Hacker News Reader

Comment by from-nibly | Hacker News Reader

look, whatever the charts say is a 100% bold faced lie. have you seen the price of a little ceasars pizza? it's jumped nearly 50% in the last 4 years. my salary has not gone up 50% relative to my experiece in the last 4 years. most recently i got a salary cut. you can't make me believe the economy is doing fine.

View on HN

Do all the population eats Caesars pizza? Inflation (or more accurately CPI) is a weighted average where the items that represent the biggest spending on the consumer (not on volume, but also relative to their income) is calculated and changed over time. Housing is the biggest item there, then there's food, energy and health services and communication. How does Caesars pizza change of price affects inflation: via restaurants, an item that has lost relevance after the run away price increases over covid.

I don't agree with the idea of everything being a "lie" as they put it, but I have also noticed prices have risen over 50% for a number of food items. I'm a regular consumer of dark chocolate and brands that used to cost $2.50 or less just four years ago are now $4.00 or more.

What is pizza made of?

For purposes of GP's example, yes, the entire population eats Little Caesars.

Even worse, my Kombucha went from $3->$4.

But, GP's example vibes with pretty much all food prices I've seen. McDonalds went from 2 for $3 to $3 each. It's really kind of surprising. Easy to avoid all this junk food, but price increases are very substantial.

Here's the CPI numbers for food [0] where we saw increases from 261 to 332. 27%

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDNS

Okay, I hear you. But can you tell how Trump is gonna fix it? Pizza price won't go down from $15 to $10. If anything, it will be $25.

But Trump _was_ president when it was $10, and now he is not president it is more than that. People are going to make that connection even in the absense of a ten point pizza price plan or whatever and are going to think that they will be better off with him.

>> are going to think that they will be better off with him.

This is what I thought, too. So it will be their fault when they suddenly find out that not only prices didn't go down, but everything is a way expensive than before! And as a bonus, their rights were stripped away. From that PoV, liberals are in much better position now than those who votes for trump. at least they don't have any illusions on what's coming next.

He's not gonna. It's related to the fact that people are saying the economy is fine and people don't like being lied to.

I mean, there's more than one dimension to "the economy". Unemployment rate and GDP recovery is good, inflation curtailed, wages are growing - but obviously not enough. Then Harris proposed a decent policy to improve housing affordability, but that would only beg the question "why didn't Biden do this?".

Basically, too little too late. They fucked up that, and fucked up on the border, when there was no excuse to fuck up. I believe the Harris' policies would have been better for the economy than tariffs and deportations, but it's a moot point in voters' minds.

Your first paragraph should be printed, framed, and put in a museum as a perfect example of why the Biden-Harris messaging around the economy fell flat. Nobody gives a shit if unemployment is down and GDP is up when a pizza that was $10 3 years ago is $15 now. The answer to someone saying that they can't afford as much as they could a few years ago is not to tell them that they're wrong.

Her housing credit suggestion a) was less than the amount the median home price increased by under Biden, and b) would have only served to increase the price of housing further by increasing the supply of money available, exactly the same thing ZIRP did.

I'm not referring to the credit. She had proposals to boost supply.

Tax incentives for builders that build starter homes sold to first-time buyers

An expansion of a tax incentive for building affordable rental housing.

A new $40 billion innovation fund to spur innovative housing construction.

To repurpose some federal land for affordable housing.

To remove tax benefits for investors who buy large numbers of single-family rental homes.

as per - https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/harris-has-the-right-idea-on-h...

> I'm not referring to the credit. She had [all these things]

… that people didn’t believe.

She ran for her first 50 days claiming Bidenomics was working. That term was so stupid I thought it was a joke that conservatives made up. Surely they weren’t trying to say the economy was good right?

Well, no surprises on my end last night.

They plainly had no awareness of them, nevermind believe, but even if they did it probably would not have sufficed for the aforementioned reasons. Like you said, no surprises.

No one is talking about the real source of a lot of these problems: there was supposed to be a minor collapse/major correction of the economy around this time in 2022. Essentially, there were signs that people were preparing for a major recession that was going to be precipitated by a collapse in one or more major markets (probably real estate, either American CRE or Chinese residential); inflation necessitating rapid FFR hikes would have played a part in this. Instead, everything was backstopped by various means, and the Fed went for a "soft landing". This didn't solve the problem, it just shifted the burden onto people who didn't own the assets that were backstopped. A number of other actions (breaking the rail strike, a number of actions taken to prevent turmoil in securities markets) also forestalled the correction.

The result is that, instead of taking a big blow early in his presidency, leaving us currently in the recovery period, Biden disrupted every "attempt" by the market to correct. This allowed for common economic metrics to read as healthy, even while the portions of the economy that most effect the average American were distorted.

But it was Trump demanding lower interest rates while he was president and which in turn created the high inflation we have today.

Yeah, unfortunately voters cannot connect inflation to the ramp up in COVID spending and stimulus checks and free PPP money Trump gave out.

Interest rates remained relatively low compared to history throughout the 2010s and the year over year inflation figures for that decade remained below 2.5% throughout those years, during both Obama's and Trump's presidencies. Inflation spiked after the Feds debasement of the currency in 2020 and 2021, during both Trump and Biden's presidencies, when it expanded the money supply at an unprecedented rate.

Money Supply: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS

Consumer Inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA

Nice anecdote, but that's not how we arrive at the truth. Good data and a scientific approach does.

Now there are tens of thousands of highly educated credible economists with enormous amounts of good data in the US. It'd be for them, trivially easy, to constantly hit news headlines with a couple of papers substantiating why certain official inflation statistics are wrong and actual inflation is much higher, and we're all actually much worse off than before.

But there is no such widespread consensus economic research being published, I wonder why. I guess the quarter million people in the US who graduated with an economics degree in the past decade are all corrupt, as are all the institutions who report on inflation, captured somehow by Joe Biden... /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com