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Comment by deltarholamda | Hacker News Reader

>the numbers are good

The numbers are meaningless, even if they are accurate, which I sincerely doubt. GDP is up 5%? My salary hasn't gone up 5%, but my grocery bill has gone up way more than 5%. Health insurance costs went up more than 5%. Maybe all those increases in prices are boosting GDP, but wages aren't keeping up. Maybe the numbers are hand-waving nonsense.

People know whether they are doing okay or not. GDP is a blunt instrument metric of little value except as a broad comparison. But noting that it "happens during a Democrat presidency" is quite telling.

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Did you switch jobs? A voluntary job switch is an average ~20% bump in salary. Job switchers and union members are getting the vast majority of the gains. A low unemployment rate makes switching easy, and low end workers were switching at a much higher rate then normal.

But job switchers (rightly) give themselves the credit for their salary boost. OTOH the government gets the blame for inflation and job loss. It's a crap job, you get blamed for the bad stuff, but don't get credit for the good stuff.

If you make $100k and your grocery bill is $10k a year, a 5% increase in groceries (to $10.5k) only needs an 0.5% increase in salary to offset.

Why stop at $100K? Why not $250K? $500K?

If you're in the top 1-2% of income earners you feel things differently, this is understood.

Ah I see. Then let's do the median. That's $74580 from the census. So your income has to rise by 0.67% to compensate for a 5% rise in grocery prices.

For one, grocery prices have risen by more than 5%. (My own experience is more like 30-40% just in the past year.) For two, grocery prices are one metric among many in the cost of living, e.g. you also have to account for housing prices, energy prices, etc. And, of course, wages are not rising commensurate with the overall CoL, they have been essentially flat for decades.

So while your math is good, it's not meaningful. I find it very weird the lengths people will go to in trying to make one-off metrics reflect a different reality than what is very clear from people's experiences.

Do you even remember 2008? If this is a bad economy for you, imagine actually entering a recession and you lose your job + house.

I don't want 2008 to be the benchmark for a good economy.

It’s a benchmark of a truly _bad_ economy.

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