Fascinating little window
- Almost 60% of respondents wrongly believe that the country is in a recession (it hasn’t been since 2020)
- 55% believe the economy is shrinking (it is growing)
- 49% say unemployment is at a 50-year high (it’s close to a 50-year low)
- 58% said the reason the economy is worsening is due to Biden’s mismanagement
That’s good, I didn’t know that. However, that hasn’t had any affect on me, personally, as you have suggested, being a tech worker. In fact, I had to take a wage cut just for the business to survive. This whole economy is screwed in one way or another. And anytime the economy is screwed like this, it usually benefits some (typically the rich), and destroys others.
This is all considerably too complex to boil down to any one real thing to point to, but the notion of corporate greed still nags at me every single time I go to the grocery store. If prices can rise, they surely can also fall – and they simply haven’t, all while record profits are continually posted, and not for just luxury items – but for basic needs as well (groceries, etc).
This is as large a cost-of-living swing as I’ve ever seen in my many decades on this Earth. And it worries me greatly for my kid’s future.
It doesn’t help that wage growth has largely been in the “unskilled” sectors (I hate that term, every job is skilled), but inflation reduction has largely been in non-essential goods. Which means that upper-middle to upper income people have been noticing their wages not increasing with inflation despite inflation overall being lower, and lower to low-middle income people have been noticing inflation impacting their budgets despite their wage increases.
But in aggregate, “everyone” is being paid more and “inflation” is down. So at a macro level everyone “should” be happy with how things are going. But human beings don’t live at the macro level.
Do you have numbers for this? Like what’s the inflation number for one of those nonessential goods? Because I suspect you literally just made all of this up as a way of saying, okay sure inflation dropped last year and low-income wages are way up but here’s why none of that counts. Although, I’m open to being proved wrong.