're scared because people gave up buying their shit altogether.
Where was all that growth? Could it be in the pockets of billionaires and the owners of this country? Cause I don't hear regular people cheering about the extra money they suddenly got from their jobs.
...then it is.
Check your instruments.
It was triggered today… and has had only two false positives since 1959.
What most people don’t know is that the economist who coined the term, Claudia Sahm, proposed this rule as a way to warn governments to allow them to preemptively send out stimulus to their population lol.
The Sahm rule originates from a chapter in the Brookings Institution's report on the use of fiscal policy to stabilize the economy during recessions.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahm_Rule#cite_note-2)The chapter, written by Sahm, proposes fiscal policy to automatically send stabilizing payments to citizens to boost economic well-being. Instead of relying on human intuition to determine when such payments should be sent, Sahm outlines a condition to trigger the payments.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahm_Rule#cite_note-:1-3) The trigger suggested indicates an economy beginning a recession and is now known as the Sahm rule. The Sahm rule recession indicator was also featured early in a Goldman Sachs U.S. economic research report by economist William C. Dudley with a recommended trigger of 0.33%
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahm_Rule#cite_note-4) (the nowadays more commonly used rule triggers a recession signal when the Sahm metric is crossing above 0.5%).
That last chart uses "raw" numbers but it needs to be compared using per 100k or something of the sort
The secret ingredient is corporate greed.
I dare you to post a wage gap chart. Who gives a fuck if the "country" is growing financially, if like 60 billionaires take more of it??
Also doesn't even actually help the country grow financially if if all goes to a tax haven...
Well, an economy that prices more and more people out of specific markets (like, the average person can't afford the median home any more and the cost of necessities like food, fuel, clothing and housing has gone up much faster than return on labor) might involve a rising stock market but it is objectively worse if you make your money by working.
The economy IS getting worse.
VIX yesterday let me know that economists think we're about to enter a recession.
Homes aren't going to get more affordable... Neither is Healthcare.
The other 30% are rich
All economic numbers are bullshit
"Believe"
Looks like you should instead be focusing on how these 70% draw the conclusions that lead to their "beliefs"
It's too uneven. Personally our household is doing better because both kids are working and the company I work for ditched plans to go public, and a couple of other factors. But:
Car insurance increased sharply (probably counted as money coming into the economy)
Homeowners insurance increased
Food prices increased.
Wages don't increase as much as household costs. Until the wages of everyday people are growing faster than their expenses, they aren't doing better. Again, personally we are, but I don't think that can be extrapolated out, most households don't have an opportunity to deploy more people to work.
Fuckers always trot out that wage growth shit. They truly don't understand that most people's wages have not increased. If they have they likely have not even kept up with inflation.
I'm an accountant and the measurements used in economics are kind of backwards, they worry about payroll cost, that's true but what the fuck? They measure economic growth as though companies are people and people are expenses.
We need employee owned businesses all round and then that measure might make sense. But as it stands now, it's literally measuring inequality.
Nah, the economy is fine, just like the planet. The people are fucked! Just like George Carlin used to say.
I have a feeling that they announced the rate cut because of early access to the data showing that everything was finally cracking under the pressure and Powell was hoping to spike up the stock market with wild abandonment partying before the jobs data and recession flags would become public knowledge.
It's definitely just a game for getting rich people to be playing with their money and it's so tiring to be ignored for only their sake.
In the past 4 years my salary grew at about 3-5% while inflation grew at a much higher rate. I don't even buy eggs anymore.
With the most recent employment numbers, things are about to get worse
As usual they measure the wrong sectors for these pronouncements
oh boy, gini is up
GDP has to be the worst way to financially review a country.
