mozz

Organized election trolling ~~starting to~~ consider Lemmy ~~?~~

It's even worse here.

Literally the topic of the OP article is "If you look at what the economic situation is for workers in the US, it's almost as good as it was pre-Covid which is a goddamned miracle. It's not perfect, still a lot of people are struggling, but $15/hr being the new more-or-less entry level minimum wage and some increased union membership has produced real progress especially at the bottom end of the scale, when a lot of first-world economies are still struggling to dig themselves out even back to normal. Wage inequality is down, unemployment is the lowest it's been in decades, etc etc, Biden deserves some credit for that. Here are detailed citations to back all that up. It's weird that that's not the popular perception."

Then, go look at the comments and read them through. It's literally a nonstop tide of rando user accounts saying "but inflation stacks year on year, they don't know basic math" and "they just think stocks going up means the economy's better, they don't care people are hurting" and "my grocery bill is high things are real bad, I'm suffering, this article's not true." It's almost impossible to read the comments front to back and hold on in your head to the fact that they're objectively wrong. It's like Goebbels's propaganda theory in real time -- if you grab out one individual comment and analyze it and really think about it, compare it to evidence, it falls apart. But looking at them all together it really looks like there's this groundswell of opinion. It also makes it more or less impossible to actually have a conversation about the article because it gets swarmed with people talking discouraging nonsense and being apparently incapable of absorbing anything different.

"Potentially taking longer"

It's obvious to me that what you're claiming the article is happy about, is the exact opposite of what the article is happy about.

The point of the article is, wage inequality is down, unemployment is down, wages adjusted for inflation are up.

The fact that you're gaslighting what the article says, in order to be able to argue against things that aren't what's in it, indicates to me that you probably don't have a real strong argument against what's actually in the article.

I got a pop quiz for you

If wages have grown relative to inflation

Then has the stacked impact of the reality of wages combined with the stacked impact of the reality of inflation made it easier for the average person to buy groceries? Or harder?

To any given person, it'll just seem like groceries are more expensive. That's always true (because, they are) and when inflation has been high for a couple of years it'll feel really true and really tangible. That's why these "I don't know what you're talking about I'm struggling, fuckin grocery bills and rent" talking points are so relatable. Because almost certainly the person you're talking to will feel some version of that. And grocery prices are an easy touch-point to make it feel true.

But to a person who didn't have a job before, and now does, it doesn't feel like "the economic program" got better. It feels like they got a job. To someone who joined a union as those are making a start at a comeback for the last couple of years, or someone who was able to get one of those $15/hr entry level jobs that used to be impossible during and before Trump and are now becoming the standard, it doesn't necessarily feel like things are "easy" now. And of course you can't say Biden's really fully responsible for that all happening, because he's not.

If inflation at the grocery store is partly Biden's fault, though, then why can't the growth of unions and increase in wages at the bottom end of the scale be partly to his credit?

That's the whole point of the OP article. The reality is, those $15/hr jobs and that union membership came about under Biden, and the wage growth that's happened has been large enough to outpace even a couple years of massive inflation as Covid's supply-chain issues and government spending really came home to roost. The fact that the growth is actually larger than the pain, even with those challenges, is really remarkable. And it's weird that that's not really any kind of significant narrative in the media. And it's definitely weird that the inflation is somehow Biden's fault while the wage growth that outpaced it isn't to his credit.

COVID/Greed inflation pushed the amount needed well above what they got raises for.

Did you read the article which had citations saying it's the complete opposite of that?

like we don't have eyes of our own and brains to think with.

You sound like a campaign commercial with an angry-eyebrowed white woman looking straight into the camera.

Part of the point of the article is that wages, compared with inflation, have gone up.

There were people who couldn't afford food before Biden, and now even though he got handed an absolute economic shit show, there are quite a bit less of them than there were before. Surely that's relevant?

And if you play around with this calculator, you'll see that food inflation is currently at 2.2%, the lowest it's ever been since February 2020, when it was 1.8%. Energy has had some wild fluctuations around a fairly constant mean, including a big spike after Covid, but it's currently actually back down to a negative 1.9%. It's actually pretty interesting to look at the different metrics on that page, because they all show variations of the big spike after Covid but the return of pre-Covid levels afterwards. Housing is also an interesting one to look at, just bear in mind that it shows pure value (i.e. going steadily up) and not the percent change year by year like the other inflation metrics.

So... the argument is perfectly accurate, and the numbers shown good economic performance, but because one particular metric doesn't include some numbers (because those numbers need to be excluded to do apples-to-apples international comparisons which is what they're specifically talking about there), let's throw the whole thing out and say Biden must actually doing a bad job because obviously the numbers that aren't included are bad (even though when you look at them they're not)? Kinda sounds like that's the argument.

100% agree. Costco makes most of their profit (more than 50%) from membership fees. The membership fees really are not that high.

The price you're paying for the stuff you find on the shelves is really very very close to what it costs them to put it on the shelves.

I'm not sure this is the best metric, since someone who's able to make it when before they couldn't make it at all, is much better than someone at the top just having more disposable income now. The OP article goes into some metrics like wage disparity and unemployment that touch more directly on economic survival as opposed to wealth at the top. But if you want to see disposable income then sure. The little divot followed by resumption of the upward line after the Covid chaos is what OP's article is talking about: Biden recovering the economy from Covid almost as if it hadn't happened, which most first world countries haven't been able to do.

Do you have citations for all this detailed rebuttal? Even just explaining verbally why it is you think their inflation numbers wouldn't include housing, healthcare, energy, or food?

The fact that they specifically said that wages are higher now even accounting for inflation, and you're saying that wages in real terms are now lower because of inflation (without commenting on the discrepancy), makes me think that maybe you're just throwing out claims instead of having done your own detailed point-by-point analysis of what they're saying.