The previous guy in office drove up the debt and gave tax cuts to the very wealthy. Climate change is ruining crops. Russians are hampering Ukraine from producing grain. Fungus ruined a lot of of the cocoa crop. Bird flu has hit the poultry industry. Corporate greed is rampant. Still, eggs at $3 a dozen make 6 meals. Avocados are still $1 a piece on sale. Lay off the prime rib and filet mignon, you will be fine.

For me my everyday prices have doubled but my wage has not. I don’t know whos wage it is that is keeping up with inflation. Oh wait is that the one where they cut out all the purchases people have to make everyday?

This is a ridiculous argument and, honestly, reminds me of corporate thinking. Is the line going up this quarter? That’s all that matters. Yes, assuming inflation is CPI, the last year has seen wage growth. For two years before that, it showed an even more severe wage decline. It seems a bit out of touch to say “Hey, look, I know your savings are dry and your spouse dropped out of the work force because childcare costs outpaced their income but it’s starting to get better! If we use this particular method to examine your well-being the last year was back to normal so quit whing and be grateful!”

The first article linked is alleged to demonstrate that wages have exceeded inflation for over a year. That article includes text like this after this graph:

if we look at the fourth quarter of 2019, which was the last quarter before COVID, the real wage is $362. Now nearly four years later, it sits only $3 higher at $365. Four years of zero wage growth is also something that could perhaps bother people.

So instead they looked at a longitudinal study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which assumes CPI is the rate of inflation. They ended up with this CPI adjusted wage growth graph.. Even with their metric it shows wage growth being in the red from early 2021 and not recovering until 2023.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

If you zero in on these omissions, the posture of these Democratic economists can appear unseemly: Where do these rich liberals find the nerve to tell working-class Americans that they should stop worrying about rising food prices and start loving the Biden economy?

This X post from the author Carol Roth is a crude, but not atypical, example: “Paul Krugman doesn’t know any regular Americans, and so he and the rest of the corporate press mock and gaslight you while you struggle with your rent or mortgage, food and other living costs.

The signature strengths and weaknesses of the Biden economy — its low unemployment and elevated prices — are byproducts of one fundamental policy decision: Faced with the Covid recession, the US government chose to prioritize poverty reduction and full employment over minimizing the risk of inflation.

I know from personal experience that adding the wrong hyperlink to a piece is an easy mistake to make — yet Powell’s column does not cite or link to any other example of liberal economists measuring real wages using core inflation.)

A new analysis of survey data by the Harvard economist Stefanie Stantcheva lends credence to an old hypothesis: People tend to attribute wage gains to their own efforts or their employers’ largesse — rather than to market dynamics — even as they blame price increases on government mismanagement.

If voters will punish elected officials for presiding over inflation but won’t necessarily give them credit for engineering real wage gains, then Congress will have an incentive to err on the side of understimulating the economy during the next recession.

The original article contains 2,747 words, the summary contains 267 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Yea and consumer spending is up because parents have to buy their adult children’s groceries