So only 50% of Democrats think Israel is even “going too far.” Yeah, sounds about right.
I mean yes, and more than 35% are “not sure”. Less than 15% of democrats felt Israel what Israel was doing in Gaza was appropriate. Therefore, the answer to what you said was the question is “yes”.
Yeah here’s the thing: Inflation as a statistic is rigged to make things look better than they actually are. Now Biden did good things for low-wage workers don’t get me wrong, but the idea that things got better for them is outright wrong, as evidenced by how many of them voted for Trump—the "things are horrible and I’ll fix them—candidate. Things just got less bad for them than they did for everyone else, which is a good thing and something he can take credit for but it’s not the massive accomplishment that Biden and the DNC seem to think it is. It certainly doesn’t allow them to gloat about how good things are, because things simply weren’t good. To reiterate, things were simply less bad than they could’ve been, not good, for all segments of the population other than the ultra-rich. Almost nobody could afford more things in 2023 than in 2019.
And even if we accept the proposition that things did get better for the bottom 10%, there are a whole 80% of the population between the bottom 10% and the top 10%. For those people things undeniably got much worse.
but the idea that things got better for them is outright wrong
You didn’t read the link, did you.
I do understand that when you look at vibes, everyone thinks Trump was okay on the economy and Biden was bad. What I am saying is that when you look at the dollars, low-income workers are making a lot more now than they were in 2019. Enough to be comfortably above even absolutely punishing inflation.
It’s perfectly sensible to me to say that because things are still pretty bad, even after their wages jumped by 12% more than inflation took away, they might feel like punishing the people in charge. Especially if they saw a whole bunch of messaging that sold them on the idea that Biden had fucked it all up and Trump was a savvy businessman who might be able to set it right.
And even if we accept the proposition that things did get better for the bottom 10%, there are a whole 80% of the population between the bottom 10% and the top 10%. For those people things undeniably got much worse.
How much, in your world, did wages change for people in that 80%? Median or average, it’s up to you. I want to know what you think the numbers are. Not the vibes, the numbers.
I did, but it seems you didn’t read what I wrote. To quote myself: Inflation as a statistic is rigged to make things look better than they actually are. The link’s thesis—the idea that “real” wages increased and therefore low-wage workers’ finances materially improved—relies on the false assumption that “real” wages are real, or equivalently that core inflation (which is the method used to calculate inflation in the united states) reflects price changes as experienced by the common person. This assumption is false, because among other things core inflation excludes food and energy, which is… uh… what? Now don’t get me wrong, there are things core inflation is good for, but measuring the lived experience of the working class is not one of them.
How much, in your world, did wages change for people in that 80%? Median or average, it’s up to you. I want to know what you think the numbers are. Not the vibes, the numbers.
Reverse engineering from the article’s numbers got me 22% for nominal wages, 3.3% for “real” wages. Sure as hell not keeping up with the price of meat.
I did, but it seems you didn’t read what I wrote. To quote myself: Inflation as a statistic is rigged to make things look better than they actually are. The link’s thesis—the idea that “real” wages increased and therefore low-wage workers’ finances materially improved—relies on the false assumption that “real” wages are real, or equivalently that core inflation (which is the method used to calculate inflation in the united states) reflects price changes as experienced by the common person. This assumption is false, because among other things core inflation excludes food and energy, which is… uh… what? Now don’t get me wrong, there are things core inflation is good for, but measuring the lived experience of the working class is not one of them.
I’m familiar with this talking point. It’s actually brilliant. So core inflation does exclude food and energy (as well as housing), mostly because their prices swing up and down in ways that would add noise to the metric. And so, there’s an argument that the real level of inflation would be much higher if only they were included.
The problem is that the premise is completely accurate (“inflation” level excludes important things like energy and food), but the idea that inflation would be way different if they were included makes perfect sense, but it isn’t true. The prices of things that are excluded have been rising at about the same rate (on a timescale as years go by) as the prices of things that are not excluded. Even for housing, which is a little surprising.
That’s the percent inflation in meat over the time Biden was president. It’s 15% cumulative. Your low-income worker who made 30% more, nominally, is able to buy 15% more meat now then they were in 2020.
You can look at the graph and see a lot more of the picture, too: There was Covid inflation for 2020 - 2022, and then it dropped right back to as if the whole thing hadn’t happened. The two huge bars in 2021 and 2022 are the only reason it was even 15%. Biden didn’t do that, he actually recovered well enough from the Covid apocalypse and also boosted up wages by enough that low-income people were better by quite a bit than they had been before it all happened, even though he got handed a big shit sandwich at the beginning. Without that shit sandwich, they’d be more like 30% ahead right now. And it happened specifically because of Biden’s deliberate policies, I can send you a couple articles that get into the weeds of the details if you want.
Your numbers (22% nominal and 3% real) for the middle chunk of the graph sound pretty accurate to me. Biden prioritized low-income workers (in particular with short-term-inflationary policies to keep unemployment down), and so the middle part of the graph pretty much kept pace (they gained 3%) but any actual gains they could have made got swallowed up. They still have 3% more, though, and they can buy more meat now though (22% nominal gain over 15% meat inflation). That’s one important reason why food prices are kept out of the overall graph – they might swing either up or down and distort the picture.
Does that make sense? I’m very into this type of analysis. I’m saying that there is a big disconnect, now that we’re talking numbers, between the numbers you are saying and the vibes that they should imply.
It makes sense and I admittedly didn’t know a lot of this (I revised my thought process to reflect that new information, in case I sound like I’m moving the goalposts), but it’s kind of running parallel to the point I was trying to make. Let’s take this from the top:
but the idea that inflation would be way different if they were included makes perfect sense, but it isn’t true. The prices of things that are excluded have been rising at about the same rate (on a timescale as years go by) as the prices of things that are not excluded. Even for housing, which is a little surprising.
That makes sense, but not very relevant to my point. To a working class person, the big three items in their budget are food, energy and housing. Therefore to them, core inflation being X% implies that at some point they’ll look at the items in their budget and find that they inflated X%. It doesn’t, however, say anything about their present state, which is that everything is expensive as hell. The core issue here is that “at some point” isn’t “now”. The DNC missed that distinction in their campaigning strategy, and bragged about their (sort of real, to be fair) accomplishments rather than doing damage control.
That’s the percent inflation in meat over the time Biden was president. It’s 15% cumulative. Your low-income worker who made 30% more, nominally, is able to buy 15% more meat now then they were in 2020.
You’re using 2019-2023 wage growth with 2021-2025 inflation, so this comparison is meaningless. Now I actually can’t find 2021-2025 (or 2021-2024 for that matter) wage growth numbers, but they’re probably not 30%.
They still have 3% more, though, and they can buy more meat now though (22% nominal gain over 15% meat inflation).
Again time intervals don’t match.
I’m saying that there is a big disconnect, now that we’re talking numbers, between the numbers you are saying and the vibes that they should imply.
That disconnect is because core inflation, as it pertains to working class finances, is a promise rather than a statement of fact. That promise wasn’t fulfilled by election season, a fact which completely flew over the DNC’s heads. Fundamentally, that’s the source of the disconnect.
That makes sense, but not very relevant to my point. To a working class person, the big three items in their budget are food, energy and housing. Therefore to them, core inflation being X% implies that at some point they’ll look at the items in their budget and find that they inflated X%. It doesn’t, however, say anything about their present state, which is that everything is expensive as hell. The core issue here is that “at some point” isn’t “now”. The DNC missed that distinction in their campaigning strategy, and bragged about their (sort of real, to be fair) accomplishments rather than doing damage control.
Yeah. This is completely true. The Democrats pulled off some genuinely impressive economic things, among them controlling inflation, but then they fucked up any chance that the messaging would hit by talking about how they “brought inflation back down.” To an economist, that’s true: Things used to cost 7% more every year, and now they cost 3% more every year. That’s not how any normal person looks at “inflation” though. To the average person, inflation has “gone back down” once eggs and meat go back to what they used to cost.
I think if Biden had done half as much about climate change, and half as much for working-class wages, and gone after grocery stores to get them to stop price-gouging (like actually threatened the hell out of them with the federal governments’ lawyers Bernie Sanders-style and made a big stink about how he was doing it), he would have won the election. He and his team did do a bunch of really important things for working people in this country. But they also just don’t understand how the average person looks at it, apparently, or how to communicate effectively about what they did.
I sort of wish the news media would do its job, and bridge that gap instead of actively working to make people’s misunderstandings of the world worse, but that seems unlikely to change. Especially now. I was extremely creeped out to realize that a lot of the statistics about this stuff, and news stories I remember reading about it, are much harder to find on Google now, and I wonder if that is on purpose. I think it might be.
You’re using 2019-2023 wage growth with 2021-2025 inflation, so this comparison is meaningless. Now I actually can’t find 2021-2025 (or 2021-2024 for that matter) wage growth numbers, but they’re probably not 30%.
Why do you assume they are not?
It looks to me like, if you look 2021-2024, 10th percentile wages went up by 25%. You can download the Excel sheet at https://www.bls.gov/ecec/factsheets/compensation-percentile-estimates.htm under “The complete set of estimates and relative standard errors are available in Excel.”, from the very end. You want the second line “Civilian workers / Wages and Salaries.” It went from $11.26 to $14.06 (current dollars), so 24.8% up.
If you look on https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ for inflation over the same period, it looks like 2021-2024 inflation was 15%. So they beat inflation by about 10% if you constrain the periods to be the same.
I think most of the people are actually reasonable. It’s just easier to get in discussions and stay in them with the unreasonable people than it is with the reasonable people.
I mean yes, and more than 35% are “not sure”. Less than 15% of democrats felt Israel what Israel was doing in Gaza was appropriate. Therefore, the answer to what you said was the question is “yes”.
Yeah here’s the thing: Inflation as a statistic is rigged to make things look better than they actually are. Now Biden did good things for low-wage workers don’t get me wrong, but the idea that things got better for them is outright wrong, as evidenced by how many of them voted for Trump—the "things are horrible and I’ll fix them—candidate. Things just got less bad for them than they did for everyone else, which is a good thing and something he can take credit for but it’s not the massive accomplishment that Biden and the DNC seem to think it is. It certainly doesn’t allow them to gloat about how good things are, because things simply weren’t good. To reiterate, things were simply less bad than they could’ve been, not good, for all segments of the population other than the ultra-rich. Almost nobody could afford more things in 2023 than in 2019.
And even if we accept the proposition that things did get better for the bottom 10%, there are a whole 80% of the population between the bottom 10% and the top 10%. For those people things undeniably got much worse.
You didn’t read the link, did you.
I do understand that when you look at vibes, everyone thinks Trump was okay on the economy and Biden was bad. What I am saying is that when you look at the dollars, low-income workers are making a lot more now than they were in 2019. Enough to be comfortably above even absolutely punishing inflation.
It’s perfectly sensible to me to say that because things are still pretty bad, even after their wages jumped by 12% more than inflation took away, they might feel like punishing the people in charge. Especially if they saw a whole bunch of messaging that sold them on the idea that Biden had fucked it all up and Trump was a savvy businessman who might be able to set it right.
How much, in your world, did wages change for people in that 80%? Median or average, it’s up to you. I want to know what you think the numbers are. Not the vibes, the numbers.
I did, but it seems you didn’t read what I wrote. To quote myself: Inflation as a statistic is rigged to make things look better than they actually are. The link’s thesis—the idea that “real” wages increased and therefore low-wage workers’ finances materially improved—relies on the false assumption that “real” wages are real, or equivalently that core inflation (which is the method used to calculate inflation in the united states) reflects price changes as experienced by the common person. This assumption is false, because among other things core inflation excludes food and energy, which is… uh… what? Now don’t get me wrong, there are things core inflation is good for, but measuring the lived experience of the working class is not one of them.
Here’s one example off the top of my head: The retail price of beef rose 33% from 2019 to 2023. More relevant to the election, Energy rose 30% between 2019 and 2024. Get the idea? This is what people actually feel in their day to day lives.
Reverse engineering from the article’s numbers got me 22% for nominal wages, 3.3% for “real” wages. Sure as hell not keeping up with the price of meat.
I’m familiar with this talking point. It’s actually brilliant. So core inflation does exclude food and energy (as well as housing), mostly because their prices swing up and down in ways that would add noise to the metric. And so, there’s an argument that the real level of inflation would be much higher if only they were included.
The problem is that the premise is completely accurate (“inflation” level excludes important things like energy and food), but the idea that inflation would be way different if they were included makes perfect sense, but it isn’t true. The prices of things that are excluded have been rising at about the same rate (on a timescale as years go by) as the prices of things that are not excluded. Even for housing, which is a little surprising.
Look. I’m not making it up:
https://www.in2013dollars.com/Meats/price-inflation/2021-to-2025?amount=100
That’s the percent inflation in meat over the time Biden was president. It’s 15% cumulative. Your low-income worker who made 30% more, nominally, is able to buy 15% more meat now then they were in 2020.
You can look at the graph and see a lot more of the picture, too: There was Covid inflation for 2020 - 2022, and then it dropped right back to as if the whole thing hadn’t happened. The two huge bars in 2021 and 2022 are the only reason it was even 15%. Biden didn’t do that, he actually recovered well enough from the Covid apocalypse and also boosted up wages by enough that low-income people were better by quite a bit than they had been before it all happened, even though he got handed a big shit sandwich at the beginning. Without that shit sandwich, they’d be more like 30% ahead right now. And it happened specifically because of Biden’s deliberate policies, I can send you a couple articles that get into the weeds of the details if you want.
Your numbers (22% nominal and 3% real) for the middle chunk of the graph sound pretty accurate to me. Biden prioritized low-income workers (in particular with short-term-inflationary policies to keep unemployment down), and so the middle part of the graph pretty much kept pace (they gained 3%) but any actual gains they could have made got swallowed up. They still have 3% more, though, and they can buy more meat now though (22% nominal gain over 15% meat inflation). That’s one important reason why food prices are kept out of the overall graph – they might swing either up or down and distort the picture.
Does that make sense? I’m very into this type of analysis. I’m saying that there is a big disconnect, now that we’re talking numbers, between the numbers you are saying and the vibes that they should imply.
It makes sense and I admittedly didn’t know a lot of this (I revised my thought process to reflect that new information, in case I sound like I’m moving the goalposts), but it’s kind of running parallel to the point I was trying to make. Let’s take this from the top:
That makes sense, but not very relevant to my point. To a working class person, the big three items in their budget are food, energy and housing. Therefore to them, core inflation being X% implies that at some point they’ll look at the items in their budget and find that they inflated X%. It doesn’t, however, say anything about their present state, which is that everything is expensive as hell. The core issue here is that “at some point” isn’t “now”. The DNC missed that distinction in their campaigning strategy, and bragged about their (sort of real, to be fair) accomplishments rather than doing damage control.
You’re using 2019-2023 wage growth with 2021-2025 inflation, so this comparison is meaningless. Now I actually can’t find 2021-2025 (or 2021-2024 for that matter) wage growth numbers, but they’re probably not 30%.
Again time intervals don’t match.
That disconnect is because core inflation, as it pertains to working class finances, is a promise rather than a statement of fact. That promise wasn’t fulfilled by election season, a fact which completely flew over the DNC’s heads. Fundamentally, that’s the source of the disconnect.
Yeah. This is completely true. The Democrats pulled off some genuinely impressive economic things, among them controlling inflation, but then they fucked up any chance that the messaging would hit by talking about how they “brought inflation back down.” To an economist, that’s true: Things used to cost 7% more every year, and now they cost 3% more every year. That’s not how any normal person looks at “inflation” though. To the average person, inflation has “gone back down” once eggs and meat go back to what they used to cost.
I think if Biden had done half as much about climate change, and half as much for working-class wages, and gone after grocery stores to get them to stop price-gouging (like actually threatened the hell out of them with the federal governments’ lawyers Bernie Sanders-style and made a big stink about how he was doing it), he would have won the election. He and his team did do a bunch of really important things for working people in this country. But they also just don’t understand how the average person looks at it, apparently, or how to communicate effectively about what they did.
I sort of wish the news media would do its job, and bridge that gap instead of actively working to make people’s misunderstandings of the world worse, but that seems unlikely to change. Especially now. I was extremely creeped out to realize that a lot of the statistics about this stuff, and news stories I remember reading about it, are much harder to find on Google now, and I wonder if that is on purpose. I think it might be.
Why do you assume they are not?
It looks to me like, if you look 2021-2024, 10th percentile wages went up by 25%. You can download the Excel sheet at https://www.bls.gov/ecec/factsheets/compensation-percentile-estimates.htm under “The complete set of estimates and relative standard errors are available in Excel.”, from the very end. You want the second line “Civilian workers / Wages and Salaries.” It went from $11.26 to $14.06 (current dollars), so 24.8% up.
If you look on https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ for inflation over the same period, it looks like 2021-2024 inflation was 15%. So they beat inflation by about 10% if you constrain the periods to be the same.
Because the data I did find had average wages going up a decent amount between 2020 and 2021.
Yeah that makes more sense.
Anyway I think we’re mostly in agreement here. I can’t believe I just had a productive discussion on Lemmy.
Lmao
I think most of the people are actually reasonable. It’s just easier to get in discussions and stay in them with the unreasonable people than it is with the reasonable people.