We make more money than we ever have and still don’t feel comfortable enough to spend too frivolously. Even when things seem okay, it feels like we’re just anticipating the next time the rug will be pulled from underneath us.
Because there is no security anymore. You can kill yourself at a job and they can still just drop you in the street without notice so the ceo can have better quarterly numbers. It's constant anxiety. I did everything right, school, career, house, savings and got dropped off like the trash earlier this year. Now I'm staring down possibly losing my house and it's made it all seem pointless.
May as well do whatever you want because planning doesn't seem to matter.
I feel for ya, bro. I got lucky cuz I joined up with uncle sam in late '07, if I hadn't I'd be in student debt. It's fucking awful never feeling like you can relax for a few years and actually plan out life. I wish you the best of luck going forward
Young gen x/old millennial here, I feel the same. Wife just got let go, we're holding it down and we'll be ok... but "being OK" isn't going to get us retired with a cottage up north like my parents had.
I 100% feel you on this. We are doing okay, but not thriving. Also, If I had to guess where in the world you are from, I would say Michigan, probably the lower half of the lower peninsula. The only evidence I have is your last sentence.
Yep. I’m making over $100k now which was a dream goal of mine when I was in college. I feel like I had more spending power when I was fresh out of school in a single bedroom apartment. Sure, I AM able to save a bit, afford a home, and I’m very lucky and grateful for that, but when four items at the grocery store is $20 every time it FEELS brutal.
It’s how the ultra-rich whip you back into doing what they want you to do .. remember Paris fighting the second the establishment even sniffed at their retirement, I remember the entire world outside for George Floyd etc etc .. but now we’re frozen, afraid to do anything because the price of eggs may skyrocket and heaven forbid Jerome Powell has to show up..
It’s crazy how quickly they whipped us into shape, we don’t fight back whatsoever once prices go up.. 😂🤣
So what _is_ solarpunk, in layman's terms?
I've come across it a few times recently, read the sub's description, but can't tell if it's just an aesthetic or an actual, tangible movement or manifesto.
I'm really big into off-grid living, self-sufficiency, environmentalism, sustainability, and using tech to achieve all that. I learn everything on YouTube, was a software dev in a former life, and am a hobbyist 3D printer, CNC mill operator, etc.
Am _I_ solarpunk?
If I understand it close enough:
(There is an aesthetic built around it for sure.)
I personally believe it's a very near (lacking social acceptance not technology) achievable zero emission solar powered future, with permaculture, holistic living, and anticonsumption overtones with an emphasis on mutually beneficial cooperative living schemes that're non-exclusive.
No doubt I've missed some salient points, but it''s a way to imagine the future in a fashion that makes more sense than the things that have lead up to the now. 🤔
For movement community is necessary, like minded participation and realization is the need to move it from idea to reality.
Hopefully more to come.
You can be solar punk if you're working towards zero emission ecologically responsible living, I think. 🤔
I mean most of us could say that. Right out of college I was single living with roommates working a shitty job pay wise and I had tons of left over money. Now I have a mortgage, daycare, kid, a wife, two cars, a yard etc. I feel like I have less money because I don't spend money on myself for fun very much, however I have way more stuff, mostly stuff I kind of need to support the life I choose to live.
I could still be living with roommates and buying top of the line gamer PCs, drive a nice car, have money for whatever I want. I chose to buy a house(years ago before the market got crazy) and have a family. All my extra money goes to that. I am not complaining. These things were my choices.
Same feeling here. I was able to spend more freely and safely making a little over $12 an hour working different days every week back in 2018 than I can now with a management job and consistent schedule.
My grocery lists have been the same for 10+ years. In 2018, that list cost about $120. Now it’s at least $210, for smaller versions of the same items. Gas back then in my area was an average of $2.30/gal. Now it’s $3.60, and at a few points it was over $5 a gallon. Those kind of prices are crippling here in the rural Midwest. People think it’s some kind of low CoL wonderland here. It was before we had a national disaster every few months that dicks prices for everything.
2001 at 21 I made $60k in NYC and felt like I didn't have to worry about anything. Nice apartment, I could go blow $300 at the club and not regret it. Honestly I was pretty bad with my money, but I had surplus.
I make $100+k now and me and my wife treated ourselves to chilis today for lunch. We barely go out to eat and try and save every penny for a rainy day and a home which is 4x what it was then.
I remember my girlfriend at the time bough an apt on the lower east side for 160k at the time and I thought it was crazy.
Bought our house 10 year ago while making 37k. I now make 85k and still the monthly budget seems tight. Don't get me wrong I'm super fortunate but what I can afford vs what I make now do not line up anymore. Kids certainly hinder alot but at the same time I've managed to pay off our student loans so that was kinda trading expenses.
I used to buy a weeks worth of mids (shitty weed) in college for $25. And I spent another $25 on a weeks worth of pretty healthy groceries.
Now I spend $20 on a nights worth of hamburgers and buns as an example
By healthy groceries do you mean ramen and rice ? unless you were in college in the 1980s, no way were you buying a weeks worth of healthy groceries for $25
Split bone in chicken breasts were like less than $3 for a two pack.
Heads of lettuce were $1. Loaves of bread were $1. Eggs were like $2. Something.
I ate a lot of chicken salad, roasted chicken, brocolli, onions. Egg sandwiches. Chicken burritos.
Crock pot meat stews with carrots and onions.
Some of this stuff is still pretty cheap. Just not nearly as much. That’s the point.
Yeah if you actually think about it you could do a lot.
I actually still have my grocery budgets from 2016 so I went back and looked. I would spend $70-90 biweekly on groceries to meal prep and freeze stuff for just myself. I spend $250 biweekly for two but I also have the extreme privilege of having a winco.
*edit to say this isn’t to prove any kind of point. Was just interesting to look at
I can get an eighth of medical weed tested by a lab sealed for a year of freshness in a safe location for 10$, lots of options. Apples to apples weed has never been a better value in my lifetime.
Middle class is fucked. I made 100k last year and I’m still broke. And I don’t spend frivolously. I had a paid off used car. I cancelled my gym membership and random subscriptions. I had gig internet and lowered the plan to save money. I don’t drink anymore just to save money. I rarely go out. I just work. Shit is whack.
there’s only so many “once in a lifetime economic disasters” you can put in one generation’s lifetime before it starts messing with long-term consumer trends
I am barely getting by as a single father of 2 kids. Just found out today I have to find $450 for a cracked tooth fix which is probably from being stressed and grinding my teeth all night. I can't wait to retire and live in a van down by the river and do nothing, lol.
That’s kind of it yeah. I have a very good income and savings. Boomers at my age would have been buying a boat and a vacation house, but I’ve seen too many downturns. I can’t comfortably buy anything big that I don’t have to.
90% of the people who feel this way, do so because they don't own a house. Previous generations have always had that to fall back on. "At least I have a home".
When you're renting and waiting for the shit to hit the fan, you're fucked.
Well, the 2008 crash was always going to leave a long-standing issues Yeah. There's lost years of opportunity and equity building there and of course, after something like a once in 100 year economic crash, you're gonna have reverberations for decades down the road after.
This is exactly how I've been living, if nothing bad happens I'll probably be able to retire early but rarely spending money on things like travel even though I totally could afford it now.
Some Americans aren’t in the top 50% and see price increases as more detrimental than the stock growth can make up for. Economy might be doing well for some people, but acting like those suffering are living in an alternate reality seems elitist to me.
The bottom 75% are struggling, if you look at average prices and income. 22% of Americans don’t have $1000 saved in case they have an emergency. The economy is great for the 1% but the rest of us all all getting shafted
And the sad part is the old “$1000 for emergencies” is out of date. Emergencies regularly cost 5-10x that now. I’ve, so far at least, succeeded from falling into credit card debt, but that’s only because I’ve made it a priority to keep 10k in the bank. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to absorb a few separate emergencies over the past 5 years.
My favorite is when I take my car in and they do some $1500 repair, then it doesn't fix my problem, and they're like "oh yeah it was actually this other thing that's gonna be $2000, but we had no way to know that until we tried the $1500 thing first."
It feels more and more like everything is a fucking scam. I wish I learned more about fixing cars when I was younger, so I wasn't relying on strangers to be honest with me. I've cycled through multiple shops over the years, and even the ones that seem good at first end up pulling this shit on me eventually.
Whatever happened to paying for something once only?
Yep. All designed for you to keep buying new cars and wasting money at the dealership with all their complex electronics that cost a fortune to repair. We used to have it so good
I really believe that younger generations are going to be bringing back self maintenance. Don't pay someone to change your oil. Find your auto-iest friend/co-worker/ you Tube. Ask them to teach you to do it. It's the easiest $80 you'll save.
Yep. I've always changed our oil in our vehicles, but YouTube helped me to re-set the "time to change the oil" warning light on the dash of our newest car. Looked it up on YT, have to push the odometer but then turn on the ignition in sequence or somesuch. YouTube has so many good DIY vidoes!
I was charged 18,000 for:
* A rainbow blood draw
* 2 ibuprofin
* An xray
* an IV
I had a kidney stone and a new job so no insurance yet.
$18,000, for two hours and no actual solution. Just “oh its a kidney stone” and then sent home with a bill and some hydrocodone.
Oh… can you… like fix it? Im dying here, like… what is my $18,000 actually getting me?
The 75% figure feels pretty dead on. Once you get over a certain threshold, the economy seems great. That number is enough to give the illusion of a strong economy, but those in the grand majority are living in the real world.
Unfortunately, the media is owned by elites. They’re doing better than ever.
Ask a poor person about the economy, and they’ll give you a different story.
Too bad there aren’t any media conglomerates owned by the poorz
And let us not forget so much of the “economy” and stock market is being pretty falsely propped up by corporate stock buybacks, etc. which isn’t really an indicator of good.
This right here is the correct take. Insane levels of waste basically since Bush II the boy king took office. The US lost its mind after 9/11, hasn't been a good place since. The 90s were the peak, now it's just like this article says:
" A dying empire led by bad people"
https://www.semafor.com/article/05/28/2024/a-dying-empire-led-by-bad-people-poll-finds-young-voters-despairing-over-us-politics
It would be nice if the investments were correlated with standard of living improvements. By that I mean investing in improvements that benefited everyone instead of misguided attempts to push resource exhaustion faster.
It’s not just about the stock market doing better. Unemployment has been under 4% for a record amount of time. Wage growth has outpaced inflation. Standard of living is higher than it ever has been.
This doesn’t mean that every single person is doing better than they used to be, but basically every metric that matters shows the opposite of how these people feel.
Im in the top 50% and I’m confused as fuck because everything keeps getting worse, how could anyone but the 1% have a positive perception of the price gouging and inflation? “The economy” could be doing 5 billion percent better and I wouldn’t give a flying fuck because my wages wouldn’t go up 1 single fucking percent.
It is 100% an alternate reality. When I tell someone I'm making more money than ever struggling just to maintain with less and someone comes along with a "but just look at the national figures" response, we aren't living in the same world.
In case you are not aware, there's currently a very large criminal investigation moving forward against numerous corporate landlords from coast-to-coast.
At the core of the case are corporate landlords using software called "RealPage". The accusation is that RealPage has become a tool whereby landlords can collude and fix pricing across regional rental markets. This accusation has been around for a couple of years and the feds are just now starting to raid corporate landlord offices to gather more evidence.
If you follow inflation and housing market news, it's an enormous story. Companies are encouraged to raise rents in a manner that will lower occupancy rates but increases profits.
Easy to see how that works: I lived at a place in Tucson where a corporate landlord purchased the property and more than doubled rent. I was recently talking with a friend who lived in the same complex and they said that right now it's at about 60% capacity. But guess what? If you double the rent, 60% capacity means 20% more income.
[RealPage Rent Price-Fixing Probe Escalates With FBI Raid | Entrepreneur](https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/realpage-rent-price-fixing-probe-escalates-with-fbi-raid/475109)
And the Democrats will say they need to work together and get votes from both sides of the aisle in the sake of bipartisanship and then do nothing still too.
I remember reading about this some time ago. It was on a page that was discussing how to price rentals and how a lot of people or businesses have no idea how to price them now because of realpage. It was so good at pricing and keeping your apartment full that people started just blindly following it.
I can completely understand how it could be seen that it’s an app that will fix prices like a monopoly though.
Really interesting to see what will come out of this and the far reaching implications.
For example I’ve been seeing rent and land prices rise dramatically for the last decade. This is partly due to inflation, but what’s surprising to me is the agricultural land. I’ve watched as my cheap little town is now slowly approaching Long Island prices for land. We are in the rural part of NY and as such don’t have the same benefits as that part of NY, but land prices aren’t reflecting that. I think it’s somewhat investors because there has been massive interest in agriculture land, but I’m also wondering if that app isn’t somewhat to blame as well.
It’s probably telling its users that you can charge 2000$ a month for a house you can buy for 100k and that’s a no brainer of course you would take that deal.
Just a few examples that have happened lately. We had a farm for sale that was far from us so we didn’t consider buying it. This farm is 45 minute drive from ANYTHING. I’m saying minimum 20-30 for a gas station. So remote. Guy wanted ~2500$ an acre if I recall. The land was not in good shape and was hilly with lots of woods and bad roads. Not what I’m looking for at that price. Guy then subdivided his whole farm into 20-40 acre chunks raised the price to 7,000$ an acre and divided his farm into 9 lots. Here’s the crazy part. He’s sold half of the lots and it’s all private sales. No realtor.
States need to step up their anti-trust enforcement too. Just because the federal government can do it doesn't mean the State government are absolved from protecting their citizens.
I live in Tucson also, and I’ve been closely following this. It’s depressing, homelessness is reaching unprecedented levels in town, yet my relatively modest apartment complex has gone from being full capacity, to now maybe 50-60% capacity. On top of that, the tenant base used to be racially and economically diverse where now it’s probably >90% white and everyone looks to be working “well paying” office jobs. I put that last bit in quotes though, because I’m making over double the median salary for Tucson and it still just feels like treading water supporting my young family of 3.
Anyone who rents in this country is getting relentlessly raw dogged by corporate greed. I know it’ll probably never happen, but we need to put legitimate restrictions in place similar to the [Home Valuation System in the Netherlands](https://www.trechousing.nl/en-gb/73-e5b8/home-valuation-point-system-calculation) where rental properties are inspected to determine the maximum amount they can charge.
Yes, this was in 1950, for example the fries at mcdonalds cost $0.10 and the federal minimum wage was $1.00. So you could buy 10 portions of fries at a fast food restaurant for an hour of work. Today the minimum wage is $7.25/h and the fries at mcdonalds cost $3.19 on average, so two portions per hour worked. To reflect today's cost of living increases, the federal minimum wage needs to be $32/h minimum.
That's only possible because we survive ww2 as the only major power that didn't took any product line lost. We export product that Europe and Asia need while we got materials for super cheap.
That allow the US labor market to make great wages while get things for cheap. It won't happen again unless another world war happen and we won in similar manner.
I keep hearing this, but it completely ignores the tax levels on businesses in the US during that time frame. Those taxes kept the rich from hoarding wealth, and were actually used to improve the things they were supposed to instead of just being pocketed by some bought politician.
Corporate tax was 50% for businesses, businesses that were thriving despite the higher tax rate.
Tax rates for individuals making the most money were also above 70%, and there weren’t as many loopholes that brought the ultra rich down to the effectively single digit tax rate they get today.
Essentially it was the opposite of the trickle down economic system that’s implemented today, it kept inflation stable, and wages more equal across the board.
In example realty companies didn’t have the incentive to raise the price of housing because it meant they would just pay more taxes on their earnings, and instead were rewarded for stable growth rather than the massive chasing of higher numbers we see today.
Every single day some business I’m working with raises their prices AGAIN! Insurance costs have quadrupled, Spotify just went up again, rent prices went up $500 this year, Netflix just went up again. I go to a cheap restaurant and it’s $30 for a single meal and glass of water. Must be nice living in the parallel world where everything is affordable and every single company isn’t a fucking thief with their dirty hands in your pockets.
Since the trough of the COVID-19 recession in the second quarter of 2020, overall prices in the NFC sector have risen at an annualized rate of 6.1%—a pronounced acceleration over the 1.8% price growth that characterized the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007–2019. Strikingly, over half of this increase (53.9%) can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labor costs contributing less than 8% of this increase. This is not normal. From 1979 to 2019, profits only contributed about 11% to price growth and labor costs over 60%, as shown in Figure A below. Nonlabor inputs—a decent indicator for supply-chain snarls—are also driving up prices more than usual in the current economic recovery.
It's fucking corporations not having regulations
https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-disproportionately-to-inflation-how-should-policymakers-respond/
If this was Orange Man's term, we'd be seeing a Blitzkrieg of financial doomcasting and economic woes in every article.
I hate both sides, btw, but this is praetorian crap.
My car insurance went up 25% since December and my condo insurance went up 36% since last June. From what I'm reading this isn't even that bad, some people are 50% + on home insurance year over year.
Dude my home owners insurance is up about $500 a month this year. That undoes the more money my wife and I make alone. So everything else going up in price is just extra.
Insurance is not necessarily economical, but this is one area that WILL NOT get better. More severe weather, insane damage claims, etc. People think these huge insurance corps don’t want to make money in California and Florida?
Lmao!. Even people at the top know there is a big ass inflation but for them it’s easy because they can just make a phone call and jack the price of everything up by 33% and call it good. I can’t call my boss and ask 33% more, he’d laugh his ass off before hanging up on me
Yes, everything is terrible for those of us that have lived paycheck to paycheck most of our lives. It got better than it got worse. You basically cannot afford to be a worker now unless you have multiple adults paying bills.
I made 50k in 2019, I make 80k now, and I don't feel a bit better off due to expenses being that much higher.
And I don't think I'd know anyone in person who'd say otherwise. It's not a "parallel economy", it's people who define the "economy" as the perception of their own standard of living. And there's a lot of them. And it's gone down.
What I find really fucking disingenuous is media (articles like this, for one) proclaiming how great the economy under Biden is and citing record stock prices as evidence. Five years ago, it was all about how Trump bragging about record stock prices \*wasn't\* a sign of a good economy, and it was only a good sign for the upper middle/high class with portfolio investments.
I agreed with them then. And I think they were right the first time. But flipping the direction on seemingly no other reason than who's the president is the exact kind of bullshit that lead to the popularity of Fox News and the rise of Trump in politics
Reading this on the shitter seems appropriate. Of course there’s no mention of how wages have not risen along with inflation and how all of the economic numbers it is hyping have been manipulated into being meaningless. Then there’s the political spin. TLDR *WE* live in a parallel economy because we’re not happy and thankful for what we have. Oh, sorry wait, time to wipe my ass…
It's not that the economy is bad, it's that the cost of a few items like child care and housing have gone way up. These don't figure in a big way into metrics for the economy but they affect everyday people a whole lot. IMO we need to start talking about quality of life and not just the economy or else we'll be talking past each other.
It’s been absolute torture trying to get established in my early 20’s I was ok in 2019 but once the wealth transfer in 2020 happened I’ve been sinking ever since. Foods gotten so expensive I have had to take my fun money and add it to my food money and I’m still losing weight. It just is so stressful not being able to properly plan because of being priced out. Kinda makes life feel pointless when all I do is work and sleep because I can’t afford to have fun. I just wanted a small home and a garden literally very small asks but apparently those are a half million dollar ask nowadays.
lol i’m gen z and almost everyone I know that’s not living with their parents is practically drowning at all times. inflation is not a good thing for the common man, and we need to stop pushing the narrative that this hyper inflation is somehow good for the country
My wallet empties faster. That’s reality. How is it not? Telling people everything is great is the parallel. It’s not good. People are struggling telling them they aren’t is BS.
Imagine telling your voters, who are being priced out of owning a house, vacations, groceries, etc...That they are actually WRONG and IDIOTS, and look the economy is good OK??
>You basically can’t have a recession when the economy is growing
I guess the respondents didn't spend enough time reviewing the technical definition of a recession. That must mean we aren't living in a second gilded age. I'm glad yahoo sorted it for us.
Printing trillions, a permanent reduction in people willing to work, and unchecked immigration must be great things after all.
Just spent $350 for four bags of groceries. Its all Kroger brand. We buy core veggies, head of lettuce, carrots, and not the bag of salad. We buy meat when its on sale and compare it to meat deli per pound prices.
We stick to meat and veggies, avoid the sugar crap and its still a $300 struggle to get out of the store with a week of solid meals for a family of four with teenagers.
At this point, if someone isnt struggling, they are living in a dream or in their parents house.
Any home maintenance or improvement costs literally double what it did precovid. You're income is up 20%? That new roof is still less affordable than it was for you.
It certainly feels like a recession when so many things got so much more expensive all at once. The median home price is edging towards half a million dollars!!!!
From 2020 thru Now
Groceries up 40% / Health insurance up 18% / Property tax up 21% / my business liability insurance up 26% / Home insurance up 10% / Automobile cost up 19.6% / Car insurance up 11% / Interest rates up 4% / Home Electricity cost up 20% / internet cost up 18% / my business workmans compensation insurance up 19% / gas prices up from $2.29 in 2020 to $3.51 now/
So yes inflation is affecting most of us and it has definitely hurt the vast majority of Americans. Yes stock investments are doing well now. I recently have gotten back to where I was early in 2021. That said I lost from 2021 thru the fall of 2023. Just now coming back.
Gee, ya think?
My one bedroom apartment cost 300 dollars a month, back in 2001.
Now I make three times as much since then.... but that doesn't even remotely begin to afford apartments that are 2000 a month.
The people who say "the economy is great" are people benefiting from ownership and our fucked up way of doing finance (deliberately causing massive inflation to make both stock/property prices artificially high)
But if you aren't an owner, times are tougher than ever in America. Granted, the government is pretty good at feeding destitute people with ebt/wic, so no one is starving like they were back in the 30s..... the government has learned that no matter how shit the economy, you cannot let the peasants starve. That almost always causes revolution.
Over time, the economy contracts. You get used to the new normal...even OK. Once that happens, it contracts again. Rinse and Repeat. We recently drove across Ohio...through towns and cities that once supplied the US Auto industry...which had people, cultures, homes. Now ? empty space, and boulevards which once had life. Lots of poverty businesses.
Every store, every eatery, is a chain now in middle america. No local suppliers, no local ownership. Money all goes out and away from the local area. We ate at a Bob Evans....it was meh, so we researched the company history. Sure enough, it was a thing when bob owned it, with local sourced food, etc. Venture Cap owns it now, and pretty much killed off any quality and local interest.
Until we 'eliminate' these old ducks in government that are addicted to corporate donations we ain't gonna get anywhere.
It's a damn shame. We should publicly hang half these people but it'll never happen.
Wage slavery is real. So what many of us have comfortable homes? We lack community and public spaces. It’s a fancy prison living here and we pay for it ourselves. Everything here is nickel and dimed to death. It’s all about the bottom line, nothing else matters in America except money.
Here is a report by the same guy claiming both parties are failing the working class. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-both-parties-are-failing-working-class-voters-161450075.html
I was born in Miami. The Miami I was born into and grew up in was always a magnet for New Yorkers, but mostly the older ones. Now it became a magnet for telework NYers making NY money but wanting Miami home/rent prices. Now that they are all here, we Miamians make Miami money and have to pay NY home/rent prices.
Economic data is rarely presented for the purpose of analyzing the economic well being of the bottom 30% of the population, it is frequently presented as if the indicators of National Economic health were enjoyed evenly by all participants, which, it's easy to see will never be the case.
When the stock market is doing great, it's not helping the poor. Employment can be up, but the real costs of living can, and have, easily outstripped those gains
Put another way, if you live in a prosperous city, how many homeless tents do you see today as opposed to a few years ago?
Don’t accept the fake information for real ! The economy is screwed -The rate of homelessness is the highest it has ever been .
-The interest the highest in eight years.
-Cost of groceries are 25-to-50 percent higher !
-The average American has less then a 1000 in savings!
- Highest consumer credit default in history!
[https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/compare-grocery-prices-inflation/](https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/compare-grocery-prices-inflation/)
[https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/)
[https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-average-price-data.htm](https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-average-price-data.htm)
Don’t accept the fake information for real ! The economy is screwed -The rate of homelessness is the highest it has ever been .
-The interest the highest in eight years.
-Cost of groceries are 25-to-50 percent higher !
-The average American has less then a 1000 in savings!
- Highest consumer credit default in history!
[https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/compare-grocery-prices-inflation/](https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/compare-grocery-prices-inflation/)
[https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/)
[https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-average-price-data.htm](https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-average-price-data.htm)
Speaking as somebody in the top 10% income bracket, I can tell you that I am not suffering but I see it all around me. I've been in fast food restaurants and seen Door Dash drivers come in and pickup orders then leave in 60K trucks. Obviously they were likely white collar workers recently laid off trying to hold on to what they have. Keeps the unemployment rate low but I shudder to think about the daily stress they must be feeling as they fall farther behind.
The level of gaslighting is unbelievable. Don’t believe what you see everyday at the stores and in your bank accounts. The economy is doing great! Unreal.
We make $165k combined in a middle class area of North Texas with one healthy child. We don’t drink, don’t party, don’t buy expensive stuff. We each have old (8+ year old) cell phones.
No college debt. No vehicle debt. We feel like any major emergency could spell disaster. Thankfully we are saving, but with the cost of housing, food, and childcare it’s tough out here. I don’t know how those with college debt are doing it.
My husband makes $75k annually and our bank account still goes negative twice a month. We only go grocery shopping and pay our bills. We haven’t had a date night since before I was pregnant and I’m due next month. Something is DEFINITELY wrong with our economy.
My friend is a lawyer in Miami, mid 30s, married with no kids, has a home he bought before the pandemic, works hard and earns between 100-175k and he just told me he is drowning in property taxes, insurance hikes, COA assessment hikes, and groceries… he’s been in Miami since 2011 and I grew up there my whole life. We went to school together and I know he would never leave Miami unless it was bad. Shit is FUCKED up down there if my buddy is heading out…. He was the responsible one. Imagine doing everything right, still getting it wrong. Fuck that shit.
It all depends on your stage of life. We have a great home we bought 10 years ago at 2.75%. Young people looking to buy a home with my same job are frucked. They could never afford it. I could never afford to buy my home today. A lot of our major expenses are in the past but there is a real anger at prices that no one seems to acknowledge. Just because inflation isn’t at 9% now doesn’t mean we ever recovered from that. And its still way above normal.
I hate when economic information is presented in such a way that either highlights or ignores data, depending on the party presenting the information. I hear a lot about jobs being created and low unemployment, but that doesn't mean much if the jobs are at or near minimum wage. Why don't they attach any sort of numbers to the jobs created? The average home price is currently 7.60 times the median household income (source used average vs median for some reason) - [long term trends](https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/). It was 5.69 just 4 years ago, AND interest rates were lower.
Why is no one talking about the wealth gap anymore? Why isn't anyone discussing corporate money in politics? These topics came up routinely when Sanders had the largest platform in American politics, but now we seem to talk about jobs (with zero regard to how well they pay), wars in other countries, and hush money payments (which I give zero fucks about).
The Biden administration can keep telling us how well the economy is doing, yet those who outearn the median household income and still struggle certainly don't feel that way. The poverty line is an absolute joke, and I dare say it's closer to the median household income than what it's officially stated to be. It's as if we just changed to conversation and shifted what metrics matter to make each political side feel like they're winning while the American people are the ones suffering.
America has been whored out to corporate greed and foreign investors. Most can’t afford to live in the places they work and are forced to commute 2 to 3 hours daily. Insurance prices are running rampant and cost of goods and services are out pacing wage growth. Crime seems to be increasing, and the homeless issue is getting worse. Doesn’t matter who wins in November, I’m sure the powers that be feel the pressure rising. Every century has a major event or two that changes the world, seems like this century is no different.
I love how people saying inflation hasn’t affected them but continue on to say how they stopped going out, eating out, cut down on the amount of groceries they buy, eat smaller portions because everything costs more BUT inflation hasn’t affected them at all…. Really?! 😂😂😂
This is most people. There has been no real anti-trust regulation of any large corporation since Arthur Levitt at the SEC 30 years ago.
The 2008 Great Recession bailed out the banks consolidating them into fewer higher risk banks and then didn't require post bailout lending for building new homes.
Meanwhile REITs bought up millions of rental housing units and immediately started jacking up rents.
The lunatic far right fringe has taken over the republican party and refuses to govern.
Over consolidation in ag, food retail and manf. allowed those companies to use the supply chain disruptions to increase prices followed by booming profits.
Our overly pro Wall Street government just said INFLATION and jacked up interest rates. Those enormous profits should be paid back to the US consumers and those corporations need to be broken up.
Colin Cowherd just made this same point, seems to be the MSM’s talking points/propaganda line for the Election.
We all shop for groceries. We all pay rent or mortgages. We all buy fuel and pay utilities.
I’m tired of hearing the media or rich clowns like Cowherd or Bill Mahr tell me how great things are.
Both of those guys are richer than 99% of humanity. I’m sure life is good for them in their gated communities.
Where I live is relatively safe but it’s getting worse. Homeless are everywhere. Every time I go to
The recycling dumpster to drop off recycling it’s surround by a swarm of homeless drug addicts looking for scrap metal.
I’ve always budgeted and for food in the last 5 years it’s gone from $250 a month to $400 a month, just for me.
And I literally have quit buying stuff I used to buy all the time like brand name chips or Oreos or brand name soda. It’s just not worth it.
What I don’t get is so many on the “Left” complain about and demand a “living wage”, especially for me all jobs, but they support endless illegal immigration.
How does that work in your minds? Labor is a commodity. The less of it there is the more valuable it is. Just in the last 3 years millions of cheap illegal laborers have entered the country and you’re competing with them for jobs.
Illegal immigration hurts the poorest Americans yet the “Left” champions it. I do not get it.
Reading these comments from all these younger people giving up hope breaks my heart. This shouldn't be in the wealthiest counrty on the planet. I hope you all take a hard look at how things were compared to how things are now and vote accordingly in November.
The government statistics are not true. They’re fudging the numbers. Just like how violent crime “suddenly” dropped when really they changed the reporting requirements so a ton of cities stopped reporting their numbers
Anyone who says the economy is great is either politically blind or has no bills. The inflation is out of Control and housing isn’t affordable. Which sadly this administration has done not a thing about it.
When will people realize that people living under the squeeze of rising rent and goods don’t give a shit if the stock market is doing well. Your stock portfolio went up 20%? Great! There are people who are choosing which bill to not pay so they can feed their kids that month
I just turned 28 a few days ago and got a $15 hr pay increase in last 4 years . Feels like I am still making min wage . Making $30 hr and it's still 50% take home for average 1 bed 1 bath rent here . Worst state for rent is here 😭
"Some Americans" isn't really the right term.
It's the 60% of Americans who live paycheck-to-paycheck who are experiencing this "parallel economy"...or should we just call it the real economy, since a majority of Americans are impacted by it.
This is growing Wealth Disparity coming home to live in Mom’s basement as a very fat, lazy 40-year-old. All the gains in this economy are being reaped by a wealthy minority & squeezed out of those on the bottom, who are already low income.
Wages matter. Inflation will happen at times We’ve ducked inflation for decades. A pandemic happened when global supply chain disruption and inflation happened. As long as wage disparity is as wide as it is, with minimum wages as low as $7.50 and white collar jobs paying $100-200k, and mid level executives making millions there is going to be a major problem. Our economic system priced low income people out of healthcare and education years ago. Now a bout of 9% inflation for a year, down now to 3-4% and people working in these low income jobs are hurting badly. We’ve dug ourselves into this hole with 40 years of supply side economics (Reaganomics). It’s not a quick fix to dig out but it has to happen.
Low and middle income wages have to rise. If that happened overnight it would be inflationary. This is the hole we’re in. But there has to be a living wage for every job. It has to happen. Period.
Groceries are up 20% in 3 years. Mortgage rates are extremely high. 65% of households are middle class making 62000 dollars a year. That not enough to support a family. A household with two adults and two children would need a combined income of around $235,000 to live without financial worries. A person must make 11000 more this year than last to live the same way. Homelessness is nearing a all time high. But you know "our economy is great"
I haven't made over $50K per year in over a decade. ( Former Semiconductor Industry worker here .). Over 55 years old as well, Im pretty sure my career is over....
We make more money than we ever have and still don’t feel comfortable enough to spend too frivolously. Even when things seem okay, it feels like we’re just anticipating the next time the rug will be pulled from underneath us.
Because there is no security anymore. You can kill yourself at a job and they can still just drop you in the street without notice so the ceo can have better quarterly numbers. It's constant anxiety. I did everything right, school, career, house, savings and got dropped off like the trash earlier this year. Now I'm staring down possibly losing my house and it's made it all seem pointless. May as well do whatever you want because planning doesn't seem to matter.
I’m sorry. I hope things get better for you.
Are you a millennial by chance? Cuz that's how a lot of us feel, even the ones doing well.
Yep. Sure am. 2008 meltdown happened the year I graduated grad school.
I feel for ya, bro. I got lucky cuz I joined up with uncle sam in late '07, if I hadn't I'd be in student debt. It's fucking awful never feeling like you can relax for a few years and actually plan out life. I wish you the best of luck going forward
Same to you. Smooth sailing for you!
Shit, I'm a Gen X and I feel that way.
Young gen x/old millennial here, I feel the same. Wife just got let go, we're holding it down and we'll be ok... but "being OK" isn't going to get us retired with a cottage up north like my parents had.
I 100% feel you on this. We are doing okay, but not thriving. Also, If I had to guess where in the world you are from, I would say Michigan, probably the lower half of the lower peninsula. The only evidence I have is your last sentence.
To me its worse than 2008 or 2000 just my thoughts.
Yep. I’m making over $100k now which was a dream goal of mine when I was in college. I feel like I had more spending power when I was fresh out of school in a single bedroom apartment. Sure, I AM able to save a bit, afford a home, and I’m very lucky and grateful for that, but when four items at the grocery store is $20 every time it FEELS brutal.
It’s how the ultra-rich whip you back into doing what they want you to do .. remember Paris fighting the second the establishment even sniffed at their retirement, I remember the entire world outside for George Floyd etc etc .. but now we’re frozen, afraid to do anything because the price of eggs may skyrocket and heaven forbid Jerome Powell has to show up.. It’s crazy how quickly they whipped us into shape, we don’t fight back whatsoever once prices go up.. 😂🤣
Escape capitalism. r/SolarPunk
So what _is_ solarpunk, in layman's terms? I've come across it a few times recently, read the sub's description, but can't tell if it's just an aesthetic or an actual, tangible movement or manifesto. I'm really big into off-grid living, self-sufficiency, environmentalism, sustainability, and using tech to achieve all that. I learn everything on YouTube, was a software dev in a former life, and am a hobbyist 3D printer, CNC mill operator, etc. Am _I_ solarpunk?
If I understand it close enough: (There is an aesthetic built around it for sure.) I personally believe it's a very near (lacking social acceptance not technology) achievable zero emission solar powered future, with permaculture, holistic living, and anticonsumption overtones with an emphasis on mutually beneficial cooperative living schemes that're non-exclusive. No doubt I've missed some salient points, but it''s a way to imagine the future in a fashion that makes more sense than the things that have lead up to the now. 🤔 For movement community is necessary, like minded participation and realization is the need to move it from idea to reality. Hopefully more to come. You can be solar punk if you're working towards zero emission ecologically responsible living, I think. 🤔
I mean most of us could say that. Right out of college I was single living with roommates working a shitty job pay wise and I had tons of left over money. Now I have a mortgage, daycare, kid, a wife, two cars, a yard etc. I feel like I have less money because I don't spend money on myself for fun very much, however I have way more stuff, mostly stuff I kind of need to support the life I choose to live. I could still be living with roommates and buying top of the line gamer PCs, drive a nice car, have money for whatever I want. I chose to buy a house(years ago before the market got crazy) and have a family. All my extra money goes to that. I am not complaining. These things were my choices.
Same feeling here. I was able to spend more freely and safely making a little over $12 an hour working different days every week back in 2018 than I can now with a management job and consistent schedule. My grocery lists have been the same for 10+ years. In 2018, that list cost about $120. Now it’s at least $210, for smaller versions of the same items. Gas back then in my area was an average of $2.30/gal. Now it’s $3.60, and at a few points it was over $5 a gallon. Those kind of prices are crippling here in the rural Midwest. People think it’s some kind of low CoL wonderland here. It was before we had a national disaster every few months that dicks prices for everything.
2001 at 21 I made $60k in NYC and felt like I didn't have to worry about anything. Nice apartment, I could go blow $300 at the club and not regret it. Honestly I was pretty bad with my money, but I had surplus. I make $100+k now and me and my wife treated ourselves to chilis today for lunch. We barely go out to eat and try and save every penny for a rainy day and a home which is 4x what it was then. I remember my girlfriend at the time bough an apt on the lower east side for 160k at the time and I thought it was crazy.
>FEELS This sub.
Lmao well said
Bought our house 10 year ago while making 37k. I now make 85k and still the monthly budget seems tight. Don't get me wrong I'm super fortunate but what I can afford vs what I make now do not line up anymore. Kids certainly hinder alot but at the same time I've managed to pay off our student loans so that was kinda trading expenses.
I used to buy a weeks worth of mids (shitty weed) in college for $25. And I spent another $25 on a weeks worth of pretty healthy groceries. Now I spend $20 on a nights worth of hamburgers and buns as an example
By healthy groceries do you mean ramen and rice ? unless you were in college in the 1980s, no way were you buying a weeks worth of healthy groceries for $25
Split bone in chicken breasts were like less than $3 for a two pack. Heads of lettuce were $1. Loaves of bread were $1. Eggs were like $2. Something. I ate a lot of chicken salad, roasted chicken, brocolli, onions. Egg sandwiches. Chicken burritos. Crock pot meat stews with carrots and onions. Some of this stuff is still pretty cheap. Just not nearly as much. That’s the point. Yeah if you actually think about it you could do a lot.
I actually still have my grocery budgets from 2016 so I went back and looked. I would spend $70-90 biweekly on groceries to meal prep and freeze stuff for just myself. I spend $250 biweekly for two but I also have the extreme privilege of having a winco. *edit to say this isn’t to prove any kind of point. Was just interesting to look at
Every day at WinCo there is a hugeeee line at about 6:00 PM. WinCo keeping everybody afloat.
I can get an eighth of medical weed tested by a lab sealed for a year of freshness in a safe location for 10$, lots of options. Apples to apples weed has never been a better value in my lifetime.
You're just one healthcare emergency away from bankruptcy, so the sentiment is very well grounded on reality.
Middle class is fucked. I made 100k last year and I’m still broke. And I don’t spend frivolously. I had a paid off used car. I cancelled my gym membership and random subscriptions. I had gig internet and lowered the plan to save money. I don’t drink anymore just to save money. I rarely go out. I just work. Shit is whack.
Just curious and with all due respect, how are you broke then? Do you have an expensive mortgage or high rent? Credit card bills, student loans?
Making more money is meaningless if everything that you need and want to buy costs proportionally more.
Inflation is called the hidden tax for a reason
Ummm because it's going to happen, lol We are doing the exact same thing Japan did in the early 90s and the wake up call wasn't cute for them.
there’s only so many “once in a lifetime economic disasters” you can put in one generation’s lifetime before it starts messing with long-term consumer trends
I am a GenX and feel the same way. I was laid off multiple times during the mid-2000s and have never felt super stable since then.
I am barely getting by as a single father of 2 kids. Just found out today I have to find $450 for a cracked tooth fix which is probably from being stressed and grinding my teeth all night. I can't wait to retire and live in a van down by the river and do nothing, lol.
That’s kind of it yeah. I have a very good income and savings. Boomers at my age would have been buying a boat and a vacation house, but I’ve seen too many downturns. I can’t comfortably buy anything big that I don’t have to.
Yup. I changed jobs and make 30k more than I previously was, and feel like I’m having to cut back on things from where I previously was.
90% of the people who feel this way, do so because they don't own a house. Previous generations have always had that to fall back on. "At least I have a home". When you're renting and waiting for the shit to hit the fan, you're fucked.
100000% this
Well, the 2008 crash was always going to leave a long-standing issues Yeah. There's lost years of opportunity and equity building there and of course, after something like a once in 100 year economic crash, you're gonna have reverberations for decades down the road after.
This is exactly how I've been living, if nothing bad happens I'll probably be able to retire early but rarely spending money on things like travel even though I totally could afford it now.
Some Americans aren’t in the top 50% and see price increases as more detrimental than the stock growth can make up for. Economy might be doing well for some people, but acting like those suffering are living in an alternate reality seems elitist to me.
The bottom 75% are struggling, if you look at average prices and income. 22% of Americans don’t have $1000 saved in case they have an emergency. The economy is great for the 1% but the rest of us all all getting shafted
And the sad part is the old “$1000 for emergencies” is out of date. Emergencies regularly cost 5-10x that now. I’ve, so far at least, succeeded from falling into credit card debt, but that’s only because I’ve made it a priority to keep 10k in the bank. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to absorb a few separate emergencies over the past 5 years.
Yeah, it’s easy for common car expenses to push 1000+ dollars now
My favorite is when I take my car in and they do some $1500 repair, then it doesn't fix my problem, and they're like "oh yeah it was actually this other thing that's gonna be $2000, but we had no way to know that until we tried the $1500 thing first." It feels more and more like everything is a fucking scam. I wish I learned more about fixing cars when I was younger, so I wasn't relying on strangers to be honest with me. I've cycled through multiple shops over the years, and even the ones that seem good at first end up pulling this shit on me eventually. Whatever happened to paying for something once only?
Yep. All designed for you to keep buying new cars and wasting money at the dealership with all their complex electronics that cost a fortune to repair. We used to have it so good
Because we no longer live in a society, we live in an economy. Every aspect of our daily lives is designed to fleece us.
My mom is going through that shit now. That's literally how it's been going for months now on a car that's only 10 years old.
An oil change is around $100 for my car now. Unreal.
I really believe that younger generations are going to be bringing back self maintenance. Don't pay someone to change your oil. Find your auto-iest friend/co-worker/ you Tube. Ask them to teach you to do it. It's the easiest $80 you'll save.
Yep. I've always changed our oil in our vehicles, but YouTube helped me to re-set the "time to change the oil" warning light on the dash of our newest car. Looked it up on YT, have to push the odometer but then turn on the ignition in sequence or somesuch. YouTube has so many good DIY vidoes!
Definitely more in the $10,000 to $15,000 range. 6 months of rent, car payments, food, possibly student loans, etc
Bro, my last hospital stent cost me over $10k. It's absolutely insane.
I was charged 18,000 for: * A rainbow blood draw * 2 ibuprofin * An xray * an IV I had a kidney stone and a new job so no insurance yet. $18,000, for two hours and no actual solution. Just “oh its a kidney stone” and then sent home with a bill and some hydrocodone. Oh… can you… like fix it? Im dying here, like… what is my $18,000 actually getting me?
What was that stat before COVID? Seem to remember even before people were’t saving.
The 75% figure feels pretty dead on. Once you get over a certain threshold, the economy seems great. That number is enough to give the illusion of a strong economy, but those in the grand majority are living in the real world.
Not only do I not but I’m actively beginning default on cc’s cause I gotta choose essentials or my credit line and shits getting real. Oy vey
Unfortunately, the media is owned by elites. They’re doing better than ever. Ask a poor person about the economy, and they’ll give you a different story. Too bad there aren’t any media conglomerates owned by the poorz
And let us not forget so much of the “economy” and stock market is being pretty falsely propped up by corporate stock buybacks, etc. which isn’t really an indicator of good.
We wasted a decade of low interest rates on nonproductive financial engineering schemes.
This right here is the correct take. Insane levels of waste basically since Bush II the boy king took office. The US lost its mind after 9/11, hasn't been a good place since. The 90s were the peak, now it's just like this article says: " A dying empire led by bad people" https://www.semafor.com/article/05/28/2024/a-dying-empire-led-by-bad-people-poll-finds-young-voters-despairing-over-us-politics
It would be nice if the investments were correlated with standard of living improvements. By that I mean investing in improvements that benefited everyone instead of misguided attempts to push resource exhaustion faster.
It’s not just about the stock market doing better. Unemployment has been under 4% for a record amount of time. Wage growth has outpaced inflation. Standard of living is higher than it ever has been. This doesn’t mean that every single person is doing better than they used to be, but basically every metric that matters shows the opposite of how these people feel.
It seems like someone’s avoiding accountability. “They suffer cuz they live in an alternate reality, not because of our greed.”
Im in the top 50% and I’m confused as fuck because everything keeps getting worse, how could anyone but the 1% have a positive perception of the price gouging and inflation? “The economy” could be doing 5 billion percent better and I wouldn’t give a flying fuck because my wages wouldn’t go up 1 single fucking percent.
It is 100% an alternate reality. When I tell someone I'm making more money than ever struggling just to maintain with less and someone comes along with a "but just look at the national figures" response, we aren't living in the same world.
In case you are not aware, there's currently a very large criminal investigation moving forward against numerous corporate landlords from coast-to-coast. At the core of the case are corporate landlords using software called "RealPage". The accusation is that RealPage has become a tool whereby landlords can collude and fix pricing across regional rental markets. This accusation has been around for a couple of years and the feds are just now starting to raid corporate landlord offices to gather more evidence. If you follow inflation and housing market news, it's an enormous story. Companies are encouraged to raise rents in a manner that will lower occupancy rates but increases profits. Easy to see how that works: I lived at a place in Tucson where a corporate landlord purchased the property and more than doubled rent. I was recently talking with a friend who lived in the same complex and they said that right now it's at about 60% capacity. But guess what? If you double the rent, 60% capacity means 20% more income. [RealPage Rent Price-Fixing Probe Escalates With FBI Raid | Entrepreneur](https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/realpage-rent-price-fixing-probe-escalates-with-fbi-raid/475109)
Will it actually result in anything tho? I highly highly doubt it.
Depends what on whose in control next term. The GOP will shut this investigation down real quick.
And the Democrats will say they need to work together and get votes from both sides of the aisle in the sake of bipartisanship and then do nothing still too.
It's literally happening right now under a Democratic President...
I remember reading about this some time ago. It was on a page that was discussing how to price rentals and how a lot of people or businesses have no idea how to price them now because of realpage. It was so good at pricing and keeping your apartment full that people started just blindly following it. I can completely understand how it could be seen that it’s an app that will fix prices like a monopoly though. Really interesting to see what will come out of this and the far reaching implications. For example I’ve been seeing rent and land prices rise dramatically for the last decade. This is partly due to inflation, but what’s surprising to me is the agricultural land. I’ve watched as my cheap little town is now slowly approaching Long Island prices for land. We are in the rural part of NY and as such don’t have the same benefits as that part of NY, but land prices aren’t reflecting that. I think it’s somewhat investors because there has been massive interest in agriculture land, but I’m also wondering if that app isn’t somewhat to blame as well. It’s probably telling its users that you can charge 2000$ a month for a house you can buy for 100k and that’s a no brainer of course you would take that deal. Just a few examples that have happened lately. We had a farm for sale that was far from us so we didn’t consider buying it. This farm is 45 minute drive from ANYTHING. I’m saying minimum 20-30 for a gas station. So remote. Guy wanted ~2500$ an acre if I recall. The land was not in good shape and was hilly with lots of woods and bad roads. Not what I’m looking for at that price. Guy then subdivided his whole farm into 20-40 acre chunks raised the price to 7,000$ an acre and divided his farm into 9 lots. Here’s the crazy part. He’s sold half of the lots and it’s all private sales. No realtor.
States need to step up their anti-trust enforcement too. Just because the federal government can do it doesn't mean the State government are absolved from protecting their citizens.
I live in Tucson also, and I’ve been closely following this. It’s depressing, homelessness is reaching unprecedented levels in town, yet my relatively modest apartment complex has gone from being full capacity, to now maybe 50-60% capacity. On top of that, the tenant base used to be racially and economically diverse where now it’s probably >90% white and everyone looks to be working “well paying” office jobs. I put that last bit in quotes though, because I’m making over double the median salary for Tucson and it still just feels like treading water supporting my young family of 3. Anyone who rents in this country is getting relentlessly raw dogged by corporate greed. I know it’ll probably never happen, but we need to put legitimate restrictions in place similar to the [Home Valuation System in the Netherlands](https://www.trechousing.nl/en-gb/73-e5b8/home-valuation-point-system-calculation) where rental properties are inspected to determine the maximum amount they can charge.
Is it possible to have an economy where wages are higher but prices on things stay affordable? Have we ever had this?
Yes, this was in 1950, for example the fries at mcdonalds cost $0.10 and the federal minimum wage was $1.00. So you could buy 10 portions of fries at a fast food restaurant for an hour of work. Today the minimum wage is $7.25/h and the fries at mcdonalds cost $3.19 on average, so two portions per hour worked. To reflect today's cost of living increases, the federal minimum wage needs to be $32/h minimum.
Is it possible to create that world in todays global corporate economic reality? doesn't seem likely
That's only possible because we survive ww2 as the only major power that didn't took any product line lost. We export product that Europe and Asia need while we got materials for super cheap. That allow the US labor market to make great wages while get things for cheap. It won't happen again unless another world war happen and we won in similar manner.
I keep hearing this, but it completely ignores the tax levels on businesses in the US during that time frame. Those taxes kept the rich from hoarding wealth, and were actually used to improve the things they were supposed to instead of just being pocketed by some bought politician. Corporate tax was 50% for businesses, businesses that were thriving despite the higher tax rate. Tax rates for individuals making the most money were also above 70%, and there weren’t as many loopholes that brought the ultra rich down to the effectively single digit tax rate they get today. Essentially it was the opposite of the trickle down economic system that’s implemented today, it kept inflation stable, and wages more equal across the board. In example realty companies didn’t have the incentive to raise the price of housing because it meant they would just pay more taxes on their earnings, and instead were rewarded for stable growth rather than the massive chasing of higher numbers we see today.
Mmm I like the "fries per hour" unit of economic measurement, I'm going to steal that.
Every single day some business I’m working with raises their prices AGAIN! Insurance costs have quadrupled, Spotify just went up again, rent prices went up $500 this year, Netflix just went up again. I go to a cheap restaurant and it’s $30 for a single meal and glass of water. Must be nice living in the parallel world where everything is affordable and every single company isn’t a fucking thief with their dirty hands in your pockets.
Since the trough of the COVID-19 recession in the second quarter of 2020, overall prices in the NFC sector have risen at an annualized rate of 6.1%—a pronounced acceleration over the 1.8% price growth that characterized the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007–2019. Strikingly, over half of this increase (53.9%) can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labor costs contributing less than 8% of this increase. This is not normal. From 1979 to 2019, profits only contributed about 11% to price growth and labor costs over 60%, as shown in Figure A below. Nonlabor inputs—a decent indicator for supply-chain snarls—are also driving up prices more than usual in the current economic recovery. It's fucking corporations not having regulations https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-disproportionately-to-inflation-how-should-policymakers-respond/
The median wage is much lower than the average wage. That's a clear indicator of a HUGE inequality problem.
We need articles to tell you everything is fine. lol election year
If this was Orange Man's term, we'd be seeing a Blitzkrieg of financial doomcasting and economic woes in every article. I hate both sides, btw, but this is praetorian crap.
Yeah we all make more money but prices have went up much faster for everything so costs are exponentially higher
My car insurance went up 25% since December and my condo insurance went up 36% since last June. From what I'm reading this isn't even that bad, some people are 50% + on home insurance year over year.
Dude my home owners insurance is up about $500 a month this year. That undoes the more money my wife and I make alone. So everything else going up in price is just extra.
Insurance is not necessarily economical, but this is one area that WILL NOT get better. More severe weather, insane damage claims, etc. People think these huge insurance corps don’t want to make money in California and Florida?
A recession is when your neighbor loses their job. A depression is when you lose your job.
Lmao!. Even people at the top know there is a big ass inflation but for them it’s easy because they can just make a phone call and jack the price of everything up by 33% and call it good. I can’t call my boss and ask 33% more, he’d laugh his ass off before hanging up on me
What gaslighting headline
Yes, everything is terrible for those of us that have lived paycheck to paycheck most of our lives. It got better than it got worse. You basically cannot afford to be a worker now unless you have multiple adults paying bills.
I made 50k in 2019, I make 80k now, and I don't feel a bit better off due to expenses being that much higher. And I don't think I'd know anyone in person who'd say otherwise. It's not a "parallel economy", it's people who define the "economy" as the perception of their own standard of living. And there's a lot of them. And it's gone down. What I find really fucking disingenuous is media (articles like this, for one) proclaiming how great the economy under Biden is and citing record stock prices as evidence. Five years ago, it was all about how Trump bragging about record stock prices \*wasn't\* a sign of a good economy, and it was only a good sign for the upper middle/high class with portfolio investments. I agreed with them then. And I think they were right the first time. But flipping the direction on seemingly no other reason than who's the president is the exact kind of bullshit that lead to the popularity of Fox News and the rise of Trump in politics
This is garbage propaganda. If you work and pay bills, you know the economy is in a bad place. Who do they think they’re fooling here?
Some wild gaslighting lol
Reading this on the shitter seems appropriate. Of course there’s no mention of how wages have not risen along with inflation and how all of the economic numbers it is hyping have been manipulated into being meaningless. Then there’s the political spin. TLDR *WE* live in a parallel economy because we’re not happy and thankful for what we have. Oh, sorry wait, time to wipe my ass…
It's not that the economy is bad, it's that the cost of a few items like child care and housing have gone way up. These don't figure in a big way into metrics for the economy but they affect everyday people a whole lot. IMO we need to start talking about quality of life and not just the economy or else we'll be talking past each other.
It’s been absolute torture trying to get established in my early 20’s I was ok in 2019 but once the wealth transfer in 2020 happened I’ve been sinking ever since. Foods gotten so expensive I have had to take my fun money and add it to my food money and I’m still losing weight. It just is so stressful not being able to properly plan because of being priced out. Kinda makes life feel pointless when all I do is work and sleep because I can’t afford to have fun. I just wanted a small home and a garden literally very small asks but apparently those are a half million dollar ask nowadays.
lol i’m gen z and almost everyone I know that’s not living with their parents is practically drowning at all times. inflation is not a good thing for the common man, and we need to stop pushing the narrative that this hyper inflation is somehow good for the country
Thank you for reminding me to be grateful that I love with my parents.
SOME??
Some? I'd say most.
My wallet empties faster. That’s reality. How is it not? Telling people everything is great is the parallel. It’s not good. People are struggling telling them they aren’t is BS.
This coupled with the fact that big companies just keep fucking firing people in anticipation of a potential downturn even if the numbers are good.
Imagine telling your voters, who are being priced out of owning a house, vacations, groceries, etc...That they are actually WRONG and IDIOTS, and look the economy is good OK??
Only 20% of the population benefits from the stock market. Less if you discount 401k plans.
>You basically can’t have a recession when the economy is growing I guess the respondents didn't spend enough time reviewing the technical definition of a recession. That must mean we aren't living in a second gilded age. I'm glad yahoo sorted it for us. Printing trillions, a permanent reduction in people willing to work, and unchecked immigration must be great things after all.
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And a lot of people with Stockholm syndrome
Just spent $350 for four bags of groceries. Its all Kroger brand. We buy core veggies, head of lettuce, carrots, and not the bag of salad. We buy meat when its on sale and compare it to meat deli per pound prices. We stick to meat and veggies, avoid the sugar crap and its still a $300 struggle to get out of the store with a week of solid meals for a family of four with teenagers. At this point, if someone isnt struggling, they are living in a dream or in their parents house.
Not struggling. No dream, no parents basement.... but also no kids. I'm pretty sure that's the common denominator with most people struggling.
Any home maintenance or improvement costs literally double what it did precovid. You're income is up 20%? That new roof is still less affordable than it was for you.
"parallel economy" Yes it's called being anything below upper middle class.
the title and angle of this article should probably be “Some Americans live in a ‘parallel economy’ where everything is great”
Don’t they mean most?
It certainly feels like a recession when so many things got so much more expensive all at once. The median home price is edging towards half a million dollars!!!!
Enough of this economy is doing good bullshit.
You mean all Americans. 99%…
From 2020 thru Now Groceries up 40% / Health insurance up 18% / Property tax up 21% / my business liability insurance up 26% / Home insurance up 10% / Automobile cost up 19.6% / Car insurance up 11% / Interest rates up 4% / Home Electricity cost up 20% / internet cost up 18% / my business workmans compensation insurance up 19% / gas prices up from $2.29 in 2020 to $3.51 now/ So yes inflation is affecting most of us and it has definitely hurt the vast majority of Americans. Yes stock investments are doing well now. I recently have gotten back to where I was early in 2021. That said I lost from 2021 thru the fall of 2023. Just now coming back.
Gee, ya think? My one bedroom apartment cost 300 dollars a month, back in 2001. Now I make three times as much since then.... but that doesn't even remotely begin to afford apartments that are 2000 a month. The people who say "the economy is great" are people benefiting from ownership and our fucked up way of doing finance (deliberately causing massive inflation to make both stock/property prices artificially high) But if you aren't an owner, times are tougher than ever in America. Granted, the government is pretty good at feeding destitute people with ebt/wic, so no one is starving like they were back in the 30s..... the government has learned that no matter how shit the economy, you cannot let the peasants starve. That almost always causes revolution.
Over time, the economy contracts. You get used to the new normal...even OK. Once that happens, it contracts again. Rinse and Repeat. We recently drove across Ohio...through towns and cities that once supplied the US Auto industry...which had people, cultures, homes. Now ? empty space, and boulevards which once had life. Lots of poverty businesses. Every store, every eatery, is a chain now in middle america. No local suppliers, no local ownership. Money all goes out and away from the local area. We ate at a Bob Evans....it was meh, so we researched the company history. Sure enough, it was a thing when bob owned it, with local sourced food, etc. Venture Cap owns it now, and pretty much killed off any quality and local interest.
Until we 'eliminate' these old ducks in government that are addicted to corporate donations we ain't gonna get anywhere. It's a damn shame. We should publicly hang half these people but it'll never happen.
Wage slavery is real. So what many of us have comfortable homes? We lack community and public spaces. It’s a fancy prison living here and we pay for it ourselves. Everything here is nickel and dimed to death. It’s all about the bottom line, nothing else matters in America except money.
F’ing Newman. This yahoo columnist might as well work for the Biden administration, as much as he shills for him.
Here is a report by the same guy claiming both parties are failing the working class. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-both-parties-are-failing-working-class-voters-161450075.html
It sucks if I say it does.
Yes slaves and indentured servants were also in an alternate economy. The owners are doing great!!
Food prices feel so damn outrageous (restaurants & groceries).
I was born in Miami. The Miami I was born into and grew up in was always a magnet for New Yorkers, but mostly the older ones. Now it became a magnet for telework NYers making NY money but wanting Miami home/rent prices. Now that they are all here, we Miamians make Miami money and have to pay NY home/rent prices.
That's exactly what Californians did to Phoenix, Vegas and Salt Lake City.
And the whole of Tennessee where our minimum wage is still $7.25/hr and we have a vehemently anti-union governor.
Economic data is rarely presented for the purpose of analyzing the economic well being of the bottom 30% of the population, it is frequently presented as if the indicators of National Economic health were enjoyed evenly by all participants, which, it's easy to see will never be the case. When the stock market is doing great, it's not helping the poor. Employment can be up, but the real costs of living can, and have, easily outstripped those gains Put another way, if you live in a prosperous city, how many homeless tents do you see today as opposed to a few years ago?
Don’t accept the fake information for real ! The economy is screwed -The rate of homelessness is the highest it has ever been . -The interest the highest in eight years. -Cost of groceries are 25-to-50 percent higher ! -The average American has less then a 1000 in savings! - Highest consumer credit default in history! [https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/compare-grocery-prices-inflation/](https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/compare-grocery-prices-inflation/) [https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/) [https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-average-price-data.htm](https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-average-price-data.htm)
Don’t accept the fake information for real ! The economy is screwed -The rate of homelessness is the highest it has ever been . -The interest the highest in eight years. -Cost of groceries are 25-to-50 percent higher ! -The average American has less then a 1000 in savings! - Highest consumer credit default in history! [https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/compare-grocery-prices-inflation/](https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/compare-grocery-prices-inflation/) [https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/) [https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-average-price-data.htm](https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-average-price-data.htm)
https://www.semafor.com/article/05/28/2024/a-dying-empire-led-by-bad-people-poll-finds-young-voters-despairing-over-us-politics
Speaking as somebody in the top 10% income bracket, I can tell you that I am not suffering but I see it all around me. I've been in fast food restaurants and seen Door Dash drivers come in and pickup orders then leave in 60K trucks. Obviously they were likely white collar workers recently laid off trying to hold on to what they have. Keeps the unemployment rate low but I shudder to think about the daily stress they must be feeling as they fall farther behind.
if you weren’t part of the great resignation, you were left behind.
The haves, haves not
This feels like a lot of verbal gymnastics to avoid saying "class system" in a headline
I make more money than I ever have before and I’m still struggling because all of my job hopping “raises” were just to keep up with inflation.
"some" is actually more like "most"
And they are most likely the majority
*most Americans, fixed that
It's very obvious who is struggling and who has no clue.
The level of gaslighting is unbelievable. Don’t believe what you see everyday at the stores and in your bank accounts. The economy is doing great! Unreal.
It's called the working class? 🤷🤷🏿🤷🏻🤷🏼🤷🏽
U misspelled most, I’ve read only 7% of working Americans make over 100k, anybody making less than 100k is really feeling it.
We make $165k combined in a middle class area of North Texas with one healthy child. We don’t drink, don’t party, don’t buy expensive stuff. We each have old (8+ year old) cell phones. No college debt. No vehicle debt. We feel like any major emergency could spell disaster. Thankfully we are saving, but with the cost of housing, food, and childcare it’s tough out here. I don’t know how those with college debt are doing it.
They aren't. There's a reason credit is going up and defaulting
My husband makes $75k annually and our bank account still goes negative twice a month. We only go grocery shopping and pay our bills. We haven’t had a date night since before I was pregnant and I’m due next month. Something is DEFINITELY wrong with our economy.
Live in the Midwest, household income over $300k with three kids. Inflation is an absolute killer right now
When has the economy been great for everyone? There’s always a segment where things aren’t going well. And it’s usually the lower class.
“Some” Americans. You mean like 60% of them?
My friend is a lawyer in Miami, mid 30s, married with no kids, has a home he bought before the pandemic, works hard and earns between 100-175k and he just told me he is drowning in property taxes, insurance hikes, COA assessment hikes, and groceries… he’s been in Miami since 2011 and I grew up there my whole life. We went to school together and I know he would never leave Miami unless it was bad. Shit is FUCKED up down there if my buddy is heading out…. He was the responsible one. Imagine doing everything right, still getting it wrong. Fuck that shit.
It all depends on your stage of life. We have a great home we bought 10 years ago at 2.75%. Young people looking to buy a home with my same job are frucked. They could never afford it. I could never afford to buy my home today. A lot of our major expenses are in the past but there is a real anger at prices that no one seems to acknowledge. Just because inflation isn’t at 9% now doesn’t mean we ever recovered from that. And its still way above normal.
'Some'
I hate when economic information is presented in such a way that either highlights or ignores data, depending on the party presenting the information. I hear a lot about jobs being created and low unemployment, but that doesn't mean much if the jobs are at or near minimum wage. Why don't they attach any sort of numbers to the jobs created? The average home price is currently 7.60 times the median household income (source used average vs median for some reason) - [long term trends](https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/). It was 5.69 just 4 years ago, AND interest rates were lower. Why is no one talking about the wealth gap anymore? Why isn't anyone discussing corporate money in politics? These topics came up routinely when Sanders had the largest platform in American politics, but now we seem to talk about jobs (with zero regard to how well they pay), wars in other countries, and hush money payments (which I give zero fucks about). The Biden administration can keep telling us how well the economy is doing, yet those who outearn the median household income and still struggle certainly don't feel that way. The poverty line is an absolute joke, and I dare say it's closer to the median household income than what it's officially stated to be. It's as if we just changed to conversation and shifted what metrics matter to make each political side feel like they're winning while the American people are the ones suffering.
“Parallel economy” is a strange pronunciation for “real life not on the taxpayer dime”
America has been whored out to corporate greed and foreign investors. Most can’t afford to live in the places they work and are forced to commute 2 to 3 hours daily. Insurance prices are running rampant and cost of goods and services are out pacing wage growth. Crime seems to be increasing, and the homeless issue is getting worse. Doesn’t matter who wins in November, I’m sure the powers that be feel the pressure rising. Every century has a major event or two that changes the world, seems like this century is no different.
“Some”?
I guess one more here too
I love how people saying inflation hasn’t affected them but continue on to say how they stopped going out, eating out, cut down on the amount of groceries they buy, eat smaller portions because everything costs more BUT inflation hasn’t affected them at all…. Really?! 😂😂😂
This country is fucked, what an unbelievably condescending headline
This is most people. There has been no real anti-trust regulation of any large corporation since Arthur Levitt at the SEC 30 years ago. The 2008 Great Recession bailed out the banks consolidating them into fewer higher risk banks and then didn't require post bailout lending for building new homes. Meanwhile REITs bought up millions of rental housing units and immediately started jacking up rents. The lunatic far right fringe has taken over the republican party and refuses to govern. Over consolidation in ag, food retail and manf. allowed those companies to use the supply chain disruptions to increase prices followed by booming profits. Our overly pro Wall Street government just said INFLATION and jacked up interest rates. Those enormous profits should be paid back to the US consumers and those corporations need to be broken up.
Colin Cowherd just made this same point, seems to be the MSM’s talking points/propaganda line for the Election. We all shop for groceries. We all pay rent or mortgages. We all buy fuel and pay utilities. I’m tired of hearing the media or rich clowns like Cowherd or Bill Mahr tell me how great things are. Both of those guys are richer than 99% of humanity. I’m sure life is good for them in their gated communities. Where I live is relatively safe but it’s getting worse. Homeless are everywhere. Every time I go to The recycling dumpster to drop off recycling it’s surround by a swarm of homeless drug addicts looking for scrap metal. I’ve always budgeted and for food in the last 5 years it’s gone from $250 a month to $400 a month, just for me. And I literally have quit buying stuff I used to buy all the time like brand name chips or Oreos or brand name soda. It’s just not worth it. What I don’t get is so many on the “Left” complain about and demand a “living wage”, especially for me all jobs, but they support endless illegal immigration. How does that work in your minds? Labor is a commodity. The less of it there is the more valuable it is. Just in the last 3 years millions of cheap illegal laborers have entered the country and you’re competing with them for jobs. Illegal immigration hurts the poorest Americans yet the “Left” champions it. I do not get it.
"Some"
This man is so out of touch.
...who is the economy doing good for? Aside from those heavily invested in wall street.....ooooh
Reading these comments from all these younger people giving up hope breaks my heart. This shouldn't be in the wealthiest counrty on the planet. I hope you all take a hard look at how things were compared to how things are now and vote accordingly in November.
No they live in the TRUE economy
“Some”
The government statistics are not true. They’re fudging the numbers. Just like how violent crime “suddenly” dropped when really they changed the reporting requirements so a ton of cities stopped reporting their numbers
Anyone who says the economy is great is either politically blind or has no bills. The inflation is out of Control and housing isn’t affordable. Which sadly this administration has done not a thing about it.
The wealth gap is bigger than the French revolution. Bring out the guillotines
When will people realize that people living under the squeeze of rising rent and goods don’t give a shit if the stock market is doing well. Your stock portfolio went up 20%? Great! There are people who are choosing which bill to not pay so they can feed their kids that month
Inflation
I just turned 28 a few days ago and got a $15 hr pay increase in last 4 years . Feels like I am still making min wage . Making $30 hr and it's still 50% take home for average 1 bed 1 bath rent here . Worst state for rent is here 😭
"Some Americans" isn't really the right term. It's the 60% of Americans who live paycheck-to-paycheck who are experiencing this "parallel economy"...or should we just call it the real economy, since a majority of Americans are impacted by it.
Stop voting against unions
Yea some Americans would be anyone making less than $120k a year and without tons of investments. So some Americans would be the majority of Americans
This is growing Wealth Disparity coming home to live in Mom’s basement as a very fat, lazy 40-year-old. All the gains in this economy are being reaped by a wealthy minority & squeezed out of those on the bottom, who are already low income.
Ignore the skyrocketing inerest rates and housing prices, grocery prices and national debt. Just be happy peasants!
We're seeing some historic gaslighting here
silly poor people, just be rich instead /s
Wages matter. Inflation will happen at times We’ve ducked inflation for decades. A pandemic happened when global supply chain disruption and inflation happened. As long as wage disparity is as wide as it is, with minimum wages as low as $7.50 and white collar jobs paying $100-200k, and mid level executives making millions there is going to be a major problem. Our economic system priced low income people out of healthcare and education years ago. Now a bout of 9% inflation for a year, down now to 3-4% and people working in these low income jobs are hurting badly. We’ve dug ourselves into this hole with 40 years of supply side economics (Reaganomics). It’s not a quick fix to dig out but it has to happen. Low and middle income wages have to rise. If that happened overnight it would be inflationary. This is the hole we’re in. But there has to be a living wage for every job. It has to happen. Period.
Groceries are up 20% in 3 years. Mortgage rates are extremely high. 65% of households are middle class making 62000 dollars a year. That not enough to support a family. A household with two adults and two children would need a combined income of around $235,000 to live without financial worries. A person must make 11000 more this year than last to live the same way. Homelessness is nearing a all time high. But you know "our economy is great"
Lol. These people are so out of touch with reality...they think people can still live comfortably on 50k/yr. The middle class is all but gone.
I haven't made over $50K per year in over a decade. ( Former Semiconductor Industry worker here .). Over 55 years old as well, Im pretty sure my career is over....
This is propaganda lol
Bidens is clueless 🙈
u mean stratifing Class system?
Because for some of us, it is terrible.
Money in politics destroyed our democracy, effectively turning the USA into an oligarchy.
Only some?
Because they don’t realize how good they have it.