Aggressive price controls work. Profit forfeitures work. Generous universal social programs work. But no, Joe wants to use the defense production act instead to make meds. Neoliberalism is accelerating fascism and autocracy.
Inflation is like acceleration. Acceleration going down means you are still speeding up, just at a lower rate. For prices to go down, we need DEFLATION!
Inflation has gone down. Doesn’t mean the prices have. In fact they specifically keep going up, because it seems that literally every business has decided the only thing that matters is how much their CEO is worth.
When every industry and consumer goods producer is a monopoly, market competition no longer exists so prices don’t really effect demand. Especially for inelastic goods like gas or food.
Except it hasn’t. Inflation-adjusted prices for commonly-referenced foodstuffs (eggs, milk, bacon, and coffee, for example) are actually steady since 1995.
Things feel expensive in part because human perception over time is a frail thing and we can remember (for example) that when we were younger, gas was $1.20 a gallon. Of course, that was when I was in high school and making minimum wage, which was $3.05. Adjusting both those to inflation (in 2023 dollars), that’s $3.76 for the gas (spot on) and $9.95 for minimum wage (which is a bit short of the current federal of $7.29 $7.25 (typo) , although 29 states have set higher minima, the lowest of which is $9.95)
This isn’t intended to make anyone feel any better. The big problem is the absolute insane record profits and consolidation of wealth into an equally insane number of billionaires. Those are the forces we should be lining up with knives and forks against.
And contrary to the “both sides” argument, there’s one side that wants to take absolutely everything for themselves and create a Christo-fascist theocracy, continuing to hoard their gold like Smaug; and another that, while still upper class and definitely not perfect, does try reduce world suck. Choose wisely.
This article is confusing as fuck. How can you use 2022 dollars “adjusted” and then claim there’s no inflation. That’s literally what that adjustment is for, to normalize prices for inflation over time.
Also it jokes eggs aren’t crazy expensive but they’ve been up to comedy levels of pricey at least twice in 3 years due to avien flu.
First of all the comparisons are to 2019, not pre 1983 when those changes are made, so most of this is totally irrelevant to the point I was making. That’s also why all the real wage statistics are anchored to 1982-1984 dollars. Second a forever unchanging fixed basket of goods is not a good way to measure inflation. What people spend their money on changes over time. Cell phones are necessary now, didn’t used to be, shouldn’t they be in the consumer price index? Internet is necessary now, those costs should be in the index. The same things that were necessary in 1975 are not the exact same things people are buying now. Using the exact same basket of goods from 1975 would be ridiculous and not useful. Another frequent criticism is that housing prices aren’t included after 1983. The reasoning being that is an investment, not an expense that you will never get back. However rent is, and the increased housing cost ends up reflected in the rent. So that change doesn’t change the index nearly as much as you might think.
All this is to say, I’m highly suspicious of this sudden narrative across the entire media that the economy is in shambles and everyone is struggling, when almost all measures are to the contrary. I’m expecting migrant caravans and all sorts of other sensationalized non stories with only some kernel of truth on the way. And a headline “prices didn’t increase from September to October” gets nowhere near as many clicks as “inflation was 3.2% in October,” even if technically true, taking advantage of misconceptions about what an annualized rate is.
That’s why we have “real wages” statistic so you can do that comparison. Where you adjust wages for inflation in comparison to a set point in time so they are comparable.
This chart only goes to 2019. Real wages did dip some during the corona virus pandemic as for a time inflation was out pacing wage increases. This has since reversed though, with wage growth outpacing inflation, and real wages are now higher than they were in 2019. Anchored to 1982-1984 dollars, in December 2019 real wages were $10.96 /hr, in October 2023 they were $11.05.
So yes, as of right now inflation that occured during the pandemic has been fully accounted for and then some by the total wage growth that occured during and since. Wage growth continues to out pace inflation, so hopefully things will continue to get better. That’s not to say there hasn’t been a persistent problem over decades of wages getting diluted. Real wages dropped significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, remained flat in the 90s and 00s, and only really began to recover after the financial crisis in 2008. Real wages are just catching up finally to where they used to be way back in the 1970s.
This concept needs to spread. Those record profits and the consolidation of wealth is a real-life exploit (a hack) of capitalism. These types of situations were never intended by the visionaries that designed capitalism. This entire clusterfuck of 1% having 99% of the money was never intended by design, nor seemed like a plausible situation to need to design protections for when the economy started getting destroyed by this situation. As the sickness of greed among policymakers grew, they punched holes in the system in order to exploit the mechanics of the capitalism to collect virtually limitless money while simultaneously denying other less privileged people not “in the know” the chance to do the same.
Does anyone remember the original Super Mario Brothers, where you could get crowns, basically giving you more lives than you could possibly use? These capitalist hackers found a way to get crowns at the expense of the 99%, and nobody has any clue or organized any way to stop this hack/exploit from ruining it for everyone else.
Capitalism has been hacked. If the system administrators don’t manually intervene and redistribute wealth, we are just going to keep circling the drain until it’s all over like a game of Monopoly where everyone except one entity is completely bankrupt.
Ever since they got us to come out of the fields and into the factories, the point has always been about a class war against the poor. To act otherwise is to ignore history.
Agree with you, real wages have stagnated, and so have real prices.
However, one thing that bothers me, and that I’d like to know, is what does it mean to “eat the rich”? “Eat” in what sense? Destroy? Take all their money? Because why are people so angry, that someone else is doing better than them? Is it some form of jealousy? Idk. What people should be looking at, IMO, is how they themself are doing. Are they doing ok? If not, then we have a problem. But why do they care whether somebody else has a lot of money? I seriously don’t get it.
Thats what you get, when one party is economic hardcore neoliberalists and otherwise fascists and the other party is neoliberal reactionaries with some gay rights sprinkled in.
There is no political left in American mainstream politics and they get fucked royally for it. But then again Americans want to get fucked over getting evil socialist things like affordable healthcare
But then again Americans want to get fucked over getting evil socialist things like affordable healthcare
As an American, while I do enjoy fucking (I thought that was a universal thing for the most part) I also would really appreciate affordable (or better yet free) healthcare as well.
We should try not to generalize that every member of a population agrees with every choice their government makes.
According to Gallup, most Americans do believe healthcare is the government’s responsibility (57% yes to 40% no, remainder unsure/no opinion). Meanwhile paradoxically, 53% prefer private healthcare over government-run vs 43% that would prefer government-run, so what in the actual fuck…
Republican party made a lot of effort to gut Medicare as much as possible, and they are quite successful when they want to destroy something that helps other people.
As someone who has had something large and expensive break with frequent enough regularity lately that it’s been keeping me from building up almost any savings for almost a year, I feel this. I feel very behind.
Sure how many train derailment under his watch. Oh yeah thanks to him rail workers can’t strike.
And I don’t hear bullshit “He GoT tHeM a RaSiE LaTeR” nonsense. The strike wasn’t just about sick time which got them what 1 day. It was about how the fucking greedy rail companies were endangering lives and not fixing the infrastructure.
Also Biden sold more oil leases then Trump so naw not good on the environment either.
I see a salty downvoter doesn’t like facing reality. Truth is we’re not going to get a good candidate, Trump is the front runner and it’s got people riled up. I don’t see “good” in the next election cycle, I just see “shitty and less shitty”. A shitty leader is still a shitty leader, and it’s going to add to the apathy issue we have as well while empowering populist nutjobs.
I expect the downvote train, but I want just everyone to remember that in America the Establishment A and Establishment B have both decided to go against the regular American. Whenever you doubt it, just remember Clinton cut off welfare benefits and Bush enforced it, Bush cut immigration and Obama was deporter in chief, Obamacare only got expanded under Trump with anything medical becoming subsidized. The actual record is way longer but it is a big club and we are not in it, believing that either represents you 100% is an obvious lie that people for some reason try to internalize, to the benefit of these bloodsuckers.
Yeah, among polls of weird freaks who actually answer polls. Plus, do you even know how these are conducted? People under 60 don’t answer calls from unknown numbers, nor do they have the landline phones that pollers call. Traditional media paradigms are dead and polls are now meaningless, it’s time to adapt or die now.
Pollers have been using internet surveys, stopping people downtown to ask questions, and other methods besides phone calls.
It’s also well-established that the younger generation, who might not get included in these polls, are much less likely to vote anyway.
Assuming all the polls, in all the swing states are wrong is a good way to be surprised in a year. People should be looking at this and getting involved to make sure younger people vote. If no one takes it seriously, things don’t look good.
I mean, you’re defending polling that hasn’t been great for the least few elections and has meant almost nothing except for Trump winning the republican primary (obviously).
I saw several polls saying that issue 1 in Ohio would barely pass. Definitely didn’t have polls predicting big dem wins this November either.
While I completely agree that people need to get active now and beat down the apathy, focusing on flawed data and developing a defeatist attitude probably isn’t good for the soul.
People should be looking at this and getting involved to make sure younger people vote.
Or maybe politicians should actually do shit for younger people to make them want to vote for them instead of spitting in their face and assuming they will get their vote because the other guy is worse.
The infrastructure bill was a big accomplishment. With that said, I don’t really care for his personality and all I wanted was healthcare reform (single payer, etc) which we didn’t get.
I am voting for him again because I don’t want trump or any other of the Republican candidates as my president. But could we have a better democratic candidate? Definitely
I mean that is the narrative right, we have to go with a centrist because it might scareee people to give them universal healthcare.
The reality is that in a lot of cases Biden is to the right of the majority of the US on issues. Take the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, it is extremely unpopular to support it right now among US voters (especially younger ones) but I am sure the media narrative is that oh we can’t say no to Israel, that would doom Biden for being too leftist.
Calling it a “narrative” doesn’t make it not true. It wouldn’t have taken very many people voting differently for Trump to have win last time, and that’s without swing voters’ goldfish memories fucking things up.
And I think it’s one more thing that Poland will copy from US. People got super exited when the right wing government lost the election but my prediction has always been that the “progressive” government will be extremely meh and in 4 years they will lose anyway.
Yeah. I really think he will. Trump shouldn’t be allowed to run, but in America you can try and overthrow the government, be a cartoon villain in the business sector and a rapist and they’ll let you be president twice.
It’s all rigged anyway. The electoral college, gerrymandering, having some states votes count more and ignoring the popular vote… We’re at the mercy of our corporate overlords.
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