It’s not just red state residents. It’s the entire bottom 60% of the income distribution. Things are meaningfully better for the older people in that distribution who own homes but the under 40 bottom 60% are pretty much universally entirely fucked out into the infinite future with no realistic prospect of improvement anywhere on the horizon that doesn’t come from real economic and social change on a systemic level.
60-80% are hanging on by their fingernails. It’s not fun but they haven’t fallen off the cliff yet. 80-90% aren’t sure why they can’t afford the apartment they had when they were a server at a restaurant when they’re a CPA now but they aren’t in any danger of going hungry. 90%+ do better pretty much every year and the further you go up that top 10% the faster it goes because the whole goddamn structure is a giant siphon and at this point a huge % of economic activity is just value being extracted from all of us to a tiny group of extremely wealthy people. How much of your value they siphon is directly correlated to how easy it is to replace you. So in our case that means we get to do pretty well. In other people’s cases they get to make 20 bucks an hour operating someone else’s money machine that makes 10,000 a week in personal income.
my spouse is an underpaid public school teacher in a red state.
systemic underfunding of k-12 education in red states has zero to do with a) how the economy is doing now relative to 4 years go, b) people’s perception of same, c) what biden’s messaging strategy should be about the economy. a, b, & c being the topic of this thread
these people have shown the best improvement, and literally no one has argued that it’s enough and they should shut up. Just more dishonesty.
Nothing about attitudes of the economy has to do with classes, facts, bank accounts, etc. It is the current media environment allowing crazy ass republicans to pretend like they are honest players.
The teacher derail might have been my fault, just pointing to fact lots of previously very solid careers are not positioned as well financially as times in past.
Like one my friends growing up Dad was a mailman and Mom a hotel maid. I just looked up what I think was there house on Zillow and we talking 6k/month house payment. I don’t know what they paying mailmen but I doubt it’s that
And I think leaving it at that is all this thread should have been. I think just flatly saying “economy is great, vote Biden” not the best strategy given the discontent of a lot of folks with the economic order of last 50yrs. But that certainly doesn’t mean Biden cant campaign on aspects of economy
My next door neighbors are both mailmen / mailwomen, married couple. Their house is a little smaller than mine but still nice enough. I think postal workers are probably doing ok.
I agree with this whole paragraph except for the bolded.
I don’t think many of them are being condescending; I think they literally don’t get it.
I understand the arguments that people like CN are putting forth (at least I think I do). He, and many others, think the economy is good because a lot of the traditional economic metrics are good. And they are! No one is disputing that.
I’m not sure the other side actually understands why some are saying the economy sucks. Many times ITT it’s being handwaved away as anecdotal and bad data, which is not at all how I would classify these posts, especially those of Boredsocial.
And I just can’t accept the explanation that people are down on the economy because of Republican media framing. Like, do you really think that people like me and Jwax and Commonwelth and Boredsocial are having our minds propagandized on this issue by the NYT et al? Young people are more down on the economy than anyone. Are they falling victim to this at a rate that far exceeds those of Boomers? Seems intuitively laughable to me.
I think the leftists on this forum are biased to see the economy through the lens of, well, a leftist. By the standards used in this thread, the economy has literally never been good ever. That’s a defensible position, but it’s not particularly helpful in the context of why polling says the economy is bad. All of those structural inequalities and what they’ve complained about existed 5 years ago when people thought the economy was good.
That’s lead to a lot of argument about how those structural things are worse now in some way, and that’s where I have a big problem. The closest thing to broad data used by BS and CW is a Zillow survey, which is absurd frankly. If we’re using shitty online listing companies over standard CPI data or blindly dismissing all economic stats, we aren’t describing reality anymore, we’re backfilling arguments to what we think to be true.
I’d have very little disagreement with BS and CW if they said the economy isn’t good based on their view of what is right and fair. The disagreement is over if the USA is suddenly seeing things in a leftist way which is causing the lagging polling or the media environment and republicans are the main cause.
It kept getting worse the last 5 years like it got worse the 5 years before that and the 5 years before that. There comes a point, now 20+ years past, where GDP growth and other conventional econometrics simply don’t matter for the people who don’t have enough leverage to negotiate a better deal than subsistence from their employer. Teachers aren’t even getting subsistence lol.
Pay and productivity were still tightly linked as recently as the 80’s and calling me a leftist is a huge huge stretch. I want us to turn away from the cliff before we go over it and shit gets ugly, thus ruining my chance at spending the last 50 years of my life as an aristocrat.
‘They economy is actually great’ doesn’t pass the eye test so it’s the wrong counter messaging. Which is why we need to measure new shit to track how the economy is in 2024 than GDP, unemployment, raw job creation, etc. We definitely need to go back to the drawing board on what we’re measuring because we’re achieving very hard on what we’re measuring and it isn’t working.
these people have shown the best improvement, and literally no one has argued that it’s enough and they should shut up. Just more dishonesty.