TIL thinking an economy with extreme inequality is sour grapes.
Minimum wage in my state is $7.25 an hour. Do you think you can relate to someone earning that?
Negative views of the economy arenât persisting because of the economy not improving in the lower half of the economy, thatâs been an area of strongest growth. The negative views are due to republicans being nuts and a shitty media playing horserace games instead of reporting on positive news.
Like I get that you want to see better, I really do. I want to see better. That doesnât mean that you have to hand waive away every single good thing about how things are going right now either. And, in fact, itâs a super bad idea for democrats to do that. The message should be âThings are going better/well, we can do betterâ, not âThings are so badâ
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you donât have to be in the group for who the economy improved âmostâ in order for the point to land
Great pull
@bestof
Iâm confused, thatâs exactly my point.
So letâs say your biggest priority is income inequality, things are improving on that front too!
Again, I get that itâs not where you want it to be long term, but a key part of continuing to do policy is to be able to convince people that your policies are working towards your stated goals. The above linked report notes how certain programs that the tax code was using expired due to republicans tanking them. The right thing to do is to point out how those things worked. You arenât going to convince anyone new to your side if youâre just chicken little-ing about the economy being so bad.
I donât think middle class people getting poorer is the preferred way to improve these sort of stats.
Household income of folks making 75k per year going down is not really an accomplishment to hang your hat on come campaign time
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due primarily to declines in real median household income at middle and top income brackets, according to the report released today.
The report shows real median household income dropped 2.3% to $74,580 from 2021 to 2022.
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If you keep reading, you see how governmental tax policy has raised middle and lower class post tax incomes. The report is also out of date as 2023 was a good year for these things, this kind of report just doesnât come out until much later.
Pretty sure it says looking at post tax it made things way worse as far as inequality?
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In contrast to the 1.2% decrease in the Gini index calculated using pretax income, the annual change in the Gini index calculated using post-tax income increased 3.2% from 2021 to 2022. These contrasting findings highlight the importance of definitions in understanding economic well-being.
Using post-tax income, the ratios of the 90th- to 10th-percentile, 90th- to 50th-percentile, and 50th- to 10th-percentile all increased between 2021 and 2022.
As Figure 2 shows, the ratio of the 90th- to 10th-percentile showed the largest post-tax income increase (8.2%), from 8.94 in 2021 to 9.67 in 2022.
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Well thatâs embarrassing, thanks
I assume this is almost entirely due to the covid child credits expiring though so seems pretty fixable
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Median household income is one of those stats that actually does a pretty good job of telling you whatâs actually going on. Itâs very popular/used among serious economists and barely ever mentioned by corporate owned media.
I have my issues with it, but itâs good enough that you absolutely can get useful information from it, and adjusting it to be even more useful isnât that hard. More useful in this case almost always means more refined. For instance Iâd be interested in seeing the differences between 1 earner households and 2 earner households, households with dependents and without, and all of that is fairly easy to get from the data you have to collect to get median household income. Itâs also wildly useful when applied geographically because that lets you analyze the costs of stuff in that zip code and actually analyze the standard of living that median household income purchases.
This is unlike GDP which is just basically a noise metric that doesnât correlate to anything we use it as a stand in for. In a hundred years when they are covering this period in history GDP and other bad economic metrics are going to have their own paragraph when describing how we got it so wrong as a civilization from 1980-2020.
We measured the wrong things, we set our objective as maximizing those wrong things we were measuring, and then everything got weird. Thatâs how we got here.
US median real income is on a big uptick since last spring/summer
https://motioresearch.com/household-income-series/
The pandemic payments make the 2020-21 difficult to parse and really emphasize how much good can be done with some basic policy to me
Exactly the same as it was when Biden took office?
Thatâs not really cause for celebration imo.
Yeah not taking account pandemic payments affect that stat is not exactly great way of looking at things
Who had a trifecta in the federal government when those payments stopped?
Yeah not taking into account sinema and machin is also a thing you could do, but shouldnt. Donât think indefinite UBI has actual support either, despite it likely being good policy
Letâs check in on some random comments on how the media is covering the economy. Saw this posted today by a real estate bro who by all metrics should be very well off currently. All the comments are some form of the second two screenshots.
Not posting this to further rehash if the economy is good or not, but to highlight that while you think the media is not reporting positively enough there are plenty of people who see the exact opposite as being their reality.
Probably easier to see it as the media covering for Biden when you are living paycheck to paycheck, everything costs way more than it did a few years ago, and your take home pay has barely moved.
A real estate bro convinced that the economy is in recession whenever there is a D President?
Well, now Iâve seen everything.
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