65% say the economy is bad
61% say their own finances are good
38% say their own finances are poor
So if the 38% poor ~all say the economy is bad, that leaves 27 of the 61 who say their finances are good to be partisan Republicans who call the economy poor even though it’s good for them.
Seems about right.
Do you really think the people here are 38% poor? There was another “help me my family is dying while I spend 6k on “misc”” today on Twitter.
That ain’t what that stat means
That’s the 38% who said their finances were poor as you’ll see in the previous sentence:
The 38th percentile for income is $55K.
If you’re single making $55K, you’re living on just over $4K a month. I don’t know that I’d call that poor, but you’re almost certainly paycheck to paycheck and not enjoying many luxuries. $55K for a couple is poor.
At a minimum, these are the people who are paycheck to paycheck because they basically have to be. A luxury splurge for them is probably an occasional meal out at a restaurant that’s $20-30 a plate. And God forbid they have car problems or medical expenses, just put that on a credit card and start running 27% interest or whatever and they’re just fucked, making the minimum payment and watching the debt balloon.
$6K a month is just below the median, the people spending that on misc who think they’re broke are high earning idiots.
Maybe some of them rate themselves poor and some of the actual poor rate themselves middle class, but that’s a whole separate topic.
The bottom line here is 38th percentile isn’t doing that well and if we ignore edge cases and account for partisan responses, the numbers make perfect sense. The poor think the economy is bad, the non-poor Republicans do too, that gets you right around the response rate.
The census bureau has real median household income going down in 2021 and 2022. Median income for 2022 was 85k. That means half of households made less than that 85k. As we’ve mentioned over and over again inflation understates the impact of the cost of necessities like housing and food on people in the lower income strata (which 85k, particularly for a two earner family, absolutely is).
Even the stats you accept have things getting worse in an absolute sense for the median family and you can’t wrap your head around why people don’t love the economy.
What I don’t get about you is how you could have been so very very wrong about your world view as a younger man, pivoted (good for you a lot of people just dig into full bore reality denial instead), and retained the same level of absolute confidence in the correctness of your current world view.
Your experience in life is not in any way typical. You’re a straight, white, upper middle class doctor who recently started making legit doctor money and you honestly can’t wrap your head around the fact that your experience is very atypical. When people with significantly more education and experience on a subject tell you over and over again that something isn’t actually all that simple you proceed to mash the freshman level econ button irritated that it isn’t working.
If you were actually right about any of this you’d be getting tons of support from other posters absolutely including me and probably riverman. You look like Don Quixote tilting at windmills right now. You’re literally 20 years out of date on the subject and keep demanding that we acknowledge your victory lol.
I will give you credit though you are absolutely demonstrating in real time why everything we teach in freshman econ is wrong. Nothing in freshman econ should be counterintuitive. We’re teaching this nations ruling class to just accept junk econometrics instead of the broad strokes of how the economy actually works.
I sympathize with the desire to bury your head in the sand and say this is fine when your own life is going very well indeed. So is mine. There was real cognitive dissonance when I started making doctor level money myself during the early Trump administration. On the one hand the political/economic situation for normal people was really bad but on the other hand my life was going amazing. I was infuriated by the tax cuts, and also saw a ~13% drop in my federal income taxes because of the pass through deduction. I’m not asking you to do anything I’m not doing myself, namely looking beyond my own interests/situation to figure out how things are going in a macro sense. I can be doing well while things are bad and so can you.
It’s a poll of people where the largest influence on their view of the economy is their party affiliation, not reality. It decidedly isn’t description of the 38th percentile income/wealth.
Feature, not a bug. The ruling class broke the economic metrics so they could increasingly screw over the middle class and arguments like this would play out instead of everyone pointing to the non-broken metrics as complete evidence that change was needed.
Ok I think I will die on the hill of the economy is good and it’s messaging. Quinnipiac Michigan poll:
Thirty-five percent of voters describe the state of the nation’s economy these days as either excellent (6 percent) or good (29 percent), while 65 percent describe it as either not so good (28 percent) or poor (37 percent).
Nearly half of voters (47 percent) think the nation’s economy is getting worse, 28 percent think it’s staying about the same, and 23 percent think it’s getting better.
A majority of voters (61 percent) describe their personal financial situation these days as either excellent (9 percent) or good (52 percent), while 38 percent describe it as either not so good (25 percent) or poor (13 percent).
It’s a messaging issue
I would love to see a break down by income because it ain’t going to be that way
Republicans are richer than average, and they say the economy is shit and getting worse at the highest rate.
I heard about this study the other day which may support some of the arguments that CN is making.
- The U.S. economic news coverage has, after accounting for changes in the economy, become systemically more negative over time.
- Initial analysis showed that the tone of economic news has become more negative since 2018, with a marked increase in negativity since 2021.
- A growing body of literature suggests a link between the news sentiment and consumer sentiment.
It’s funny that this type of nittery demonstrates exactly what’s wrong with economics. In econ 101 you’re absolutely right. In real life supply begins being created the second anyone demonstrates there is money in meeting that demand. From the person who first tried it if no one else.
Econ 101 is full of counter intuitive shit like this. The whole discipline has a terrible case of unnecessary contrarianism. It’s not enough to be right, they desperately want their findings to be something that only they could have seen through their great mathematical reasoning. It’s honestly kind of nauseating at a certain point.
Personally I’m not interested in parlor tricks and impressively overcomplex (yet somehow also they’ve always hacked the p value into orbit around Saturn) equations. I want to know how to build human systems that work.
I’m honestly not sold that academia will ever have the incentives necessary to do this kind of scientific work in the tangible/important work that takes place at the corner of psychology, economics, and sociology… which is a problem because there are plenty of incentives to do and exploit that work in the private sector.
Lol when it opens with an anecdote about a boomer who can’t afford to buy a house I’m gonna pass on the rest.
Lines up pretty squarely with @commonWealth 's theory that view of the economy is very much tied to whether you owned a home before 2022 or not, and with the lived experiences of all of us who do not currently own.
And that whole thing started the first time because I said Biden may struggle to get votes from people on the wrong side of that situation if he doesn’t address the issue - especially if he brags a lot about the economy without addressing the issue.
He did address it in the SOTU, hopefully he makes that a big part of his campaign.
You’ll be shocked to find out that there’s a Lori Shelton in CO that has donated to republicans.
And you’ll be shocked to find out that the article also cited a Harvard University analysis, Census Bureau data, Obama’s Secretary of HUD, and the chief economist at Redfin.
The lack of housing has caused a record number of renters to devote an excessive amount of income to housing, according to a Harvard University analysis.
In fact, the Census Bureau reported that homeownership fell slightly at the end of last year in an otherwise solid economy.
the housing affordability challenge is the worst I’ve ever seen in my career,” said Shaun Donovan, a former secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama years
“Even as incomes are going up and the economy is doing well and inflation is coming down, people can’t buy homes,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at the brokerage Redfin.
No one denies these as problems. The entirety of support for voters being frustrated by the US economy is supported by a randomly reported (likely) republican. Despite all of these facts decidedly not changing, US voter impression of the economy has drastically improved over the past several months, strongly suggesting it’s not the problem.
Sorry, I’ve been moving the thread over in chunks and it may have buried your new post here.
