This is the best summary I could come up with:
That disconnect looms large over Biden’s political prospects, with White House advisers and campaign officials acknowledging that how Americans feel about the economy could be decisive in determining whether the president can win a second term in November.
But one senior adviser to the president told CNN the one thing they have not offered Biden is a prediction for when the American public’s psychology about the economy will have meaningfully improved.
There is also a delicate balancing act for the president to execute: Touting economic progress while being publicly sympathetic to the reality that many Americans still feel burdened by high prices, including on rent, housing and food.
To that end, Biden has started testing out lines that point the finger at some corporations that he says are taking advantage of the fact that prices were at record highs for so long.
And as Biden addressed culinary union workers at a hotel cafeteria in Las Vegas on Monday morning, he pointed to a classic American candy bar to gripe about shrinkflation.
A recent New York Times op-ed by the chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management that used the price of Snickers bars to examine why so many Americans are still unhappy – despite falling inflation – had caught the president’s eye.
The original article contains 858 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Because most Americans can’t afford to loose a week of pay?
Because it’s a zero-sum game and most Americans are losing so rich fucks can have their “good economy”.
Biden is so fucking out of touch it’s embarrassing.
Polling suggests this is not the case. In December there was a poll of swing states that showed the people were split 50/50 on whether what they saw in their own lives, their local or city economy, was heading in the right direction but when asked about the national economy, something they have to rely upon the media for rather than their own experience, only 1 in 4 thought things were heading in the right direction. People are constantly fed negative economic propaganda but don’t see it in their own communities so they assume it’s happening everywhere else.
Polling is opinion, and they all have varied (and usually terrible) reasons for their opinions. But some telling statistics?
nearly half of Americans have little to no savings , while 89% of Americans save, the average savings is ~1000, and 60% don’t have a retirement account
60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
About 50% of people under 65 have trouble affording healthcare- with insurance
All while corporations are netting record profits despite all this.
I get my credit score up through tricks of the trade, get whatever procedure I need on credit, and then don’t pay at all, because I can’t afford basic medical even though I work, for above minimum wage no less. They want too much for essential medical treatments, so now I have to do this to survive, I just hope that between every 2 years when my credit tricks work again, that I don’t get mysteriously ill with no way to pay. I tried everything. I work 40 hours and live in a very basic tract home built in the 90s with roommates, I sell things on the side, my old man does repairs/handyman services, we don’t shop, or go on dates, or get to enjoy life really at all outside the home, hell, I’ve even tried selling porn; but apparently I’m not hot enough to pull that off either. And to top off this absolutely lack of sundae; I work enough to not qualify for any assistance despite all the above details keeping me stuck renting/working a shit job until something breaks or I get sick or somebody dies. I know some of y’all are gonna hate me for this, but I didn’t create this broken economy where $10-$30 a month for insurance is an unaffordable expense on top of copays and deductibles and all the BS to make sure you never use the service they’ve made you purchase… When is enough gonna be enough? Then our leaders have the balls to ask why we’re upset? Give me a damn break.
Went to a wedding in Milwaukee last summer, it wasn’t terrible. I wouldn’t want to be there in the winter, I’m content to stay in California. I was on the college side, but it seemed like a slightly larger Redding/Chico area. A lot more brick, closer to a major city, and with more local national level sports teams. The locals seemed nice enough, I enjoyed the first generation immigrants running their cafes.
it’s a zero-sum game and most Americans are losing so rich fucks can have their “good economy”.
That does seem to be what his rhetoric is pointing at:
“But for all we’ve done to bring prices down, there are still too many corporations in America ripping people off. Price gouging, junk feeds, greedflation, shrinkflation,” Biden added.
“bring prices down”? Does Biden think we’re in a deflationary period or is he intentionally misleading people?
EDIT: It’s weird how when people ask why prices haven’t come down they’re mocked for not understanding the difference between deflation and lower inflation. But when the president of the United States confuses them and I point it out I get down voted. Classy people. Classy.
On the contrary, the fastest growth in real income right now is among those in the lowest quintile. Which means income inequality is actually decreasing for the first time in decades.
“Fastest growing in real income” sounds really fancy.
But it’s a bit misleading. I assume you’re looking at percentage gains. For someone working 40 hrs/week 42 weeks a year, a dollar raise (which is huge for that “lowest quintile”), would equate to a bit more than 2,000 per year.
At federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, that dollar gain represents an increase of 13%. At 15 an hour, its a 6% gain. At 200k/year? Barely a percent. For Walmart CEO, for example, who’s salary is 24.1 million is barely even worth mentioning at .08%.
Said another way, Walmart has 2.2 million “associates” which iirc, is everyone whose not a manager. Let’s say 3 million people who aren’t corporate because I don’t care to go get the accurate stats and frankly want to keep the math easy.
So if they gave them all a 1 dollar raise, that would cost Walmart 3 million dollars. Last year, Walmarts annual gross profit was 147.568 billion, with a 2.65% increase over ‘22. An increase of 3.8 billion dollars.
You know the difference between a million and a billion? About a billion. That hypothetical dollar increase would have been a rounding error on their financial statements.
So if they gave them all a 1 dollar raise, that would cost Walmart 3 million dollars.
I think your numbers are off. It would cost $3m to give 3m workers a bump of exactly one dollar on exactly one paycheck. That’s not a 13% increase. It’s not even a 0.01% increase.
If you actually wanted to increase the wage of 3m full time workers from $7.25 to $8.25, it would cost $6 billion.
Walmarts annual gross profit was 147.568 billion
This isn’t really relevant. Gross profit is Walmart sales minus what it paid manufacturers for its products. So if it buys a TV for $200 and sells it for $300, that’s $100 in gross profit.
Gross profit is used to pay employees, rent, utilities, advertisers, etc. The amount left over after paying the bills is the operating income. Then they pay taxes on that, and the actual earnings (aka net income) are left over.
Nearly all of Walmart’s gross profit was used to pay employees, etc. Their operating income was $23 billion in 2023, which is a decrease of 20% from the previous year. Of note, this coincides with pay increases for Walmart’s hourly workers, from $17.50 to $18/hr on average.
That just shows that the economy is not “booming” as they say in the capitalist media - the needle may be moving in the right direction, but we need to acknowledge that the current position of that needle is deep in the gutter, with a lot of improvement still needed before the voting public feels like the economy is actually working for them. Claiming that the economy is doing well, when the people are not doing well economically except for a handful of ultrawealthy, causes feelings of resentment and alienation in people who are currently working hard and still unable to afford basic necessities, ie the majority of Americans. It makes the journalists and the politicians they appear to be hyping seem out of touch and unaware of the problems the voters are dealing with, and therefore it does not inspire hope that those problems are being worked on.
Showing that the needle is moving in the right direction is an important component of effective messaging, but so is demonstrating a clear eyed view of the problem. Articles that talk about how ‘strong’ the economy is fail on the latter.
Maybe it’s that the “US economy” and it’s metrics are severely detached from the American people. Unless we’re still on this corporations are people too bullshit
So very much all of this. Just because corpo America, the 1% and the fake numbers stock market are doing good means nothing for the average American.
Our wages are stagnate. Our healthcare either kills you or bankrupts you. Our housing is prohibitively expensive. Our food is to expensive to eat. Our education system doesn’t educate and is slowly privatizing. And our police are killing us in lieu of protecting us.
But we’ve got guns for tot’s, piles of dead school children, an insurrectionist running for president, insurrectionists in congress facing zero consequences, a fading separation of church and state. Rising hate crime numbers. And a corrupt Supreme Court openly accepting bribes to destroy democracy.
Yeah Joey everything is sunshine and rainbows.
Back when Joe was a kid he had to walk to school shootings and it was uphill, both ways!
That healthcare bit hit home. Been trying to get treatment for 9 months. Docs spent a lot of my money doing nothing. I got tired of trusting, read peer journals, put together my own plan using promising options, have the first actual sustained relief I’ve seen since last May.
$100 OTC versus like $6000 in tests, scans, and fuckery.
I guess it beats the NHS, partner can’t even get seen for a fractured vertebrae. “Do PT first.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
