United States | News & Politics

Love that you totally ignore the wages v. income. Ha.

You’re talking about bad financial decisions not economic distress

I would hardly call getting a car a "bad financial decision", given that cars are a practical necessity in the US. Fundamentally, people right now are doing better than they were four years ago. The data backs this up.

The housing shortage traces back almost directly to the pandemic. The first house I bought was in 2013-ish, and houses were cheap because enormous numbers of people had defaulted on mortgages after the 2008 crash. There was also an enormous supply as a result. Construction halted during the pandemic as building supplies dried up, and unemployment skyrocketed. Now that wages have been rising, you have too many people bidding on too few houses, which drives up costs. Once--if--housing supply catches up to demand, you can expect to see prices fall again. Anecdotally, there was a lot of farmland around me that had been bulldozed shortly before the pandemic, and then it just sat, with pretty signs touting the development that was going to go in. It's only been in the past four years that they've started building again, and they're almost full now.

You’re talking about the finance bro shit not the working class shit.

Hate to state the obvious, but these things are, in fact, linked. The finance bros don't exist in a vacuum where labor magically happens that they can skim profits from.