Eh, I’m with @CaffeineNeeded . Yes, there are probably some people in @commonWealth ’s position. However, the vast majority of people are just really fucking stupid like the people quoted in this article. “I want to vote for Biden because of abortion but Trump made prices come down.” Ok dude. This is decades in the making and goes back to right wing infiltration of our education system and making our education system terrible, so that the populace is really fucking stupid when it comes to civics, so that the rich can lie about what people are really voting for. It’s as simple as that.
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Hated that article.
- Too many Boomers profiled
- No one is pressed on how they think Trump will solve inflation
- Uses “labor shortage” unironically
It’s like it was designed to piss me off.
Though I did appreciate one tidbit:
“Yes, groceries are expensive and we’re making sacrifices,” she said, adding that her weekly grocery bill had jumped from $150 to $300 in the past few years. But, she stressed, she was more concerned about women’s rights and other issues on the ballot than the price of food. “I’m voting Biden,” she said, “no matter what.”
Hmm…I wonder if Biden’s team should focus more on abortion and less on how awesome the economy is.
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Unfortunately, you can’t see threads/replies any longer unless you have an account (and LOL I’m not doing that).
I mean if you tell a truck driver, a teacher, a nurse, or anyone who works in tech that the economy is doing great you’re going to get a reaction somewhere between a frustrated scoff and a punch in the nose… and there are better things to run on like abortion, legalizing weed, forgiving student loans, literally almost any other topic. There are large industries that aren’t doing great, the job market is both as good as it has ever been for some people and absolutely awful for others. And the polls say people don’t agree with the economic stats and the economic stats that dwell literally one layer below the top line economic stats will tell you why that is.
The nice thing about a good economy is that it advertises quite well for itself. The people who are doing well generally are pretty happy about it and the people who aren’t generally aren’t. If you’re bragging about how great the economy is you need to be sure a large majority of the population agrees with you first. That incumbents do well when the economy is doing well isn’t a messaging thing it’s like the salinity of a body of water. With any luck Biden has a few tricks up his sleeve to goose the lagging sectors before election day and make the environment even more favorable for Democrats, but that’s not messaging that’s concrete results.
Part of it is the media being owned by plutocrats who pretty violently disagree with the consensus among non plutocrats that we should actually tax rich people at the federal level to reduce debt and offer more and better government services particularly in healthcare, childcare, and education… and part of it is that if they treated the GOP like they treat Democrats it would be a lot less close and they think close drives ratings because it does. When the financial and political needs of the owners/funders of every media outlet with reach you don’t need a conspiracy for some pretty weird shit to happen.
Still bad coverage or not the housing market is entirely broken, and a large portion of the population has seen their standard of living decline over the last 4-5 years, and by more than it usually did in the years prior to that. Income inequality is a big problem that is causing other problems like Biden not being able to take credit for what looks like a pretty good economy from space. The outcomes for different segments of workers have been diverging pretty rapidly for decades, and that rate has been accelerating since the pandemic.
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Building more is good and rent coming down is good - Austin rent still up 16% vs 2021, though. Roughly in line with overall inflation even with all the added supply, which demonstrates the magnitude of the problem in places that aren’t building.
Austin is also massively growing. Rents holding stable against inflation is a massive win in that situation
Lame
https://x.com/dkthomp/status/1769712786647437469?s=46&t=N0_fcOKIYYmlCS2e4YShsQ
https://x.com/dkthomp/status/1769717681953943864?s=46&t=N0_fcOKIYYmlCS2e4YShsQ
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Yeah I suspect Austin rent is going to go back to being cheap here shortly. The tech workers getting the ever living shit beaten out of them has as much to do with that as anything though. Austin was a tech boom town, which means the return to gravity we’ve seen in the tech industry had a disproportionate effect for sure. You throw building a shitload of units on top of that and I suspect we’re going to see a bunch of reit carnage in Austin.
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Not going to wade too deep in here but I think there is just a fundamental question or disagreement of what it means for an economy to be “good”. And is a “good” economy correlated strongly enough to the experience of individual people to be a useful foundation of a campaign.
I thought the Biden approach of saying well we doing better than rest of world was a pretty decent take from electoral standpoint.
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Yup plus we unmistakably are doing better than the rest of the world. Europe is really struggling between the war and higher interest rates.
China overstated their population by 100M workers which means that they are actually much further along the demographic collapse graph than they had previously admitted and a large fraction of their GDP was apparently substantially empty/imaginary apartment buildings sold as ‘investments’ (that soaked up most of their absolutely historic savings since they weren’t legally allowed to invest in much besides local real estate). China is literally a case study in the hidden inherent terribleness of GDP as a metric. They got amazing GDP growth stats producing plastic shit for export and surplus construction they didn’t need and couldn’t afford to use/maintain.
Russia is finished. This phoenix isn’t rising from the ashes they’ve incinerated the fig leaf that covered up the fact that all of their soft power was predicated on an air bluff. What they have left is oil and global consumption of that will go down significantly in the future. I wish them the best of luck holding onto Siberia as soon as China decides they want it because climate change has made it semi valuable real estate.
India is the other country whose overall position is improving. I wish they weren’t fascists so I could be happier about it.
Japan is still in a demographic hole and is continuing to dig.
Korea has begun digging a Japan sized demographic hole for themselves and will also likely continue to dig. The Korean birth rates are so low it’s actually crazy.
Africa is like the United States in that the different outcomes are too divergent to generalize effectively… but high interest rates aren’t great for them overall which is why growth for the continent is in the 3.3-3.8% range for 2023. 3.3% growth in an emerging economy is not a great time. In the parts of Africa that wouldn’t classify as emerging you mostly got European/Asian numbers which is to say very low or slightly negative growth.
Well their salary gains are now outpacing the increases in the cost of food and they are bad at math and that teacher should do a better job of teaching math!
Here we go again…
Teachers have very much not had their pay keep up with inflation. Which was shitty back when inflation was 2% when they also weren’t keeping up with inflation lol. Now what we have is a full blown ‘teacher shortage’ situation where states are experimenting with letting people without even a college degree much less a degree in education teach public school. They’ve literally lowered the pay on a job that required a masters degree when we were in school to the point where it’s not competitive with… really anything so now they’re deprofessionalizing it.
Ok, I looked it up to double check and you are right about teachers. Not so much the other professions though.
I’m not wrong about tech or truck drivers either. They were good in 2020-2021 but since then it’s all taken a turn for the decidedly more apocalyptic. If your dataset stops in 2022 it’s out of date on those two. The market for truck drivers started getting relatively shitty summer 2022 fyi. There have been absolutely no raises, a lot of layoffs, and a lot of outright paycuts taken since then almost across the board everywhere except some isolated corporate fleets maybe. There are 750k fewer semi’s registered on the road today than there were at the previous peak and this will have been the longest down market my brokerage has ever seen in the middle of april. The 08-09 one was deeper so it’s not really comparable but in terms of duration this thing is about to set a record. All of this affects the people at the trucking companies and the people who aren’t established on the arrangement side where I am pretty substantially.
Nurse pay nationwide was flat or declined in 2022-2023 once the travel contracts for a zillion bucks dried up. Look up what nurses make in Austin working in the hospitals, compare it to the cost of living, and gasp audibly yourself. Then do the same for any major non CA metro in the US. CA has state mandated patient ratios that keep the demand pressure on.
And for nurses it’s not just the pay it’s the patient ratios. Getting paid 10% more to do 50% more work is not a great deal. We’re talking about an occupation that has fully half of graduates leave the bedside within the first two years. All is not well there in any way shape or form. They’re bearing the brunt of the private equity assault on healthcare basically.
Bottom line is don’t tell nurses that their lives got better since before COVID. It didn’t and if the economic stats say otherwise the problem is the economic stat being broken in some way and that’s cause for further investigation into how it’s reading the room so wrong.
I picked truck drivers, nurses, tech workers, and teachers because I know a lot about the working conditions in those jobs over the last few years and didn’t feel like defending my post on unfamiliar ground. I’m not wrong about any of those.
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K-12 teacher situation in US is shameful considering how it’s become such a high stress job/paperwork burden/etc.
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Every pink collar job is a medical waste dumpster fire right now. The responsibilities/requirements and the pay aren’t even vaguely in communication with each other.
These occupations pay was set by the fact that their workforce couldn’t go and do anything else. That is very much not true anymore and now they are being compared to having an equivalent level of responsibility working in corporate and it isn’t even close.
Good teachers can make twice as much money for 70% as much work by switching to literally any traditionally male dominated industry. Logistics, HR, Sales, Operations, almost any area where soft skills are a major requirement they’re very strong candidates. Once teachers realize they’d be making the same money for way less bullshit being an associate at costco it’s gg. And that’s where we are.
I’m sorry but the look at a few sectors of the economy and getting scared of pushing the idea the economy is good is dumb, and that’s beyond the fact that as a whole the economy is good.
How Americans view the economy is not based on facts, it’s based on narrative. As democracy relies on democrats winning, they should be pushing a narrative that they are good. Letting what you think is the truth make it so you cede that ground is moronic. It’s a losing mentality when you’re the mostly incumbent party
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on the one hand yes you’re going to have dipshits who are completely disconnected from reality going on CNN and crying about how they’re spending $400/week on milk or whatever but on the other hand you also have the 0.01% capturing more and more of the surplus. So while “the economy” in the aggregate may be booming AND we might even see people at the very bottom doing disproportionately well that doesn’t mean the middle isn’t getting hollowed out
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