Inflation may have slowed last year, but it continued to deal heavy blows — some devastating — on Americans’ livelihoods: Nearly two-thirds of US households were worse off because of it, and roughly 1 in 6 adults couldn’t pay all their monthly bills, new Federal Reserve data shows.
Honestly I set out to make again the point about “asking people how they feel like things are going isn’t actually a good way to measure economics, especially when 50% of them (you know the ones) are programmed by the news they consume to be in a state of constant frothing panic about inflation, crime, and immigrants” - but I looked at the report itself and its charts and I actually really like them. They seem like they ask enough very specific things to get down to brass tacks of how people are doing on a month to month survival level in a way that seems like it’s exactly one of the key things that the Fed should be tracking. So yeah fair play.
Idk if I would have led off with all the worst possible things you can find - like take a report that says, 72% of adults say they’re doing okay or better financially, and find the highest statistic that you can find that can be paired up with something bad, and then put that in the headline instead - but the actual report seems really good.
Did you not see the 6% drop in adults that are doing ok financially in the last 2 years?
And yeah asking how people are doing is a bit meh but when they can tell you that people aren’t able to afford to see a doctor or dentist in the last couple years that is a much bigger show of a problem.
Yeah, 2022 was a shit show. That’s when all the Covid inflation hit, that ate up the gains in wages at the top of the scale and then some. The fact that even with that having happened, wages at the bottom have been beating inflation by quite a bit, is a damn miracle. But yeah I’m a little surprised it went down by only 6% in 2022.
Health care is a good one yeah - the number of uninsured people has been dropping steadily the last few years, to where now it’s lower than it’s ever been. Enrollment in ACA-sponsored plans shot up when Biden started unfucking some of the things that the Republicans had done to try to kill it. Idk how health care spending looks, but there’s like 20 million people who have health care now who didn’t before, I know.
Honestly I set out to make again the point about “asking people how they feel like things are going isn’t actually a good way to measure economics, especially when 50% of them (you know the ones) are programmed by the news they consume to be in a state of constant frothing panic about inflation, crime, and immigrants” - but I looked at the report itself and its charts and I actually really like them. They seem like they ask enough very specific things to get down to brass tacks of how people are doing on a month to month survival level in a way that seems like it’s exactly one of the key things that the Fed should be tracking. So yeah fair play.
Idk if I would have led off with all the worst possible things you can find - like take a report that says, 72% of adults say they’re doing okay or better financially, and find the highest statistic that you can find that can be paired up with something bad, and then put that in the headline instead - but the actual report seems really good.
Did you not see the 6% drop in adults that are doing ok financially in the last 2 years?
And yeah asking how people are doing is a bit meh but when they can tell you that people aren’t able to afford to see a doctor or dentist in the last couple years that is a much bigger show of a problem.
Yeah, 2022 was a shit show. That’s when all the Covid inflation hit, that ate up the gains in wages at the top of the scale and then some. The fact that even with that having happened, wages at the bottom have been beating inflation by quite a bit, is a damn miracle. But yeah I’m a little surprised it went down by only 6% in 2022.
Health care is a good one yeah - the number of uninsured people has been dropping steadily the last few years, to where now it’s lower than it’s ever been. Enrollment in ACA-sponsored plans shot up when Biden started unfucking some of the things that the Republicans had done to try to kill it. Idk how health care spending looks, but there’s like 20 million people who have health care now who didn’t before, I know.
I read your comment twice to try to understand why you’re being downvoted. I’m still not sure, seems like an innocuous take.
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