[flagged]
Politics is relative. The US has a right and a left wing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/18jbd11/this_...
The semantics and bullshit around "social issues" like abortion or LGBT rights is just that - semantics and bullshit intentionally amplified to keep people focused on the wrong thing.
There are two nearly identical sides, as you rightly point out. Just like political parties, where there's the pro-corporate party that's OK with minorities, and the super-pro-corporate party with a little religion mixed in.
The media very much follows that same blueprint.
Nor is every single case of homelessness necessarily related to the economy.
So one way to frame it would be the national economy is doing well despite significant problems in housing supply/demand.
My thing is, even if its not the main issue causing issues with demand, I don't see how you can bring in nearly 3 million "undocumented migrants in a year" who are all going to compete for the lowest tier of the housing market, and outcompete single parents, etc on what they can afford in rent (since many have several adults rooming together and sharing rent). If you only have so many affordable apartments/houses etc to go around in a town/neighborhood/borough, etc, an influx of a few thousand, especially in high population areas is going to drive rents up and create constraints on the market.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/migrant-border-...
It's certainly not helping. I don't see how you can not link these two issues, if you bring in migrants, documented or not (or not migrating through legal methods), they need housing, and its going to be the undocumented ones competing for housing in the sector with our most vulnerable citizens.
There seems to be some level of cognitive dissonance politically, at least in the media, when it comes to these two issues. Maybe those on the ground notice it or have tried to call it out. But if I can see it from my middle class suburbia, I don't see how this is getting missed, if not outright ignored.
All that to say, while certainly a local issue, this is a national issue I feel is at play here that local governments (short of stunts like bussing ppl to Martha's Vineyard or NYC), have no control over.
What tends to bubble up is hatred; calling them dirty and rapists and whatnot. The fear mongering about how migrant caravans are coming to overdose my children with fentanyl or whatever the panic de jour is isn’t helping the cause for me, though it does seem quite effective for many.
On the other end of the economic spectrum, it seems like builders only want to build high end luxury housing where the margins are fat. While I’m sure the ROI on that is nice from a financial standpoint, it doesn’t seem to add much to society for some rich dude to own another mansion that they might spend a month or two in per year. I don’t know if that sort of thing is a huge effect however. It does seem that as wealth inequality ever increases, so do our social problems.
That's a very good question, however you ask it.
A problem when you go looking for the root cause of things, if you can bear to ask "why?" more than five times, is that you can go around in circles or start seeing things that aren't there. That's definitely going to happen if you go looking for the end of rainbow like "The Economy" [0].
Other nebulous categories like "mental health" or "immigration" don't add much to the conversation. but kick the can into someone else's camp.
It also a difficult question because in a sense it's a void question in world where we reduce _everything_ to "economics" - all human affairs, structures and processes - to the point where it seems there's nothing left that lies outside the realm of economics. (Maybe that tells us "economics" has lost its power as a concept word and pursuit, if we have problems that seem to lie outside of it.)
So when I hear someone say "It's not about 'The Economy'" what I'm really hearing isn't "it has nothing to do with economics" (because everything does), but "I don't think economists can understand and fix this". And that's a valid observation - that people who think as economists have a serious blind-spot and defecit of real power.
[0] If there isn't already there should be a South Park episode where "The Economy" is kept in a glass box at the City Hall and Eric steals it to sell at school.
It used to be the job of the left to argue the opposite.
In my best sarcastic Tucker Carlson voice: "you judge a society by its worst off"
And as near as I can tell the bottommost segment of the American populace is, in material and numerical terms, generally seeing a more positive rate-of-change than pre-COVID; lower-end wages are increasing faster than they have in most of my lifetime and are significantly outpacing the inflation that got everybody hairshirting last year. The thing that the doomer set doesn't love to acknowledge is that so much of that dooming is sourced from precarious tech workers or members of/aspirational members of the media, who are getting hammered (in other words, the economic recovery seems K-shaped) and are in turn using their outsized megaphones to convince everybody else that it's a universal problem.
Not to a liberal (or even Adam Smith). The purpose of a economy is it benefits the people, that's why the people allow "the economy" to exist in the first place, if the common people aren't benefiting the economy isn't doing it's job and therefore cannot be "strong".
It's only strong if you think the economy exists to serve mainly the professional managerial class as well as the elites and perhaps the claims of strength reveal the true thoughts of the speaker.
The Federal gov (read: both parties) can't keep using aggregated numbers to hide the details and the hurting. Ppl aren't that naive any more. The world has changed. The gov's reporting of the economy has not. The more that disconnect widens, the worse the potential for sociopolitical fallout. We've been seeing that and yet how has Uncle Sam adjusted?
Please don't shoot the messenger.
In the past couple of weeks I've heard multiple news media segments where some talking head is interviewing some "expert" and asking the same question, "Why isn't the public believing the economic news?" Yet neither of them considered: let's ask the public, we can do that.
So here's news on why, and there's a couple disconnect at the top from the middle and the bottom. Yeah, nothing new...until there's an election and the exploited vote to show their frustration. It doesn't - and shouldn't - have to be this way.