Americans are feeling much better about the economy thanks to slowing inflation
cnn.com
cnn.com
LOL
You must think I'm pretty dumb, CNN.
From a macro perspective, the same factors that drove inflation is what drove their big pay hikes. But most people only see that "I earned more money and now I'm being screwed by inflation". These are often the people who spend like crazy while simultaneously complaining about how bad the economy is!
I think the main reason for this is that improvements implemented after the subprime mortgage crisis worked too well - in that, now, every buyer is guaranteed to be able to afford the monthly payment for their home. The crash in home values only happened because the market was flooded with foreclosures in a very short period of time, and that isn't happening now.
Although maybe people can only make their mortgage by putting more of their spending on revolving credit[0].
0: https://abcnews.go.com/US/credit-card-users-avoid-mounting-d...
Inflation, on paper, might be okay, but each week I find myself curtailing our grocery selection more and more, simply to maintain the budget at status quo.
Inflation may be slowing, but it's still bad, and it is much worse for many more people than it is for me.
It’s pretty common to eat out for most meals. The plethora of options and low cost is obviously a big driver, but it’s getting hard to find meals for under $5 now.
So 150 meals a month times $5 is $750 for food. And that’s eating super cheap. The more hearty hawker meals are more like $6-8.
Of course not everyone eats every meal out and there are people that cook at home a lot (seems to be more common with Malay), but when this 25 year old colleague making $5,000 per month told me they spend $1,000 per month on meals I was surprised.
When I was in the Bay Area our family of 4 spent $600 per month on food (all prepared at home). That was shopping at Costco and Asians markets and not really counting dollars while doing it.
Even Costco - I’d fill a cart for $350-$400 and now it’s $600-$650. Things feel like they’ve stabilized but costs are extremely high. Something broke.
This anti-capitalism has got to stop.
The pandemic taught retailers that they can increase margins and people are too lazy to shop. I bought a container of strawberries for about half the cost of the local supermarket chain at Aldi. Beef is about 30% less at warehouse clubs.
Those price differences are just margin, and people tag on more with delivery services, and blame the economy for their own stupidity.
If you pay someone to fetch and deliver a commodity, that’s not commodity inflation.
The popularity of Instacart has not grown enough to account for inflation. That’s just grasping at straws to blame people and bury your head in the sand.
I never use delivery services and my grocery prices have gone up 50%. There is more money chasing fewer goods. It’s simple supply and demand.
Only idiots get hung up arguing if middlemen are to blame for price increases. If supply was adequate, it wouldn’t be possible for grocery stores to raise prices.
In 2019 it was around $250 per month. Pretty much the same set of items.
(This is in Chicago)
Even 10-15 years ago, $5/meal was more than reasonable to eat well. For a just a 2 adult household, that is $15/day and $450/mo. What I was paying eating cheap fastfood and making ~10/hr pre-2015 was twice that. Just last year, trying to live strictly off of delivery apps like doordash and ubereats as a single person I could barely crack 1200/mo.
1k/mo is 12000/yr. 2k/mo rent for a 3 bedroom is 24k/yr. Being able to pay groceries and rent on $36k/yr only for that isn't so bad.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to ruin anyone's plans to live a better life, but when someone says "the economy is great", that's relative to post-covid and two multi-decade wars the US fought and a global recession not even two decades old.
I almost want to beg and plead people to realize the amazingly prosperous times they live in. The great depression and grear famines were not so long ago. The dust bowl can still come back. Multiple wars at the same time at a global scale is still a very much impending realistic possibility. Another war in th middle east is brewing. A dictator wanna be is being nominated in the US for president. Appreciate what you have so you can fight to keep it!
Things can get much better but also much worse. We must be sober minded in fighting for a better future without forgetting what we have. There has never been a more prosperous time and place to be alive in the history of mankind than now in America, especially when you consider the marvels of medicine and technology available today.
Again, things could be much better on many fronts, but what good is that fight if what little you enjoy now is gone?
Things like being most prosperous and powerful country and the center of tech and medicine don't tend to come back once they are gone for a country if you look at history.
Maybe we need to celebrate thanksgiving more than once a year?
No? It's relative to pretty much all of 20th/21st century data. Can you point to some numbers that you think tell a different story? We are vastly wealthier than our grandparents. Real[1] median household income is 50% higher today than in the 80's. See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
It's down a little (like 5%) across the pandemic, which is what everyone seems to be freaking out about. But that correction is behind us now and things are looking good again, which is causing a somewhat counter-intuitive anti-anti-freakout a-la your comment. Which is what the linked article is about.
Cheer up, basically. You've been fooled by the discourse into believing things that aren't true.
[1] Where "real" means "inflation-adjusted"
https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/06/22/us-household...
> In fact, this is also a period when the number of two-income households shrunk, from 35% in 1987 to 32% in 2020. During this time period, overall household income increased by 18.5% (inflation-adjusted with the CPI-U-RS). For households with just one earner, income increased by almost the exact same amount (19.1%). Income of two-earner households did increase even more (37.7%), so seeing the full distribution would be very useful.
Second, we get deflation of specific goods all the time. Electronics and solar equipment are the poster child for this. An Apple 2 cost a lot more than my most recent machine.
Thirdly, wages rise to compensate with inflation. Ask your grandfather what their first car cost. Then ask them about their first salary check.
I get that people get antsy when they see prices go up. I get that a combination of increased demand and constrained supply both work to increase specific things (housing in SF). I get that your employer may not be increasing wages to match inflation.
I get that people on fixed income pensions feel inflation a lot. (Let their pain be your education; don't use fixed income products as your retirement plan.)
But equally don't use a word like "damage" here. There's no damage. The price of goods is always in flux, and always the result of many different interlocking numbers.
I understand that to folks who have grown up in zero-inflation environment that this can seem scary. But, from one who has lived my whole life in a single-digit inflation environment, its not scary. You just get/give a wage bump each year to compensate.
And yeah, I get that US employers are profit hungry and less inclined to pay living wages. If you're starting a business I heartily suggest you build inflation into your wage bill .
Everyone repeats that as mantra but I think that should be challenged.
I find it doubtful that inflation is needed to encourage spending or investment. Currency inflates naturally (that is, loses value) because it is not inherently useful, and things you can exchange for it are more useful today than they are tomorrow.
You won't skip buying a burger today to buy two burgers next year if you're going to starve. And even for luxuries, they are worth more today than next year, because lifespans are limited.
> But equally don't use a word like "damage" here. There's no damage.
You come across as an out of touch loon when you say something like that right after shitting on people who have fixed incomes.
Inflation is damage to the value of the currency and that impacts everyone.
How much exactly should a family of four pay to eat "reasonably" well, in your estimation. That number comes to about 17% of median household income. Is 17% too much to pay for food? What's the right number?
It sounds glib, but it's a serious question. What you've done here is cherry pick a specific expense that rose faster than inflation, and tried to draw a global conclusion directly through that outlier! I mean, what if you and your upper middle class friend were talking about flat panel TV prices? Would you have concluded the economy was great?
Maybe if you buy a flat panel tv every month, you’d think it was?
I'm just pointing out that freaking out about food prices is the same kind of cherry picking.
Where did you learn that? It doesn’t seem very likely.
A number of my peers have homes worth 2-5x mine and they’re really struggling. Which just feels bizarre given they’re making very good money.
Burgers should cost what’s needed to pay an American with deep roots in the country to flip the burgers. I think it would be morally beneficial for people if the employees flipping burgers or serving them at restaurants were their neighbors’ kids.
Yes, exactly—that’s why we should let everyone in.
We’ve been able to see that for the entire history of this country, as successive waves of immigrants have settled in this country. It’s how America works.
That later immigration trend coincided with the decline of American self government. Instead of establishing self-governing communities like German and Scottish immigrants, the Italians and Irish that came to America as a service class were co-opted into machine and ethnic-bloc politics.
If you think America is pretty good—and I do, my family left our homeland to come here—it seems reasonable to worry that the cultural changes wrought by immigration could mess up a good thing.
As pragmatic issues of policy it has been the case that spinning these up as political issues costs magnitudes more in real money (white elephant solutions pulling in expensive private contractors et al) and human suffering (drawn out processing, seperation of families, etc).
Always a big issue as elections draw closer.
Rarely as much of an actual issue as is made out to be on the stumps.
The large influx of south Asians to the UK will make the UK different. And if you think the UK is a better place than India, those changes will probably not be great ones from your point of view.
The argument I've seen is that people are spending down their savings, which is of course translating into healthy economic data - but once those savings are gone, things may not look so good.
Personally, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem cut and dried.
[edit] Note that inflation numbers are improving but still well above target and in past instances, this last bit has been hard to shake. Higher for longer and no real new supply of housing means that's not going to change any time soon.
Economies are cyclic and there will always be doom in the future. But there's no good justfication for predicting any particular doom. You're reaching, basically.
[1] Conveniently ignoring the huge boom during the pandemic due to assistance programs.