I actually like Biden and still plan on voting for him, but I'm not sure I can say the economy is "good" right now, definitely not good for regular people. Just because the stock market is picking up doesn't mean shit if rent just went up 10% or food is expensive as hell everywhere you go. People are getting priced out of making a living and this shit can't go on for much longer.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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The article actually goes into some pretty extensive statistics showing that wages for poor people are growing faster than inflation.
It may not be obvious to a lot of Lemmy users, because wages for top earners (esp in the tech sector) are actually dropping slightly. But there's significant growth at the low end and that's super unusual (especially during post-Covid supply chain and business-greed inflation like we're experiencing now). It doesn't say a word about the stock market that I remember.
How many times do we need to spell it out for you finance bros before you get it? The working class does not care about how Wallstreet is performing. The working class does not care about your cherry-picked misrepresentations of macroeconomic issues, nor do they trust them. The working class cares about the price of their grocery bill and the cost of housing, both of which have seen record increases in the last 4 years. You can shake your heads all you want and blame social media but until we dont have to chose between paying for medication or paying for groceries we are not going to buy any of the BS you are selling.
In norway we have a word called "kjøpekraft" or purchasing power. It is basically how much goods you can buy for your salery. And about the only statistic that is relevant for normal people. Tried to find something similar in that article, but did not.
Americans, in our typical way, have a system of economic reporting that allows those in power to sort of hide that elegant metric in a combination of other statistics.
Here, you'd have to compare the rate of change of the Consumer Price Index against wage growth. And also find some way to factor in the cost of gasoline (which has more volatile price changes and as such isn't included in CPI figures).
These articles are starting to annoy me. There's no yardstick that says "Economy: terrible <-> great". It depends on who you are, how much income you make, what kind of assets you hold, what kind of debt you hold, etc. Ask different people and you will get different answers.
If you poll congressmen regarding the health of the economy and then poll the next 100 people that walk out of your local Dollar General, you'll probably get a lot different answers.
We can talk specifics like inflation, rates of household saving, etc. but just trying to say "the economy is great/terrible" is overly reductive and doesn't really take into account the country as a whole.
Slate is not known for its nuance. Not that it doesn't have a lot of company in that regard, but since this OP is a Slate article, well...
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