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
People will stop believing a country is in recession when it starts to feel like they can actually afford to do the things they want to do, like live in a home and eat food once in a while. They are incorrect to believe that it’s a recession causing their current dire circumstances, but they’re entirely correct to believe that something is amiss when they’re just barely keeping themselves alive. It appears to be due to Biden’s mismanagement only insofar as Biden has opted for largely continuity neoliberalism, which is how things have been mismanaged for the last 40 years or so.
Blaming the current economic issues on Biden is wholly ignoring the shit-show that preceded him. He’s not perfect, but he didn’t directly cause this bullshit — he’s just not done much to combat it except for college debt, the Inflation Reduction Act, and a few more actions like stimulus. As an aside, I personally have lost $25000+ now solely due to Trump’s tax changes.
It’s also wholly ignoring the unfettered greed that the US seems to have a fetish for. One prime example: soda is literally 4 times as expensive now than it was just 5 years ago. It still costs pennies to make a 12-pack of soda, but $10 for that 12-pack is now the norm. The supply chain woes of the pandemic no longer apply, yet they decided to just keep the prices at that level.
It’s time to blame the real reason the 99% are fucked — corporate greed, and a spineless, useless Congress unwilling to do anything about it.
Yeah. Inflation is real (Covid aftereffects and corporate greed), and in 2022 it hit this huge spike so prices are still high. As far as I can see the reasons for that had nothing to do with Biden, but I get it; it’s painful to people directly, so it’s the part of the equation that’s easy to focus on, and it’s easy to blame the guy who’s “in charge” because he’s supposed to take responsibility for things being good, whether they’re his fault originally or not.
At the same time Biden actually has done a ton of things (boosting domestic manufacturing and supporting unions through an actually-pro-labor NLRB) which have been boosting wages. A lot of it is at the lower end of the scale, so I think it’s largely invisible to Lemmy people who my guess is are largely tech workers or students or etc (as opposed to truck drivers), but the wages at the bottom have actually outpaced even the huge inflationary level.
Blaming Biden for the inflation, and pretending the wage gains didn’t happen, and pretending that Biden’s policies are neoliberal is… I mean, I get how it could look that way (again especially if you exist at the white-collar end of the scale in a tech job), but it’s definitely not what happened.
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.
Hence why I said “it appears to be due to Biden’s mismanagement only insofar as Biden has opted for largely continuity neoliberalism”. He didn’t create the situation and he’s tried to combat it, but there is so much more he could have done, given that the underlying problem is neoliberalism.
Is there so much more he could have done without an act of Congress? We saw from Trump’s presidency that most executive orders do not hold up in court and Congress controls the power of the purse.
Economists don’t call something a recession until rich people start feeling the squeeze. The definition of a recession, while vague, is really designed around that fact. So even if they’re not doing it on purpose, their analytical blinders prevent them from recognizing other conditions that are at least as meaningful to many more people.
Yep. An awful lot has to go badly wrong in an economy before rich people start feeling it, and that’s the only point they start caring.
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Wait. Neoliberalism is literally a set of fiscal practices that that online folks refer to as late-stage capitalism. They’re practically identical in meaning. Without neoliberal policy, the phrase “late-stage capitalism” likely never gets coined.
I disagree. Neoliberalism turbo-charged all of the problems with capitalism, by encouraging the “everyone out for themselves, dog eat dog world” mentality.