Hacker News Reader

Comment by smileysteve | Hacker News Reader

... The data says wages outpaced inflation.

Social security / medicare are indexed to inflation.

The s&p500 outperformed inflation. (And treasury interest rates - 3 month and 10 Year - are ~<2x cpi and cpi targets for the first time in ~20 years)

How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?

https://www.marketplace.org/2024/10/30/wage-growth-slowing-o...

https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/awifactors.html

View on HN

Wages in aggregate outpaced inflation in aggregate. That's not necessarily going to make it feel like your living situation has improved, especially if your consumption patterns don't perfectly match the CPI model and if you're financing major purchases. Compared to 2020, rent indices are up 30%, houses are up 50% (in value, not monthly payment - that's worse), used cars are up 30% currently but peaked at 40%. Groceries are up 26%. Costs of borrowing have skyrocketed across the board, and Americans live on financing.

If Americans own stock at all (38% don't), the majority of it is in retirement accounts.

Last year, the median income was still below 2019: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

>... The data says wages outpaced inflation

The data are aggregate measures. I have no doubt that for, say, the top 20% of earners, wages did outpace inflation. Maybe the next 30% were able to tread water. The bottom 50%, however, are likely on a sinking ship.

Why does the richest country in the history of the world allow 50% of its workers to be on a sinking ship?

That is the question

Because it was bought by billionaires.

Not just billionaires so much as multi-billion-dollar corporations that are too big not to be stronger than (indebted) government and control politicians.

It's been a while but lots of the real gems (precious metals too) have already been sold for a profit so there's not as much upside as there was traditionally.

Without hard-asset inflation, the dollar could turn out to be one of their least-performing assets, and you know they can't have that.

Because it's foundational social contracts rely too heavily on the Fundamental Attribution Error.

And the (simplistic) answer is because many of those 50% vote Republican, because the Republicans say they will fix things and yet always make things worse for the bottom 50%

The obvious example being minimum wage earners.

>How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?

It would probably be best with deep empathy from the heart, which seems to be in extremely short supply from some camps, and nothing else seems to be working.

If you want a verifiable large-scale example, the General Schedule has only increased by 12.5% cumulative in the last 4 years, compared to 22% CPI

I think average and even median aren't the right way to look at this. In an atmosphere where both inflation and wages shot up and then came back down, it's the variance that kills you. Compared to a steady 2-3% growth with low variance, the raw number of people who experienced distressing adjustments, with some people profiting and others losing, is a big deal.

> How do you convey ideas to voters when the basis of the idea is feeling vs fact, outlier vs median?

That's the best description of what good politicians can do that I've ever heard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com