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And yet the quality of life for Americans is still declining, while the wealth gap keeps growing.
Yep, and a bunch of the things Biden supporters want to tout are making this problem worse, because his economic legislation and climate legislation and healthcare legislation and all the rest is almost entirely just throwing taxpayer money at businesses and hoping it trickles down to us somehow
Narrator - It didn't.
If at first you don't succeed, give businesses more money and try again.
I would argue the quality has been improving as if late. But kind of hard to blame him for the fact that the world was gripped and massively disrupted a by a pandemic and the financial moves by the fed to stave off an even worse financial melt down led to high inflation. But we're going in the right direction, even if it isn't fast enough for some people.
Wages aren't keeping up with inflation for most people. The wage increases reported are mostly driven by top earners. It isn't moving at the bottom. Longer lines than ever at food pantries. I remember when Democrats used to at least pretend to give a shit about that stuff.
Been that way for a long time bud
Nothing new happens under the sun.
And that's also not true for the past year. Wages have out paced inflation.
Whose wages?
Even without answering that question let's take a look at the 2023 numbers. According to BLS weekly wages went from 55k to 59k a seven percent increase. Inflation was 3.4. So we regained 3.6 percent.
The pandemic alone was worth 10 percent. And we've been left behind by the hundreds of points over the decades.
So while technically true, your statement is very misleading.
The poster said that over the last year, wages have out paced inflation. Pointing out how that is not true for years prior doesn't mean his statement is misleading.
My comment, where this all comes from, was about how things are getting better as of late. So in context especially the comment is appropriate.
Regaining 3.6 percent out of 137 points is a drop in the bucket. Of course if you frame it as just this last year it looks great. But food is still up by 20 percent on it's own. Trying to take a victory lap on this is how the working class gets fucked over again.
Saying we're heading in the right direction is not taking a victory lap.
It's funny that you are whining about it being misleading, while repeatedly misrepresenting other comments.
It absolutely is a victory lap. Because we get this news and then nothing for another decade when suddenly everyone realizes we never made good on that progress. It happened in 2003, 2008, 2012, and now 2019. So yeah fuck that. I'm done waiting to be forgotten and then yelling into the void because the narrative of the win has set into the zeitgeist.
It's not technically true, it's just true. I specifically said "for the past year", so bringing up "over the decades" is what's misleading.
Especially in the context of Joe Biden, who has not been president for the past several decades.
Yup you framed it the one possible way to make it look like good news. Great job, the Kremlin is always hiring propogandists.
Kremlin propagandists HATE Joe Biden rofl what the fuck is this comment
This is both very specific claim, but very vague as to what you mean. What is "many" and where are you getting these numbers?
This has been a decades long problem that he has contributed to over his entire career.
More specifics please.
But, ftr, we're talking about his presidency, which has been way more progressive than him throughout his career.
1994 Crime Bill, giving many people records and restricting their access to voting/housing/jobs/life.
1996 one of 24 Democrats to vote for the Welfare reform bill that kicked many people off of government benefits and caused needless suffering.
2003 American Dream Downpayment Act. It increased the amount of Adjustable Rate Mortgage you could get and made them available to low income families. This would prove to be a trap in 2008 that anyone with a basic education in economics could see coming because the rate was adjustable.
That's just three examples, I'm not going to keep going. This is an old problem, older than- Well I was going to say older than him but he was elected to the Senate in 1972. He has presided over the entire crushing of the middle and working class. And we put him in the white house for it.
1994 Crime Bill, giving many people records and restricting their access to voting/housing/jobs/life.
1996 one of 24 Democrats to vote for the Welfare reform bill that kicked many people off of government benefits and caused needless suffering.
2003 American Dream Downpayment Act. It increased the amount of Adjustable Rate Mortgage you could get and made them available to low income families. This would prove to be a trap in 2008 that anyone with a basic education in economics could see coming because the rate was adjustable.
That's just three examples, I'm not going to keep going. This is an old problem, older than- Well I was going to say older than him but he was elected to the Senate in 1972. He has presided over the entire crushing of the middle and working class. And we put him in the white house for it.
Research constantly points to things getting worse, especially for younger generations. At best you could say the rate of decline has slowed somewhat recently.
And it’s unfair to blame it on the pandemic, the trends been going on for much longer.
That would all make it even less his fault tho...
It's not his fault it happened, it's his fault he's not doing enough to fix it. He campaigned on the status quo, yet the status quo is the problem.
Fundamental change needs to happen.
Like what?
He's not magic. He can't actually wave a wand and do anything. He's gotta get congress on board for anything meaningful that can't be undone the second someone else sits in the chair. Incremental change sucks, but acting like he's been doing nothing is dumb. That's not to say he hasn't done bad things (looks at Israel), but painting him as inept is disingenuous at best.
Explain what changes can happen with Republicans in charge of the House.
I like how you can't imagine a leader actually wanting change.
We could deschedule cannabi-- oh who am I kidding? We can support Netanyahu's genocide even harder.
Trump sure seemed to change a lot with a divided Congress... Biden isn't doing it because he doesn't want to. But because he can't.
Cricket cricket
He's been in politics for like half a century.
That has been a trend for decades so it's not going to turn around overnight. He has made some big steps by expanding numerous quality of life programs.
Real wages (i.e. inflation adjusted) have been growing for the last year and are now even with what they were before covid.
In 2019 real wages were on par with what they were in 1973. That is no growth in over 50 years.
Of course things are going to go back to pre-Covid levels post-Covid. That's not a sign that things are magically fixed. Housing and food costs are at extreme highs, the amount of people working two jobs to survive are at highs, etc. etc. CPI also lags behind on many things such as market rent.
And don't even get me started on the generational gap, millenials, zoomers, and alphas are all far far worse off than previous generations.
That graph kind of sidesteps the actual problem. Inflation has run away so much that 1973 isn't nearly enough. I know that seems weird because they used real terms but median wage increases since 1974 have lost to core inflation over the decades by over a hundred points.
What we're actually seeing here is the worth of money adjusting. But if you put core inflation on there it would be an even higher line.
It's worth mentioning that WEC is heavily pro-corporate and neo liberal. They'd love to push a graph that made it seem like everyone was panicking for no reason.
Cool, what does that have do with Joe Biden's presidency? You know, the one that started Jan 20, 2021 and is the topic of this thread.
Massive systems, like the economy, don't get fixed overnight. It took 40 years to fuck it up as much as it is now and it will probably take nearly as long to unfuck it.
Congratulations you swallowed a propaganda line that wasn't even true when they printed it.
If by propaganda you mean statistics from the BLS, then yes. But I'm sure your gut feeling is far more accurate.
BLS never announced that. An "economic" think tank did. Coincidentally the math doesn't work out and it's an election year.
Yes, they did. They publish data monthly on average hourly earnings of all employees. It doesn't take a master statistician to take that and compare it against CPI-U and see that the average earnings one is now bigger compared against a Jan 2020 baseline. Do you want me to send you my excel from last night?
So did they announce it or are you interpreting the data they put out.
What exactly do you think the difference between "announcing" something and posting the data is?
Did they make a blog post? Hell if I know. I went to the data directly. Do you think adjusting for inflation is some complicated thing?
Edit: Here, is this what you want?