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.
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?
Do you think that every article written about inflation just happens to forget that prices are still rising?
I think media organizations owned by billionaires are going to keep repeating what billionaires want the poor people to hear…
And that with rampant wealth inequality what’s good for “the economy” is rarely good for the average person.
I thought as a society, we all understood that by now…
But you don’t seem to have gotten any of the memos.
What you might call a memo, I’d call a poor explanation to confirm your biases. Do some reading on how economists came to their conclusions, and you’ll see why we arrived at an ideal environment of some low inflation. If economics reporters were only serving at the behest of billionaires, we’re in an age of unprecedented access to information, and economics is almost entirely math. If someone wanted to be a whistleblower and show the math to back it up, it would have gone viral by now, and that still would have to contradict a working model of reality that makes sense for what we all understand about inflation. There will always be some percentage of people who don’t thrive in whatever our economic conditions are, and that sucks, but I don’t think anyone’s been able to show a system where we can save literally everyone, because as human beings, our flaws tend to get in the way of that. Still, that low amount of inflation tends to be the best we can do.
If economics reporters were only serving at the behest of billionaires,
I just can’t believe someone that doesn’t understand billionaires own media companies to control the public narrative still exists in 2024.
Still, that low amount of inflation tends to be the best we can do.
Because straight capitalism is unsustainable…
But you want it to be the only option and will accept everything else we need to prop it up.
Have a nice life, don’t expect any more replies.
It’s far easier to explain the world with historic precedent than it is with conspiracy theories.
I mostly agree with you, but economics is at best a heaping tablespoon of math and a sack of human behavioral psychology. Those guys really only know what’s going on 6 months after it happened.
Deflation causes mass unemployment. We tried it in the 1930s. Didn’t go well.
…no longer afford?..man, the last proper vacation i took was in nineteen-ninety-mother-f*cking-eight…
When you threw Mankind off the top of the cage at Hell in the Cell?
shitty morph lives!
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?
Yup, pretty much.
Fine, whatever. You do still recognize that America Bad, don’t you?
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.
Not only that, she works for a billion dollar multi-national. I can’t tell you who, but you do know who they are. They even have union representation in other areas, just not hers.
Why can’t she do FMLA?
Apparently an amputation isn’t serious enough? 🤔
That’s insane!
I haven’t had a summer vacation since school lmao
No longer? Im in my early 30s and have never been able to take a vacation since I’ve been on my own/with my wife. Between bills and rising prices, and my job combining pto and sick time, i dont have time or money to do anything more than a day trip to someplace not that far away.
I’m in my late 30’s in the NYC area. What my wife and I consider a “vacation” is going to Philly and staying in a hotel with a pool, and just putzing around a different city for the weekend.
The idea of taking a week+ off from work and flying somewhere is a foreign concept to me.
There have been a couple of times that we have gone to states far away to stay with family/friends, but it’s usually for like a long weekend.
100% this
No longer? I’m almost 60 and have never been able to afford a vacation.
My family never could. I couldn’t myself until I was around 30, single with no kids. I believe it’s gotten much worse for families that are in that same socioeconomic class, especially those who have kids to raise.
Despite negative perceptions on the state of the economy, inflation is now much lower than its June 2022 peak of 9.1 percent.
The writers are irresponsible here. They are implying that the public is unaware of inflation, that this is a perception problem. But the reality is, nobody cares about inflation. We care about the cost of living, and we know exactly how that impacts us when we look at our credit cards and bank accounts.
I make more than the average by quite a bit and have unlimited time off, my wife works PT to get out of the house and gets paid well also with basically unlimited unpaid time off (there’s the catch). Even we aren’t taking a normal vacation for us this year (flying to see family or exotic getaway), instead staying within the state and doing cheaper things like camping.
The solution is not to increase your income to compensate for the costs of living, but instead to lower your standards. I go off-trail camping every year and never think about the costs because it’s fucking cheap. Getting away from civilization is the vacation. See you around the campfire!
EDIT - Downvoting is easy. Haters gonna hate!
Oh wow, so I need to get a car, camping supplies, and to take time off from work that I don’t have.
This doesn’t sound cheap, it just sounds like you have the means.
Be as apathetic about the state of the economy as you want. The rest of us will fight for a better life.
Get a tent for free on Buy Nothing, strap it to your bike, take a bus to the nearest trail, ride all day, camp next to a river, go home the next day. Easily doable in a 2 day weekend. I did this exact thing 2 weeks ago and it was a great mental reset.
Sounds like you just want an excuse to be miserable instead of finding ways to be happy.
I find happiness in demanding that I get paid what I am worth, rather than rolling over and trying to make due with less.
I wasn’t really speaking honestly when I said that I personally can’t afford to go camping, I am just ridiculing your belief that people are just failing to make the most of life, when life fucking sucks hit shit for millions of people right now.
Nobody wants to hear you pretend that economic issues don’t matter. If that makes you feel better with your own lot in life, more power to you, but nobody wants to hear your “If I can be happy so can you” condescension from anyone when they’re talking about how wages are stagnant and the working class can’t afford basic luxuries as a reward for their hard work as previous generations could.
You sound pretty offended. I was merely offering it as an inexpensive option and I stand by my original statement.
Camping is pretty cheap compared to other vacation types, where most would spend hundreds if not thousands staying at a hotel, dropping plenty on food, entertainment, transportation (planes and car rental) and who knows what other expenses.
I don’t spend more than $20-30 a night on all expenses. Initial costs might seem daunting to you, but you can get a tent, a sleeping bag, a cooler with food and a lighter for less than $150. If you can’t afford that, you need to reprioritize some things in your life.
Shit, I have 3 or 4 holidays every year and it still feels like I’m always working. How the hell do you cope without a single holiday??
Drugs
Drugs
You can have drugs on holiday ;)
You can have drugs all the time
Masochism and addiction
Practice escapism, touch grass, focus on the small things, take time to treat yourself, etc.
Yep. Had to cancel ours. Made just enough money to cover some emergencies, nothing left for fun.
How many Americans struggle to afford to live?
mow their lawns
Look at this rich fuck, they’ve got a lawn!
