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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Let's see this fucker live on minimum wage and try to afford an apartment.
Real wages have been growing in the past year, especially for those in the lowest quintile. In fact, there are almost no adults making the federal minimum wage any more.
Dude. Rents are skyrocketing, grocery prices are insane, everything is wildly more expensive and wage growth isn't keeping up for a lot of people. This kinda "well look at the data" thing that the Democrats constantly do is not helpful. They always fail to account for some part of reality and it shows just how disconnected these rich fucks are from the common person.
So many people are living paycheck to paycheck and that is disastrous for a country without socialized medicine and with the incredible costs of retirement. Homeownership and freedom from vampire landlords isn't a possibility for a vast majority of people and many are paying a significant portion of their take home just to keep a roof over their heads and the lights on.
They have no clue what it's like to walk a day in a normal person's shoes.
No doubt many people are suffering. But wages for the lowest quintile have been outpacing inflation for the past year. Which means that overall, most of those in the lowest quintile are better off now than they were a year ago. Of course, doing better is not the same as doing well.
This is as detached from actual people's lives as the DNC's messaging
Yes, and on average each human has roughly 0.98 testicles.
The goal of public policy is to benefit the public as a whole. So the average will always be a more useful metric than the experience of an individual, or even a hundred individuals.
By that logic, Medicare for All would only cover less than one testicle
Except testicle coverage is a policy, not a valid metric. A valid metric is the outcome of a policy, like average deaths from testicular cancer.
Yes, and if we simply remove the excess testicles from those who have them, we could halve testicular cancer rates.
That wouldn't work unless the only metric you cared about was deaths from testicular cancer.
Half joking response- but wouldn’t the survivorship bias mean those who were surviving only on minimum wage alone didn’t survive for very long?
I think you're on to something, but in reality people will quit a job that doesn't provide enough to live on. In other words, the job is the one that doesn't survive, not the worker.
So you might expect a rise in unemployment, but in fact we are seeing low unemployment. This suggests that employers respond to vacant minimum wage jobs by increasing the wage. And in fact there are plenty of well-known employers (e.g. Wal-Mart) where nobody works for minimum wage any more.
Or they'll get a second job. Or a third job. Or start doing gig work.
Especially if the job provides them with health insurance.
Either way, they aren't working any minimum wage jobs.
Okay but they're still living off ramen and putting off medical treatment and hoping their car doesn't blow up
The solution to all those problems involves increasing real wages. Which is what has happened for the last year, especially for the lowest quintile.
I'm sure that will make the ramen taste better.
Increasing real wages is always better than decreasing real wages. Which is what was happening before Biden.
Yeah, if only people looked at the statistics and ignored the rumbling in their stomachs. Public policy folks have it so hard.
For most people, the rumbling was even worse before Biden. That's the part you try so hard to ignore.
I'm not doubting the statistics show that.
But people's stomachs are still rumbling, and they're not going to be silenced by statistics.
No, but the only way to silence them is to do more of what Biden has already done.
I’m also not sure how relevant my experience is to this whole thing since my work experience is 100% contract work in a specialized field instead of salaried or employer scheduled. From my perspective everything is becoming gig work, but that might not be the case. I think it’s hard to budget for groceries getting more expensive if one year I make 85k and the year after, I make 25k. Employers just don’t seem to have as much money to spend on advertising as they used to, so finding work is hard unless you take less than what you’re used to taking.
All my peers seem to be having issues with finances nowadays unless their parents are helping them out or have a partner making quite a bit as well. Combine that with businesses forcing the end of work from home means we have to move back to expensive cities. It’s looking pretty bleak even from my pretty privileged vantage point.
One thing to keep in mind is that you may not be in the bottom quintile. And if you're not, then you may have a very different view of the economy.
Income inequality is decreasing right now, but many people don't understand that this necessarily involves some zero-sum adjustments. You cannot reduce inequality if everyone grows at the same rate, something must be transferred from the upper X% to the lower X%. And if you're in the upper X%, then the economy might feel worse to you than it really is.
I’d be interested to see a source on if income inequality is decreasing because I haven’t seen any articles about that tbh. In fact, since 2020 when I last looked at graphs on it, it’s seemed like the gap is just getting wider and wider every year.
And if I was told things would get harder for me and other people in my bracket to make it easier for people making less than me, I’d be fine with it, but I’m not seeing an indication that that is what’s happening. But to be honest, so long as I’m seeing record profits for corporations and billionaires continuing to breathe, I’ll continue to think income inequality is continuing to get worse regardless of a study that states the contrary.
Reduction in income inequality started under Biden, after 2020
Looking at the Realtime Inequality source, I think the picture is a bit less rosy than the article gives it, if I’m reading the graphs correctly. It looks like the bottom 50% were absolutely financially destroyed during 2020 (as was everyone else) and measures have been taken to place them relatively close to where they were before the pandemic. But the upper class not only didn’t fall as hard as the bottom 50%, but they recovered to a higher level than they were previous.
To me, this seems like “the income inequality train is slowing down” rather than “the income inequality train is going in reverse”. That being said, I’m a dummy when it comes to economics, so I might not know how to read this correctly.
Note that the y-axis is income growth. Staying at zero means "no change". So it's more accurate to say that before late 2021 the bottom 90% stagnated (or slightly lost income) while the upper 10% grew, seemingly oblivious to hardship.
After late 2021, the income of the bottom 50% grew faster than the top 50% (or top 10%). That is exactly what is meant by "inequality is finally decreasing", because the only way for two extremes to get closer together is for the bottom extreme to grow faster than the top extreme.
Faster growth among the highest incomes is a longstanding feature in our economy, and this differential growth means that income inequality has almost always been increasing. Faster growth among the lowest incomes, ie any period of decreasing inequality, is practically unheard of in recent American history.
I do think it’s possible to make statistics claim anything you want if you categorize the positions you’re comparing in a way that supports what you want to claim. All I know is people generally don’t feel like they’re doing better economically whether it’s the honest fact or not. And if I’m having issues with groceries, those who make less than me must be struggling more.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-income-inequality-rose-3-years-through-2022-fed-data-shows-2023-10-18/
If feelings are more important than statistics, then government should make less effort to reduce inequality and more effort to get people to feel good about the status quo. In other words, do what the GOP does when they are in power.
The thing is statistics can say anything so they’re nearly meaningless if someone has a motive for presenting the statistics in a particular way. But so long as we’re making comparisons, going to bat for the party in power and refusing to listen to valid complaints from people is also pretty similar to the GOP and Republican voters.
Considering the article I posted contradicts yours, I find it hard to believe either 100%. I trust the people who are having trouble buying medicine, rent, or groceries over some article telling me some carefully crafted statistic on why things really are good and we should just stop complaining or protesting about anything and everything. Essentially, it’s just an appeal to status quo to present specific statistics in a way that makes things seem rosy to contradict those who think otherwise.
The article you posted does not contradict mine. Yours says that inequality is higher in 2022 than in 2019. The one I posted said inequality began to decrease in late 2021. Both can be true. Inequality may finally be decreasing after decades of relentless increase, yet remain higher than it was in 2019.
People can certainly misinterpret statistics. If you think that's the case, then you should examine the methods and data and propose a better interpretation.
Dismissing data that do not match personal experience is how you end up with science deniers (e.g. "It's 20 below in Chicago, so much for global warming!", "Nobody I know has died of covid so I don't need a vaccine!")
Nobody said you should stop complaining. But complaining without a solution in mind is pointless. And data suggest that Biden has made more progress towards a solution than previous presidents, or his opponent.
When your link says when the bottom 50% has increased faster than every other group except the top 1%, the fact still stands that income inequality is getting worse. And a misleading title on top of that. All of us in the middle are just stagnating and you’re seeing that as a win because the poorest and most vulnerable were given crumbs? Also the article mentions that the gains of the lower class might not last long because that gain is due to covid stimulus programs.
Corporate profits have risen 25%-30% and the value of the dollar has lost 18% of its value since 2020. Something is wrong.
Not necessarily. Inequality is not just about the top 1%, it reflects the entire distribution of income. For example, suppose that the bottom 50% and the top 10% were stagnant, but the 51st to 90th percentiles all experienced rapid growth. The range of incomes would be the same, but inequality would nevertheless have increased.
Mathematically, inequality is expressed using the Gini coefficient. It is quite possible for inequality to decrease even if the top 1% grows faster than the bottom 50%.
Income growth of 6% is not crumbs.
True, there are no guarantees because we don't know what the future will bring. If Trump wins the election, I suspect the gains won't last long at all.
Yes yes, many different methods to try to convince people that the Matthew effect isn’t real and the top 1% isn’t gaining wealth at an ungodly rate to the detriment of the planet and everyone living on it. Ignoring the richest people when comparing the gap between the richest to the poorest income growth is such a dishonest way of making statistics work.
Income growth of 6% when your income is near nothing is crumbs. Surviving on less than $38 a day and getting a bump of a couple dollars might be greatly needed to those people, but it’s really absolutely nothing compared to the rate of wealth accumulated by the rich in this country. How much material change to one’s life will a couple dollars make? The difference between starving on the street or starving on someone’s couch? All while the richest are suddenly making enough money to buy entire countries, let alone their impact on governing policies to keep those who are poor poor enough to always be gasping for air, too tired to fight back.
So long as capitalism is functioning as intended, every president will feel worse and worse unless you’re comfortable. Comfortable people are willing to believe any article they read on the internet to not feel guilty that the system they feel comfortable in exploits their fellow countrymen as well as those in the global south. I’m not playing political team sports and I have no incentive to try to convince people “my guy” really isn’t that bad. I have no reason to parrot other people who have a material incentive on writing articles that are trying to convince people who are hurting that they aren’t really hurting. If you want Biden to win, you’re better off trying to convince him to pull an FDR with a New Deal than trying to convince me to vote for someone who is perpetuating genocide.
[edit] forgive me for not giving any sort of credit to the Gini method, created by someone who defended fascism and the nazis. (I’ll ignore his eugenics stance since it seems everyone around then was big into eugenics). From Robert H Wade, professor of economy: “it has long been accepted that the Gini coefficient is the workhorse measure of inequality. But it is not generally recognized that the coefficient is normally defined in a way which biases the measure in a downward direction, making inequality seem less large than another version of the coefficient would suggest. By this alternative measure inequality is much higher than is generally thought. The standard measure is misleading us into thinking that economic growth is more “inclusive’ than it is.”
It seems to me like the Gini index is just as bad as the GDP for being an oversimplification of something complex (be that income inequality or economic health). Hey, but it’s a single number and that number is easy to understand at the detriment of its accuracy.
I don't need to convince him, he already passed the IRA.
Anyway, I'm still not sure what your plan is to solve the problems you describe, but I don't think it's going to work
If you think the IRA comes even close to touching the 75% taxed income of the highest earners of the New Deal, you’ve been brainwashed. Also, as far as I understand IRA was mainly the push for subsidizing more green energy production, not actually fighting inflation. And that also falls flat because biden has been approving more oil drilling than trump as well as the US now being the worlds largest exporter of liquified natural gas (diet fossil fuels), surpassing Australia and Qatar.
“Well what’s your plan??” as if exploiting everyone we can is the only possible option. Do you also ask starving people how they would combat world hunger? Do you ask homeless people how they would combat the housing crisis? Go gather some empathy and realize that your comfort comes at the cost of others. How much are you willing to fight for a system that says it’s okay if “the undesirable” dies, so long as the voting population are comfortable?
I mean, dude currently lives in public housing, what more do you want? (I kid)
Ohhhh I'd love to see any president spend a month in some of the run down slum lord apartments I've been in.
Leaders should have suffered more to understand the plight of their constituents. Though I suspect a lotta those rich old men simply don't have the constitution to survive a normal life.
I mean come on, he only owns like three houses or something and one isn't even worth a million. He is clearly suffering.