President Joe Biden has opened a new line of attack against former President Donald Trump. At a campaign fundraiser in the Dallas area on Wednesday, Biden asked and answered the classic “are you better off today than you were four years ago” question to remind voters of what it was like when Trump w
I won’t say that’s not true for you and your friends, because I have no idea. But for the country as a whole, particularly for people struggling, it is mostly exactly the opposite of what you’re saying. I.e. not only are they not still having to go into their housekeeping jobs even though they might catch a disease that might kill them or their family, but they’re mostly making more than they were, even adjusted for the (quite high although lower than pretty much every other country post-Covid) inflation.
I certainly don’t blame the president for inflation, because I can see how all the corporations just decided to raise their prices because everybody else was raising their prices. It kinda seems like a rush to take all the profits they can like it’s their last chance to make money, which is quite disturbing to reflect on.
Personally I’ve only become more prosperous throughout the terms of the last 3 presidents. Biden’s presidency has been mostly positive improvement over Trump’s time in office. I’d never vote for Trump, and have voted against him 3 times already. My main problem with Biden is his repeated calls to ban guns, because individual liberty is the most important issue of all and gun bans are authoritarian garbage.
That’s actually an excellent point. Since it’s been shown that a lot of the price increases actually have nothing to do with economic conditions the companies are facing, but are just them raising their prices because they can get away with it and keeping the extra money because they want to, it seems a little extra silly to blame Biden for that (even above the silliness of blaming him for inflation at all, if you’re not going to credit him for wage growth.)
That’s not true at all.
Adjusted with inflation, assuming all people hired got salary bumps to offset inflation, you’re looking at 3% to 4% of the population. That is not most. That is not even many. That is a few.
A few people are better off today adjusted for inflation. The majority of people are not.
If you did not get a 20% to 25% bump during the past couple years you are worse off. If you got a 20%-25% pay bump, you’re pretty much where you were before except major life goals are more expensive so you’re also worse off. If you got 30%+ bump, which some definitely did, then they’re better off. It is NOT most.
What is your citation for saying this? Mine is here. The yellow bar at the very top, +5.7%, represents the poorest segment of workers making wage gains that outpaced inflation. Where are you getting your 3% or 4% numbers?
I’m starting to suspect that a lot of the Lemmy population may be in the tech-savvy early adopter white-collar-job segment up in the top 10% (the brown bar showing -5%, wages dropping compared to inflation for the very top earners as tech jobs slow down and the wage gap shrinks). I’m not saying that wage drop at the top is a good thing necessarily, but it’s very different from everyone being worse off.
Here’s a breakdown of the average wages overall; that black line at the top shows a year-on-year compounding growth in wages adjusted for inflation in 2020, 2021, and 2022, even facing the difficult conditions that kept almost every other first-world country down in the bottom half of the graph, where wages are actually dropping.
Those are my sources. What are yours for the specific claims you’re making?