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Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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politics
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Sure. Two ways to visualize:
Income by race -- you can literally see the lines squeezing together, as income on the higher lines falls (inflation), and income on the lower lines rises even beating inflation.
GINI coefficient is the usual statistical metric. It's a little more abstracted, but maybe more rigorous. Anyway you can see the steady trend line of it always going up, and then a little down tick at the end as it drops. Not really like "oh okay it's fixed now," but definitely also not "okay Biden spiked income inequality like everyone else does," since it started moving in the actual opposite direction.
To be fair, in the second article you linked it actually indicates that post-tax inequality increased due to specific COVID era tax breaks expiring, while pre-tax inequality decreased. I think most middle to lower income people are not going to care that their pre-tax inequality is getting better because that doesn't result in a feeling of the boot easing up.
I also think that when many people speak colloquially about wealth inequality they're thinking more in terms of "1% vs 99%" mentality rather than racial income inequality. Not to say that it's not an important metric to monitor, but I think the class divide is more useful to focus on when talking about general income disparities and is what most people mean when they say wealth inequality.
Could Biden do more to help with income inequality? For sure. Will he? Probably not that much. Will he be better for it than Trump? 10000% yes.
Yeah. Hard to say that's Biden's fault though. He was handed an economy that was in the throes of a catastrophe (literally still in the middle, with almost half the country still on Covid assistance to some extent), and he managed to actually recover it and make some small amount of positive progress even with more than half the existing system being against the idea (like rabidly against it). And then people are throwing that positive progress back in his face like "THIS ISN'T ANYWHERE NEAR ENOUGH, I'M STILL STRUGGLING, SO FUCK YOU." Like yeah... it's not enough. You are correct. Your solution for that problem seems kinda counterproductive though, my guy.
Agree. It's just for some reason hard to find a version of that chart that shows particular quartile lines or something, and I was more or less assuming that racial inequality trends would match up with non-racial inequality trends.
Also side note, WTF is up with the Asians, those guys are killing it.
Definitely agree it's not really Biden's fault. I think people in general attribute way too much of the state of the economy to the president when it's Congress that is passing the laws that are affecting the most change. Although presidential appointments to regulatory bodies do play a big role and that is something I think Biden has mostly done a good job with and deserves credit for.