who gives a fuck about a solid economy if I can’t afford anything? Who is it solid for? The fucking shareholders??
wages are finally rising faster than inflation
This is macroeconomics, not microeconomics.
Personally, I don’t really feel much of a difference. I pay a bit more for goods and services and I get paid a bit more as well.
A lot of us aren’t getting paid a bit more. Especially those of us in rural industries. And yeah goods and services are a bit more, rent is a lot more, even in places a lot of people don’t want to live.
Inflation is systemic and in everything. Food. Housing. Healthcare. Debt.
Americans are spending more. Doesn’t mean Americans are buying more. Wages haven’t kept pace for most the bottom half of the workforce, the jobs they keep touting are low pay, service or gig work types.
Remember, the stock market isn’t the economy. Just because businesses are doing okay (doing amazing, actually, record profits!) doesn’t mean the people are- where do you think those profits come from?
People will give pretty much anything to not be hungry, sick or homeless and insatiably greedy executives know this.
The only reason people have anything left after rent and food is because it’s not viable for landlords and companies to work together to strip you of every cent.
The only reason people have anything left after rent and food is because it’s not viable for landlords and companies to work together to strip you of every cent.
God help us when they figure out how.
For now, they just operate on a pecking order.
First, landlords take as much as they can with no regard for how little they do to earn it, nor how much if left is over for their tenants.
Next at the trough is grocery chains. Like most companies under neoliberalism, they’ve spent 20 years scouring the globe in search of the cheapest, most vulnerable, exploitable people they can and now that they’ve forced out the competition by subsidising chocolate with child slaves, it’s time to jack up the prices.
Vying for position with food comes utilities, because sitting in the dark half frozen is slightly more tolerable than starving and digging through bins. Energy prices are crippling more and more families despite the companies responsible pocketing handout after handout and being allowed to pump the sky full of carbon and the sea full of oil.
For millions of people, that’s where the money ends. But if you’ve got any left over, there’s plenty more billionaires in the queue.
Insurance companies that provide emergency funds in a way that could definitely be socialised but instead has the overhead of greedy executives with a vested interest in denying your claims.
How about some entertainment? There’s plenty of streaming platforms ready to offer you less content for more money, while still harvesting and selling your data. Maybe pick up a video game that’s riddled with microtransactions.
Still got money? Make sure nobody mistakes you for a dirty poor by picking up the latest flagship phone, 4% faster than your current phone. Get in fast because you’re not getting a pay rise this year – it’s already been given to the executives.
They already did in Seattle, they’ve been price fixing rent for awhile. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221114006134/en/Hagens-Berman-Downtown-Seattle-Renters-Sue-Leasing-Companies-for-Allegedly-Illegally-Inflating-Rents-in-City’s-Densest-Neighborhoods
I’m no fucking expert, but I’ve been around this shit show of a world long enough to realize that “economy good” equals Stockmarket is good which translates to rich people are still getting richer so fuck NBC
My company is expanding, and my career is actually going in a direction I want, but I haven’t seen an equivalent rise in my pay.
So the economy might be good, but my income remains the same, and that doesn’t make me feel like the economy is all that great.
I’ve gotten about 10% more the last three years but I’ve changed jobs once, changed positions twice at the original job, interviewed a dozen times for jobs where no one would commit on a salary.
It just took a lot of work. Work that I did and was a fight the entire way. If I’d stuck around in my original position I’d be at 2.5% raise each year give or take a half point. That’s not beating inflation 10 years ago let alone today.
Sure, the train track ends shortly at a cliff, but why aren’t Americans enthusiastic about how the train is currently moving swiftly over a good solid trestle?
The vast majority of Americans are worse off economically than they were before the pandemic. This was in the news just last week. NBC says “good economy” and the people say “pull the other one”.
It’s about numbers as a whole, and the bottom 50% of earners in the US only have 2.6% of the wealth. They can advertise a ‘good economy’ but most of us can’t afford to participate in it.
